Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the fibre fad’s heroes and villains

Fibre is having a moment. But its latest advocate isn’t a perfectly preened 20-something extolling the benefits of chia seeds while clad head to toe in athleisure wear. It’s Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the 61-year-old chef and campaigner.

Fearnley-Whittingstall’s new book, High Fibre Heroes, is centred on “how to turn 12 everyday vegetables into 100 joyful, health-boosting recipes”. That’s because, while he insists “fibremaxxers are great” and “it’s a really good thing, bringing fibre to the attention of the next generation in a fun way”, he feels “they do home in quite often on a set of dry ingredients”.

That’s why the book is broken into chapters focused on his 12 ‘high-fibre heroes’, the likes of peas, carrots, leeks and mushrooms. “The radical thing I’ve done is make my high-fibre heroes not so much the things the influencers are all talking about. They’re vegetables you already know. And they’re all found in the fresh, canned or Frozen section of the supermarket.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall is big on canned and frozen vegetables and pulses being an easy win for consumers. While he admits to being a “huge fan” of Hodmedod’s and the “absolutely delicious” Bold Bean Co, “at the same time, I also rate good, old, tinned beans”.

Good fibre, bad fibre

He also name-checks classic cereals like Weetabix and Shredded Wheat as high-fibre products that have “quite a lot of good things in them”. In short, he says, “you want nice, brief ingredients lists, with nothing in them that you wouldn’t have at home. Then you’re in good shape, definitely.”

That’s why he’s “not a massive fan of the fibre bars – “they’re often glued together with glucose syrup, modified starch or other binders and things like that”.

They are just one example from an industry that’s “clearly wising up to fibre”, he says, lamenting the slew of products with ‘high in fibre’ or similar claims on the packaging. “If all you can say that’s good about it is it’s high in fibre, you’re probably not talking about the possibly numerous ingredients that are concerning.”

Fearnley-Whittingstall is clearly no fan of UPFs in general, but he does try to take a more nuanced position than some of his peers.

“I’m open-minded to things like bread and pasta that are brown and not white, even if they’re manufactured. It’s not a blanket condemnation of all heavily processed foods flashing fibre credentials on their packs,” he says. “You’ve just got to tread a bit carefully and see that a lot of it is marketing, and it’s not as healthy as something you’ve made at home from scratch.”

While that’s unsurprising for an accomplished chef and serial cookbook author, Fearnley-Whittingstall accepts that swapping out UPFs is very often an expensive endeavour, one that’s out of reach for many consumers for reasons both economic and otherwise.

“It isn’t completely straightforward, and that’s precisely the reason I’ve focused in the book on these familiar veg as my heroes, because they’re the most accessible – both price-wise, and where you’re going to find them,” he says.

“I’m not saying never eat processed food. It’s just when it becomes the go-to for all your food problems and you’re completely alienated from scratch cooking, that’s not a healthy place to be.”

One of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s greatest frustrations is that his cookbooks will rarely reach the people they could help the most. “It’s very, very hard, because I can’t write books about cooking healthy food, inexpensively, for people who have never been helped to cook, who don’t feel confident cooking or whose kitchen hasn’t got the basic equipment,” he says. “That’s where the barrier comes down for me. And that’s where we need social policy to help people out of the trap.”

The school food opportunity

Fearnley-Whittingstall concedes there are “all kinds of very complicated and very understandable reasons why people struggle to put healthy food on the table at home” and shouts out the many “brilliant” organisations that help disadvantaged people learn how to cook. But, he says, “where I’m always coming back to in conversations about healthy eating on a national scale is school. School is the opportunity. School is the place we can meet kids with good food every single day.”

He welcomes the “interesting announcement” from the government last month that school food is set for “the most ambitious overhaul in a generation”.

“I really hope it goes through in a robust way, because [if so] it will make a difference,” says Fearnley-Whittingstall. “We need to put better food in front of kids at school – and support that with education about what real food looks like. There’s this idea that that’s not fundamental, or less important than skills in reading and maths. But school is surely for anything that sets children up to look after themselves well as they go through life.”

He’d also like to see the industry do more to help with the nation’s health. Currently, he says, “supermarkets are guilty of making it very easy to buy UPFs inexpensively and making it the obvious choice for families on a budget. But they’re also places you can get tonnes of great ingredients, lots of which are grown in the UK.”

The industry should “more regularly” remind shoppers “just how amazingly good for you these vegetables are, whether fresh, frozen or tinned – I don’t think we shout about that enough at the point of sale.

“We also need to find ways to ensure sometimes it’s the healthy foods that get discounted. At the moment, the culture of discount is centred around less healthy foods. A rebalancing has to happen. After all, those budget tins of beans, the frozen peas, the fresh carrots – all of these can bring a lot of goodness into your home.”