The 12 Books of Christmas | Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & ZOE’s Dr Federica Amati on Eating 30 Plants A Week
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. We're looking back at some of our favourite books of the year in our 12 Books of Christmas. Today's episode is with chef and food campaigner, Hugh Ferdley-Whittingstall. Hugh joined us earlier this year, alongside Dr. Federica Amadi, to discuss the politics and pleasures of plant-based eating and the themes from his new book, How to Eat 30 Plants a Week. Let's go to the episode now.

Well, I am so pleased to be here tonight to speak with Hugh, who needs no introduction, a man who has written over 20 books. He is an absolute legend and an icon for the environment and for eating seasonal local produce and making the most of beautiful food. Hugh,

Hugh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me to host you tonight. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for coming, by the way, on what's easily the loveliest day of the year so far. The good news is there is a balcony behind the bar there, and so you will be able to bask in some late evening sunshine after we've finished chatting. So please, please stick around for that. And the topic of tonight's conversation, of course, is Hugh's new book, How to Eat 30 Plants a Week.

And you may have watched him on This Morning, this morning, really showing us what a cheerleader he is for 30 plants. I saw some interesting photos of you essentially pom-pomming with some coriander, was it?

Oh gosh, I'm kind of hoping that not that many people here this evening did watch me on this morning, but maybe one or two. But I somehow got a little bit overexcited with a bunch of parsley in one hand and a bunch of chives in the other. And suddenly Kat Deely said, oh I see you're a cheerleader for 30 plants. That's a little...

I encourage you all to look it up later. So you are a cheerleader for 30 Plants. No, I guess I am, yes. I'm happy to be the cheerleader. And if I need to shake a pom-pom of parsley and chives every now and again to make the point, I'm happy to do it. Good. And I'd love to hear from you, Hugh, why are you a cheerleader for 30 Plants? What inspired you to write this book? Well, so there's some fantastic science that tells us that it's a really great idea to eat lots of plants.

I feel that lots of us know it in our heart of hearts, or if you like, in our guts. But I have found it very, very compelling to have this clear science which has somehow landed on the number 30, which we'll come to very shortly. But basically, a particular study that really drove this home, that was actually in the press quite a bit about 18 months ago and has...

What perhaps kick-started the 30 plants conversation was a study of 11,000 people in the US and the UK who kept diet journals, every detail of everything they ate. As I understand it, the main aim of the study originally was to try and see if there were some interesting health distinctions to be made for people who identified as vegan, omnivore, vegetarian, and perhaps at another level, paleo, low-carb, and that kind of thing. So people who were following particular diets

were there any clear outcomes, particularly for the diversity of their gut biome, which is very much at the heart of this way of thinking about health.

but also the consequences, the outcomes that flow from that. And they couldn't make any valid connections between particular identified diets and particular health outcomes. But taken across the reporting of the food journals as a whole, one thing emerged that was very striking. The more plants you ate,

the more diverse your gut biome and the less likely you are to have heart disease and other diet-associated diseases. And that didn't matter because obviously it isn't necessarily the case that a vegan eats more vegetables than an omnivore or a vegetarian or whatever. So the more plants you're eating...

the greater the diversity of your gut biome, and the better you're then dealing, the boost to your immune system, and the better you're then dealing with various other challenges to your health. The number 30 comes up because 30 is a number that quite a few people in the study were reporting they were managing to eat. Not a lot of them, about 10 to 15%,

And that's probably what it is in the general population. But they were having very high scores and very good outcomes. As the number goes above 30, the benefits continue to grow, but they plateau off a bit. And there are far fewer people who seem able to achieve that.

Most of us, it seems, are sort of stuck around the 12 to 15 plants a week. And as we climb up to 30, the benefits accrue. It's pretty compelling. And I think if people are going to set about changing the way they eat, it's nice to be able to peg it on some really good science. I love that synthesis of that paper. It's really good. So one of the things that I get asked a lot, and I'm sure you do, and your book really unpicks this, is it sounds quite hard to get to 30 plants a week.

So how do you do that? How do you actually get to 30? Well, I think the first thing is we're not going to do it if it isn't fun. And so what's the very thing that makes the diversity of 30 plants good for you is what makes food delicious in the first place. It's the variety in them.

