We need to forget fashions and focus more on the joy of feeding people, ourselves included, with good food cooked with love!

              I usually have breakfast from7.30. After a quick walk with Eden our little dog and she is fed and in her basket under the kitchen table. I make eggs – soft boiled, precooked 63°C for 60 minutes from the fridge, scrambled or an omelette – smashed avocado, drizzled with olive oil, broccoli or avocado bread with butter and a perhaps some Greek yoghurt on the side. Whether I eat breakfast, or not, depends on how much I ate the previous evening – and how late. Or simply how hungry I am!

Last year, I decided I’d skip breakfast altogether. I was reading everywhere about the benefits of intermittent fasting  and it didn’t feel like a huge sacrifice. Apparently, if I managed to avoid food for 16 hours, half of it spent sleeping anyway, I was more likely to sustain weight loss by, burning visceral fat, compared with following any other diet. On top of that, fasting periods are said to allow the body to repair cells and, as a result, help to reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes, general inflammation, memory loss, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other maladies.

So much gain for so little pain; it would be silly not to, right? And it did, for a while, give me that satisfying feeling of an empty stomach, a kind of lightness and a sense that I’d instantaneously lost weight, even before I’d shed a single kilogram. Looking in the mirror, my belly seemed flatter.

After a few days, I noticed that as soon as the 16-hour fast was up, I was starving. I had to have something, immediately. At 10, I had a handful of nuts and an apple, just to keep me going. It was not enough, so I had more nuts at 11 and then the big meal that I “earned” through fasting at 12.30pm. Unfortunately, my existence  involves preparing and therefore tasting food throughout the day, which meant that after my ‘well-earned’ lunch I felt too full to work. All I wanted was to lie down and sleep, for ever. Having a wholesome dinner at 19:30 -20:00, before going on the next fast, was a small torture.

I always wanted to shrink my belly and love handles; That I didn’t always have as a younger fat burning man, but it wasn’t an obsession. Now, after trying intermittent fasting, it was!

I ended up gaining weight. My belly now looked plumper than when I started. The irony is that before hearing about Intermittent Fasting and its benefits, I wasn’t thinking that much about my size. Yes, I always wanted to shrink my love cushion and its associates, the love handles, but it was far from an obsession. Now, suddenly, it was. In short, intermittent fasting messed with my brain and contributed zilch to my physique.

I may be exaggerating the effect of this fleeting episode, but it serves to make a point. We have all been there. With turmeric and avocado, fermented foods, superfoods, low-fat, just fat, an apple a day, five a day, the Mediterranean diet, keto, paleo, protein. The list goes on and my memory isn’t good enough (do I need more oily fish?) to recall half of it. But the impossible length of this list goes to show how ephemeral these dieting diktats are.

It seems to me that if we stopped for a moment and tried to ignore all this noise, and instead follow the well-established cuisines we grew up with surrounding cooking and eating but ignoring completely transformed foods, we wouldn’t need such “solutions”. Eating regimes foster self-doubt where there is no need for it. They make us overthink our relationship with food instead of just living it. The world of diets is a trap that locks you in by messing with your head and often your wallet. However eating things in order is certainly of primary importance. Avoiding glucose spikes by starting a meal with some apple cider vinegar, following with fibre , crudités, protein, fat and then carbohydrates.

The trouble is that there is much to be said for many of these notions. Who would deny the goodness of vegetables or the benefits of fermented foods for our guts? The idea of taking a break from eating for a good few hours every day also makes sense. That’s what our hunter-gatherer ancestors did and they didn’t suffer from our cardiovascular conditions. The point is, adopting a “regime” comes at a cost, there’s a balance to disrupt.

As 21st-century humans, we are always on the lookout for simple ideas that would solve all our problems and eradicate the constant anxiety we suffer. For the past few decades, it seems that nutrition has been the source of many such simple notions. Mental health, physical health, longevity, wellbeing – everything can be fixed if we sort out our diets.

Others have already pointed out that the problem lies with equating food with nutrients. Nutrients alone don’t make you healthy, but food can make you healthy – and you can also be unhealthy even if you eat an incredibly “healthy” diet.

