After more than 60 years of inquiry and self-indulgence Colin Tudge concludes that good farming, sound nutrition, great gastronomy, and care of the natural world could and should operate in perfect harmony. This offers a very significant ray of hope in an otherwise desperate world
Enlightened Cookery, Part One
Enlightened Agriculture is vital if we, humanity, seriously aspire to survive in large numbers and in a tolerable state for more than a few more decades without wrecking the natural world — which indeed would be both sacrilegious and suicidal.
And Enlightened Cookery is the necessary complement to Enlightened Agriculture. For farmers don’t for the most part produce food – or not at least in a form that most modern human beings would want to eat, or even would be able to eat, or would always be safe to eat in its pristine form. Farmers provide the raw materials. Cooks – defined broadly, to include bakers and cheese-makers and brewers and charcutiers and the rest — are needed to turn the raw materials into what most of us would recognize as food, and especially as good food. Most other animals don’t have this problem. With a few remarkable exceptions they just eat what nature provides. But for whatever reasons (apart from salads and fruits from trees and vines) we don’t. As outlined later, this has enormous advantages, a few disadvantages, and huge implications. Most of all, it offers hope.
Enlightened Agriculture raises the bar. All farming is difficult and farming that can properly be called “enlightened” — wildlife friendly and carried out without cruelty or exploitation – is doubly hard, or indeed is triply hard because the economy does not encourage such scrupulousness. The modern economy is focused on quantity and profit, which can and does lead us in quite different directions – a fact that largely accounts for the precarious state of the present world. Enlightened Cookery is designed to make best use of what enlightened farmers must strive so hard to produce, and in a crowded and beleaguered world we certainly need to make best use of what the Earth can sustainably provide. We cannot afford to waste and squander, although to a large extent the modern economy depends on both, and governments tend to follow wherever the economy leads.
Beyond question, although it’s not always top or even high on government agendas, a prime task for humanity is to provide us all with good food. And for this we need both farmers and cooks (in the broad sense), working in concert and supported by excellent science (with the emphasis on ecology) and by an economic system that is designed to solve the real problems of humanity and of the biosphere as opposed to making rich people richer. (I suppose we could call this “Enlightened Economy”. A subject to be explored!)
So — first question:
What is good food?
It seems reasonable to suggest that food that can properly be called “good” should meet three criteria. It must be
Nutritious, delicious, and ecologically sound
In truth, it isn’t always easy to meet all three requirements as well as we might like. To some extent they seem incompatible. In particular, nutritionists have advised us of late to eat more fish – not specifically because it is rich in phosphorus, as Bertie Wooster’s Jeeves maintained, but because fish is rich in the polyunsaturated fatty acids known as omega-3s, which are essential for brain development. Yet the world’s major fish stocks are already severely depleted. Cod, mackerel, eels, herring, and skate, once cheap standbys in the British diet, are now at a premium if available at all; and fish farming in its present forms leaves much to be desired and surely can never match the potential of the ocean, or at least of uncontaminated ocean. Waitrose has already discontinued mackerel — yet I remember when the now defunct Mac Fisheries in Herne Hill in South London sold mackerel for 10d (about 4p). We can’t all max out on fish (and maritime molluscs and crustaceans and the occasional echinoderm) or soon there won’t be any. And as argued elsewhere we ought to be preparing for the long term – where the “long term” means millions of years; not simply for the next few years or decades as seems right now to be the extent of our leaders’ ambitions (insofar as the most powerful leaders care about anything apart from their own aggrandisement).
It has also been dinned into us these past centuries that the most delectable foods are nearly always bad for us. As the Beverley sisters sang most tunefully in 1967,
“It’s illegal, it’s immoral, or it makes you fat”
But as Sportin’ Life had observed some decades earlier (actually, in 1935) in a somewhat different context in Porgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so”. “Moderation in all things” said Ralph Waldo Emerson (although I paraphrase). But the body is wiser than we often give it credit for and as folk wisdom has it,
“A little of what you fancy does you good”
For me, food has always been somewhere between a leitmotiv and an obsession and so too, even more so, are the sciences of biology, with particular reference to evolution and ecology. In this I have had enormous luck. I had excellent teachers of biology in the 1950s — and the 1950s proved to be a golden age for biology. The theories of evolution and of genetics were finally reconciled to create what is called “the modern synthesis”, and the whole grand thesis was capped off by the emergent science of molecular biology which showed beyond further doubt that genes are made of DNA, and began to show how DNA actually works. In the 1950s indeed it began to seem not simply to novices like me but also to some leading scientists – quite a few in fact – that biology was more or less done and dusted, with nothing much left to do but dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Some outstanding physicists made the same mistake about physics at the end of the 19th century – just before relativity and quantum theory began to come on board. Like Ophelia (again in a somewhat different context) we were the more deceived.
