Poland is Good For You

Poles eat the most veg out in the whole of Europe, suggests research this week by the by the European Food Information Council. In fact they eat over double the European average (220g) every day, racking up an average of 577g daily. The UK comes in almost bottom of the table (how many social and health indicators do we come top in? Not many, I wager) at 258g.

I think this probably confirms what most of my fellow bloggers know already: Living in Poland is Good For You. It’s already been covered here and on many other blogs, but I say again this is one of the key benefits for me of living in this country: That it’s a much healthier environment – I shed 10 kilos within six months of moving here, although that may have been poverty.

(I’m fascinated by behaviour patterns on the national level. How is it our lives can be so different? How is it a Pole finds the idea of beans for breakfast so weird, whereas ‘continental breakfi’ are so unappealing to the British/Anglo-Saxon eye? Aren’t we all just varied operating systems tacked onto the same frames?)

So let’s list 5 ways that Poland is healthier...

1. Lots of zupy, in fact dozens of them. And young people know how to cook them too.

2. Less of a fast food culture – this is changing, rapidly, but the penetration of fast food outlet is much lower than in the UK (a fried chicken shop on every corner).

3. A much larger farming sector with many more smaller farmers whose livelihood depends onselling locally. My local stoisko in summer in Imielin was packed full of freshly picked fruits

and vegetables from just the day before.

4. A seasonal food culture. I’ve noticed once or twice punnets of strawbs in shops over Winter,but generally fruit, vegetables and foods are much more seasonal here.

5. A pick your own culture, taking advantage of nature’s bounty is much more common toPoles than in the UK.

Although it’s commonly said that Polish vegetables are in the main organic (overall in Europe anyway the use of pesiticides is much more regulated via EU Council Directive 91/414/EEC than in America or Asia), I’m not so sure.

Nutrition is something I’m interested in having had a pretty unpleasant stomach problem since eating an ill advised falafel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 2006. I won’t go into details but let’s say that I lost a little weight! Recovery meant completely re-assessing my food intake (which, looking back at my diary at that time seemed mostly to comprise of Guinness).

Recently having read ‘Eating Animals’ by Johnathon Safran Froer, I decided to become a vegetarian (of which more later). Polish people, especially men, tend to snort in derision at that news and say it’s impossible in this country, but given the EFIC findings it might be a lot easier here than they suggest.

After all, you don’t need to turn the Poles into ‘foodies’ in the same way the UK has seen an explosion of home cooking, celebrity chefs and organic produce. To them a healthy lifestyle is more than common sense, it’s second nature. Let’s enjoy and celebrate that fact and try and help keep it that way before the KFCs spawn Chicken Cottages on every corner.