And the fact that people quickly say, we seem to be barely able to manage five a day fruit and veg. How are we going to do 30 plants a week? It's very important to quickly spread the idea of plant-based foods beyond simply fresh fruit and vegetables. Fantastic though these ingredients are, and we should all be piling in. But actually the spectrum of plant foods includes things that we don't necessarily think of as

fruit and veg, all the pulses, the nuts, the seeds, dried fruits, spices even, even things like coffee, if they are whole unprocessed foods and they've got their unique set of characters and micronutrients in them, they each bring something different to our diet.

To benefit our gut, but also, of course, in terms of flavor to the kitchen. So the pleasures of bringing these ingredients into your cooking are right up there with the benefits that they're going to give to you physically. Exactly. And I know that in the book you have a big plant list. And in that big plant list, you've sort of identified groups of plants. Now, which ones do you think that we need the most love for people to learn how to enjoy more?

So there's a couple of hundred plants that I've organized in the book into, as you say, various groups, the leafy greens, fruits, nuts, seeds, even a few seaweeds and things like that.

But none of them will be, I think, unfamiliar or seem obscure or that you're being invited to go off and buy weird ingredients that you don't normally cook with. I think the first thing in reading that list is to remind yourself that there's lots of things on it you like but you probably haven't had for a while. They've just slipped off your routine. They're just not in your cupboard but there's no reason why they shouldn't be. So that's the first place to start catching up is remember the things that you actually like and go and get them next time you go shopping.

But I do think there is one group of foods, or an extended group of foods, which I've just mentioned, in fact, that probably most of us could eat plenty more of.

Pulses is certainly right up there. It's actually incredibly easy to put more pulses in your cooking, and they are delicious, creamy, yielding. They're not in themselves the most flavour-packed or exciting of ingredients, but, gosh, they are good in a sauce, and they respond well to herbs and spices and other things. So I think, you know, I find myself often these days saying whatever I'm cooking is...

Should I chuck a tin of beans in that? And the answer is very often yes. It's an excellent idea. I love that. I'm a massive fan of beans and lentils and pulses. And I think what's really powerful about those foods is that they are really affordable. Because often what we get is, you know, it's expensive to eat healthy. Food prices in the UK are all over the shop.

But actually, beans and pollsters really are often some of the cheapest foods on our shelves. Yeah, no, they totally are. And they fill you up, they make you feel good, and there's an incredibly versatile ingredient. I'd also go a little bit beyond that to nuts and seeds and spices. You are getting foods that are a little bit more expensive there, but they're...

Again, they're so great to cook with. We don't necessarily think of nuts as an ingredient. We think of them as a snack. But when you're baking treats, also it's really important to remember that when we're cooking even really indulgent treats, things that we're going to give to our friends for tea, sweet treats, there is yet again plenty of opportunities there to pack in the plants, nuts, seeds, dried fruits, dial down the sugar, dial up the nuts and fruits.

I love that. I'm getting quite hungry. I'm glad you've organized bites for after this talk. So you have over 100 recipes in the book and you've just touched on a few ideas, but can you tell us what your favorite plant-based recipes are?

My favorite plant-based recipes are the easy ones. I love being able to throw handfuls of her. I mean, we're going to have some really easy canapes this evening, none of which are unfamiliar things, but we've made a lovely hummus, some great herby labneh, which is a sort of yogurt-y cream cheese, but full of fresh herbs.

Smoked mackerel pate, but one that's got lots of plants in it. These kind of homey things that you kind of know how to make already, these are just revisionist plant-boosted versions of them. And you know what? They're even more delicious than the previous versions. And then, so I've mentioned that, you know, I've already mentioned fish. You know, this is...

This is not necessarily about veganism, and I know there's another Intelligence Squared event coming up soon called How to Interrogate a Meat-Eater, did I hear? I'm not sure I'd be coming along to that, actually. But, I mean, I'm still an omnivore, but I'm an omnivore who eats meat and fish once or twice a week, sometimes a little bit more. But, you know, I still raise livestock at home. But whenever I'm cooking meat and fish now, I'm surrounding it with plants, and at this time of year...

The herb garden in the spring beats the veg garden by about a month. So we've got herbs up to here and the vegetables are like, come on, you're not trying hard enough. So handfuls of parsley and lovage and going into a lot of things at the moment.