At school we had excellent teachers who kept up with the latest insights. In the early 1960s I progressed very smoothly (and free of charge, as was the norm in those more enlightened days) to an eminently respectable if very damp and extremely cold university that was full of Nobel prize winners, notably in molecular biology. I went on from there to work for the excellent but now defunct World Medicine, with a licence to talk at length to some of the world’s leading medics and medical scientists; then on to Farmers Weekly in the early ’70s (and wrote reports for the now defunct but much lamented Agricultural and Food Research Council); then to New Scientist where I was shocked to find how little I knew of modern physics (where “modern” means “post 1900”); and then to the BBC, with an even bigger licence to pester outstanding thinkers. So for 60 years or so I was able and even paid to pursue my passions for food and the natural world from all angles, and have been able to talk at length to some of the leading authorities in nutritional science, ecology, agriculture and gastronomy in all these fields in all six habitable continents and to report and reflect at length on their work and ideas. Astonishing luck indeed.
And my overall conclusion after all that endeavour and self-indulgence is not that we must live lives of austerity and indeed of asceticism as we have so often been told, but almost the complete opposite. For in truth, I have found that —
There is a near-perfect, one-to-one correspondence between agroecology, sound nutrition, and the world’s finest gastronomy
This, surely, is a truly wondrous serendipity. It means that if only we did conceptually simple and perfectly possible things well, we could all be enjoying good food – some of the best there is indeed – and in theory at least could continue to do so for aeons to come. If we get food and farming right, then everything else we might reasonably aspire to do becomes possible, and if we do not, then the world can never work as well as it should. And it turns out – wonder of wonders! – that in this, the Earth, if not the political and economic ideas that we impose upon it, are very much on our side. In particular, the ideas of agroecology and the modern science of nutrition are, or should be, in perfect accord. That is, the produce of agroecological farming is very much in line with what modern nutritional theory tells us we should eat. Which is, in nine words:
“Plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety”
I’ve tried at least to outline the thinking behind this nine-word adage at length in Part 2 of this essay, which is based in part on chapter 7 of my most recent book, The Great Re-Think, published by Pari in 2021. The underlying nutritional theory is endlessly complex and will surely grow ever more intricate as research continues — assuming it remains possible to do research at all, of a kind that is intended to increase knowledge and understanding, and is not designed simply to smooth the paths of commerce. Agroecology is endlessly complex too, once we start looking in detail, because life is endlessly complex. Yet both can be reduced to the same irreducibly simple nine-word formula. The reasons for this lie deep in our and the world’s evolutionary past and as the great Ukrainian-American evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously commented in an essay in 1973,
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”
–to which I am inclined to add:
“And nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of ecology”
Furthermore – yet another huge serendipity — this nine-word slogan also defines the basic structure of all the world’s greatest cuisines, on a broad axis from Italy to China – including all the best cooking of Europe and Asia, which over the centuries has borrowed from and has spilled over into the traditional cuisines of the Americas and Australasia. And as Michelin chef Raymond Blanc likes to point out, all the world’s greatest cooking, including the best of haute cuisine, is rooted in the end in traditional cooking, which basically means peasant cooking.
It follows from all this that in the end —
All most of us really have to do is to re-learn how to cook, and to follow as least in outline the recipes of traditional cooks
I modestly suggest that these irreducibly simple thoughts should be printed in six-foot high lessons in all research centres, government departments, corporate boardrooms, and centres of learning that have anything to do with food and farming.
