Episode 5 Fruit and Veg
While 75% of us know that we should be eating 5 portions of fruit and veg daily, only one third of us follow through. Philip Boucher-Hayes meets the people of Cloughjordan Eco Village who grow their own food, tests schoolchildren on their knowledge of fruit and vegetables, puts the squeeze on the current craze for juicing, and finds out why our aversion to bitter tastes is narrowing the range of fruit and veg on supermarket shelves.
Series Overview
Up until the 1950s food was a relatively simple matter: you bought meat from the butcher, bread from the baker, vegetables and fruit from the greengrocer. Most shopping was done daily – usually by housewives – and the choice was narrow. Back then expenditure on food was a relatively large part of the weekly household income and keeping food fresh was a constant battle.
Fast forward to the present day: mass production, intensive farming, refrigeration, freezing, and food technology have given us more choice and lower prices than our grandmothers could have imagined. But in order to titillate our palates with all this choice, the food manufacturers have had to find ways of keeping food fresh for longer whilst maintaining competitive price points.
This means that a sizable proportion of all food stocked by your local supermarket has been processed and processed doesn’t just mean cut and packaged, it means flavoured, irradiated, stabilised, enhanced and coloured, and it affects everything from your bagged salad leaves to your fruit to your 6-pack of chicken fillets. It begs the question: do you know what you’re eating?