#Unprocessed

I’ve been humming and hawing, trying to decide whether or not to take part in #Unprocessed. It’s a virtual event designed to enable people to feel smug about their diets by eating nothing “processed” for the whole month of October.

The name is a misnomer, of course, as many foods are processed in some way: bread and beer are some of the oldest processed foods. But in this case a very liberal notion of “unprocessed” applies.

But can I do without Nutella for a month?

I eat (or think I do, at any rate) relatively little “processed” (in the sense of October Unprocessed) food anyway, so it will be interesting to see what difficulties I encounter. What I don’t make from scratch passes the “kitchen test” in most cases: bacon, jam, pasta ... things I could make in my kitchen if I really wanted to.

So while I have my reservations about the concept and am aware there are likely to be a lot of food faddists on board of the sugar-is-poison school, eating more whole grains and fewer things packed in plastic can’t be bad.

I have already slipped this morning and had brown sauce on my bacon and eggs. So I’m not going to be a purist and will be guided more by common sense than someone else’s criteria. I’ll still choose a home-baked white loaf over a wholemeal one from a supermarket.

At the moment I’m thinking of what to do with the box of mushrooms in my fridge. I would make risotto, but I don’t have any stock, and stock cubes are out of bounds. When you make risotto with stock cubes it just tastes like packet soup anyway, so perhaps #unprocessed is doing me a favour.