Where is the really healthy food?

Another week, another health scare - it's only Tuesday and already we have been warned that our favourite lunchtime sandwiches are full of damaging levels of hidden salt, and then this newspaper yesterday revealed how children's fizzy drinks are little more than a cocktail of chemicals.

I can't say I am surprised by any of this news. I've spent years investigating the food industry and writing about the junk that gets passed off as food. The single most common question I face these days is: "So what the hell can we eat?"

It's all well and good exposing things that are bad for us, say my friends, but how can we become virtuous shoppers in a city where supermarkets dedicated to fulfilling our need for fast, easy and cheap food are taking over and pushing smaller shops out of business?

Well, I admit it isn't easy. With three young children and a full-time job, I lead a typical stressed-out Londoner's life. But I reckon there are ways of negotiating the system so that you can get the best for your family and their health without taking out a new mortgage to cover the cost.

There are some things we as a family don't eat any more. Most chicken was already off the menu in our house after my investigations into the poultry industry. Half the chicken on sale in UK supermarkets is contaminated with campylobacter, a nasty food-poisoning bug. Catering chicken is routinely adulterated with water, and beef waste is sometimes used to keep the water in. I had also found out about the mountains of chicken skin that get shipped around the world to make chicken nuggets.

Then there came a point when I could no longer eat ready-to-eat bagged salad. In most cases, the salad leaves are immersed in water with chlorine maintained at a level 20 times higher than in the average swimming pool. Recent Government data has also shown that about half the lettuces bought from major supermarkets contain pesticide residues.

Processed foods and ready meals are frequently made with cheap fats, sugars and starches instead of more expensive real ingredients whose absence is disguised by flavourings, colourings and other chemical additives. More than £11 billion is spent by the food industry each year on chemical additives to change the colour, texture, flavour and shelf-life of our food. More than £500 million a year is spent on food colourings alone to deceive our senses. So processed foods are a bit of a no-go area in our house too.

As I travelled from farms and factories to packing plants and lorry depots around the world, I began to understand how our modern diseases - cancers, heart disease, and obesity - are the result of the way we eat now.

After all this, I felt I had to shop in a different way.

My husband and I live in London and, like most people, we used to steel ourselves for the weekly supermarket raid, but we now buy less of our fresh food there. Instead, we follow three main principles: local, seasonal and direct. Some of what we buy now is much more expensive than it was before, but some is much cheaper and we waste less. Shopping does take more time. We cook a lot, and shop more regularly, often on foot. If we have had to make a cultural shift, it is this - instead of being a chore to be done as quickly as possible, shopping for food and cooking has become part of our daily lives, where cycling to fetch the bread at the weekend gets the exercise out of the way; walking down the high road involves catching up with friends; making the puddings occupies the children.

What's on offer at school and pressure from peers means they usually come home in the week having been tempted by buns, crisps and fizzy drinks. The prevailing culture means they are as faddy as most children are today, which means we feel we have to work doubly hard to make sure they get the nutrition they need for growing bodies.

For most of our fruit and vegetables we belong to a weekly organic box scheme. Ours is run by Abel and Cole, which is large and has direct links to farmers, but there are dozens of others serving Greater London. It guarantees that half the price of the food goes back to the producer and that none of its fruit and vegetables is airfreighted. Fifty years ago, 50-60p of every £1 spent on food and drink in the UK went to the farmers. Today just 9p in every £1 goes back to them.

By cutting out all the packaging and transport costs that go with supermarkets' centralised distribution systems, more of our money goes on the quality of the food itself. Air-freighting food is inefficient and produces more damaging emissions than other forms of transport. Importing just one calorie of lettuce from California burns 127 calories of fuel energy.

If you are out at work, deliveries can be a problem, but Abel and Cole uses our local primary school as a distribution point each week to reduce the number of journeys. It donates a share of the profits, roughly a quarter of the total bill, to the Parent-Teacher Association in return. Other box schemes use small local shops as a pick-up hub for those who are out at work all day.

We follow the seasons more now. It feels no loss to forgo tasteless outofseason strawberries flown halfway around the world. We find ways of using vegetables we had almost stopped buying, such as cabbage, chard, beets. We make soup and liquidised sauces in bulk, so that we can slip them past fussy offspring. We freeze the extra for evenings when we are in a hurry.

Keeping alive alternative systems of distribution is one of the most important things individuals can do in the face of ever-growing retail concentration. So making use of local independent shops is also a priority for us. It has also made us feel safer in our own area, because we know so many more people than before, and they know and would look out for our children.

I live within cycling distance of three good butchers, all of whom can tell me exactly where their meat comes from.