Some people might be surprised to learn the Hemsley sisters drink. On the covers of their bestselling cookbooks, they look so pure and radiant, nobody would believe they consume any liquid more exciting than a NutriBullet smoothie. Yet, included on the menu for their new and rather handsome cafe in Selfridges are a beetroot bloody mary, a low-sugar champagne, a blueberry, lime and lavender cocktail made with potato vodka and biodynamic and organic wines. It’s too noisy to conduct an interview in the cafe, so we move into an adjacent hairdressing salon.
Over 90 minutes, Jasmine, a 36-year-old former model, drinks two-thirds of her glass of fizz, while her sister, Melissa, 30, has barely a sip of the potato-vodka cocktail, but they have an early flight to New York in the morning.
They are two of the most important figureheads in the clean-eating movement, the most significant trend in British eating this decade. Serious food lovers often see them as emblems of a joyless, expensive, unrealistic, medically dubious kind of guilt noshing. Nigella Lawson recently said she worries that people eat a certain way “to hide an eating disorder, or a great sense of unhappiness with their own body”. One newspaper writer dismissed the phenomenon as one of “self-regard, self-delusion and staggering pomposity”.
“That’s quite a hardcore thing to say,” says Jas. “Some people know nothing about what we’re doing. But this is changing people’s lives.”
“Sorry about the smell of hairspray,” says Mel as we sit down. They’re instantly likeable, energised and candid, finishing each other’s sentences and steering the conversation away from controversial questions. It’s hard to get past sisters.
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I tell them that, unlike other people in their movement, I’m surprised how many things they do eat. “Exactly,” says Jas. “We love whole, nourishing foods. We don’t eat grains, gluten or refined sugar, but we’re not vegans, don’t follow paleo, don’t eat raw.” You probably haven’t missed their most famous contraption, the spiraliser, which cranks courgettes and carrots into spaghetti-like strips.
“Everyone knows how to base a diet on grains,” says Mel. “We’re trying to offer something different, helping people to organise their eating around vegetables.” They are entirely self-taught, and some people report that their recipes don’t always turn out like the pictures. Their fans, however, adore them. Either way, they’re great adverts for the way they eat, and Mel says she barely exercises nowadays: “I often just do bed yoga.” (I Google it later; it’s a thing.)
But I wonder whether clean eating, with its photogenic Insta-slebs, could be giving young women unrealistic expectations of how to look. “I don’t like the clean-eating label,” says Jas. “We love gravy, sauces, plenty of fat — pulling out bone marrow. Some people might think of all that as dirty, but actually it’s incredibly nourishing.”
I mention a well-known clean eater and say, “People say she’s anorexic.” “Modelling taught me some girls have less meat on their bones,” says Jas quickly. “Perhaps she’s just really healthy.” Do you ever worry that some supposedly healthy eaters might be taking things too far? “Maybe, but people also tell us that it’s OK to give children puddings every day, coffee is the same as water and margarine is fine.” Who says that? “Dieticians. Meanwhile, the country’s health is in crisis.” Mel orders puddings from the cafe on her phone: a blueberry muffin made with coconut flour and a carrot cake with almonds and “raw honey frosting”.
Their Filipina mother, a strict Catholic, fed them well. “We were brought up on vegetables, mung beans and stews until I was about 10,” says Jas. “Then Vitalite margarine arrived in a horrible tub — it smelled disgusting.”
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“Mum started cooking pasta because she had a crush on Jamie Oliver,” Mel says. They were hugely fond of their father, who spent his entire career in the army and died in 2014. “He had a rare cancer. They didn’t catch it until it was too late.”
One interviewer said that, despite their success, they weren’t making much money. Do they pay the top (45%) rate of tax? They shriek with laughter. “No way,” says Jas. What about the 40% bracket — with a threshold of £43,000? “No, we don’t pay ourselves that, either.” Instead, they pump all the profits into the business, paying themselves a modest dividend. They don’t have an office, and although Jas’s boyfriend is a successful model, they live in (separate) unfashionable bits of south London.
It’s easy to pick holes in some of what the Hemsleys say. Unless you have coeliac disease, gluten is rarely as bad as they claim. Once a year, Jas says, she visits a homeopath. And their fuzzy spirituality — “God is another name for a universal everything” — might rankle Richard Dawkins. Their books subscribe to pseudoscientific ideas about alkalinity in the body, and they predictably spurn genetically modified food. But, on the whole, they’re right. We do eat unhealthily as a country: diabetes and obesity are surging. If, at times, they can sound a little hippie-ish, so what? They’re brilliant vehicles for an essential message. The point, I realise, as I finish my muffin, is that they haven’t sucked the pleasure out of food, they’ve redirected it into delicious new zones. A few days after meeting them, I order myself a spiraliser.
Hemsley + Hemsley Café, Body Studio on 3, Selfridges, 400 Oxford Street, London W1
The drinks
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Jasmine drank Ayala Brut Nature champagne (£15). It has no added sugar, so is healthier than standard fizz.
Melissa sipped a blueberry, lavender, lime and potato vodka cocktail (£12).
Oliver tried it, too (delicious), as well as a glass of Flower and the Bee biodynamic red wine from Ribeiro, Spain, (£8, sublime).