Cooking on a Bootstrap: Over 100 Simple, Budget Recipes

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When you create your lunchbox, centre it around a balanced plate of carbs, protein, veggies and healthy fats. They come from the same companies and the same system of production that makes the other ultra-processed foods, so they are not manufactured with your health in mind," but with the purpose of making more money, claims Dr van Tulleken. If you're vegetarian, you might opt for a meat alternative, but lots of these products also "meet the definition of ultra-processed." If your next question is 'How easy is it to reduce my UPF intake?', it's important to note there are several factors at play and cost is one of them.

But, please don't let that panic you. Once more, "There are definitely ultra-processed products that aren't harmful. The issue is the pattern of diet," says the doctor (around one in five people in the UK and USA get 80% of the calories in their diet from UPF). Is it cheap to cut out ultra processed food? What does that mean? Well, for many of us, lots of our meals are centred around UPF. Think about your lunch, for instance. "All our sandwiches are ultra-processed. Our crisps and baked chips are all ultra-processed, and our fizzy pop, even the fancy stuff, is ultra-processed," says Dr van Tulleken, who adds that we follow similar patterns at dinner, too. Baked beans, oven chips, fish fingers, sausages, all of that is ultra-processed, according to the pro.Having tried many of the recipes from the book, among my favourites are a splendid makhani daal, and an impressive onion and lentil korma, which are so much more than the sum of their parts. So, UPF often includes ice cream, sausages, crisps, flavoured yoghurt, and mass-produced bread, to name a few examples. But every single one of us, who has been desperately hungry, intolerably cold, suicidal, clutching at the periphery of survival by our bitten-down fingernails, have a single rotten thread that runs through us all. Binding us together, in our common unspoken grief for the ordinary lives that we didn’t get to have. That thread is austerity. A needless, useless ideology dreamed up by spin doctors and Old Etonians who have never missed a single one of their taxpayer-subsidised meals, let alone ten in a row. Its the idealistic abject cruelty of deliberately inflicting human suffering to bolster profit margins for the Treasury, by the rich, at the expense of the most vulnerable. Many of whom end up paying with their lives; snuffed-out mothers and disabled people, balancing the books of the economy, fertilising those much-lauded ‘green shoots of recovery’ with their decaying bones and subsequent ‘efficiency savings’. Recipes from here will no doubt be handed out at foodbanks with tins of potatoes, and tomatoes (suggestion try Aloo Dum, but with tinned peas).

There's a binary food divide in the media these days between "the rich", who we imagine swanning round Waitrose with a trolley full of quail's eggs and umeboshi, and "the poor", who apparently live on fast food and ready meals. It's great that at least one food writer in print today understands the issues people on a tight budget have with good food - expensive to buy, cumbersome to transport and store, hard to cook from scratch with limited equipment, risky to spend cash on ingredients you're not familiar with.Nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert is the author of a new e-Book, A Simple Way to Build A Lunchbox. She says: But low UPF recipes and diets have been on the rise lately, thanks in part to best-selling books like Ultra-Processed People, written by Dr Chris van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. Naturally, your next question is probably, 'Is all ultra-processed food bad for us?' This is certainly not the case, according to Dr van Tulleken, who points out it's not as simple as categorising food as either 'good' or 'bad'. Every one of the millions of hungry people in Britain today has a different story of how they got there. Benefit sanctions. Illness. redundancy. cancer. Military veterans. Survivors of domestic abuse. Generational trauma. Unpaid carers. The gig economy. Poverty wages. Zero hour contracts. Underemployment. Cleaners. Nurses. Teachers. Neighbours. This beautiful edition contains illustrations and original full-colour photographs to really make your mouth water.