Deleted Notes & Queries response: "What are the fewest separate foods you could eat and still have a healthy, balanced diet?"

Below is my response to a question that appeared on the Notes & Queries page of The Guardian website on 14th August, 2022

The comment has since been deleted from the website.

This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use.

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What are the fewest separate foods you could eat and still have a healthy, balanced diet?

image generated by Craiyon

For as long as I have known Lorna Swash, she has worn her hair in the style of a 1970s social worker: Cut shoulder-length using the kitchen scissors, with a dark listless fringe in need of shampoo, framing a round face, that is prominently dimpled with a pair of rosy cheeks, and drawn into a chin that is too small and incongruous with her other features. For five years it was ridiculously easy to pick her out in a crowd: Just look for the faded red anorak with the detachable sleeves. I never saw her take it off, even during in the height of summer.

Her name (which conjures images of a distraught heroine on the cover of a paperback romance, fleeing a lighthouse in a torn ballgown) is an almost onomatopoeic evocation of her childhood in Morsow, on the storm-battered South-West coast of England: A row of cottages so obscure that the residents had to petition the government for it to be recognised as a village. Two decades later, all but one of the houses had been claimed by the waves, and the newly minted settlement was declared in the records as having been “lost at sea”.

The first time I met Lorna, I thought she had the look of someone who might whip out a copy of the Communist manifesto and attempt to engage anyone within earshot in ardent political discussion. Her confession that she had never set foot inside a supermarket until she moved to Milton Keynes in her late teens, added to my suspicions that she had grown up on a commune where dried mung beans comprised a subversive black market currency.

Instead she showed me an unpublished pamphlet titled 'The Ripe Beach' that she had written and illustrated. It was subtitled as a local foraging guide for the landlocked fisherman. Her family, at the behest of their patriarch, had subsisted outside of society, operating at a level of grinding poverty that would be alien to all but a few living with the UK. After her father lost his boat, they were left with no option other than to scavenge the shore for their meals.

Fresh food would arrive on the incoming tide and would wash up at different levels of the beach. At the surf line, there were crabs that had been herded by the waves and had buried themselves in the wet sand to escape the attentions of predatory birds. A few feet inland there would be a line of small shellfish that had been torn from their anchorages. Above this there were strata of kelp and different seaweeds.

Lorna and her siblings would each select one of the meal lines, that stretched across the sands like buckled railway tracks, and harvest all that they could of the meat and vegetables that were available.

“Claw line, Shelly line, Kelp line, then Pepperweed, Rainyweed, and Pocket Gommon.”

She counted them off on the same finger.

“And conveniently there were six of us, so we each harvested something different. And that was all we ate for almost four years and it did us no harm.”

One of her brothers, named Spragg (whose birth had not even been registered – it caused him a lot of problems later) worked out that you could catch more crabs if you provided them with a convenient shelter. He stole a box of shoes from a church jumble sale and buried them in the gritty mud with the toes pointing upwards, crenelating the foreshore so that it resembled a crooked jawline of worn-down teeth.

There is a crab called the 'seawarden' or 'seaguard' that has pleasantly sweet flesh and that scavenges in the foam along the tidal edge. Out in the open they were too nimble to be caught, however the Swash children were able to ensnare them in large numbers using Spragg's shoe traps.

“He changed his name to David after dad passed,” said Lorna. “He kept Spragg as his middle name.”

More mysterious were the disembodied tentacles that would occasionally wash ashore. They were chunky with abundant suckers, and measured between 4-9 inches in length.

It is likely that these were the detached limbs of the pacific velvet octopus which is capable of autotomy (self-amputation). The disembodied tentacles possess some limited intelligence and are sometimes seen swimming independently in the vicinity of octopus dens. They navigate the world by means of touch and vibrations in the water, and they are capable of feeding by drawing nutrients from small prey caught on their suction pads. Their appearance on the Swash dinner table can perhaps be explained by colonies of octopus being taken up in ballast water that was later released into the North Sea.

In the Pacific region, the tentacles are killed just prior to being eaten by immersion in a spirit called Mitiava, which is distilled from seaweed and saltwater. The Swash family ate them seasoned with beach salt – a fine, rust coloured power regurgitated by shore crabs. It has an intense 'crabby' flavour and is found as nuggets that dissolve readily and deliciously in the mouth.

It is on this simple diet that a family of six children were successfully nourished.

I hope this is of help.