As in all worthwhile pursuits, however, the ideas surrounding food and farming are changing all the time — advances in knowledge, changes of mind, and what the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “paradigm shifts”: changes of mindset; what the Ancient Greeks called “metanoia”.
Changes of mind and paradigm shifts: how theories of nutrition have come and gone since the mid-20th century
In the 1950s nutritional science was taught basically as an exercise in organic chemistry: a nice, safe science, it seemed, rooted in observable and repeatable fact. The job of the gut was to provide a milieu in which the chemistry could take place – which it did, we were given to understand, with perfect efficiency, at least when we are healthy.
Food, we were told, belongs to one of three main classes – protein, fat, and carbohydrates; although sometimes, we were told later, molecules from different classes are combined, as in lipoproteins and mucopolysaccharides. Proteins consist of long, linear chains of amino acids. Fats are chains of lipids, usually linear but sometimes branched, And carbohydrates are chains of monosaccharides, aka sugars, sometimes highly branched. In the foregut, the stomach and small intestine — or so we were given to understand — enzymes break down the ingested proteins, fats, and carbohydrates very thoroughly, into their constituent amino acids, lipids, and sugars, which are then absorbed. So it didn’t seem to matter what form the ingested food took. It would all be broken down into its component molecules whatever form it took, and then reassembled as required. Or so we were told. And this, I believe, was the general understanding.
These core nutrients were aided and abetted by vitamins – a somewhat random collection of recondite organic molecules that for some reason were vital to survival but had to be acquired ready made from such unlikely sources as blackcurrants, Marmite, and liver. (But, we were warned later, don’t eat the livers of Polar Bears or Huskies, should such delicacies ever come your way. They are far too rich in vitamin A, on which it is possible to OD. Vitamin A is fat-soluble, and can accumulate in the body, and then can be harmful. You can have too much of a good thing.)
We also need to consume a fair proportion of the minerals in the periodic table, both metals and non-metals. There was and is special emphasis on calcium (bones, and much else besides) and iron (haemoglobin, and much else). Several others including zinc and selenium have also been the subject of much serious study — which is very necessary. But they and others have also given rise to much faddery, and sometimes to quackery, the modern equivalent of the toad on the belly. It works if you believe in it. Up to a point.
Some of what we eat, though, we were told, is indigestible, and was accordingly labelled “roughage”. It served as a kind of Brillo pad, giving the hind-gut, the colon, a good spring clean and encouraging peristalsis. It was all very Wesleyan: a healthy mind in a healthy body, meaning thoroughly purged. Roughage went with cold baths and cross-country runs. Austerity, bordering on asceticism, was held to be both health-giving and virtuous, and aristocrats and other rich people paid enormous sums to subject their sons to it in Britain’s most expensive boarding schools.
All this can be seen as an attempt to reduce the messy biological mysteries of food and nutrition to chemistry — still immensely complex of course but eminently amenable to analysis and hence to precision. But as a nod to biology we also learned that the colon is packed with microbes, which in those days exclusively meant bacteria, which are indeed the main players, although nowadays it’s known that archaeans feature too, and viruses also play a big part. Viruses are no longer seen in avant-garde circles as out-and-out villains. In all ecosystems (and the gut “microbiome” is indeed an ecosystem) they are big players, mostly of a positive kind. It’s just that the baddies are more conspicuous, as in the ‘flu and Covid pandemics and a great deal more besides.
The colon itself was seen as a temporary parking lot and as a conduit, shuffling what remained after the goodness had been extracted from whatever we’d eaten, and duly expelling the debris to the outside world. The microbes – the gut “flora”; now generally called the “microbiota” or the “microbiome” — were seen as “commensals”, which in this case meant uninvited lodgers, or as spivs, enjoying free board and lodging. But every now and again (and, historically, rather often) bacteria gained entry of a kind that could be positively harmful and sometimes lethal, and multiplied, including pathogenic strains of E coli, Salmonella (which includes the agent of typhoid), and Vibrio cholerae (which causes cholera). Thus, overall, the microbes that lived in the gut were generally considered either to be of no great interest, or were seen as a potential threat. No one seemed to put in a good word for them in the mid-20th century, at least as far as we were given to understand.
