The first mention of five-a-day, as a fruit and vegetable diet ideal was in California in the late 80s, but didn’t reach the chattering crudité classes until the mid-90s. I once wrote a food diary for a magazine, in which it turned out I’d had one vegetable across the space of a week, when someone in a cafe slipped some spinach under my fried egg. Eating five a day was harder than it looked, particularly if you didn’t like tomatoes and hated fruit. There was a bit of debate around whether potatoes counted (they don’t), whether bananas and avocados were false friends (nobody ever got to the bottom of that) and how much lettuce counted as a portion, given that it is basically air. Later, there was a little consternation at how much influence had been wielded by the fruit and vegetable industry. But the........

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