A friend phones asking for my recipe for duck legs braised with olives, lots of red wine, tomato passata and two anchovies. 'Can you leave out the anchovies?' she wants to know. Anchovies, she has heard, are a bad food because of their high salt content. (She is just back from a long wait at the doctor's surgery where she has whiled away the time reading government healthy eating advice.)
The answer, from a food lover's perspective, is that she could, but the dish wouldn't taste anything like as good or as interesting. Why get your knickers in a twist over two anchovies anyway? Europeans have been consuming bucketloads for centuries. Just think about the classic Piedmontese speciality, bagna cauda - that melt of anchovies, olive oil, garlic and either butter or cream. At this time of year, Italians will be consuming it with gusto, dipping into it prodigious quantities of marvellously healthy winter vegetables like cardoon, broccoli and cabbage, and they don't appear to be especially hypertensive as a result.
But within the Anglo-American nutrition establishment, the high-fat, high-salt bagna cauda sets the pulse racing. It is a nutritional nightmare, a heretical traditional dish that must be modified urgently to conform to current diet orthodoxy. One US healthy eating website has helpfully reformulated the recipe so that most of the olive oil, anchovies and garlic is replaced by canned, evaporated skimmed milk. This is the sort of gastronomic travesty created when knee-jerk nutritional advice is not grounded in a love of good food.
The government has long been pursuing a fatwa against salt, and no one can deny that Britain could only benefit from reducing its alarmingly high intake. But it isn't the odd anchovy, or sprinkle of flaky sea salt that clocks up the nation's sodium consumption, it's our over-reliance on staple processed foods. Lacking the guts to spit this one out - and so tread on the toes of big food manufacturers - the Food Standards Agency has picked a fight with relatively powerless producers of traditional food. It wants Stilton cheesemakers, for example, to reduce the amount of salt in their unique recipe. Can't imagine the French government trying that one on with Roquefort producers, can you? You can just see a pyramid of rotten cheese in front of the Elysée Palace and the ridicule such a move would provoke among the French media.
But in Blighty, blue cheese gets it in the neck twice over. The FSA views cheese, by dint of its fat content, as a food only to be eaten in restricted quantities. Applying its new traffic lights food labelling scheme, unreconstructed cheese sets red warning lights flashing. The FSA praises the virtue of 'reduced fat hard cheese', whatever that ominous-sounding creation might be, and the bitter, spirit-sapping qualities of Quark. It would prefer that we ate reduced fat crème fraîche with its modified starch and additives, rather than the full-fat version which contains only milk.
A worrying cluster of whole, unprocessed foods falls foul of the agency's fat reduction targets. Nuts of all kinds become undesirable, yet walnuts and brazils are treasure troves of health-promoting micronutrients. Oily avocados get sent to the naughty corner too, even though they are loaded with vitamin E. Have we learnt nothing from the US, home of 'skinny lattes' and 'non-dairy fat-free cream'? It's been reducing its intake for decades, and yet its waistline continues to expand exponentially.
The traffic lights categorisation descended into farce recently when the FSA awarded four green lights to McCain Rustic Oven Chips because they don't contain added sugar (what chips do?), have just a trace of salt, and are only five per cent fat. Punters may now reasonably infer that they can devour them with impunity. But what positive contribution do spuds, in any form, actually make to health, being essentially stodge that rapidly releases sugar into your body, disrupting your blood sugar level?
The Rustic Chips Affair illustrates how food traffic lights are not only besides the point but also actively counter-productive when it comes to helping more Britons develop a more rounded, more intuitive feel for the health properties of food. To be practically useful, cut the bullshit and get results, government dietary advice could be summed up in one simple sentence: eat as little processed food as possible and base your diet on home-cooked meals, made from scratch from raw ingredients. Unfortunately, the government seems to regard any such advice as a lost cause, the culinary equivalent of flat earth-ism.
Are we really so locked into a junk food lifestyle that we can't face the truth? Which is that if you skip lunch and breakfast, snack throughout the day and then fill up on convenience food at night, then there's an odds-on chance that you'll become fat and unhealthy and possibly depressed also. After all, there's nothing quite as dispiriting as a microwaved 'healthy living' ready meal washed down by Diet Coke, even if it does have green lights on the label. But a nice slow braise of melting duck legs with a hint of anchovy, served with a lively green salad? Now that will nourish body and soul and really set you up for life.
