The way we deal with the concept of simplicity can be strange indeed. Those of us who desire simplicity in our life can make it a very complex process.

We decide to declutter so we read books and blogs about it instead of simply getting on with it. We think about simplifying without actually doing anything about it. Surely that’s making a simple process more difficult than it actually needs to be.

One way to simplify is to become free of addictions. If you’re addicted to nicotine or alcohol, you can’t simplify in that area. You can’t decide not to use that product . You need it. You have to think about it. Plan for it. You must go to the shop so you don’t run out. The product, then, is your master. If you’re a hoarder, your things own you, not the other way around. If you’re addicted to sugar, the cravings overcome any knowledge you have about the subject and you find yourself having to eat something (a lot of it, usually!) you know is not healthy.

If you’re not addicted, you can drop something effortlessly simply by deciding to do without it, leaving you with extra time and often extra money. When nicotine, alcohol and sugar no longer hold dominion over you, you are free. Free and happy, because there is no conflict between the thing and you. The thing ceases to have importance. When things you no longer use are not left around to make your house a cluttered graveyard of the past, cleaning is quicker and the visual effect of your home gives you satisfaction instead of angst. It makes life easier. You have space for the important things.

Simplifying food can be a good idea. You can have easy, uncomplicated meals that take little preparation yet give you lots of nutrients. Finding simple food and simple preparation styles helps you overcome the desire for fast food for reasons of convenience. You increasingly realise that food can be just as convenient to prepare at home and that you are in control of the timing of the delivery. It’s just a case of buying a little differently during your weekly or monthly shop. You might have stores of tinned chickpeas and butter beans to help make easy salads or stews or put whole potatoes and huge pumpkin chunks in the oven to roast while you’re busy doing other things. It’s really just a case of thinking about it anew, rather than doing things the same old way you’ve always done them. Simple.

Marie Antoinette supposedly said, “Let them eat cake” when told that the peasants had no bread (their staple diet) and were starving. (The quote has also been attributed, perhaps more accurately, to the wife of Louis XIV, Marie-Therese, who lived a century before.) The example was to show how ignorant the French upper class was to the common man’s predicament, as at that time cake (brioche) was hugely more expensive than bread.

Nowadays many of us have the opposite problem. We have all the bread and cake we could possibly need, and most of us eat a lot more than we should. We know that to have a healthy diet we shouldn’t really eat cake. But is there a way that we can have our cake and eat it too? This is a pretty frivolous look at the subject of health, but here it is anyway.

Even little changes can make a difference. If you want cake, cook it yourself from scratch. Live by the rule that you can have any kind of junk food you want, but you have to prepare it yourself from real ingredients. It slows you down but doesn’t put anything totally out of bounds. (It helps if you’re a great cook, of course.)

You just must have cake? Zucchini works in some recipes, pumpkin makes a moist cake or great scones and beetroot can go into chocolate cake, and where would a carrot cake be without …? Then there’s apple cake, banana cake, rhubarb cake, carrot and apricot muffins, all kinds of fruit loaves. Many berries work well in cakes and muffins.

So pick a kind of cake, do some research and you’re well on your way to at least slightly healthier cake than the store-bought stuff.

Here’s one recipe to start you off. It’s deliciously moist with a slight tang—and it’s as far from health food as you can get. But we’re hastening slowly here. If this replaces cake with some ingredients you can’t even pronounce, it’s a step in the right direction. It’s also an incredibly easy recipe and once you’ve made it a couple of times you can start tweaking ingredients, substituting wholemeal flour for the white, maple syrup for the sugar et cetera.

WHOLE ORANGE CAKE
1 whole navel orange, including skin
150g butter, melted
3 eggs
1 cup caster sugar or substantially less
1 ½ cups SR flour

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C (350 degrees F)
2. Grease a cake tin and line base and sides with baking paper
3. Cut the orange into bits and discard any really big pieces of pith
4. Process in food processor to slightly chunky mush.
5. Add all other ingredients and process until well mixed.
6. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.

This is quite a dense cake. It freezes well, which is good when you’re looking for something extra to pop into your lunchbox. Don’t ice. We’re trying to be slightly healthy here!

If we had just one rule for the foods we ate, it could be this: Start with single ingredient foods that still look the way they did when they came off the plant.

