Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall: The cheap, everyday veg packed with fibre that ‘we take for granted’

By Lauren Taylor, PA

The ‘fibremaxxing’ trend – increasing fibre content in your diet – has been gaining traction for a while, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is here for it.

The TV chef and campaigner says: “If you look at people talking about fibre online, and by the way I’m very happy that they are, there is a lot of focus on nuts and seeds – particularly chia seeds because they’re so high in fibre.

“But one of the reasons they get such a high score and such a lot of attention is, per gram, they’ve got a lot of fibre because they’re dry ingredients. Whereas vegetables have anything between 60 and 80% water.

“If you take the water out [of veg] that fibre also really, really high.”

If eating a lot of dried nuts, seeds and chia seeds, you need to add or drink a lot of water, adds the 61-year-old. So while the movement towards eating more nuts and seeds is beneficial, he thinks many high-fibre vegetables are being forgotten about.

Plus, vegetables have the added benefit of phytonutrients, micronutrients, vitamins and other things to help feed your gut bacteria.

So does he think we all underestimate how much fibre we need?

“I don’t think it, I know it,” says Fearnley-Whittingstall, who set up River Cottage at Park Farm 20 years ago this year. “About 6% of us are getting 30 grams a day, over 90% of the population. This is central to the crisis in dietary health.”

While eating plenty of wholegrains, nuts and seeds is certainly important, it’s the everyday, simple veg, probably featuring regularly in your weekly shop, that the TV chef reckons are the ‘fibre heroes’.

In his new book, High Fibre Heroes, the chef focusses entirely on 12 vegetables – peas, carrots, broccoli, spinach, cabbage and kale, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, cauliflower, lentils, leek and sweetcorn – and how to make each the star of a dish in a tasty way.

It’s the veg we “almost take for granted”, he notes – “Everybody knows what they are but we don’t give them the hero status they deserve.

“They’re overlooked because they’re hiding in plain sight. I wanted to bring them out of the bottom of the fridge and make them a superstar.”

These new recipes are designed to be “low stress, easy midweek meals, which either come together in one pan on the hob or come together in a big tray in the oven”.

Peas, for example, are probably in every freezer. “I love growing them in my garden, says Fearnley-Whittingstall, “but like most, I eat a lot of frozen peas.”

“The [warm] bashed peas [dip], which is probably one of the simplest recipes in the book, is incredibly delicious and the pea and noodle coconut soup is such an easy, lovely thing.”

While carrots are in most people’s fridges and, along with peas, Fearnley-Whittingstall says “they really are the most obvious of vegetable”.

“There is an issue that kids aren’t really introduced to fresh vegetables and don’t know what they look like. But everyone knows what peas and carrots look like!”

But rarely is the orange veg seen as the star of the show. Enter Fearnley-Whittingstall and his carrot and cashew curry or his carrot lasagne.

Incredibly inexpensive, and packed with goodness beyond fibre – like beta-carotene and antioxidants – 75% of us are said to eat carrots on a regular basis.

You can even make carrots “actually rather elegant”, he says. One recipe is based on an idea from Heston Blumenthal and involves braising carrots with oranges and tomato, “so they’re very tender with a really rich, tangy sauce and a few olives, to give it a bit of an umami hit.”

Leeks are “absolutely” underrated, he says. Usually just getting “chopped up and thrown in” to something like a soup or the base of a sauce.

“But I really like the texture of them.” And the new book gives ideas for using them in ways you might not have considered before – think leek and fennel bruschetta or a leek and chickpea curry.

Meanwhile, buying frozen spinach, he says, is “incredibly useful”. The leafy green can be grown year-round in the UK and, of course, Fearnley-Whittingstall grows a lot of it himself, but also says: “I love having a bit of quick, easy-win spinach.” Use it in a roasted saag aloo dish, or a spinach and lentil gratin bake.

“Something you can chuck spinach into is a really nice, big soupy, saucy type of dish. I call them ‘stoups'” – somewhere between a stew and a soup.” Think, spicy lentil, squash and greens ‘stoup’.

The key way to fight the lack of fibre problem is to cook from scratch, he reckons.

“The thing I definitely can’t solve, is how to help people eat really healthy if they don’t cook at all. We need to raise a generation who are broadly able to put a healthy meal together from scratch, if we’re not going to go on having this massive problem of diet-related disease.”

If young people have some inexpensive, healthy recipes up their sleeve, the chef says that gives “incredible resilience in a world that we know isn’t easy for kids when they leave school.

“If they can cook a few meals that gives them the chance to look after themselves and stay well, which I think is priceless whatever else the world throws at them.”

But fibre intake is important at every age.

“It’s never too late to start improving your diet,” he says. “The older they get, the harder it is to get people to change their ways, it’s really hard to get adults to change their ways, unless they’ve made the decision that they’re open to doing things a little bit differently.”

High Fibre Heroes by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing. Photography by Emma Lee. Available now.