You don't have to eat at home to eat well. Sometimes the easiest way to eat whole foods is to borrow from cultures that never stopped cooking them.
There is a slightly peculiar idea surrounding healthy eating.
That once you decide to eat better, restaurants become the enemy.
The menu becomes a minefield of sauces, dressings, refined carbohydrates, mysterious oils and dishes described with words such as crispy, loaded and indulgent. Eventually, the safest option appears to be eating at home with a Tupperware container and the general demeanour of someone avoiding civilisation.
It doesn't have to be this way.
In fact, one of the easiest ways to eat more whole foods when you're out is to look beyond the increasingly globalised idea of “health food” and look instead at food cultures.
There are cuisines around the world in which vegetables, beans, grains, herbs, fermented foods, nuts, seeds and simply prepared proteins aren't special requests.
They're lunch.
Start with Lebanon
Lebanese food is perhaps one of the best examples.
The genius of the Lebanese table is that a meal does not necessarily arrive as one large plate with everything decided for you. It arrives as a collection of smaller dishes — mezze — and suddenly dinner becomes less about choosing the healthy thing and more about assembling a good meal.
Hummus.
Tabbouleh.
Fattoush.
Lentil soup.
Ful.
Stuffed vine leaves.
Grilled vegetables.
Olives.
A little pita.
Perhaps some grilled fish or meat.
The ingredients are familiar. Chickpeas, parsley, mint, tomato, lemon, bulgur, sesame, aubergine, beans and greens. Traditional Lebanese cuisine places considerable emphasis on cereals, pulses, vegetables and herbs, making the mezze table remarkably compatible with a whole-food approach.
It is also a useful reminder that eating well doesn't have to look austere.
A table covered in colourful little dishes is hardly punishment.
Ethiopia has another trick
Ethiopian cuisine takes a different route.
Instead of several small dishes sitting politely beside one another, a large piece of fermented injera becomes both plate and utensil, with stews and vegetable dishes arranged across it.
Lentils.
Split peas.
Greens.
Cabbage.
Carrots.
Beans.
Chickpeas.
Beetroot.
Spices.
It is a wonderfully practical way of eating.
And Ethiopian fasting traditions have produced an especially rich repertoire of plant-based dishes. A traditional combination platter can bring together several legume and vegetable preparations in one meal, with fermented teff injera alongside them.
There is something rather elegant about this.
No one needed to invent a “plant-based bowl”.
They already had one.
Japan: less, but better
Japanese cuisine offers another lesson.
Traditional washoku is structured rather differently again: rice, soup and a selection of accompanying dishes, often including vegetables, seafood, mushrooms, seaweed and pickles. The familiar Japanese principle of ichiju-sansai — roughly, one soup and three dishes — creates variety without requiring every component to become complicated.
There is also a long Japanese relationship with fermentation.
Miso.
Soy sauce.
Natto.
Pickles.
Fermented fish.
These aren't modern wellness inventions wearing beige packaging. Fermentation developed as a practical way of preserving food and, over generations, became part of the flavour vocabulary of Japanese cooking.
The lesson is simple:
Whole foods don't need much decoration when the ingredients themselves have something to say.
Vietnam knows the value of freshness
Vietnamese cuisine takes another approach: freshness, herbs and contrast.
A bowl of pho can arrive with a clear broth, rice noodles and a separate plate of herbs and vegetables. Rice-paper rolls can combine rice, fresh vegetables, herbs and a simply prepared protein. Bun dishes bring noodles together with herbs, vegetables, peanuts and grilled ingredients.
There is often an immediacy to Vietnamese food.
Mint is actually mint.
Lime tastes like lime.
Coriander is allowed to be coriander.
Vegetables are not necessarily something to hide underneath cheese.
This is useful when eating out because the food remains relatively legible.
You can look at the plate and understand what you're eating.
That should not be an unusual luxury.
Then there is traditional Mexico
Mexican food is sometimes reduced abroad to cheese, sour cream and enormous folded tortillas.
That is rather like judging Italian cuisine by airport pizza.
Traditional Mexican cooking has a far more interesting foundation: maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, chillies, herbs, avocado and other vegetables.
Beans and corn, in particular, form an extraordinarily useful pairing.
Add salsa, vegetables, guacamole and perhaps some simply cooked fish or meat and you have a meal built from ingredients rather than an assembly line of fillings.
The important distinction is traditional food versus restaurant adaptation.
The fact that something comes from a particular cuisine does not automatically make it a good choice.
A deep-fried, heavily sauced dish is still a deep-fried, heavily sauced dish — whether it has an impressive geographical passport or not.
India gives you an entire vegetable vocabulary
Indian cuisine may be the easiest place to forget the idea that vegetables need to be a side dish.
Dal.
Chana.
Rajma.
Saag.
Bhindi.
Baingan.
Aloo gobi.
Sambar.
The sheer variety of dishes built around pulses, vegetables, grains, herbs and spices makes eating a predominantly plant-based meal feel completely ordinary.
And that may be one of the most important lessons of all.
A whole-food diet becomes easier when the cuisine does not treat vegetables as an afterthought.
The common thread
Lebanon, Ethiopia, Japan, Vietnam, Mexico and India are obviously very different places.
Their histories are different.
Their climates are different.
Their ingredients are different.
Their tables look different.
But there is a common thread.
Their traditional food cultures tend to understand something that modern food marketing occasionally forgets:
Food is made from food.
Beans are beans.
Grains are grains.
Vegetables are vegetables.
Herbs are herbs.
Fermentation is a technique, not a product category.
And flavour doesn't necessarily require a laboratory's worth of ingredients.
So what should you order?
You don't need to memorise a list of “healthy restaurant meals”.
Instead, look for a few simple signals.
Choose dishes built around:
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vegetables
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beans and lentils
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whole or minimally processed grains
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herbs and spices
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nuts and seeds
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simply prepared fish, eggs or meat
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fermented foods
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broths and soups
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fresh salads
And be a little more suspicious of dishes whose main selling point is that they are loaded, crispy, smothered, stuffed or extra creamy.
You don't have to become paranoid.
Just observant.
Eating out should still feel like eating
This is perhaps the bigger point.
Whole-food eating should not turn dinner into a negotiation with yourself.
You shouldn't need to bring a scale to a Lebanese restaurant.
You shouldn't need to apologise for ordering rice in Japan.
You shouldn't regard a tortilla as a moral failure.
And you certainly shouldn't believe that eating well requires eating joylessly.
The world's great food cultures have spent centuries working out how to make simple ingredients taste extraordinary.
We would be rather foolish to ignore that expertise.
So the next time you're eating out, don't ask:
“What is the healthiest thing on the menu?”
Ask something more useful:
“Which food culture makes it easiest for me to eat real food?”
Then order accordingly.
And enjoy your dinner.
That's rather the point.
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