Curly kale.
Photo: Rasbak

I wonder how many school dinners contain kale these days. It’s a vegetable that is popular with gardeners and health freaks, but for most people it’s not part of their regular daily diet.

Kale is rich in calcium, beta carotene, vitamin C and vitamin K, and it is high in fibre. It was part of the staple diet of Scots up to the nineteenth century, when a wider variety of foods became available. It was usually eaten in a broth with barley, or boiled with oatmeal. As a vegetable that grows easily, it was a food that poor people could afford to eat, and a particularly nutritious one. But as we have added a wider variety of foods to our diet, kale has lost its place on the menu.

Maisie Steven writes about the importance of kale in the Scottish diet in her book “The Good Scots Diet”, published by Argyll. She quotes an English visitor to Scotland in the early 1700s called ChamberIayne, who wrote of the Scots that:

“Milk-meats and oatmeal, several ways prepared, and kail and roots dressed in several manners, is the constant diet of the poor people (for roast meat is seldom to be had but on gaudy-days); and with this kind of food they enjoy a better state of health than their southern neighbours, who fare higher.”

In fact, kale was also a staple food throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. These days we can enjoy it boiled with barley or blended with wonderful fruits from all over the world.

Photo: Kai Roos

Kale is cheap, easy to grow and wonderfully nutritious. It’s time to welcome it back into our regular diet. There are many ways we can do this – kale can be cooked in stir-frys or made into kale chips, or boiled as a side dish. But one of the healthiest and most delicious ways to eat kale is fresh and raw in a green smoothie.

Researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden questioned more than 37,000 Swedish men aged between 49 and 75 over a period of 10 years about how often they ate chocolate. Men who ate the most chocolate had a 17% lower risk of stroke than the men who ate no chocolate, the research found. The type of chocolate, whether milk or dark, did not appear to make a difference.

Susanna Larsson, who conducted the research, said the happy result could be due to chemicals called flavonoids which are present in chocolate. However she warned: “Because chocolate is high in sugar, fat and calories, it should be consumed in moderation.”

Wrong! Raw cacao powder, from which most chocolate is made, is not high in sugar, fat or calories. These are usually added to it to make it palatable. But you can add much healthier ingredients to cacao and get all the nutritional goodness AND the chocolate hit!

Raw cacao is high in iron, zinc and other minerals as well as flavonoids.

This “green” smoothie recipe is packed with iron, zinc, calcium and other vitamins and minerals, as well as health-giving antioxidants and flavonoids, and it will give you just 3.6g of fat and 160 calories. It also tastes delicious.

Super delicious. And it contains kale.

Ingredients

200g water

50g kale

60g banana

40g blackberries

30g raspberries

20g cacao powder

ice

Method

Pack the kale, cacao powder and water into a blender jug. Ideally you should use a very powerful blender like a Blendtec or Vitamix. Blend the kale and water till smooth, then add the remaining ingredients and blend again. Enjoy.

If you’re not used to green smoothies you might want to sweeten this up a bit. You can do this by adding more banana or a few dates. It’s still one of the healthiest ways to enjoy the goodness of chocolate.

I’m so over cakes.

Last week a friend told me about the TV documentary “Health Food Junkies”, about raw foodists, which was broadcast on Channel 4 a few years ago. I watched it on 4OD.

The opening scene showed a woman drinking her own pee. “Ah” I thought. “I know where this programme is going.”

The producers had clearly sought out the most extreme 100 percent raw food purists. The narrator adopted a gently patronising, ironic tone. It came across as a “laughing at the mad hippies” project – which is not really surprising since Channel 4 depends on advertising for its existence, and big food companies make up a large percentage of that.

Raw food is a potential bombshell for big food manufacturers. A recent BBC2 documentary series, “The Men Who Made Us Fat”, showed how food manufacturers had used scientific research to develop foods that actually made us want to eat more, foods that were very high in saturated fat and refined sugar. These foods have addicted millions of us over the past three or four decades.

Eating raw is probably the best way to desensitise ourselves from that addiction, to rediscover the full diverse flavours of real fresh plant food. I am only about 60% raw, yet I can now happily walk along the supermarket cakes aisle after a long day at work without feeling the slightest interest in any of them. It’s quite a weird feeling. A few weeks ago, before I started to develop a taste for raw plant food, I would have been arguing with myself over why I should or shouldn’t buy four cakes or sticky toffee puds. 

