Good food tastes good and is good for you
Fred and Walter at the wine bar for a Slow Food Scotland awards event.
by Walter Mowat, Slow Food in the UK, Director for Scotland
Highly processed “fast” food may seem tasty but this is often due to the sugar, salt, flavour enhancers, colours etc that the manufacturers add to ensure that the reconstituted cheap meat or the vegan pretend meat is palatable. Just look at the list of ingredients in a pot noodle or a vegan burger - it’s as unnatural as you can get. And society has been consuming fast food in ever increasing quantities over many years now - the decline in our health and especially the increase in obesity is often attributed to this. Slow Food has long recognised that using local, fresh, unprocessed food is good for small scale producers and the environment, but it is also vital for our health - and l’escargot is one of the restaurants in Edinburgh adopting this wholeheartedly.
Eating the right kind of food is key. To understand why, we need to know a bit about how our bodies process food. We eat it and it passes down onto our gut where the good stuff is extracted and used to help us grow and keep us healthy. This process is hugely complex, with a multiplicity of friendly bacteria in the gut performing the work, each carrying out specific jobs. But it seems that as we have adopted fast food with ever increasing enthusiasm, the diversity of bacteria in the gut has substantially decreased leading to less efficient production of the good stuff the body - and in particular the immune system - needs.
What we need to do is encourage more diversity in the gut by eating more natural food. Slow Food encourages eating fresh food where the good bacteria abound but there are also ways of accelerating the diversity in the gut by using food that naturally has lots of the good bugs. Cheese for example - raw milk cheese in particular - and other fermented milk products like yoghurt and kefir. Fermented foodstuffs like sauerkraut, kimchi and kombucha, naturally cured meats and sourdough bread are also beneficial. Along with an abundance of fresh, local produce you’ll find these in Slow Food supporting restaurants like Fred’s.
By eating good, fresh, or naturally preserved food our gut can help keep our immune system fighting fit, something it really needs to be these days.
For more information about food, gut and health, there are excellent publications by both Professor Tim Spector and by Dr Sally Bell. Find out more about Slow Food Scotland here.
PS from Fred. You might also be interested in Slow Food's #NotInMySupermarket campaign. Slow Food, alongside over 50 NGOs, are asking the largest UK Supermarkets not to stock genetically engineered/gene edited (GMO) foods. Find out more here.