We were taught all this at school, for what was then called O level. But I am told that the above was the essence of what medical students were taught too. Education in nutrition, in short, even for doctors, was perfunctory.
The picture has changed very considerably since then, both in factual detail and in mindset – as outlined at length in Part 2.
Why it pays to be an omnivore – and why cooking helps us to be better omnivores
Vegans like to argue that the human anatomy is designed or evolved to deal with an all-plant diet. In particular, they say, we have a long hind gut, the colon, as some specialist herbivores do, like horses; and we have molars designed to crunch, chew, and macerate.
Those who seek to promote meat argue the precise opposite. They point out that the human colon bears little resemblance to the enormous gut extensions of horses or rabbits, and of course our gut anatomy is nothing like that of ruminants like cattle and sheep, with their four stomachs, including the enormous rumen where plants are fermented and cellulose is broken down into digestible molecules that become a prime source of energy. We do indeed have impressive molars but nothing to compare with the millstone grinders of cattle or elephants.
In truth, all the evidence suggests that we have evolved to be omnivores, eating both plants and animals. Plants in general are the mainstay, with animals added opportunistically. As outlined in Part 2, our fellow hominine apes – chimps, bonobos, and gorillas – are much the same, especially the chimps. Anatomically our guts and teeth are more like those of pigs than of lions or horses. Student dentists, I am told, practice their craft on the teeth of pigs (dead pigs, that is). Ecologically we are more like foxes or grizzly bears or porcupines, potentially eating everything. This has its drawbacks. With so much choice on the menu we have to be discriminating, lest we become poisoned: and humans seems less able than dogs or foxes are to cope with toxins. But it also means that we can be tremendously versatile. Human beings can survive in most Earthly environments, and indeed do so. Cooking makes us even more adaptable. It means we can safely consume and thrive on things that are otherwise difficult to digest, or even toxic – including most of the seeds, roots, and tubers that we now regard as staples. Some of the greatest civilizations arose and thrived in some of the harshest climates. Our omnivory gives us an ecological edge and cooking gives us even more of an edge.
Furthermore, as again is obvious, cooking has become one of the world’s great crafts – even more important in the long history of humankind than the skills of building or pottery. Like all crafts too, cooking has at times evolved into an art form – but one which, unlike painting or sculpture, say, can be practiced by everyone, if only we have the time, freedom, and wherewithal. Minimalist modern kitchens, reduced to a kettle and a microwave, are not conducive. Contrariwise I have watched women in Mumbai, when it was still called Bombay, cooking marvellous aromatic curries on the pavement, in little brass pots, with their children gathered around them. Obviously this is far from ideal. But it shows what people are capable of.
Politically, cooking is of huge significance. Those who are dependent on the good offices of the modern food industry are effectively enslaved, obliged to follow wherever big-time commerce leads. Yet cooking can and should be the great liberator. Cooking, in short, perhaps more than anything, can give people back their autonomy – an essential component of democracy, and indeed a precondition, when democracy is properly construed. Beyond doubt, if we really care about the human condition and state of the world, then everyone should know how to cook. Cookery indeed should be a core subject in all schools. For as the three-star Michelin chef Heston Blumenthal argued recently in the Radio Times (October 3-8 2026 (p 11):
“Cooking is a life skill – children should leave school knowing how to cook”
More broadly, as I have argued elsewhere, a truly complete education would on the one hand at least introduce the scope of human learning, to include the high-fallutin’ heights of science, the arts, and metaphysics; and on the other, explore the day-to-day practicalities of life, with special emphasis on food – the growing of it and the cooking, and cooking is the more important because it could and should be available to everyone. Many educators have said the same – including, not least, St Benedict, with his emphasis on study and prayer on the one hand, and on horticulture on the other, with special attention to bees and the arts of brewing and distilling. We may observe indeed that all the greatest civilizations have taken food and cooking very seriously, and some, mercifully, still do.
We all know that the world is in a shocking mess which surely will prove terminal unless we re-think everything from first principles. In short, we need to bring about the Renaissance. Enlightened Agriculture must play a key role in this – in concert with Enlightened Cookery.
Part 2 puts some flesh on these bare bones – with special emphasis on the ever-evolving science of nutrition.
Share this article: