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.