Cooking from scratch – the best way to eat healthy

Gaby always tells the story of how she inherited her love for cooking from her grandmother, who cooked for the big family from scratch, with foods from the market and the garden. And she stresses that this way of cooking is the only way when you are in control of the ingredients.

We were reminded of that when reading the September edition of The Food Chain (publication from safefood). The lead article ‘Grey Area’ reported that the “newfound demand for vegan foods has come with risks attached for businesses, regulators and consumers - in particular those with allergies to animal proteins” as there is no clear definition of the term ‘vegan’, “which is considered a dietary suitability claim, not a food safety description”. This means it cannot be taken as a guarantee that a product labelled ‘vegan’ or ‘plant-based’ does not contain animal-derived ingredients. The UK’s Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) cites a study from the Hampshire and Kent Scientific Services from 2023, “which found that 24 (39%) out of 61 products labelled as vegan contained egg or dairy when tested in a laboratory, including 13 dairy alternatives and 48 meat alternatives.”

As plant based and vegan foods become more popular there is also the danger that these foods, especially the so-called dairy and meat alternatives become simply a commodity for profit rather than a nutritious food. Read the label is the first advice and don’t buy it if you cannot understand the ingredients. We feel vegan options are not always the healthiest. Like Dr. Chris van Tulleken (author of ‘Ultra-processed people: Why do we eat stuff that isn’t food’) wrote recently in The Guardian: “A vegan diet can be very healthy. Now very often it is not. If we compare two meals prepared in a domestic setting with fresh ingredients, the vegan one will often be healthier, because it is likely to contain more vegetables and less saturated fat. But many modern vegan foods (alternatives), like sausage rolls and burgers, are seen as healthier than their meat equivalent, whereas I’d say they are just as bad. They are high in salt, often high in sugar and fat and contain additives that, according to some evidence, are harmful.”

We as customers have always a choice and when we want to buy a vegan burger, a vegan burger from a trusted source or restaurant is  definitely not the same as The Impossible Burger, a highly ultra-processed food.

 Conclusion: Vegan or not, vegetarian or flexitarian, the healthiest food is the one you cook from scratch with fresh ingredients. And if you need any inspiration and guidance than look no further than Gaby’s course on November 23rd: Plant based cooking/baking for the festive season.