I’m not trying to deny myself a treat. If I do fancy a cake, I’ll eat one. It’s just that I haven’t wanted cake or chocolate for weeks! And that’s got nothing to do with my personality – it’s the way raw plant food starts to get under your skin once you start eating it regularly, whether in salads, smoothies or juices. 

What if everyone started behaving like this, happily ignoring the tempting goodies that junk food peddlers place alluringly in front of us, with aromas wafted in to enhance the seduction? It would be a calamity for the food manufacturers and probably the economy too, though the system would probably adjust. Maybe hard-pressed dairy farmers would find a new market in spinach and kale and planting orchards.

But until that day arrives, TV channels that depend on advertising will probably depict raw food as a bit of a freak show or a dangerous habit.

Most of the recipes include toasted nuts and one, with sprouted lentils, has cheddar cheese added. And the main featured recipe, a mix of raw cauliflower and toasted peanuts, looks indigestible, personally speaking. But it’s good to see “uncooking” in a mainstream cookery feature.

This photo shows my first ever properly raw dinner. It looks horrible – I admit it – the ingredients flung together in a bucket. But it tasted great! It was two weeks ago, and I’ve been eating raw dinners regularly ever since.

That meal was created in a mad rush of enthusiasm. I hadn’t even thought about what kind of bowl to use – so I just grabbed a plastic bucket. I put far too much kale and cabbage into the mix, so I needed a big vessel to contain it all.

I had been craving crunchy raw salads in the evenings on and off for the past few weeks, but had dismissed the cravings simply because I had been brought up to believe that you had to have your meat, fish, cheese or tofu and two veg, cooked, every day or you might faint, or make yourself ill, or even get on the slippery slope to an eating disorder. Salads were for a light lunch on a hot day, or as a side addition to a healthy meal.

However I didn’t turn into a raw food junkie overnight. I had been consuming a litre of green smoothies almost every day for the past six months. I had been making my own juices for the past five years, and had even opened my own juice bar and café, The Flavour Co. Without my consciously realising it, I was already leading a 20-30 percent raw lifestyle.

I’ve come to realise that the more raw food you consume, the more you want to eat!

Another factor was that I had been developing a range of nutmilks for The Flavour Co. I had been trying them out on a regular basis. I think that adding more nuts to my diet gave me the nutritional boost that satisfied most of my body’s cravings for animal proteins.

So that day when I finally decided to give in to my crunchy salad cravings, I added tahini, nuts and dried fruit to my salad to make sure I was getting all the protein and nutrients I needed. The amazing thing was that after I’d finished eating it – and I enjoyed every mouthful, though I did leave some of the kale – I felt so full that I didn’t even want the biscuits I usually have as an after-dinner treat.

I have continued to enjoy a litre of green smoothie and a big raw salad each day, and apart from that eating anything I want. I usually have an egg or tuna roll for breakfast. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but I do think it’s important not to put pressure on yourself if you want to improve your eating habits. As soon as it becomes a chore, you’re in trouble.

However I seem to have lost my taste for biscuits and chocolate bars! I still eat oatcakes occasionally and I had a slice of cake yesterday. Let me stress once again – this is NOT because I’m being virtuous or denying myself certain things. It’s simply the way your taste for food changes once you start to introduce plant-based nutrients into your diet on a regular basis.

I think it’s too early to assess the health benefits I’m seeing since I went “60 percent raw”, though I’m certain that my health is improving. I’ll report further on this in a few weeks’ time. One thing I have definitely noticed is that my psoriasis has GONE – and it was certainly there a few weeks ago! I’m not missing it.

I had noticed nearly all of the health improvements Robyn Openshaw lists in her book The Green Smoothies Diet after a few weeks of consuming a litre of green smoothie a day.

There are many film clips on the internet advocating a raw food lifestyle. I think some of the people featured in them look a little fragile and spacey. I wonder if that’s because they’re not getting all the nutrients they need.

On the other hand there are also many raw foodists who seem to be full of health and vitality. That’s why I think it’s very important to listen to your body’s cravings as you start to introduce more raw plant food into your diet. Don’t try to exist on fruit and vegetables alone, and don’t try to radically change your eating habits overnight. Build up to it gradually. Remember that raw plant food encompasses nuts, seeds, sprouts, dates, figs – anything that grows out of the ground and is not toxic. And remember also that you don’t have to be 100 percent raw to get the benefits of a raw lifestyle.