Recipe For Change with Nick Nairn

Scotland's top chef and his ideas for healthy eating by Richard Goslan

How did becoming a father change your approach to food? I became a father at the same time as I was approaching middle age, and the two things combined gave me a very different outlook on health and wellbeing in general. With the kids specifically, both my wife and I saw it as an opportunity to give them the best possible start in terms of diet, so we took the decision that as far as possible they would eat only home-grown food, organic food, and that they wouldn’t eat any junk,

Right up until about a year ago that included sweets and chocolate, but my daughter Daisy is about to go to school so I’m slowly easing her into the world of chocolate!

We’ve given them a very low salt diet, high in fruits and vegetables – and they both enjoy eating, especially fruit, which they can eat until it comes out of their ears. But if you gave Daisy a crisp she wouldn’t like it, it would be too salty for her. 

If we go out to a restaurant and have soup which is seasoned to a restaurant’s usual seasoning, it’ll be too salty for them.

So they’re just not used to that?
No … they have well-trained, well-tuned palates, and my hope is that I’ve given them this palate that will reject a lot of that food. We were at a birthday party recently and they had strawberries and ice-cream for dessert and Daisy ate all her strawberries and left half the ice-cream, because she’s just not used to sweet things.

But it’s difficult in the real world, especially at kids’ parties where they’re offered the usual stuff – chicken nuggets, fish fingers, hot dogs … so what can you do?

Well we’re very lucky to have a circle of friends who are all share our way of thinking, but obviously our kids go to parties with children from outwith that group, and it’s a very different scene. Daisy has gone to parties when it’s the chicken nuggets and the hot dogs and everything – I don’t have so much of a problem with hot dogs made with decent meat and maybe in a wholemeal roll – but it’s these hyper-processed sausages with plastic skins, that’s the stuff I’ve got a problem with.

But it’s a hard thing, because you can turn people off, you can make them run a mile from you if you become too scary about it, and I’ve lightened up considerably in the last 12 months because I am aware of this peer pressure thing and I don’t want my kids going to school and people laughing at them because they don’t know what these things are!

So I’m trying to be a bit more pragmatic and accept that you can’t wrap them up in cotton wool. It’s more to do with tuning their palates at an early age and keeping your fingers crossed that stands them in good stead later on – and that’s probably as much as you can do.
But when we eat at home we eat a lot of stuff out of my wife’s garden, so their palates are set up for that kind of food, and they both enjoy their food, the kids eat a wide range of things, from fish to game, chicken livers, we’ve never ever held back and given them bland food, we’ve always had interesting, varied food.

That brings us to the whole idea of “children’s menus” in restaurants that promote themselves as “child-friendly” establishments – do you think that sends out the wrong message, that kids are offered something different from what the adults are eating?

When we take our kids out we just give them a half portion each of whatever it is we’re eating … but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a kids’ menu, in terms of budgeting, but what really turns me off is when the kids menu is crap – frozen pizzas, deep fried nuggets … why can’t we have interesting children’s menus? How about fresh asparagus in season with some grated parmesan?

But do you know anywhere in Scotland that’s serving that kind of food for children?

I know people who would like to do it, and talk about doing it … but no, outside of London I don’t know of anywhere that’s doing it.
But there are a whole lot of things about taking the kids out to eat, besides the food – the speed of service for a start, because if you make a kid sit at a table for half an hour, they’re just not going to want to go back to a restaurant again because they’re so bored. If you walk into a restaurant with two small kids, there should be a “red alert” going off in the kitchen – get some food out to those kids fast!
And then there’s the whole way people deal with children, why not treat them as customers, it’s great for them and their dining experience. So those are also factors we look at.&nbsp;</p><p>
We’ve been eating out with kids, both here and abroad, since they were about nine days old, so they’re used to eating out.

What kind of differences do you find when you’re eating out overseas?

The biggest problem in Scotland is salt, all restaurants use far more salt than they need to, and I can understand why they don’t cut it down, because people would then complain that their food is bland. But for a family like ours that doesn’t eat much salt at home, restaurant food can taste very salty for the kids. 

But it can feel like you’re continually swimming upstream, you’re the odd one, with your focus on children’s diet, it’s unusual still to even be concerned about it. People settle for second best, but that extends beyond the children because parents are settling for second best, but I see children eating crisps and fast food and it makes me angry – I want to actually take it off them.

