What compelled me to write a book about nutrition?

For two months now I have been held hostage by a question that will not let me go. It is as insistent as a baby crying in the small hours of the night. I want to turn over, bury my head in the pillow and drown it out. I spend my days jotting down notes and the pre-dawn hours wrestling with solutions. It surprises me that there are no clear answers already available anywhere I look. Yet as the cost of living becomes the number one topic in the public domain it is the one question that desperately needs an answer...

The question I am trying too answer is How low can you go on the food budget without compromising your health?

Like every helicopter mum, hovering over her clutch, from the moment they were born I developed a keen interest in nutrition when my children were little. And like every cancer patient I know, these days I am always reading up on what foods might improve my chances because there is not much we cancer patients have control over. This is one thing we can do to improve our chances.

Unlike many of the so-called experts in the media telling us how to save money on food while waving about wads of cash, I have had to get by on very little for most of my adult life. This, at least, needs no research.

But really? Why me? Why am I writing what appears to be a book on nutrition? It started out in early February as a quest, a personal journal that I scribbled notes in as I researched, so that I could satisfy that nagging insistent question and go back to being just a cancer patient. (Not an occupation I recommend - it's very time consuming and the pay is lousy).

Today I came close to an answer to how low you can go after more than sixty days of hot pursuit. I read my conclusion and was gobsmacked. There is nothing anywhere to compare with this.

This morning, I showed the figures to my husband, Keith, while he was enjoying his morning coffee. I watched his eyes widen as he skimmed through my document. He looked up at me, "are you sure about this?" I shrugged, "I have gone over the figures again and again. I am using the info from the Australian Dietary guidelines. It's just maths, really."
He said, "you need to write about this."

"To hell with it. Publish and be damned!" I replied, wondering how I could ever explain to my friends and family why I was doing this.

So, as of today I am officially juggling the two - cancer patient and writer of a book on budget shopping that is like nothing else out there. It could really, really help people. It could also fundamentally wipe out any credibility I have in my actual academic field of land use planning and rural economic development.

But then again, there is the Medici Effect. Frans Johansson, an American entrepreneur wrote a bestselling book, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures. He believed that real innovation, transformative innovation, often occurs at the intersection of two or more disciplines. Basically, we benefit from outsiders, with a different way of thinking, coming into our professions and bringing with them approaches from a different profession.

My quest so far has me convinced that dietary guidelines need a shake-up. The current guidelines pay scant regard to cost and therefore the people who need them most - the rent battlers, the mortgage strugglers, the pensioners.
Statistics indicate that 90% of Australians do not follow Australian dietary guidelines* anyway. Maybe it is going to take an outsider, a mum, with a background in planning and a little economics to write this book.

One of my heroes in urban planning was Jane Jacobs who never had any kind of qualification but fundamentally changed the thinking on urban planning. Today every planner across the western world studies her ideas in their first year of university. Her philosophies seem obvious now but were considered radical in the 1960s. She was frequently put down by the mostly male planning fraternity of the time as nothing but a "housewife" and "troublemaker".

Perhaps being called a housewife and a troublemaker could be badges of honour?

Could I be so lucky as to cause that much of a stir with this book? It is radical. It tosses away the use of the five food groups for a numbers approach.

I shall throw everything I have at this, and we shall see. Publish and prepare to be damned!

For more info on this post:

ABS statistics on Australians adhering to dietary recommendations

Credits:

Cover Photo: Jenna Norman, Unsplash.com

Innovation Quote: Matt Ridley, Unsplash.com