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Happy Monday all! What a weekend. Our 13 year old dog went missing but after some scrambling we found her at the shelter! Thank goodness.

I am happy to be sharing a wonderful article with you today by Karen of a Cook’s Library. Karen is based in the UK and has a love and passion for food that is very similar to mine. What I love about her site and her writing is she is looking at the same issues I am, but she has a much different terrain than I am dealing with. She is a gifted food writer, cook and researcher and I really believe you will find wonderful information by visiting her site. Please join me in welcoming her to A Moderate Life for her first guest post on What we should be eating!

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I came across a site on the internet recently dedicated to primal living, expounding the virtues of a low-carb, grain-free, dairy-free, gluten-free and quite possibly pleasure-free diet. But the message was fierce, the author convinced (and had a best-selling book) and it seemed to make sense after all we ate this way as hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years so clearly this was the way to go: meat counter here I come, though the thought of never eating a slice of toast again is a grim one.

Then I meander through cyber-space some more and find some glossy site devoted to vegetarian cooking full of delicious whole-grain recipes and talk of treading lightly on the planet. The food looks delicious, the pictures are fantastic; I am a sucker for beautiful blogs and somehow it seems seductively pure and wholesome to eat this way (even though I will never willingly embrace tofu and can’t quite reconcile myself to an entirely fish and meat-free life).

So which way to go?

Ok, so maybe these examples are extreme or I am more confused than most – actually whilst this was perhaps true once, it is not so much anymore since I’ve learned to cook and have begun to appreciate simple, good food – but I am using them to illustrate the confusion over what to eat, what is healthy, what is good for the planet, and mostly this constant seeking for the answer to what we SHOULD eat that is endemic in our society, particularly amongst women. That’s if we think about what we are eating at all. As my nutritionist friend puts it:

“There’s more than a touch of the hair shirt about many ‘healthy’ eaters; the majority of the rest don’t even know what it is they are eating. They just want to fill that ‘empty space’ inside”.

Believe me I get as confused as the rest of us about what to eat and, of course, what to feed my family, particularly in the face of media pressure, government pressure and peer pressure to be super thin, or at least not to get morbidly obese.

So what to do? Michael Pollan offers good advice in getting off the bandwagon of ‘nutritionism’ in his article Unhappy Meals (oh, just got that, opposite of McDonald’s Happy Meals I presume) and in his books In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating: An Eater’s Manifesto and Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. And I wrote a piece on the pleasures of the table recently (do read this if you are hung up on eating for ‘health’) mostly to remind myself of why I like to cook and eat and the other, more important aspects of food as part of family life and social rituals.

Of course, the irony is that eating ‘real food’ IS healthy and, like many writers on food with even a vague interest in its implications, I can’t help but give advice on what to eat and why. So I am somewhat hypocritical in writing this piece, but I hope no more so than Pollan himself who spends chapters writing about food, diets and what to eat, then tells us not to get hooked up on nutrition and boils it all down to seven words: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’.

When I do get sucked into the lure of nutritionism or feel myself pulled in opposite directions, there is one failsafe way I can get myself back on track and feel inspired about food again and this is to go back and read some of the cooks and writers who have inspired me in the past. Michael Pollan is my first stop for consideration of how and why we eat, but for what to eat I like to read Alice Waters, Richard Olney, Paul Bertolli, Skye Gyngell and Elizabeth David; individuals who have found food genuinely inspiring and pleasurable. You can find some of my favourite cookbooks by these writers and more here.

And if I am online I have a guilty pleasure: like reading a cookbook in bed last thing at night, I sometimes sit at my desk browsing virtual restaurant menus, often ones I have never eaten in nor am I likely to eat it. No wonder menu-writing has been called an art-form; I happily eat up the week’s menus at places like Chez Panisse, The River Cafe, Petersham Nurseries and more, where there are chefs whose style of cooking and devotion to good ingredients of all kinds (be it vegetables, meat, fish or grains) well-sourced and simply prepared, is one that I admire unreservedly. Transporting myself this way never fails to make me feel positive about food again, about cooking and eating it, taking away the feeling that I should cook something and making me actually want to.

Photo credit: Vintage picture from Beverly & Pack

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Thanks so much Karen for the lovely thoughts on food and following your heart’s desire when it comes to choosing what to eat! This food intuition is at the root of all my food choices now and it is the way to balanced healthy living! This article was a part of Monday Mania.

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