“I don’t need categories”

What does good food mean to you?

To put it simply, good food for me is something that tastes good and supports my mental, emotional and physical health - and, by extension, the health of the world around us. These things belong together.

To what extent does flexitarianism correspond to this ideal?

If one wants to define flexitarianism at all, then for me it is essentially a natural diet: fresh, colourful, varied, cooked with staple foods, and now and then good meat from better animal husbandry. Understood in this way, I consider this way of eating to be one of the healthiest. But I struggle with buzzwords because they are so elastic. I don’t need a label or a definition to know how I should eat well.

Do you have to be able to cook in order to live as a flexitarian?

You don’t necessarily have to be able to cook yourself. Your partner, family or someone else can cook. But without a source of fresh, home-cooked food, it becomes difficult. Because if I only eat highly processed ready-made products, I can call myself a flexitarian and still eat unhealthily. Then I strengthen neither myself nor the environment or the climate. That is why cooking is so important. Cooking for yourself is also an act of liberation, because it makes you more independent of an industry that serves us something over which we can hardly choose whether we want to eat it or not.

Could you perhaps even be described as the inventor of flexitarianism?

No, I wouldn’t put it that way. But my long history with what is now called flexitarianism comes from the fact that, even 40 years ago, I saw an imbalance: the diversity of vegetables, fruit, pulses, grains, mushrooms and herbs on the one hand, and this excessive meat consumption on the other. It has always bothered me that meat is the centrepiece and vegetables are discriminated as a side dish. That limits people’s imagination, and the imagination of cooks and chefs. In my cooking programmes, I therefore often cooked vegetarian dishes because others were already cooking enough meat and fish. Today, it is more popular to reduce meat and to make something delicious from vegetables, pulses, mushrooms and other plant-based foods. In the past, many people did not even know how to place an aubergine or melanzani at the centre of a meal.

Can flexitarianism bring about a real shift in eating habits?

The term is elastic. You can already call yourself a flexitarian because you have eaten one vegetarian meal without meat. At the same time, I believe that many people today are aware of what is good for them and what is good for the world around them. Many want to eat less meat, also because good organic meat is expensive and because one does not really want to eat cheap meat from unknown origins. The difficult thing is this: many people do not have the routine of cooking something good from vegetarian ingredients. They do not know how meat can become merely an accompaniment. There is a longing for this, but often the practice is missing.

What bothers you about meat substitute products?

A great deal. It is not only that these products are industrial. It is about monopolisation, patenting and an impoverishment of taste. Highly concentrated plant proteins and fibres are often difficult to digest, in some cases more difficult than meat. Our metabolism has not known such products as food over a long period of time. We do not yet know what it means when we no longer eat something truly living, but something edible that has been tempered, heated to high temperatures, homogenised, divided up and pressed through an extruder. Industry recreates flavours. It takes a few aroma molecules and says: this is mango flavour now. But a real mango has hundreds of aromatic compounds. Richness, diversity, depth and perhaps also a kind of bodily intelligence are lost: what is good for me?

Food is not just taste and health. It is culture, identity, participation and craft.
 

Can meat substitute products become important in culinary terms?

My answer is fairly clear: no. Of course, anything can be seasoned and jazzed up. For me, meat substitute products are poor copies of an original. They are not a solution for making our food system more ecological, but a new branch of industry. Often, the meat industry itself is even behind them.

What does the division of society around food mean?

This division is evident both where we live and globally. Here, some people can afford everything, while others have to watch every euro. At the same time, one section of society uses nutrition as a means of distinction, as a definition of who one is: flexitarian, vegetarian, omnivore, pescatarian, palaeo diet, high protein, vegan. I think it is misguided when nutrition becomes the content of one’s life and a marker of distinction. It would be desirable if we could all eat in a healthier, fresher and more normal way again. And if not only a few people had the choice between sprayed and unsprayed food, but everyone could eat healthily, have a roof over their head and not have to fight for their existence every day. That would be a dream. But that is simply not how things are.