Food wowsers' dieting dogma
Low-fat. Low-salt. Low-carb. Skinless, as in chicken breasts. "Light" coconut milk. Everything steamed. Or if it's not steamed, minimal oil (have you tried frying two chopped onions and a carrot in one tablespoon of oil? It burns.) Look at any recipe in the "health" pages of the popular press, and this is what you will find. Recipe? Yes. For depression.
They are the food wowsers, and they cloak their purse-lipped disapproval of real food in a mish-mash of pseudo-scientific nutritionism and dieting dogma. ("Oh, but I love chocolate," they're wont to insist, before going on a 5km run to work off the two pieces they gulped down after lunch.)
Most of the time, they leave the rest of us alone, but occasionally they have a shot at restaurants, the inference being that we should limit our eating out in the interests of our health. Now that hurts.
Then again, maybe they're going to the wrong restaurants. Or are they just 20 years out of date? Back in the 80s and 90s, "going out to dinner", at least at the posher places, almost invariably involved an excess of rich food. Rich food, you see, was synonymous with luxury. Foie gras, lashings of butter, cream and cheese, puff pastry, hefty desserts. And a conspicuous absence of vegetables.
But today? The dude-food fad aside, it's hard to think of a time when the fashionable middle-class restaurant was healthier than it is now. Let's count the ways. Ancient grains such as quinoa, freekeh, spelt and other whole grains; check. Lotsa salads and vegetables, including previously spurned greens such as nettles and kale; check. A focus on small, artisan producers using highest-quality, unadulterated, non-genetically modified ingredients; check. A new enthusiasm for housemade pickles and preserves and other naturally fermented, health-giving foods (and drinks); check; increasing pride in using the good fats: butter (often house-churned, organic and/or from a small-batch dairy), olive oil, cream, duck fat, even lard, now that we know animal fats aren't the baddies the nutritionists decreed for so long; check.
Chef Neil Perry in the kitchen at his restaurant Rockpool Bar and Grill in The Rocks, Sydney, NSW.
Here's my vote for three of the best "wellness" restaurants in Australia: all guaranteed low-sodium-soy-free zones, and none of them endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow. First, Rockpool Bar & Grill (Melbourne/Sydney/Perth), because it was a pioneer of the long, long vegetable sides list (organic carrots, creamed silverbeet, potatoes sauteed in wagyu fat, yum) and for all that body-building grass-fed beef. Second, the modest, Moroccan-inspired B'stilla in South Yarra, for all those clean, healthy-but-not-pious vegetarian dishes (rgahaif - pastries filled with spinach, eggplant, almonds, fresh cheese and raisins; cauliflower with tahini yoghurt; pickled beets and radishes with avocado). Third, Sake (Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane), not only for all that virtuous raw fish and riffs on modern Japanese (miso-cream scallops; pasture-fed wallaby with light soy dressing, braised spinach & shiitake), but also for its namesake drink: yes, sake is good for you. Gargle it, I mean, Google it.
Such is my conviction that dining out is good for your health, I'm thinking of writing a book, The Wilden Total Well-Being Diet, with recommendations for restaurants worldwide committed to (a) using duck fat on their hand-cut chips instead of nasty, possibly cancer-causing generic vegetable oils; (b) properly seasoning all savoury dishes with high-quality sea salt (and offering more at table) and (c) ensuring their milk is unhomogenised, their butter hand-churned, their eggs organic and their cheeses raw-milk (sadly, a short list in Australia).
A diet of copious duck fat, butter, cheese and salt? To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, I'd hate to advocate it to anyone, but it sure works for me.
Source: The Australian, written by Necia Wilden, 14 September 2013