I read that you’d taken crisps out of a kid’s hand at a party and offered them an apple instead?

Well it was with my own daughter! But she’d rather eat an apple than a bag of crisps anyway, or a punnet of raspberries. In Scotland we have the best soft fruit in the world, I had some strawberries up in Aberdeenshire recently which were mind-blowingly good, and any kid is going to love eating those.

So obviously parents need to do their bit, but is it a question of addressing the whole issue of food in schools too?
The answer is in a broad, wide-ranging approach that needs to be taken in this country in general, moving food up the list of priorities, and absolutely key to that, education is the number one priority.
We need to introduce food education at as early an age as possible, which at the very latest should be happening at primary school, but I’d like to see it happening way before then, it should almost be provided as part of the antenatal thing, expectant mothers should be thinking about their diet, or even people who are trying to have families.

That should be carried on throughout people’s lives, but it shouldn’t be rammed down their throats, it should be made fun, but we need to connect people with the issues surrounding food – that there is an issue of seasonality, and you shouldn’t be expecting to have the same produce all year, that not all fruit is the same colour and shape – all that stuff needs to be drip fed in throughout kids’ lives.

Allied to that you have issues like school meals, which should be seen as an opportunity, rather than a problem which is the way that they’re looked at right now. They should be an example of how you could give kids food as it should be, you know healthy, tasty, nutritious food that they enjoy eating in a communal environment, getting away from this horrible, horrible thing of walking down the street with a poke of chips – that’s not eating, that’s refueling, it’s a different thing.

And then you’ve got to start working with the primary producers, the retailers, and I do accept that we are for a large part going to be a society which relies on processed food, it will make up a big part of our diet because we just don’t cook anymore, but let’s take the processed food and make it more palatable, healthier.

Transfats is already a dirty word, everybody wants to get into organic, the salt thing is starting to become an issue that people understand.

One of the positive things is that I was judging a competition for the best packed lunch recently, which I’d done six years ago – back then the packed lunches were a real mixed bag, you were still finding crisps and stuff like that, but this time, virtually every bag had a smoothie, they all had some kind of fruit cocktail or salad, all the bread was wholemeal, the seasoning was much lower, they were light years ahead in six years – maybe they were a switched-on couple of schools but to me it was reassuring and I thought it was the most positive thing I’d seen in a long time – it’s like the message is finally getting through.

Do you think we underappreciate what’s on our doorstep in terms of Scotland’s larder?

There’s no question about it, we have the most fabulous produce in Scotland, all over the country from the Borders to the northern isles, we have some of the best produce in the world, but unfortunately a large part of it, the really good stuff, gets exported. We’re the biggest producer of langoustine in the world; we land over 25,000 tonnes in Scotland every year, almost as much as total production in the rest of the world. But domestically we consume less than 1000 tonnes, yet we import massive tonnages of prawns grown in hot baths in Somalia and Sumatra and places like that, and that doesn’t make any sense to me. 

And you’ve expressed interest in working with the new SNP administration in a food and nutrition role?
Yes I have, and I met First Minister Alex Salmond recently and although I’m not a nationalist, I like the cut of his jib – I like what he’s done so far, and I like the fact that he’s trying to have inclusive politics to take some of the juvenile element out of the chamber at Holyrood. He just seems to me to be a bit more grown up and a bit more tolerant and I’ve had an extremely good response from him, I think this is an issue he’s interested in. I’ve talked to Tony Blair about this, I’ve talked to Henry McLeish about it, Jack McConnell, and this is what I’ve said to the new First Minister, that I’ve had a lot of talk, a lot of rhetoric, but I think we need to see some action now, we need to see some commitment.

You’re doing Landward for the BBC now and seem to be talking about issues other than cooking – is this you spreading your wings a little bit?

I’ve always been concerned with the food chain, it’s always been important to me, it’s not just about the food that arrives in your fridge, it’s about where it comes from and all the issues about how it gets there – so Landward isn’t that much of a departure to be honest, I’ve always been passionate about these issues and farming is something that’s close to me. But I’m really enjoying it and I’m hoping we can bring a number of issues to light which will influence things for the better.