I should clarify that by "what many people would ideally like to eat", I meant, "for the purposes of health". It just so happens that over time, my preferences have aligned with exactly what I was targeting for health reasons. Something to do with gut flora? I dunno.
Given that nutritional science is such a dumpster fire, I basically end up with a hybrid diet that's based on the parts of nutritional science that aren't too controversial: high in fiber, low-GI carbs only (and less carbs than most eat), fats are almost all "healthy fats", mountains of vegetables and fruit, and I try to minimize red meat.
I eat a LOT (and a variety) of vegetables, quite a lot of beans and lentils, quite a bit of fish, eggs fairly often, a low to medium amount of meat (about 50% poultry and 50% lamb and pork). I get some additional fats from olives (which I cook with fairly often) and nuts. Whole grains make it in there to round out fiber intake, but not in particularly large quantities. I don't enjoy or eat much dairy (excl plain yogurt, I love it), fried stuff, or processed carbs. The only thing I would change about my diet for health purposes would be to go fully vegetarian (for a combination of health and ethical reasons), but I just find that whenever I weightlift regularly, it can be difficult to get enough protein without meat.
This sounds like I'm unusually ascetic about food, but I actually LOVE food: before I started cooking, I would eat a different cuisine everyday, and now that I cook regularly, I try to rotate through at least a handful of cuisines (keeping every cuisine's ingredients around is tougher). My relationship with all the unhealthy foods that people crave tends to be analogous to how you probably feel about Pixie Stix: yes, to some degree we're wireheaded to enjoy it, but once you're out of the habit of it, it actually starts tasting pretty gross. The flavors are unsubtle and uninteresting, once you stop being used to the dopamine hit you get from it. This is how I feel about (eg) grilled cheese, or bread-heavy dishes, or the cheese and dough part of pizza.
I find them in recipes fairly often[1], and make tapenade sometimes, but they're actually pretty easy to work into many of the meat or fish recipes that I make[2], as long as the flavors are complementary. Hell, even my first regular,
staple "recipe" when I started learning to cook had olives in it and was super easy: a 3-egg scramble with chili powder, smoked paprika, baby spinach, quartered black olives and optionally a little bit of crumbled feta. Super fast, super easy, super delicious, and it came from just looking at my spice rack plus deciding that I wanted some Mediterranean flavors in my eggs.
This is probably made a lot easier by the fact that the cuisines I decided to focus on when I had to narrow it down for cooking were Mediterranean (excl Italy) + Middle Eastern + North Indian, and most of the Mediterranean makes regular use of olives.
[1] I'm relatively new to regular cooking, since the first few years out of college, Google fed me, so a lot of my cooking is still following recipes by the book
[2] I really enjoy Fish Veracruz, which is a good example of this
I mistyped in my previous comment: I don't make the eggs with Spanish olives, I make them with black olives. I find Spanish olives harder to cook with because the flavor can overwhelm other flavors, but I do eat them alone and every once in a while find a recipe that works well with them. I cook much more often with black and kalamata olives.
Given that nutritional science is such a dumpster fire, I basically end up with a hybrid diet that's based on the parts of nutritional science that aren't too controversial: high in fiber, low-GI carbs only (and less carbs than most eat), fats are almost all "healthy fats", mountains of vegetables and fruit, and I try to minimize red meat.
I eat a LOT (and a variety) of vegetables, quite a lot of beans and lentils, quite a bit of fish, eggs fairly often, a low to medium amount of meat (about 50% poultry and 50% lamb and pork). I get some additional fats from olives (which I cook with fairly often) and nuts. Whole grains make it in there to round out fiber intake, but not in particularly large quantities. I don't enjoy or eat much dairy (excl plain yogurt, I love it), fried stuff, or processed carbs. The only thing I would change about my diet for health purposes would be to go fully vegetarian (for a combination of health and ethical reasons), but I just find that whenever I weightlift regularly, it can be difficult to get enough protein without meat.
This sounds like I'm unusually ascetic about food, but I actually LOVE food: before I started cooking, I would eat a different cuisine everyday, and now that I cook regularly, I try to rotate through at least a handful of cuisines (keeping every cuisine's ingredients around is tougher). My relationship with all the unhealthy foods that people crave tends to be analogous to how you probably feel about Pixie Stix: yes, to some degree we're wireheaded to enjoy it, but once you're out of the habit of it, it actually starts tasting pretty gross. The flavors are unsubtle and uninteresting, once you stop being used to the dopamine hit you get from it. This is how I feel about (eg) grilled cheese, or bread-heavy dishes, or the cheese and dough part of pizza.