Amazing. And what are your thoughts about drinking our plants? So what is your kind of feel about how to drink your tea? There's a fantastic plant-based drink which we're going to be serving after the talk this evening called wine and it's going to be up on the balcony and there's at least one free glass for everybody in the room. But

But drinking your plants is not entirely to be sniffed at because we are allowed to count coffee in our plants. Again, these distinctive plants, they all have a unique set of things that give them their flavours and that also contribute to our health. So we definitely count coffee. We count a good cup of hot chocolate made with real dark chocolate. That counts.

Tim Spector once said to me that he thought cider was pretty much a health drink. I haven't really interrogated on that. I've just taken it at face value. And there is indeed some organic River Cottage Elderflower cider to be had for those whose heads are not turned by this sparkling wine. Yeah, as a registered nutritionist, I would like to point out that alcoholic drinks do not count as one of your plants. Oh, okay. Well, that's lucky I didn't put them in the book on the list then.

Great. And tell me about fermented foods, because fermented foods have a real special place as these sort of super-powered plants from fermentation. How do you feel about them, and where do they sit in your list? I get pretty excited about fermented foods. It took me just a little while, that sort of, that kind of pungency. You know, you open the jar, and there are some smells there, it has to be said, that are not instantly appealing.

There are whiffs to be had and they might remind you of things that you don't necessarily want to be reminded of just before you eat. But you just go like that a couple of times and off they drift.

And then you start thinking about the flavours, which, oddly enough, don't marry up with those strange smells at all. And that pickled flavour, that intensity, I mean, they invite all the things we've been talking about, because, obviously, at its most basic, a sauerkraut is literally just cabbage and salt. But those of you who have dipped your toe in the ever-burgeoning world of ferments will know that there are lots of people out there making some very fun and funky ferments.

I think a lot of which basically take their inspiration from kimchi, of course, which is that outstanding spicy Korean ferment based on Napa cabbage, what we used to call the Chinese cabbage, and lots of chili, a bit of garlic, sometimes fish paste and various other things. Once you realize that you can add some spices and put some kicks into any ferment, there's almost no end of combinations.

So it's not at all unusual to have 10 plants in a homemade kraut, half of them being spices and the other half being vegetables of one kind or another. Leafy greens, grated roots, radishes, things like that. They all ferment fantastically well.

There's that kind of fermentation technique which is perhaps a little bit... The first time you do a classic sauerkraut, you put your shredded cabbage in a big bowl and you sprinkle the salt on it and you just massage it and you've just somehow... It's an act of faith to imagine that enough liquid is going to come out of that cabbage to create a brine that you're then going to be able to have enough to actually cover your vegetables in their own liquid. But some of you who've dabbled in fermenting will know that there's a fantastic cheat for that

which is sometimes called a lacto-ferment, where you just make a 3% or 4% brine of water and you put it in a jar and you put vegetables in it. And as long as they're submerged, they will quite quickly start to ferment. And there's nothing you can't ferment. Well, that's probably not quite true, is it? There are few vegetables that don't go well in that sort of situation and don't end up being tasty pickles. Mushrooms are so hard. Mushrooms are hard. They go very slimy. I don't.

I don't try and do it. They go slimy, they go weird. You're right. They carry some dodgy things with them that misbehave when you try and ferment them. I remember hearing, actually, Rene Redzepi from Noma being interviewed about his passion for fermentation, and he was asked if there was anything he'd ever really, really struggled to ferment, and there was quite a long silence after pondering for a while. He said, blood. Oh, okay.

And that seems to be about the only thing that Rene Redzepi has struggled to ferment. So maybe I should have another go at the mushrooms and try a bit harder. Yeah, please stick with mushrooms, not the blood, though. So one of the questions that comes up as well when we talk about sort of 30 plants a week, how do we get there without buying sort of, you know, foreign plants that are brought into this country by aeroplane? How can we keep...

eating 30 plants a week, but still abiding to that seasonality here in the UK? Well, obviously you're kind of talking right into my home patch there because I've been espousing the joys of growing your own food and sourcing local seasonal food. Are we in the pursuit of this high number of 30 plants going to find ourselves saying, oh, I'm struggling a bit this week, I better have those...

that have been flown in from Africa or whatever it is. I don't think we have to go there at all. I think there is a massive variety of seasonal vegetables being grown in this country all the time. That's not to say that, you know, I issue all exotic things from overseas. You know, I love citrus fruits and I eat chocolate and I drink coffee and tea and stuff like that. But I do try and make the basic building blocks of my fresh vegetables at home as much local and seasonal as possible.

