Next time you are in the Supermarket, pause and look up. Probably you’ll have only eaten a tiny proportion of the food you can see.  The UK supermarket Tesco has over 60,000 things it sells but “the average household buys only 400 products a year, with just 41 items in their weekly shop”.

Allow yourself to think about the ones you’ve never eaten. Imagine the people who buy them: they must be real because the supermarket keeps selling their food. They might be serious cooks, or busy parents, they might have lived in a different culture.  They might be your co-worker or friend.  Maybe, just maybe, they are the normal ones and you are the strange one for not eating it.

In a year you probably buy less than 1% of the foods that you could. In your life it’s probably less than 10%, we’re all the same. But everyone who makes the effort to eat outside their 10% finds it worth the trouble.

…and when you say ‘but what do you eat?’ to a bodybuilder or vegan, or to someone with allergies, the answer is probably that 90% of the food they eat is the same as you, and the stuff that is different is in that 90% of things that you’ve never tried.

And if you are vegan, or veggie or low-carb or low-cal, then you should stop and think, that perhaps, there is a lot for you to look at in that 90% as well: we can all make more of an effort to look wider.  I’m starting to believe, that if you made a promise to never eat the same food twice, it would be a few years before you had to go hungry.

All the pictures in this post are experiments that I was talked into this year, and they were all worth it.