Add the apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, mustard and salt and pepper to a jar and shake vigorously. Alternatively, whisk together in a small bowl. Set aside.
In a large bowl, add torn radicchio, red onion and citrus. Gently toss with enough dressing to lightly coat.
Any remaining dressing will keep in the fridge for up to three days.
Every meal is an opportunity to focus on abundance. Make sure you’re covering off your intake of vitamins and minerals, sans the supplements, by filling your plate with as many different plant foods as possible. For me this salad was an attempt to work in produce I would not usually have access to, as in, what I could find in the supermarket! I found a produce supplier that offered home delivery and added to cart all sorts of wonderful, white asparagus, candy beetroots, watermelon radish, graffiti eggplants, heirloom tomatoes and radicchio. A welome addition to any meal, this blush-toned radicchio and citrus salad dressed with an apple cider vinegar dressing makes for a bright, tangy, and herbaceous side. And hopefully it acts as a reminder to eat more salad!
Beyond diversity if you can, opt for spray free or organic produce. Conventionally, the majority of food is grown with synthetic fertilisers, chemical pesticides and insecticides. It may or may not contain genetically engineered organisms and/or genetically modified organisms. Organic produce cannot be grown with all the above and where a grower states spray free, common place at produce markets, you are reaping the benefits of foods grown without artificial inputs which go against Mother Nature, the Earth and us who are of the Earth. Every day, we are making decisions that will ultimately impact our health, near or long term. We are in control of our health and the more we understand the fundamentals of human nutrition and are open to receiving and acting on this information, we can avoid disease (to a degree, genetics and environmental exposures play a role) and age very differently.
T.C. Fry is good for theory. ‘The Life Science Health System’ is a book on nutrition. I first read ‘The China Study’ while studying post-graduate human nutrition. This book is one of the most important studies in human nutrition. Everyone should read it. Hilton Hotema’s ‘Facts of Nutrition’ is another read grounded in the idea that the human body is designed to be healthy and that proper nutrition is essential for maintaining optimal health. Fundamentally, Hotema argues that understanding basic nutritional principles and returning to natural, whole foods is the key to restoring health. Ross Horne’s ‘Cancerproof Your Body’ and ‘Health Revolution’ are for anyone interested in cleansing or wanting to understand raw food, fruitarian or Natural Hygiene theory. Even if it’s not practical to implement, it might inspire the removal of processed foods. These books are full of the same information, just presented differently. And they are not new.
Frances Moore Lappés ‘Diet for a Small Planet, first published in 1971, was the first major publication to note the environmental impact of meat production as wasteful and a contributor to global food scarcity. On a personal level, I see the benefits of eating food that isn’t over-processed or that’s hardly processed. And I don’t think meat will go away, but I do think the centre of the plate will be plants; it needs to be plants. The United Nations’ ‘Towards a Great Food Transformation’ criticised unsustainable food systems and urged people to shift towards plant based diets, and that in a statement named meat “the world’s most urgent problem.”
Then, there were responses like this one published by Quartz, suggesting that if the entire US went vegan, it would be a public health disaster. Currently, obesity in the United States represents a public health crisis more serious even than the opioid epidemic, and while this represents a complex public health issue, if the United States were to go vegan, yes, Americans would be forced to “more carefully consider their diets to ensure they did not become deficient in these important nutrients,” that is kind of the point. So, how we engage in these conversations with others must be based on our values, not our feelings and our uninformed opinions.
I think an understanding of food and its consumption, the role of nostalgia, rituals and gender in food in everyday life are required for any significant shift in protein from animals to plants. Through reading you realise that you are part of something bigger, and even though this way of life is more popularised, it’s been around a while. I think this shift starts with consuming with intent. That was what we wanted to share here: to create the resources that would enable anyone to prepare nourishing food to share, to encourage others to think about plant-based food in new ways and to challenge current perceptions around sustainable living.