I don't know.

And okay, maybe things are slightly sparse in the winter months, or we've seen a lot of roots and we've seen a lot of brassicas. That's actually where things like the fermenting come in really useful because they can add, especially when you put the spices in, they add a whole extra dimension of flavors and textures to those ingredients. Like you could eat a stir-fried cabbage and then the next time you have pickle cabbage and it's like you're having a completely different vegetable. So if you get into the...

habits of playing around with fermentation and also various different ways of cooking things. Cooking techniques as well. I mean, talking about being still an omnivore. I am...

I'm an omnivore who makes an absolutely determined effort to avoid meat and fish for several days at a time. Not because I don't really enjoy them, but because they're incredibly tyrannical ingredients. You know, they hog all... Especially for chefs. You know, chefs obsess over a fish or a bit of meat and will slather it in marinades and sprinkle this on it to make the skin crispy and puff up the crackling and just, you know...

rub a bit of coriander seed, go on forever. So by the time he's finished loving the meat, there's no great surprise that there's not much effort left and the vegetables become the also-ran or the bit on the side. If you push the meat and the fish out of the way for a few days...

Then you can get just as... All those same techniques, the marinating, the charring, the roasting, you can do that with the meat nowhere in sight, and you'll get those crispy caramelised corners and those charred edges on your courgettes or your cauliflowers, and then you'll start to see that these plants are just as exciting or even more exciting. I mean, if you... Meat, I mean, it's all a bit the same, right? I mean, the difference between a pork chop and a steak, yeah, there's a difference, but completely...

But compared to the difference between, I don't know, a walnut and a leek. Yes. You know, there's some difference in the world of food and eating for you. There is huge variety. I could do those walnut, leek, you know, pear, coriander. I could do those all night. I'm not going to. But I mean, those things are miles apart. And there's so much just difference to be relished in the world of plants. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

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So hearing you talk about this and your passion is incredible. And the question that comes to my mind is, where have we gone wrong here in the UK that we've lost touch with the wonders of eating lots of plants? And actually, you know, I'm a massive fan of hispy cabbage when it's like charred and it's delicious. But what have you done?

What do you think, you know, you've been quite vocal about how little the government is doing to help improve the food environment. How do you see this message of 30 plants a week maybe changing that? What would you like to see?

Well, I've campaigned on various food-related issues, some to do with animal welfare and some to do with human health, others to do with the environment. I'll be honest with you, I don't see 30 plants a week being at the centre of a government health campaign any time soon,

you've got to learn to crawl before you can walk. And this government hasn't even crawled its way into a half-credible strategy on obesity and helping us to eat well. And that's despite the fact that they know what all the levers are that need to be pulled.

And in the 10 or 15 years that I've been interested in this stuff, I've collaborated with people who've actually worked a lot harder than I have and done amazing studies and have got the science to back it all up. But people like the Food Foundation, and I hope some of them are in here this evening, and Jamie Oliver and his team, and Henry Dimbleby, and now Chris Van Tulligan, we all pretty much agree on a lot of the things that need to be done.

We can't go on bombarding young people with advertising about really unhealthy junk foods. We can't continue to have an industry that recklessly develops foods to be almost irresistible despite the fact there's almost zero nutrition in them.

I mean, the industrialization of food has followed on from the industrialization of farming. And at one level, as a sort of revolution, it looked like a kind of blessing because it massively ramped up productivity and in some parts of the world brought down the cost of food.

But the problem with this huge industrial commodification of basic crops, of rice and wheat and maize and sugar and the oil crops, is in order to then drag those ingredients into the food industry in an industrial way, they're all stripped of half the things that are good in them. I mean, you know, wheat's...

not a bad food if you leave in the bran, but you take it out and it's worth very little. Sweet corn, lovely healthy thing full of fiber, but if you turn it into high fructose corn syrup, which is basically what half the soft drinks of the world are now made of, it's got zero nutritive value whatsoever. What happened to the husk of the sweet corn and the fiber that was discarded? Well,

Ironically, some of it now goes into making an alternative to plastic, but that's not a great solution either because we don't really want to be growing our packaging when we still aren't as good as we should be at growing nutritious food.