The unexamined acceptance that food is just the sum of its nutrients: chicken thigh, potato salad, hummus or a cookie are described using terms such as carbohydrate, protein, saturated fat, fibre, vitamin C or amino acids. This way, we can look right through them. We can forget about food and talk about things that are easy to define, prescribe and sell.

This is completely wrong!

We need to reclaim our meals from the field of nutrition and take them back to the realm of human interaction, conviviality and culture.

We have a limited idea about all the elements that make up and build our food and, more importantly, we really don’t understand the myriad intricate ways in which they interact with each other and with our bodies, which are all different and have particular needs.

The desire to reduce food to nutrients and then come up with the right set of those as a solution to our daily needs assumes that there aren’t foods out there to fulfil those needs. And there is. It is simply food with ingredients that are recognisable and aren’t excessively messed with. I know that the definition of ultra-processed foods, a category that’s much discussed right now, isn’t clearly agreed on yet, but we all know them when we see them.

Low-fat yoghurts, for example, where fat has been substituted with starches and sugars in order to conform with an orthodoxy that’s been dominating our lives since the late 1970s, are a perfect instance of how nutritionalism fails us, colossally. Replacing one “bad” nutrient (fat) with another “good” one (starch) has, most likely, been a major culprit in making us fatter and less healthy. This is evident when looking at the statistics concerning obesity and the consummation of ‘transformed’ foods.

Yet, even if we accept that nutrients tell a very partial story and that we should probably be talking about a potato, and not about carbohydrates and fibre in isolation, we need to understand that the food we eat, the meals we enjoy, are all part of and often the foundations of our very particular cultures, culinary traditions and circumstances.

You would be surprised to hear that even the so called Mediterranean diet angers me. I don’t dispute that fruit, vegetables, nuts and olive oil are great choices. I eat them all the time and my desert island food is, probably, a Greek salad – tomato, pepper, olives, olive oil, vinegar, bits of red onion….omnipresent origano – mopped up with fresh bread. The trouble with the Mediterranean diet is that most of us don’t live in Greece or have access to the Mediterranean and we don’t necessarily have access to, or even recognise, all the fresh ingredients that are cultivated there.

The idea that we can transform our diet in a radical way to make things simple – nutrients, Mediterranean, healthy, happy, satisfied – is an illusion. There aren’t simple solutions.

We know best what we need to eat – and when. The food our grandparents cooked us, the meals we made together, the things that come naturally and close to home from a good reliable source.

What we eat, and when, needs to be removed from most conversations about health. We need to reclaim our meals from the commercialised academia of nutrition and take them back to the realm of human interaction, of conviviality, culture and the daily activities that define us as humans; we are, as humans the only beings that cook! As I said, we don’t need food solutions, we have them! They are called meals and recipes; fetes and celebrations …..they are called a birthday cake.

The breakfast that I was so willing to give up in favour of intermittent fasting has proved itself for millennia as an effective way to sustain us and to mark the beginning of the day with a social gathering. If I forgo breakfast, what do I replace it with? Isn’t it just like the fat in the yoghurt? Give it up at your peril.

The solution to the bogus question of what to feed ourselves is in front of our eyes. It comes in the form of roast chicken with roasted potatoes. It’s joyful, intuitive cooking: spaghetti alla pomodoro, an omelette, dahl with rice, a quick salad, minestrone or a slow cooked boeuf bourguignon. We all know these things. We don’t need to break them down into nutrients or question their credentials.

We know best what we need to eat – and when. The food our parents (perhaps more accurately grandparents) cooked for us, the meals we made together, the things that come naturally, instinctively, as we walk into the kitchen. That’s what we should be cooking and eating. If we slow down, spend time gathering real safe, locally produced ingredients and treat them with love, respect and attention as we cook them, we’re already there.

 Organic, as a concept, is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.

Agricultural sustainability doesn’t depend on agrotechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong part of the word agriculture. What sustainability depends on isn’t agri- so much as culture.

Dismantle fences in order to build bigger tables!

Cook for yourself, cook for others, invite them to your table, give them a bowl of food. Do all of this with love and change the world one meal at a time!

You never know we might be worth it!

With love Cuoco Ergo Sum.