Remember the days when food was really food?

Just over 11 years ago, in 2007 David and I, along with three of our children moved to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. We left for two years, with the option of a third. However, just like the ill- fated SS Minnow from one of my favourite TV show’s Gilligan’s Island, we are yet to return.

This was a huge move, not only from a cultural perspective but also from a food perspective.

We were thrown into this crazy world where our local supermarket was about quarter of the size of the Coles supermarket I frequented in Australia. It stocked the basics but it very quickly became obvious that it was going to be a challenge to find the sort of foods we were used to. I remember one day when my friend rang excitedly to say that the cheese boat had landed at our local An Phu supermarket. I rushed down the street to find the dairy cabinet full (a rare occurrence) of all our favourite things and I excitedly bought ridiculous amounts of very expensive cheese and yoghurt!

We did have access to another huge supermarket called Metro. I didn’t go there often as I found it overwhelming. It was pretty much a giant warehouse full of weird and wonderful foods from all over the world, lots I didn’t recognize. I remember the first time I went there, I headed to the poultry section to buy a chicken. I was horrified to find the chickens complete with their heads, feet and the insides still intact. No nice packs of Steggles chicken breasts here. I turned to my mother in law who was with me and exclaimed in horror about the state of the chicken. She was a quite non-plussed and said to me calmly, “Karen, that is how chickens always used to come”. It made me realize how far we have moved from seeing our food the way it originally started out.  I was also horrified at how small and scrawny the chickens were. Closer inspection revealed they were from a local chicken supplier and obviously not plumped with hormones to be the nice fat juicy meat that I was used to buying in Australia. In the same cabinet as the chickens there were rabbits, pigs and ducks all with body parts intact.

On another occasion I had decided to cook fish for dinner. My helper, Xuan, accompanied me to Metro where I thought we would buy a nice fat fish with no scales, guts or head…just the way I like it. I was understandably confused when we get to the seafood section only to find huge raised tanks full of live fish swimming around happily. (Seriously, the tanks were as big as a swimming pool). My very short helper grabbed a very big fishing net and promptly hoisted herself up on a stool so she had a good vantage point. She targeted the fish she wanted and set about scooping the net through the water until she had the desired fish in her clutches. Water slopped everywhere and Xuan gave me some panicked moments when I thought she was going to fall into the tank, but she was victorious…albeit dripping wet! She threw the live fish in a bag and off we went home with it flapping around in the trolley. (terrible but true). I’m not necessarily saying I want to go back to the days when I need to fillet, gut and scale a fish, or chase a chicken around the yard so we can eat it for dinner, but it really drove home the fact that we have moved a long way past associating food with its origins.

What I lOVED about the food in Vietnam was the availability of fresh produce. The lush, rich soil of the Mekong Delta was a perfect place for growing fruit and veggies and the markets were teeming with all sorts of brightly coloured produce that was grown locally.  The Vietnamese cuisine is very much vegetable based with a small bit of protein thrown in for flavor. Meat was not the main part of the meal, and processed foods were virtually non-existent. However, I fear that is changing rapidly as the year after we left in 2010 the first McDonald’s came to Ho Chi Minh City.

Fast forward to 2018 and after just finishing my Health Coaching course, I understand more than ever the need to go back to eating food that hasn’t been “industrialised. There is a great book I have just finished by Michael Pollan called “In Defense of food”. In it he talks about the way food has changed its form over the past 50 years and the damage this has done to our health. He states that most of what we are eating today is no longer the product of nature but of food science. We are now suffering more than every from disease such as Diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease as well as a host of auto immune diseases, and food plays a major part in this. The incidences of these diseases is much higher in the western world where we have access to processed foods, than it is in developing countries where more traditional diets are still followed.

Michael Pollan has a couple of cardinal rules when it comes to food, a few of my favourite’s are:

“Don’t eat anything your Grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”

“It’s not food if it arrived through the window of a your car”

“Eat all the food you want as long as you cook it yourself”

“The whiter the bread the sooner you’ll be dead”.

And my personal favourite:

“Eat food, not to much, mostly plants.”

Simple really.

Some food for thought.