Pick a crate of lager, shandy or cider and we will knock 50% off a box of crisps. Take the crate
Nutrition

Numbers, not advice.

What was in the box, per hundred grams and per portion, taken from the declarations the producers give us. It is information. It is emphatically not dietary advice, and the line between those two is the whole content of this page.

Per 100g and per portion
0 health claims
14 allergens declared
0 advice
Provenance of the numbers

What the figures are, and where they come from.

FigureSourceHow accurate
Energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein, salt The producer’s own declaration As accurate as their laboratory analysis
Fresh vegetables with no label Published composition tables for the species A national average, not this carrot
Meat from the farm Our own butchery cut sheets Good on weight, approximate on fat
Anything cooked at the pub Recipe calculation, not laboratory analysis Within about ten per cent
The fourteen named allergens The producer’s declaration, checked by us Treated as absolute
Anything you cooked yourself Nothing. We have no idea what you did to it Not attempted

Allergens are the one thing here we treat as absolute.

The fourteen allergens named in retained food law are declared on every product page, on every box manifest and on the pub menu, and where a producer cannot tell us, the product does not go on the shelf. If you have a serious allergy, read the pack rather than this website: the pack is the legal document and it travels with the food.

The pub menu

The argument

Where information stops and advice begins.

  1. Telling you what is in a thing is information

    A hundred grams of this contains eleven grams of protein. That is a fact about a food, it is required on most packaging anyway, and publishing it more legibly than a label allows is a straightforwardly good thing to do.

    Everything on this page is on that side of the line.

  2. Telling you what to eat is advice, and we are not qualified

    Nobody on this estate is a registered dietitian. The moment a website starts building somebody a meal plan, calculating their requirements or telling them what a "good" day looks like, it has started practising something it has no business practising.

    So there is no calorie target here, no daily goal, no traffic-light scoring of your own shopping and no comparison against anybody else.

  3. Health claims are regulated, and most of them are not permitted

    Saying that a food prevents, treats or cures anything is prohibited. Saying it is high in something, or a source of something, is permitted only against defined thresholds and in defined wording.

    We use those permitted forms where they genuinely apply and we use nothing else. There is no honey on this site described as good for you, and there never will be, however much anybody would like there to be.

  4. Inferring anything about your health is the line we will not cross

    A shopping history is medical data in disguise if you squint at it hard enough. Somebody buying nothing but low-sugar products, or switching abruptly to soft foods, is telling you something they have not chosen to tell you.

    The recommendation engine is explicitly forbidden from using any of that, it does not model it, and the refusal is written into the list on Suggesting rather than kept as an internal policy.

  5. And if you need actual advice, we will say so

    The answer to a genuine dietary question is a registered dietitian or a GP. That is a dull thing for a website to say and it is the correct thing.

    The one exception is allergens, where the answer is not advice at all — it is the pack, which is a legal document, and it beats anything on this site.

Use the box

What was actually in the September box, and what to do with it.

Three meals against eight items, ordered by what goes off first. The energy figures are recipe calculations and are marked as such.

What is in the box

Ordered by what goes off first. Leaf before root, always.

What that makes

  • Sausage, kale and potato, one pan 35 minutes · Sausages, 400g, Potatoes, 2kg, Kale, 300g, Onions, 1kg The one that uses the perishable half of the box first, which is the whole trick.
  • Roast swede and beetroot with the cheese 55 minutes · Swede, one, Beetroot, 750g, Cheese truckle wedge, 250g Roughly 480 kcal a portion by recipe calculation, which is an estimate rather than an analysis.
  • Apple and beetroot, raw, grated 10 minutes · Apples, 1kg, Beetroot, 750g For the week the box has been open five days and enthusiasm has gone.
Four rules

Per 100g and per portion

Both, because a portion is the one people actually eat.

Fourteen allergens

Declared everywhere, and the pack always wins.

No targets, no scores

Nothing here tells you how you did.

Never used to recommend

Nothing inferred about your health goes anywhere near Suggesting.

Wondering

Nutrition, questioned.

Because that is a judgement about you rather than a fact about a food, and making it would require knowing things about you that we have gone to some trouble not to know.

Yes. The export includes the nutritional declaration for everything you have ever been sent, which is a strange thing to want and a perfectly reasonable one.

They are recipe calculations, within about ten per cent. A kitchen that plates by eye cannot do better and should not claim to.

It is honey. It is sugar with an interesting provenance, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

What the engine is not allowed to know.

Six signals used, nine refused, and health inference is the first of them.

Next along the route

Getting around

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