Soft fruit - healthy or hazardous?

Berries are often promoted as a healthy food and grabbing a punnet of blueberries may seem a darn sight easier than giving up smoking, cutting down on alcohol or taking daily exercise. Or indeed, easier than cutting down your total intake of fats and sugars. But of course it’s your entire dietary mix that matters, not whether or not you eat berries.

Fresh berries are expensive because they are so perishable but packets of cheaper frozen berries have now become widely available. These are advocated for all kinds of “healthy recipes” in magazines and cookery books. They are also used by manufacturers to decorate ready-made frozen desserts such as cheesecakes.

There have been two examples in the news recently of serious illnesses being contracted from eating frozen berries.

In Sweden three elderly people died from norovirus, contracted from eating a frozen dessert that contained berries of Serbian origin in  And in Australia, earlier this year, there were several cases of Hepatitis A, linked to frozen berries imported from China. 

Hepatitis A is linked to faecal contamination of food and norovirus can also be spread in this way.

If we were to give the EU berry farmers the benefit of the doubt, we would envisage their fields and packing areas equipped with fragrant portable toilets and well-equipped hand washing facilities. We might confidently envisage that their staff induction sessions include training on the importance of hand hygiene. Whether or not all farmers reach these high standards I cannot say. If we let our imaginations travel further afield then we might be less optimistic about hygiene in berry fields and processing plants. 

Berries are delicious and if you have a garden, growing your own soft fruit is a great way to use it. Fresh soft fruit  should be washed – but of course you can’t scrub a raspberry. As for imported frozen berries, they can potentially do you more harm than good. My advice is to avoid all uncooked berries if your immune system is compromised. And for everyone else, treat frozen berries as a cooking ingredient that needs to be thoroughly cooked before eating.

Sugar as a healthier option?

Hard to imagine how you did that Waitrose, given all the publicity about escalating rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. 

Your current promotion is entitled “Kick Start Your Health”, with special displays, recommended recipes and 25% discounts on supposedly healthier ingredients. How on earth did this become a prominent promotional display, featuring banks of golden caster sugar (25% off)?  It stopped me in my tracks when walking into my local store.

After some discussion with you, Waitrose, I now realise that the whole display relates to a free recipe for scones, upgraded with carrots and pumpkin seeds aimed at making them “healthier”. Ironic that fruit scones are one of the few types of cake that can be made without added sugar. (Though they do cry out to be smothered with cream and jam, thus cancelling out any low-sugar credibility.)

When I cornered one of your senior managers in my local store he was defensive about the recipe, telling me, “It’s healthier because it contains carrots and seeds”. When “Oh no!  how did we get it so wrong?” might have been more convincing.

In a written response on your Facebook page, I got more of the same, passed down from “the team in head office”. I conclude, Waitrose, that you are  still not seeing this from the point of view of your customer.

Did no one on “the team” spot that customers, who did not have recipe leaflet in their hands, would either:

a)    be somewhere on the spectrum between bemused and outraged that sugar was being         promoted as healthy 

or

b) think that this light brown sugar was a “healthy” product?

How did you mess up so badly? And why, when I point out your error, do you persist in talking about the recipe? I am disappointed and definitely in the outraged camp, to see that such a reputable food retailer has got “healthy eating” so badly wrong.