In the past couple of decades, we have complexified our food to an unbelievable level. We must have scores of spices—or, even worse, packet foods with goodness knows what in them—to satisfy our appetite for ever-increasing depths of flavour.

This has become a treadmill which ties us to processed food because we don’t always feel we have the time to faff about with 10 little bottles of spices to get the flavour we require. (Plus we’re not all knowledgeable enough to do a good job at choosing which spices and flavourings go together.)

Something has to change. We need to simplify. One way to do that is to let single ingredients be the stars of their own dish. Cucumber with a dash of vinegar and sea salt. Tomatoes with a little oil. Sweet potatoes oiled, roasted and served. Beans topped, tailed and steamed to vivid green. We don’t always need to have the complex flavour of many ingredients tossed together. In fact, we need to be increasingly satisfied with simple tastes. Real tastes. Original tastes.

I know this flies in the face of the previous column which was all about getting lots of vegies into a meal, but sometimes totally different ends of the same spectrum still make sense.

Occasionally having simple meals that have few ingredients is not going to be a nutritional disaster for us. As long as the foods we choose are as fresh as we can get them and rich in nutrients, our wonderful bodies will do their best to assimilate all the fuel we require.

Remember Bo Derek and that Movie, 10? Well, here’s how I’m going to be a 10 in the health stakes: Make sure my fruit and vegetable intake reachs 10 every day.

That’s seven vegetables and three fruit a day. For fruitarian types it might mean five fruit and five vegetables. Vegeholics might prefer nine vegies and one fruit. Once anyone starts eating this way, it leaves a lot less room for garbage food. Also, it makes a game out of eating better. We can all count to 10, can’t we? What could be simpler? Whoever reaches 10 every day wins.

I’ve found that an easy way to do this is to prepare vegetable soup. I start with some vegetable stock and add onions (prefrying makes them yummiest), carrots, celery, capsicum, cabbage, kale, snow peas, corn, zucchini and pumpkin … or whatever vegetables that are in the fridge, really. I try to add something green near the end of the cooking period. Frozen peas, shredded kale or whole leaves of English spinach (for the English spinach, just add right at the end of the cooking period so it wilts.)

Throwing a pot of vegetable soup on the stove on Sunday means being sorted for lunches for at least part of the week or perfect for a soup starter every night before the main dish. Soup as an entree helps to control how much other food we eat for that meal.

If being a 10 sounds a bit too hard at the moment, maybe I could start by being a five and just gradually work my way up.

Next column, Let single ingredients shine. Sounds counterintuitive but I think it works.

When I’m feeling overwhelmed probably isn’t the time to try this. But when I’m in control and feeling fairly organised, I can make good decisions about what I can do to simplify my life. These decisions can then form actions that line up with my personal values.

Clear as mud? Let me give an example. Years ago, I made a decision to simplify the way I cleaned my hair. Most shampoos and conditioners are loaded with all sorts of weird chemicals and I wasn’t keen to keep putting them on my scalp, considering that the skin is the largest organ in the body and does soak up at least some of what’s put on it.

It did take some time to find exactly what worked for me. Many years before I’d washed my hair with a ‘green’ laundry gel I used to make. It had soap, washing soda and borax in it. Borax? Hmmmmm. Not this time. I was looking for something simpler this time. I tried washing with bicarbonate of soda then rinsing with watered-down lemon juice. It worked okay but didn’t really resonate with me. Eggs are a great conditioner, but a bit too messy to be an everyday go-to soution. Then I tried normal soap to clean the hair followed by a dessertspoon of white vinegar in a couple of cups of water as a rinse then letting the shower water run to wash out the vinegar.

After a week of washing my hair with normal soap and cheap-as-chips food-grade white vinegar (which is actually clear), I thought I had the perfect method for keeping my hair clean. Seven years later, I still think so. I’m grateful I spent that bit of time researching my options and working out something simple that would work for me. Every time I go to the supermarket I save myself all the angst (and expense) of looking at the evergrowing shelves of shampoos, conditioners, hair colours, mousses, clarifiers, waxes, gels and whatever else is around these days. Maybe once a year I venture to that aisle to hunt down some hairspray, which I do use occasionally on a windy day. Otherwise, with a sixpack of soap and a bottle of vinegar, I’m set for eons.

The vinegar lives in the pantry and I decant into a squeezy bottle that once held mayonnaise. The biggest addition to the bathroom is a cup for mixing water with the vinegar.

Soap and vinegar simplified how I wash my hair. But making the decision not to put the colouring chemical cocktail into my hair simplified my life even more. Every six weeks when my roots grow out, they’re the same gorgeous brown-silver combo as the rest of my hair so they never need hiding. I do exactly nothing. Nowadays you can get colours that don’t have quite the same awful chemicals in them, but there’s still the time you have to take to buy the products and do the dyeing.

What I did with my hair many years ago I am now doing with food. I’ve simplified flavourings down to some basics that I can mix and match. It’s an interesting exercise and it means that in some of those aisles where there are 6,000 different packet sauces I can walk by, confident that two or three single-ingredient products and general pantry staples can do a similar job. It may take a little research and a little extra time for my first effort. But this way, I know what goes into my food.