If we wanted apple and pear juice, we would start with apples and pears and juice them. If we wanted potato chips, we’d begin with potatoes and make them into crisps by slicing and baking. If we wanted bread we would start with wheat berries. Animal products would get the same treatment. Meat would be unprocessed (not corned, reformed or covered with marinade). Cheese would begin with milk. Butter would start with cream.

Now I don’t know about you, but that would sure slow me down. No more eating packets of corn chips almost without thinking. After as much time and effort as it would take to make them, I reckon I would savour every single crunchy delight.

And that is the point. If we had to start from scratch with everything and process it ourselves, it would drastically slow down our intake plus it would ensure that we were eating food we could recognise from its native state. We would be aware of exactly what went into each meal before it went into our mouths.

There’s always pain in trying a grand experiment like this. For me, it would be … if I wanted chocolate, I would have to start with cacao beans and sugarcane. And I’ve read enough about other people’s experiments to know that chocolate is hard to get right from scratch and often ends up grainy, which doesn’t give that subtle mouthfeel of excellent chocolate.

Obviously, this means we would have to think about our food more and take time over its preparation. But food preparation does take time and we have ignored that in our downward spiral of filling our supermarket trolleys with prepackaged, chemical-laden items that pass for food and buying fast food to eat on the run. We’ve also ignored the fact that simple foods—raw fruits, salad vegetables, eggs—actually don’t take long to prepare. So in a way, the much-vaunted sophistication of our tastes has robbed us of our good health.

If we followed the principle of eating food as close to its origins as possible, even most of the time, we would find our diet automatically being better. One simple rule would make the world of difference. And we’d steer clear of any recipe that starts with, open a jar of simmer sauce.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as such, but even in the free world we are slaves for much of our lives. When we are young we are bound by the schooling system and are under the control of our parents. As adults, we are tied to our employers because we are the slaves of credit cards and other kinds of debt, and credit cards hold sway because we live our lives under the thumb of sophisticated advertising and the expectations of others (who have also fallen into the trap of ‘must have’ marketing).

We try to keep up with the Jonses who are trying to keep up with the Kafoops who base their lives on the Lowells who in turn look up to the Cabots.

We are enslaved by many things. Fashion. Sugar. Alcohol. Nicotine. Other substances. Addicted.

Anyone who breaks out of this stupidity is considered a maverick—or a hippie or some other kind of alternative-living dropout.

We are so influenced by others, but what if they are wrong? What if, by ourselves, we could land on the right track and give ourselves an abundant, brilliant life not encumbered by what others think?

I read a lot about food. I read about people who go paleo, vegan, low GI. I read recipes from the all-raw fanatics and some from the moderation-in-everything brigade. But I believe that being a blind follower of anything means giving up your independence and thinking ability. It hands your personal power to others and opens the doors to corruption. So I’m not any of those things. I don’t have a label pinned to my lapel.

Having said that, I admit I’m chained to some things (chocolate comes to mind), but I see myself as a thinking slave. I know what’s happened but I also believe I can free myself by changing my perception of what I need to be who I am. And chocolate does not define me.

It is perhaps when we are open to other ways of living that we have an opportunity to break out of the vicious cycle of our own society’s forms of slavery. When we look at how other societies live, we can start to see more clearly our own society’s mores and how they have shaped our thoughts and consequently our actions.

We have enshrined the concept of freedom, yet we live our daily lives in thrall. It’s time for that to end … time for us all to do a little of our own thinking.

It’s always a good idea to know several ways to prepare each of the vegetables that most often reside in your refrigerator. It adds a greater flexibility and interest to your meals without having to buy vegetables you don’t usually cook. Having said that, I find that when I have a little spare time for domestic goddessness, it’s also fun to come home from shopping with one or two kinds of vegetable I don’t normally purchase. But back to the idea of vegetables that multi-task. Let me pick a couple of examples.

Green beans can be steamed, stirfried, put in one-pot wonders alongside other vegetables or cooked, cooled and eaten as a bean salad with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Capsicums can be eaten in salads, added raw at the end of stews to give some crunch and colour, drizzled in olive oil and roasted, used as an edible bowl (stuffed with rice and vegetables and topped with cheese then baked), put in omelettes or a myriad other ways.

Potatoes are the master chameleons of plant food. They can be everything from mash to hasselback, roast to steamed to chipified. They can form the basis of creamy potato bake or be used cold in potato salad. Whole recipe books have been devoted to the humble potato!

