How about labelling a food's impact on climate?

A recipe for Passion Fruit syllabub

When Nigella (is there any need to give her surname?) wrote her first cookery column for the front page of the New York Times Food Section in 2002, she trumpeted a Passion Fruit Pavlova. Her recipe called for 10 of them. No-one at the NYT thought to tell Nigella that while the exotic fruits only cost around 25p/30c a piece in the UK, in the US, they can run to between $2 to $3 and as much as $6 each, depending on where you live. This turns a glamorous pudding of otherwise cheap ingredients into one that’s prohibitively expensive.

The climbing Passiflora produces a wonderfully sharp and scented fruit with crunchy pips, in a shell in colours from purple to lemon via orange. Its flower was named ‘passion flower’ by missionaries in Brazil in the early 18th century as a teaching tool. They contended the five anthers - those parts of the stamens carrying the pollen - represented the five wounds of Christ at the crucifixion. The three stigmas stood for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, though I’ve also heard they stand for the three nails through the hands and feet. The filaments that radiate around the centre were said to represent the crown of thorns, and the tendrils, the whips used in the flagellation of Christ.

Now that recipes are globally available on the internet, cookery writers and their editors have to pay close attention to every aspect of the ingredients list, from the individual prices of the ingredients to making sure they’re included.

I once worked on the food pages of a newspaper that, unlike magazines, didn’t run a test kitchen. Instead, it relied on the cooks and chefs whose recipes it paid to publish to present their readers with workable instructions. After the mail room hauled to my desk a postbag crammed with reader complaints about the utter failure of a dish of one highly regarded Chef du Jour, I realised my assumption that a recipe would work because it had been presented by a person who made their living reproducing the dish at an exorbitant price on a daily basis, was faulty. When, much later and having left the outlet, I bumped into the chef and admonished them for leaving flour out of a béchamel (yes, of course I should have spotted that), it was explained to me that it was not in the interest of the chef to have people replicate the restaurant’s skills at home. The recipe was offered up to tempt them into reserving a table at the restaurant.

Big Food Biz spent much of last year trying to foist recipes upon us which it turns out we didn’t want. After all the hoohah about plant-based meat replacements, it seems this innovation is playing better with the media than it is with the eating public.

Apparently, there are about 10 common causes of failure in the business of nutrition and health. “And many plant meat makers have made most of them,” according to Julian Mellentin, author of this year’s 4th edition of a report in New Nutrition Business, ‘Failures - and what you can learn from them’.

After 5 or more years in the plant-based meat-replacement business, not one was showing any signs of making a profit. Those that did have fast-growing sales also had the fastest-growing losses. Mellentin points to taste and texture not being up to snuff, so after their first purchase, curious buyers aren’t going back for more. Consequently, you can expect to see far less shelf-space devoted to the products this year. Which will make the necessary leap from the current 1.4 percent of consumers to a business-sustaining 5 percent of total meat category sales even harder to reach.

It seems consultants and investors didn’t pay enough attention to us consumers. “They created their own echo-chamber in which they had apparently decided that for meat substitutes, the only way was up.” Melletin continued, “It didn’t help that there were Silicon Valley think tanks feeding the echo-chamber by saying plant-based would get 30 percent market share by 2030.”

A round of applause for the consumer who can take a position and, yes, be noticed.

A recent suggestion for how to get people to stop buying products that could negatively affect the planet is ‘climate labelling’, particularly on red meat. This would indicate what impact a particular food would have on the climate. Participants in a study in which menu items were labelled with high- or low-climate impact seemed in favour of the idea. On a menu that offered high-climate impact foods, 23.5 percent avoided them in favour of the sustainable foods. On a separate menu offering dishes labelled low-climate-impact, a further 9.9 percent picked those.

The FAO, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, says twenty-six percent of the globe's ice-free land is used for livestock grazing and 33 percent of croplands are used for livestock feed production. In England, around 85 percent of agricultural land is used for grazing or to grow food for livestock feed. The UK government’s food czar, Henry Dimbleby, believes a 30 percent reduction in meat over 10 years is necessary for land to be used sustainably in England. Greenpeace argues for 70 percent. In the EU, 71 percent of agricultural land is used to feed livestock. In the USA, 41 percent of all land is given over to cattle and to producing feed for them (that’s 654 million acres of land given over to cow pasture, with 127.4 million acres more going into growing the feed for the livestock.)

Almost 40 percent of world grain is being fed to animals not humans.

Back to passion fruit, before he married, my father used to make a seductive pudding from them whose success would probably have placed him today on a dating site’s warning list. Store this somewhere for Valentine’s Day, but this is a recipe where you can multiply everything up without disaster: per person 1 passion fruit, sliced in half. Scrape the contents into a bowl. Add per fruit 1 teaspoon fine sugar, 1 teaspoon dry sherry. Mix well with a fork then pour in a slow stream of double/heavy cream while continuing to beat with the fork. The mixture will thicken very quickly in the acid - probably after a mere 60ml/4 tablespoons each helping. Plop into pretty glasses, serve with a biscotto or thin cookie, and light the candles if you forgot them till now. A romantic dessert for 50p if you live in the UK, $6 and up in the US.

If you’d like to make Nigella’s Passion Fruit Pavlova, here it it. Personally, I wouldn’t bother with the lychees. Or the raspberries.

For the meringue base:
8 egg whites
500 g/17½ oz caster sugar
4 teaspoon cornflour
2 teaspoon white wine vinegar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

For the topping:
650 ml/22 fl oz double cream
10 passion fruit
10 fresh or canned lychees, drained if canned
300g/10½ oz raspberries (frozen are fine)
25g/2 tablespoons icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180C/355F. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment and draw a rough 25cm/9ins diameter circle on it; I pencil round a cake tin that size.

Whisk the egg whites until satiny peaks form, then whisk in the sugar, a table-spoonful at a time, until the meringue is stiff and shiny.

Sprinkle the cornflour, vinegar and vanilla extract over the egg white, and fold in lightly with a metal spoon. Mound the meringue on to the baking parchment within the circle and, using a spatula, flatten the top and smooth the sides.

Put in the oven and immediately reduce the heat to 120C/250F. Cook for an hour. Then turn off the oven and leave to cool completely. Once it's cool, take the meringue disc out - and you can keep it in an airtight container for a couple of days or freeze for a month.

When you are ready to assemble the pavlova, invert the cooled meringue disc onto a large plate or a stand you can serve it on, and peel off the baking parchment.

Whip the cream until thickened but still soft, and pile onto the meringue - on the squidgy part that was stuck to the baking parchment - spreading it to the edges in a swirly fashion.

Cut the passion fruit in half, and scoop out the seeds, and any pulp and juice, into a bowl. Peel the fresh lychees (if using) over the bowl to catch any juice, then remove the stones, tear the lychees into pieces and let them drop into the passion fruit. Tear the drained, canned lychees (if using) likewise, and drop them in, too.

Leave the passion fruit and lychees sitting in their bowl for a moment, while you liquidize the raspberries with the icing sugar in a blender.

Dollop the cream-topped pavlova with the passion fruit and lychees, and their juices, then zigzag some red, red, red raspberry sauce over the top, putting the rest in a small jug for people to add to their slices as they eat.