Let Her Eat Clean

The third in a series of Friday posts looking at a very quick snapshot of the week that was.

This week I…

Ate:

… one of my most favourite simple pleasures ever. Toasted rye bread with salty, creamy butter topped with even creamier avocado, juicy tomato and lots of black pepper. Rye bread isn’t something I eat all the time (as much as I’d love to) as I know such hefty carbs aren’t overly helpful in my quest to stay lean. That said, every now and then never does any harm and this was a delish elevensies treat on Thursday.

Read:

This incredible article by Andrew Simms in The Guardian. It got me thinking an awful lot. Especially these last few paragraphs:

While Tesco provides a sort of constrained convenience, in reality it has a business model that leaves us all poorer and the economy less resilient, by sucking spending and social contact out of communities, by hollowing out supply chains and leaving clone towns and ghost towns in their wake.

There may be a deeper reaction still that increasingly works against them. We have entered a period of great economic questioning. Yet supermarkets offer a distorted map of a flat, unchanging world without seasons or reasons to question how we do business, where an already over-consuming population is encouraged to purchase ever more, in such a way that we end up wasting one third of the precious food we buy.

Pictures of smiling people and happily grazing animals on packaging bear as much relation to reality as did the joyous workers and natural abundance in Stalin-era paintings of Soviet realism. It’s a world of consumption largely detached from consequences, and the processes of production that fill the regimented aisles.

This article truly hit home in terms of why I genuinely believe Farmers’ markets are awesome.

Learned: 

…That kale sales are up. High in fibre and iron and really cheap, kale has rocketed in popularity in the past year enjoying a 40% increase in sales, says a report from retail analyst, Kantar Worldpanel. Kale is amazing with roast pork and even nicer when turned into crispy oven baked chips.