So, obviously that's a little bit of an anxiety. But what I suppose really gets me about the inaction of the government is it's all been dressed up for a decade or two as an ideological thing where people... We don't tell people what's good for them. We don't proselytise about people's health or their food choices. We're not a nanny state, etc.

It's just a poor excuse for letting an industry ride rampant and do whatever advertising it likes and develop foods in whatever way they like without any regard for human health. It also doesn't really stack up anymore. It's lost all its credibility since COVID. I mean, if you're a government that's got an ideological problem with telling people how to live their lives or how to be healthy,

when a pandemic comes along, you can't really just tell them all to stay at home and not go to work, can you? Not that I necessarily think that was the wrong thing to do, but hang on, if you can do that...

Can't you then also intervene in a far more serious epidemic, which is causing killing and harming far more people across the planet, which is their poor diet? So if it's okay for a government to intervene for a short, sharp pandemic, why is it not okay to intervene on one of the most difficult chronic health problems that's sweeping across the entire globe? Amen. APPLAUSE

And I think... You rattled my cage. Well, I did that intentionally, for sure. Yes, well, I think it's a really important point, and I think one of the things that people really struggle with is what to feed their children, which is actually...

really interesting when you think about the context of, you know, the obesity epidemic that we're in and you were seeing diseases in children that never used to exist in children. So what a book like yours does, I think, is also highlights how we can introduce more plants in a safe way and in a way that we feel empowered to do for our children. What do you think about that? What's your kind of takeaway? Yeah, no, I mean, look, I mean, I...

This isn't a how to wean your baby with 30 plants a week cookbook. We should think about that one, shouldn't we? I mean, I think that the ways in which we get children on board with good real food are probably more simple even than that. And they're just about showing kids what actual food is. And children who... Actually, there's a quite compelling Australian study where...

kids of toddler age were, over a period of time, given food to play with, not to eat, but literally to play with as toys. But real, you know, apples, carrots, and nobody, there was no encouragement necessarily to eat them, but if they decided to munch them, that was fine. But it didn't really matter whether they were playboys

playing with them, sticking up their noses, throwing them at their mum or whatever. But if they had that exposure to these ingredients and were allowed to just taste them whenever they felt like it, they then became much more relaxed about trying new foods and found it much easier. But it sort of stands to reason, if you...

If you were raised thinking that food is something that is unscrewed from a jar, you're going to have a different feeling about food than if you were raised watching someone chopping a carrot and giving you a bit of it to shove up your nose. Or eat, or whatever. And that's what we need to do. We need a very relaxed way just to show our kids what food is in its natural form and just tell them and not worry too much at that early stage about whether they like it or not.

It's just like, that's what food looks like. All these different things, all these different colours, all these different textures. Take your pick, explore the things that you like, and then when we've worked out what you're going to eat, we'll feed it to you. Exactly, yeah. I think it's a really important message about modelling food behaviour. So having these foods at home, preparing them, eating them together, and showing kids that this is real food makes such a difference.

In your book, so some people, well, a lot of people are really time poor. They feel like they don't have the time to prepare these meals and to dedicate like, you know, an hour to preparing and eating a meal with their family. What do you think about that? And what's your solution to that?

Well, it's a very important point and as a writer of cookbooks, I have to remind myself that some people don't love spending 45 minutes in the kitchen every evening making supper because that's pretty much what I do and I really love it. And I don't really mind if I've spent the whole day cooking in a slightly stressful way in front of a camera. I'm still happy to come home and pull a couple of things out the fridge and see what's in the garden.

pour myself a glass of wine, no, cider, and then enjoy that time in the kitchen. And I do get that that isn't everyone's idea of fun.