Tomatoes go well raw in salads or gazpacho, cooked into bolognaise-style sauces or cooked to a concentrate that adds depth and colour to so many dishes. They work overtime in Italian and Mexican cuisine.

We’re lucky that we live in an era where we can choose cuisine that is multinational and pretty adventurous. But let’s not leave it to others have all the fun in the preparation of interesting food. Our own kitchens deserve to have their own 15 minutes of fame. So, out with the sharp knife and the chopping board. Where are my tomatoes?

If there’s a single hour in the week that’s going to dictate the quality of my diet, it’s the hour I spend shopping for groceries. In that hour, the choices I make can mean the difference between good and bad eating for seven days. Sixty minutes, spent wisely, can set me up to succeed in my quest for a better life.

If I can zoom through the frozen goods section and only have eyes for the frozen peas and mixed vegetables … and if I can buy my washing detergent in bulk so I don’t even have to go down that aisle in my regular shop (and use this trick with all non-perishables), I can spend the bulk of my time in the fruit and vegetable department. Fruit and vegetables come in glorious colours. Their textures are fascinating and the tastes range from the familiar to the exotic. We can’t all get to farmers’ markets, but even in a supermarket we can all find real food.

It doesn’t always go to plan, does it? Sometimes life throws you a curve ball. The world shifts, and you have to simply do your best in a changed situation. You’re tired. Stressed. Falling behind with your work.

That’s when you need, more than anything, not to drop the ball with regard to the kind of food you eat. You have to pay more attention because you need good nutrition just to get through the day, the week, the year.

In emergency situations you can survive on bread, cheese, tomatoes and cups of tea—even for a week at a time. But when the emergency is over and the long haul of getting used to a changed life is in front of you, that’s the time to pay especial care to your eating habits.

Lots of vegetables cooked together is a good option. Lots of fruit, raw and eaten singly, is another. This is a time for simple preparation but food full of goodness.

And when you’re eating well, life’s not so depressing after all.

Sometimes we despair. We doubt our ability to make the changes we know we must make. We feel like we are fighting against ourselves, our natural desires, our very DNA.

I think that one of the problems is that we want to be perfect all at once. We want to wake up on Monday morning and find that it’s all easy. Our food cravings will simply disappear. We’ll naturally make better food decisions and the naughty foods will magically stop calling our name.

My solution to this impossible dream is very simple: I accept where I am today. And I add at least one nutritionally rich food to everything I eat. Want chocolate? Have a kiwifruit as well. Toasted cheese sandwich? Eat it with a side salad sprinkled with chia seeds and sunflowers. In this way, I can make big improvements to my diet while not creating a situation where I am constantly feeling conflicted about food.

Someone looking at the huge strides I’ve made might still see many, many areas where I could improve. So what? If I’m on the right track and I’m always improving my diet, I’ll get to a stage that perfectly satisfies me, and it will be worlds away from where I started. This way, I can enjoy the journey. Enjoy being better, making improved choices, learning new ways with food, the next small improvement. Revel in taking back the power. Me having power over the food I eat instead of the other way around.

Big bold strokes work for some folks. Sometimes they work if you’ve had an epiphany or a fright about your health or that of someone you love. But mostly we succeed fastest when we do things more slowly. It seems paradoxical, but think for a moment of someone who wants to get up an hour earlier in the morning. If they do it one minute at a time, one day at a time, it takes 60 days and they have painlessly succeeded. if they do it all at once and fail a few times, they may lose hope and never try again – or even do it sporadically and end up tired all day – how did doing it fast work for them?

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in big changes. I believe they can be done as a leap of faith. But the biggest change you can make is a mental shift. This is the catalyst for action – any action, as long as it’s taking you in the right direction. It doesn’t matter how small you start, as long as you do something. You have to walk before you can run. And if it’s a case of having to crawl before you can walk, that’s okay too.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

These words have been attributed to Abraham Lincoln. I call it his you-cannot-improve-something-by-destroying-its-opposite speech. (The quote starts with the words, “You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”)

Lincoln was clearly a believer in the power of individual responsibility. How could that translate to the subject of the food industry? Perhaps we will discover that it is not so hard to take back initiative and independence even in the face of the overwhelming power wielded by governments and large corporations.

