Counting Calories…
Trigger Warning: Eating disorders, recovery from eating disorders
As the latest government initiative to paint the picture of an administration that gives a shit about the general public – spoiler alert: they don’t – restaurants of a certain size are now required by law to publish calorie counts. The rationale is that this is there to encourage healthier eating and help the general public make healthier choices. As someone in recovery from disordered eating, and even just as a generally sane human, I can tell you that this is a counter-intuitive misstep with potentially damaging consequences for both the standards of cookery in this country, and the many who have both visible and hidden eating disorders.
I believe, now more than ever, restaurants have a vital role to play as escapism from an increasingly fraught and difficult world. This holds true for restaurants across the spectrum, from fine-dining to fast-casual, independents, chains – escapism and experience are at the heart of it all. I cherish date nights on days off for steak, pasta, pizza, fried chicken. Large plates of food deeply rooted in nostalgia, ritual and craveability. Rach and I often swoon at some of the city’s over-looked mainstays – not for accolades, finesse, or creativity, but because we’ve built precious memories over reasonably priced rioja and mountainous bowls of carbonara there. I am quite certain my calorific intake is excessive on such rare but special moments, but as someone who both struggles to have time for dining out and someone who has complex and persistent issues with food, they are sacrosanct. To enjoy a meal with my girlfriend and feel no guilt feels as wonderful as the first weeks of my recovery from anorexia – when I allowed myself to eat “forbidden” foods for the first time after years of restricting calories, with punishments for days I failed.
Hence my serious concern as to the implications of the government’s suggested approach to food. I can tell you from personal experience that shame, guilt, and panic are not agents to healthy eating. I have only ever achieved balance in the way I eat from positive re-enforcement and allowing myself days of guilt-free eating. It is the joy of food that has helped me develop a healthier relationship with it, not the catholic guilt. Becoming a chef was the single most powerful action I took against the voices in my head that plagued my late teens, and let me tell you as a chef I’ve eaten so much butter. So damn much.
As a professional chef, I do not believe that healthy eating is to be furthered through introducing guilt on to the menu. Obesity is not caused by restaurants. Obesity and unhealthy eating are a product of economic and time poverty, inflicted in significant part by poor government policy and the ravages of capitalism. We will help people find a healthier way of living through creating aspiration around healthy living, addressing the cost of wholefood ingredients, and changing the very fundamentals of our food culture in this country. We will create healthier lifestyles by ensuring great swathes of the population are not forced to choose between heating their homes, or filling their stomachs. We will help people find healthier lifestyles through removing the economic and social obstacles to gyms, to boxing, to cycling, to yoga – whatever your thang. We will help people embrace healthier lifestyles through changing the fabric of our cities, the way we work in them and the way we move through them. We will facilitate healthier lifestyles when city councils stop allowing landlords to populate our highstreets with shitty fast food chains, and make it possible to navigate said cities without cars. Letting someone know that their birthday meal is over 2000 calories will not further any of this.
I believe in the general public’s common sense – no, really – to work out that a cream-based pasta is less healthy than a bitter leaf salad. Find me one person who thinks a pizza is a healthier choice than wholegrain rice and chicken. I, certainly, do not eat my ritualistic post-service Domino’s under any illusion that this is even vaguely healthy, but that is not the point of food. A society that strips food of value beyond calories only serves to maroon food culture in this country even further from the dizzying heights of food cultures elsewhere – cultures where food is celebrated and discussed and so central to society.
The irony in all this being that during covid hospitality was the most persistently shut sector, demonised as the root of covid transmission on the basis of data that, ultimately, never came to light. How confronting then that it becomes apparent that with large, complex societal issues, we are apparently yet again on the frontline. A convenient scapegoat. I challenge anyone to reduce their first restaurant experience post-lockdown to the meta-calorific breakdown – “Steve, it was great, the main course was less than 10% unsaturated fat!” Food has always been so much more to me, and I suspect to you. Food is memories, it is joy, it is comfort, it is motivation, it is history, it is family, it is heritage. What an incredibly reductive and lazy way to treat it this latest change is…