Although I do think that people could have more fun in the kitchen without stressing too much. And I try and make my recipes accessible in that way. One way I do it is by just reminding people that you don't actually have to worry that much about either the ingredients or the quantities. At least in the sense that you could almost always swap one green thing for another green thing or one tinned pulse for another tinned pulse or whatever. And that really, really doesn't matter. And it still surprises me hearing from people...

for whom that seems to be a bit of a revelation because it just seems to me to be a bit obvious but it's worth saying. But in terms of just rustling something up quick for supper, I mean I use plenty of convenient foods and there's plenty of recipes in the book where you're pulling peas out the freezer or opening a tin. There's a six for supper soup which is basically I'm pretty much betting that most people in this room could make this in 10 minutes when they get home

You've got an onion, you've got a carrot, you've got a tin of beans, you've probably got a stock cube, you've probably got some peas in the freezer. You've got a really delicious soup. You really have if you just put all those things in a pan and heat them up.

Really delicious. So, you know, and actually it is the diversity, it's the contrast, it's the putting in of different contrasting flavours and textures. Whether they come from the store cupboard, the freezer, or the fridge, that makes this nice, and then, you know, you've got to whack a bit of, if you've got to whack a bit of spice in there too, absolutely. And, and,

It isn't that hard to build fun and interesting meals from things you've probably already got. In terms of if you're really going to go for it with the 30 plants, I think it's back to that list and just when you go shopping, just take the blinkers off. Just cast around for something you like that you haven't had for a while. Don't worry how you're going to cook it until you get home, maybe. But it's not about rushing off and loading up with food.

reams of new tangled foods that are going to stress you or make you worry about whether you're going to waste them. It's just about little by little rebuilding your repertoire to include a few extra good things per week. And there is... I did a late-breaking decision. As well as the plant list, I've got this... On the end papers of the book, on the inside, the plant list reappears with little boxes next to it. So you can actually...

Not everyone wants to actually count, but the only way you're going to really know if you're getting 30 plants a week is to once in a while count what you... So I've made it easy to do it.

A lot of the time, I think you're going to be freestyling. If you count your plants one week and you get to 33, and the next week feels pretty much like that, but with a few different things, you probably know you're in your 30s again. So some people like to count, some people like to freestyle. You can mix it up, but...

but I've just tried to make it as easy as possible. I love that. It's really cool, isn't it? So you can take them off. It's like people who are competitive like me would like to take as many off as possible. So tell me, do you think that there's a risk that we're overstating the benefits of plants? I think you can overstate anything. Yeah, no, I mean, well, look, I mean, from what I said earlier, I think it's hard to overstate the crisis.

So it is pretty hard to overstate what a transformative diet could do to alleviate that crisis, both at the individual and national level. Basically, the first thing that defines how well you are is what you eat. I'm not the first person to have said that, but it's not becoming any less true

And as there are more and more choices that are not good for us, if anything, it's becoming more urgently true. So I do think we have to get back to it. But it's hard. We are working, you know, we're doing, you know, we're trying to, I'm trying, lots of us, lots of us are trying to excite people about eating less ultra-processed food, more of this good stuff. And we're doing it.

We're doing it literally unaided by government or the food industry. I mean, you know, lots of us who are talking about it in rooms like this. And we're finding it hard to reach people. Of course we are. Of course there's a terrible danger that there's a massive dose of preaching to the converted in evenings like this. I still hope that people will go away with some fresh ideas and new thoughts and increased ideas about how they can have more fun in the kitchen and feel better. But there's an awful lot of people we're not reaching yet.

And in the end, it isn't necessarily our job to go out and preach those people. But I mean, another way of expressing the crisis of food, which we sort of touched on, it is sort of a fiber crisis.

is literally, a lot of it boils down to the fact that nine out of ten people don't get the recommended amount of fiber for their digestion to work properly. And so I do think we have to work at both ends to the middle. And whilst I totally, I'm in awe of Chris Van Tulleken's incredible book about ultra-processed foods and how he's brought to our attention just how much they are poisoning us.

But we do have to, as well as helping people to get back into whole and more natural foods, we have to improve the quality of that industrially produced food in itself. And we can do that. The sugar tax was about that. The buzzword is reformulation. And policies can do it. If you're banned from advertising certain types of food because they don't pass certain thresholds, one of those thresholds could be fibre.

And in order to advertise that piece of food in the way that you want to advertise it, you've got to put a bit more fibre in. You could do that. One thing it would be very unlikely to do is to be detrimental to the taste or quality of the food. It might be slightly inconvenient to change the recipe.

