Are you easily hooked on diet books that promise to change your life? If so, you should avoid Audrey Eyton's latest publication. For, like her best-selling "F-Plan Diet", the "Kind Food Guide" (Penguin) aims to revolutionise your attitude to the food you eat.
Few people, apart from those who frequented health food shops, or wore hair shirts, sandals and sackcloth, realised the importance of fibre to slimming and health before 1983 when Eyton published the "F-Plan Diet". By the end of the decade everyone seemed to be eating more fibre.
With the "Kind Food Guide", Eyton starts a new crusade. It is the culmination of a three-year quest to write a popular book about the plight of farm animals being raised for meat or milk.
Like fibre and flatulence, factory farming is not a very sexy subject. "I was in despair when I set out on this book," says Eyton. "I couldn't see how to do it." But in the last two years supermarket shelves and chill counters have begun to fill with the kind of produce she felt able to endorse in her new book. With supermarkets now trying to outdo each other with their free-range produce, "kind food" has become a mass-market subject.
In response to this, the "Kind Food Guide" acts as a directory for all those who want to buy the "kindest" pork chop, fish for the char-grill or even quiche. It contains an A-Z of Edible Animals which explains how each is farmed or fished. For example, in the section on pigs there is a sad description of the way breeding sows are kept in concrete stalls without bedding and tethered to the floor so that they are unable to turn around. (Since the book went to press, the agriculture minister John Gummer has announced a probable ban on the use of these neck and girth tethers and narrow breeding stalls. It is now at consultation stage; if it is accepted, the current system will not be phased out until 1999).
In fact, the subject is so topical that Eyton has had to update her manuscript right up to the last minute. "People often say I have wonderful timing. I say I have splendid ordinariness. I think I am a typical mother whose child has stopped eating meat and I'm certain that's happening widely."
It was her son Matthew becoming vegetarian at university that sparked Eyton's interest. "If you have any sensitivity you can't live for long with a young person who is making this gesture and saying, 'I think this is disgusting. I'm not going to eat this,' without thinking, 'Of course he's right, it is disgusting. This is causing the free-range boom.'"
It's a phenomenon Eyton has noticed among her friends. "First the parents said, 'Henry or Fred has gone vegetarian it's such a bore.' Then, a year or so later, the parents are saying, 'Of course, George and I eat very little meatâ•”' The next thing one sees them going for free range."
However, Eyton doesn't see herself as a pioneer. She is interested only in the mass market. "If you can get it from the supermarket, as you can now, then you have a mass movement." The bulk of the book is about just that, a supermarket (and other outlet) guide to where to buy food produced by the kindest methods.
The book has sections arranged in order of the level of cruelty Eyton has observed in food production. Thus The Cruellest Foods of All, is followed by Also Factory Farmed, Highly Questionable and Questionable. Within most sections there are kinder alternatives to the standard factory-farmed produce. But it is with relief that the reader reaches Foods You Can Feel Better About.
Eyton got factory farmers to show her around their farms, working on a principle she used when she co-founded and edited "Slimming" magazine. "I learned that the reformed slimmer will always tell you how many fruit cakes she ate a day in the past. In the same way, the factory farmer who will let you see the unsavoury part of his system is the one who is troubled by it and who is experimenting with new systems."
The book's parting shot is the Stay-Alive Guide, which summarises the current consensus on eating advice. "Almost invariably it is the plant foods which appear to be protective and the animal foods, eaten in the present excess, which appear to be causative." There follows a glossary of common Western ills such as heart disease and cancer and the allegedly causative and protective foods associated with them.
Eyton made her first fortune when she sold "Slimming" magazine and its associated slimming clubs, which are still flourishing. Her second came from the "F-Plan Diet". One thing's for sure, the "Kind Food Guide" won't make her a third fortune. She's giving all the proceeds to charities working to improve the welfare of farm animals.
