"Writer's block is having too much time on your hands." Jodi Picoult
I have now been writing this blog for almost eight years, so perhaps it's no surprise that I am occasionally bereft of ideas. Initially I only needed a couple of writer's block refreshers - the Lucky Dip and A Word From ... The Lucky Dip continues, although my current Lucky Dip sitting on my desk is not an appealing prospect at the moment - well I can't find the right angle to take. A Word From ... - which was supposed to introduce my favourite foodies has sort of been exhausted, although perhaps I should check on that.
Later I added the First Recipe concept - also stalled at the moment for similar reasons to the Lucky Dip. And later still in quick succession came The Food Curriculum and National Cuisines. and I tried out the next ones on those lists in my head but didn't feel like it. There have been other minor projects that are occasionally revisited - Anglo-Indian cuisine ... but nevertheless with all those options I sometimes just run out of ideas and inspiration.
So I went for a walk, which sometimes helps and today whilst walking, for some reason I thought of one of my favourite Jamie books - 7 Ways in which he listed the most bought fresh food items in British supermarkets and then offered 7 different ways to cook them. So I wondered whether I could find out the most bought fresh food items here in Australia and do a sort of 7 Ways series on the ingredients I found. I thought it would be interesting to see if they were the same as well.
So I came back home and started searching the net. I have now been searching on and off, getting distracted into various other highways and byways along the way, for too many hours. Wasting my time really because all I found were the following.
One - A list on Taste, which, apart from being undated - and that's important because food purchases change all the time - was, I suspect, a list of what they thought we should be eating rather than what we were eating. Their top ten foods to eat in fact. This is their list: Spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs, yoghurt, wholegrains and legumes - which covers a massive range of products - nuts and seeds, broccoli, extra virgin olive oil, salmon - an odd thing to tack on the end I think.
Two - from Woolworths in 2017 - so long ago and pre COVID which changed the food world entirely - their top 3 fresh fruit and veg sales - berries, bananas, avocados
Three -on a website Eativity dated 2021 - COVID times - which was only about fresh fruit and vegetables - tomatoes, bananas, salad, apples, potatoes, avocados, strawberries, mushrooms, grapes, blueberries, cucumbers, broccoli/broccolini, capsicum, onions, lettuce, carrots, melons, mandarins, oranges, herbs
Four - also in 2021 - Seafood, bananas, potato chips, cheese, legumes - Your Life Choices which actually sounds more likely but is now very dated.
But all of that was then. What about now? Well I found nothing except for this - Woolworths Shopper Data 2023 on a website called Future Alternative. If you click on the pictures below you can see the information more clearly.
It is indeed rather more comprehensive and compares to previous years. It also demonstrates the disturbing fact that:
"Australians aren’t meeting the recommended daily serves for any of the five food groups, but are well exceeding the daily discretionary food serves"
Which is a whole other topic.
It is indeed quite illuminating but just a bit too vague for my idea I think. This is the contents page of Jamie's book, which, as you can see is rather more specific.
Now his book was also published in COVID times - 2020 - and moreover he doesn't tell us where he got the information from even though he says in his Introduction:
"I've looked at the real data around what we're putting into our shopping baskets, week in, week out, and have built this book around 18 hero ingredients that just kept appearing."
It's possible that he picked ingredients which ultimately gave a balance between dairy, fruit, vegetables and meat and fish and he obviously ignored fruit completely - and those discretionary items. So I guess we can say that it is a selection from the most commonly bought ingredients.
I still didn't want to really let go of the idea however - popular ingredients and what you can do with them. The picture at right is from a healthy diet kind of website and so I guess is just a selection of what you should be eating, rather than what we are eating. Woolworths, after all, is telling us that the most popular purchases are bad things like biscuits, chips, chocolate and so on, although it's interesting that they put butter and margerine into that category.
Then I started wondering whether I could compile a list of the fresh foods - in the broadest sense - that I bought - and look at the top ten say in turn. But if I'm honest I've probably covered just about all of them somewhere or other in the past.
What to do? Drop the idea? Walk away? As apparently Margareet Atwood has occasionally done:
"sometimes you bash yourself against the wall and you get through it. But sometimes the wall is just a wall. There’s nothing to be done but go somewhere else."
And yes I think I'll drop this one. Having now had that other writer's block recommended strategy of a coffee and something sweet - that fruit loaf - that's what I'll do. Nothing.
Tomorrow is another day and I might come up with something then. Or tackle those difficult lucky dips and first recipes.
well dropped!