The first mention of five-a-day, as a fruit and vegetable diet ideal was in California in the late 80s, but didn’t reach the chattering crudité classes until the mid-90s. I once wrote a food diary for a magazine, in which it turned out I’d had one vegetable across the space of a week, when someone in a cafe slipped some spinach under my fried egg. Eating five a day was harder than it looked, particularly if you didn’t like tomatoes and hated fruit. There was a bit of debate around whether potatoes counted (they don’t), whether bananas and avocados were false friends (nobody ever got to the bottom of that) and how much lettuce counted as a portion, given that it is basically air. Later, there was a little consternation at how much influence had been wielded by the fruit and vegetable industry. But the late, much-missed Michael Mosley made the adjudication in 2013 that the advice was pretty solid, and that was considered a good enough reason to follow the rule (at least for people who had the budget and headroom to follow rules).
So, of course, with all its controversies having been leached out of it by the passage of time, all its strictures being not that strict, five-a-day was bound to be torched by rebels sooner or later, and in 2018 – again, it’s taken a while to percolate – the rule became to eat 30 different plants a week. The immediate problem is naming 30 different plants, never mind eating them. I tried it alphabetically and timed out at “carrot”. Seeds are also considered a plant, and herbs and spices count, but only to the value of a quarter of a point, so now you have a maths challenge, on top of everything else.
The lesson here is: don’t surrender. The minute we’re all eating 30 different plants, the new normal will be 60. You’ll soon be foraging for nettles.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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