But even those small incremental changes in the way that industrially produced food is made would have seriously consequential outcomes for whole swathes of the population. So I'm not imagining that within months of now everyone's going to be eating 30 plants a week everywhere we look. That's a fantasy. This is why we need the food industry to get a grip.

And the only way they're going to get a grip, because they've had voluntary options to do this coming out of their ears for years, is if government incentivises it either with tax or with laying down new laws about how food is produced and served. What is powerful is having voices like yours...

writing books like this means that there is more of a public discussion and we can vote also with our shopping so if we buy more of these foods and there's higher demand we've seen supermarkets pivot this year and make it the year of gut health for example so you know five years ago gut health wasn't a thing but if we keep talking about it and we keep you know driving this message home I think there will be a change and 30 plants a week is especially good for gut health

So before we open up to questions on the floor,

Why is it that you're... What do you think is happening inside our bodies when we adopt this way of eating? Well, you know more about that than I do, Fedda, so correct me if I'm wrong. But I do think it is quite an incredible story. And it's actually one that is weirdly, I find, quite enjoyable to think about when I'm throwing all these plants into my tummy. You're basically feeding a bacteria party in your tummy, right?

and you want them to have as good a time as possible. In fact, you want them to reproduce. You want it to be that kind of party. Sorry, I've never said it quite like that before, but I think that's probably quite a... Not an unuseful way of putting it. These guys living in your stomach, they're not you.

They're not part of you. They live inside you. They are not part of your body. They are aliens that have come to live. But you can't live without them, and you need to look after them. And if you do look after them, they do incredible things for you. They really service you in extraordinary ways. That's also a slightly unfortunate phrase. But let me just say, get a grip on yourself, Hugh. What am I saying?

It's not getting any better. Listen. Okay. Back to the part. So I'm going to get super serious for a minute. So one really fascinating thing about what the bacteria in your stomach are capable of and actually need to do

For example, the connection between our gut health and our mental health has been much discussed and is probably still only glimpsed in terms of scientific understanding. But we know it's there and we know it's real. But when you come to understand, as I only did fairly recently, that the essential neurotransmitters of phytochemicals,

that do all the work in your brain and govern your emotions like serotonin and oxytocin and dopamine and these kind of things

are synthesized in your gut. You don't produce them. There's nothing in your brain that makes them. They're synthesized in your gut and distributed to your brain. And if your gut's not working well, you're not going to do a good job of creating these neurotransmitters, and there'll be negative consequences for that. So it is a very... So I've painted a slightly kind of...

like one of those 1970s comics, like the kids, the people who live inside the telly and stuff like that. I have a slightly childlike view of it, but it's one that serves me well. I imagine you'd like to embellish it with some proper science, Federica. I think we should stop at the microbe orgy that you just described. No, you're completely right, though, Hugh. There's so much science to show the importance of gut microbiome health for so many things.

you're completely right, brain health, mental health, and we have a mental health crisis in this country. And they're not, you know, they're connected. Our food crisis and our mental health crisis are connected. And we also know that it has a massive impact on our immune system function. We saw that during the pandemic, people who had more unfavorable gut microbiome compositions had worse outcomes. So it's all, the science is actually there. There's so much science on all sorts of outcomes and gut microbiome health. And, you know,

At Zoe, we're doing a lot of work mapping out what a good gut microbiome looks like and what does that mean for health outcomes. So it's evolving quickly and this kind of eating is exactly what we should be doing to support our gut microbiome. That in turn, these trillions of microbes, they then support our health. They want us to be alive so they can carry on partying in our guts. So yeah, I think that's a really positive note to end on.

you know you're right food is the most important choice we make every day for our health and thanks to your book we can get a bit closer to achieving a diet that really supports our gut microbiome and therefore supports our overall health and joy of food tastes delicious prepare it together share it with our families and friends so i love all of that's the plan yeah amazing

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts and Bea Duncan. Hey, music fans. There are some great concerts headed this way. Don't miss out on all the shows in your favourite venues like Deftones at Madison Square Garden,

Eagles at the Sphere and Foster the People at the Ryman Auditorium. Tickets are going fast, so don't wait. Head to LiveNation.com to get your tickets now. That's LiveNation.com.