We always think we have to change the world. But do we? What if you and I can do something, right now, that can be just as successful? That would mean that if you’re not a crusader, you don’t have to crusade. You don’t need to close down multi-national companies that are pushing GM food or selling dangerous pesticides. You don’t have to rail against supermarkets that buy substandard food then hawk it to you as quality fare. Simply put, you take control of what food you are putting in your mouth and where you source it. You can work quietly and calmly, in an ordered manner, to give yourself the better food choices you need for optimum health.

It might take prodigious thought and a change in perspective which will gently translate into a change in day-to-day life. You may need to spend considerable time gathering the knowledge required so you are able to garden for yourself or at least to source better quality food.

But it can be done without fanfare; without creating a stir of any kind. What this will create, if enough people take responsibility for their food choices, is a groundswell. Small vibrations at first, then an unstoppable wave that can truly change the earth.

For me, these are aspirational thoughts. I’m definitely not there yet, although at least I’m thinking about it. And I’m taking the concept of personal responsibility seriously by doing my own cooking instead of grabbing takeaway, by preparing meals from fresh fruit and vegetables, by researching meat and grains, eggs and dairy, legumes, nuts and seeds. How good are they for our health? Should we eat meat? Is dairy good? What is the hallmark of good quality? Where can I find the best food?

We can source our fruit and vegetables from growers who don’t use dangerous pesticides. We can grow our own, if only for some of our requirements. If we lack the knowledge and the skills, we can find them in many different places and we can make it our life’s mission – at least in our spare time – to learn those things and put into place a lifestyle that will give us health.

Yes, these things take time and effort. They require a sense of responsibility, of looking after the self rather than expecting someone else ‘out there’ to do it for us.

I don’t think we need to worry about the corporations and governments and others who are making less than great choices with the food industry. As long as we have enough of a democracy that gives us the right to make our personal food choices, our individual actions can be incredibly powerful.

We don’t need a revolution. Remember the typewriter? There was no revolution to oust it from our offices. We didn’t have burn-the-typewriter marches. It’s just that something different came along and from individual to individual, office to office, country to country, we embraced it. The company which was most famous for the typewriter had to either change or wither, because people weren’t buying typewriters any more. (It changed. IBM is still in the marketplace today.) Other enterprises started. The world went on. We needed different knowledge to use the typewriter’s successor. But gradually we skilled up. And the world, for better or worse, is definitely a different place because of it. So it can be with the food we eat.

We all know that most of us eat too much gluten. If we eat packet foods it’s almost certain gluten will be lurking within, unless the pack is specifically marked ‘gluten free’. Every time we have a piece of conventional bread or any other bakery goods we’re consuming gluten. We also have a huge amount of wheat in our diet, and who knows if it’s genetically modified or not? Probably the latest hybrid variety isn’t that good for our health, anyway.

So it’s good to experiment with other flours just to give our bodies a rest from unrelenting gluten ingestion. That’s what I was telling myself this morning when I decided I should try something flour based — but gluten free and vegan – in my pan on top of the stove. Start simple, I exhorted myself. So I did. I began with just potato flour and water, thinking I would make some kind of pancake. This experiment was a resounding success. Uhh, if you want glue, that is. The bottom cooked the same way a firm paste would mature if left in the sun for days … and the uncooked top was so sticky it was amazing. I tell you, you’d pay a fortune for glue like that! After flipping the experiment and cooking the other side, I decided that I had an incredible new product on my hands. This was just like one of those gasket thingies the mechanics use! The only thing missing was the cutouts, but they could do that with a stanley knife, couldn’t they? Wow, if they only knew about this, they could DIY and save a fortune on kits. And no doubt the greenies would get on board with this great new product as it’s 100 per cent biodegradable to boot!

With the gasket experiment firmly behind me, I felt that a little further hands-on research was required. Enter some newly bought coconut flour. After mixing with water, I put some in the pan. It spattered and complained, and I could see why. I was expecting an albino to go out in the sun and get a nice tan. Needless to say it didn’t cook well. Okay, then, a blend. I threw some of coconut flour and potato flour together with water and once again oiled my pan. Not quite success but better than the previous two experiments.

I don’t want you to think that I gave up then, but truthfully I gave up trying to make it vegan. I added one egg and a little salt and the result was a deliciously eggy pancake that I consumed with gusto.

I admit that I could probably have done some online research to find out that I couldn’t cook pancakes/flat bread with single ingredient flours like potato or coconut, but sometimes the fun is in doing it for yourself. And every time I do this sort of thing I admit all over again that I’m better at cooking with vegetables – which I guess isn’t such a bad thing.