I have a theory that 80 per cent of our diet should come from fresh vegetables and fruit, prepared in any way we like.
As far as I’m concerned, the other 20 per cent can be whatever we want it to be. Meat, dairy, eggs, nuts and seeds, grains and legumes. Chocolate, wine, pizza …
Now should this theory work on volume, weight or some other measure? Raw or cooked? I think the easiest way is by volume and as 80 per cent is such a big figure, I also think it’s okay to test this theory out doing it entirely by eye. So I’m not going to be precious about it. For foods like rice that bulk out as you cook them, perhaps the 20 per cent could be for cooked volume, not raw. Still, as this is a personal theory, I’m going to be comfortable playing around with it and tweaking it as time goes by.
Say we eat three meals a day. That’s 21 meals a week. Seven of those meals are breakfast, and that’s the one meal where this idea is going to come unstuck the quickest. The only way to overcome the breakfast problem is to free ourselves from our conditioning.
I’ve always been a leftovers-are-great-for-breakfast kind of person, so dinner as breakfast works fine for me. As someone who grew up eating different food to the rest of the world (at least, that’s how it felt—we were lacto vegetarian and pretty much raw foodists waaaay back when it wasn’t heard of, let alone acceptable), I have found it fairly easy to overcome the cultural conditioning that you ‘should’ eat particular foods at particular times. But I don’t push this on my partner who pretty much eats traditional meals at traditional times.
Over the past few years, I’ve been leaning towards the conviction that we shouldn’t consider food in terms of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Rather than thinking of breakfast, we would then identify it simply as a meal. That means any combination of food that makes a meal is acceptable for the first meal of the day. (The next step would be not thinking in terms of meals but rather of hunger and food. But that’s a bit left of field and the subject I’m exploring here is how you could get this 80-20 theory to work in practice.) So within the parameters of three meals a day and a couple of snacks thrown in, what could eating look like?
If you love fruit, you’re sorted. Fruit for breakfast, salad or vegetable soup for lunch, apples or carrot sticks for snacks and a huge plate of vegetables with a small amount of meat for dinner. (See, back to breakfast, lunch and dinner already. The conditioning of a lifetime isn’t easy to escape, is it?)
But I’m more of a vegetablearian than a fruitarian. I try to do the fruit-as-snacks routine so that I will actually eat some fruit and so I make better choices when snacking. I also love cooked food which I guess means ingesting less nutrients than raw … but on the flip side, cooked vegetables are pretty easy to digest. I’ve found a way to easily abide by my decision to eat more raw fruit and vegetables. I eat salad for breakfast. If I have stew-type leftovers I put a couple of spoons of that in my salad to add softness to the crunch. It makes eating salad so much easier and tastier.
Is this strange? Am I weird? You tell me. But I can tell you this. At least by having it as my first meal of the day I am eating salad every day. It’s super easy to do the basics while I’m preparing meat/cheese-and-salad sandwiches for my partner because I have some salad vegetables on the bench anyway. I just chop extra lettuce, cucumber and tomato into a dish. I pour in a wee amount of sacha inchi oil (also known as inca inchi) or olive oil and massage it into the tomatoes. Then the dish goes into the fridge as I’m putting my salad box away. When I’m ready for breakfast, I usually add to those basics. Somehow, because some of the work is already done, it’s psychologically easy to do a few finishing touches, like sprinkling some seeds (pepita, sunflower, chia), adding home-cooked beet if I have some in the fridge, dicing an avocado, slicing a pear or grating some carrot over the dish and throwing in a few sultanas. English spinach, radicchio, capsicum, raw or cooked mushrooms, leftover roast pumpkin … you are limited only by your imagination.
As theories go, I quite like my 80-20 theory. It may not be perfectly balanced and it may not be workable in the long term. Perhaps it’s too hard for those days when I need to pack a sandwich for lunch and my partner wants pizza for dinner. But all is not lost; I have another theory. If I try to live up to the 80-20 theory, I might, just might, manage to make fresh fruit and vegetables half the food I eat on a daily basis. And you know, in the old days, 50 per cent was considered a pass.