with your food. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid stand mixer and attachments. Hello and welcome to the first of the 2020 British Library food season coming to you from the beautiful River Cottage Garden. Thank you to KitchenAid for so generously sponsoring this season of events. My name is Polly Russell, I'm a curator at the British Library and I'm the founder and curator of the food season and this year I've had the huge pleasure to work with Angela Clutton as the guest director. Now as usual with the food season we wanted to make sure that it was eclectic and relevant and in the context of Covid-19 which has so challenged and in some cases transformed our relationship with food I can think of no two better people than Hugh Foenley Whittingstall and B Wilson to speak to at this current moment. Hugh bounded onto our screens around 20 years ago with his tousled hair and boyish enthusiasm a total passion for locally sourced food and a commitment to the environment. By my counting and I may have got it wrong he has written 16 books no 20 books and made 16 television series. I'm not sure it's that many books but if you counted it could be in that ballpark. The summary is you're an overachiever so amazing output he is a vocal critic of the contemporary food system his programs like Hugh's Fish Fight and War on Waste have brought to the public's attention the connection between food production and consumption the environment and public health but although Hugh is a vocal critic of food production he's also a passionate believer that individual consumer choice can make a massive difference in terms of diet and health and the environment so what a perfect person to speak to now. B another high achiever is the author of six wonderful books including First Bite and How We Eat she is a scholar and a writer who sort of defies definition her writing weaves together sociology anthropology biology physics politics everything in order to understand our relationship with food. She's also a passionate and very effective food campaigner and is the co-founder of Tastered a wonderful charity which was set up to transform children's relationship with food through taste I'm sure we'll hear about that later. Now B and Hugh's books which are wonderful if you've not read them are available on your screens on the tab which I believe is called books and so please look there we wish that you could be here with us but this is 2020 so of course that is not possible but we would love to hear your questions so if you want to submit questions there's a form at the bottom of your screens please do do so and we will get to them as soon as we can but for now I'm going to start by asking you both how I mean this has been such a strange time for everyone and I just wondered how for you personally this period of COVID has transformed your own sort of food practices your cooking your shopping are you doing everything the same has anything changed anything challenged you? Hugh? More of the same I would say more than ever before I've been based here in Devon I don't live here lovely as it is I live about 15 minutes down the road but I do have a veg patch it's not nearly as exciting looking as this one but it's pretty good and we've just been eating grapes from your garden you have been eating some really nice grapes from my greenhouse which I'm very proud of they are sort of those grapes are the cherry on the cake of my garden as it were they were good I'm glad you like them they're very special I think one thing I have done talking of I mean I feel relished everything so much during this time the food we've grown ourselves the family meals that we've had together I've got a mixture of grown up and not so grown up children and they were all at home even the two who've sort of left home were all at home during lockdown and that was extraordinary and we cooked together we did a lot of stuff in the garden and we pickled things we it was sort of it was an extraordinary time so there have been very very many hard aspects to lockdown and I'm sure we'll talk about them and in the context of the hospitality industry it's very very worrying but personally and at home from a family point of view we were very blessed to be in this beautiful place and we made the most of it and what about for you be in came based in Cambridge I think in my house as in so many others it was the rise of banana bread the fall of the sandwich I was so happy to do you make sour dough are you that person I sometimes do but actually there's an amazing woman in Cambridge who has an Instagram account called bread on a bike she doesn't actually bike it around you go around on your bicycle to collect it and she's such a good baker my sour dough doesn't quite match up so I did have every so often I go through a new phase of trying to get my starter going I did do that in lockdown I'm more likely to make a quick bread I make very good chala bread and soda bread and various things that don't take us I'm impatient but for me I think as with you it was sort of more of the same it was values that I felt I had anyway but somehow wasn't able to put into practice in the rush of modern life so I felt I suddenly had I talk about this in my book but not just time but synchronised time that thing of everyone being around the table yeah in the same place at the same time not just for dinner but for lunch too which was magical much of the time even though I was then the person having to get the food ready so there were moments when I felt like a 1950s housewife cooking all the time and there were so many other times where I just thought as with Hugh this is great we will never take food for granted and I sort of completely bought into that idea now that we see how precious food is now that we've gone through panic buying now that we understand and then it's been really sad in so many ways what a to see that the kind of privilege that Hugh and I had absolutely has not been shared by everyone in Britain has also been a time of colossal widening well that actually brings me on to the next question which is you talked about your your own experiences but then thinking more broadly about what what light has Covid shed for you on your understandings of our contemporary food system you know where we're at now what is that you know has it been a time of you know hope or hopelessness or where are you with that well that's a good question and of course we have to acknowledge our extraordinary privilege in having access to this kind of food I think what what Covid has done is it's it's sharpened it's sharpened the truth about everything the stuff that we sort of already knew but one thing it's definitely emphasised is the extraordinary inequality in food as and in many things but but I mean it's for me it's made the idea of levelling up and and and helping everybody to eat better food more urgent much even more urgent it's been very urgent for a very long time it's made it feel even more urgent and I just think maybe it's possibly made it feel more achievable there's just a little glimmer of hope in all that gloom and some of that's come from things that the government is now finally saying which it's never said before about intervening on on behalf of our health and I'm I'm sorry if I've barged into one of your questions but that's where we've got to and I mean that has been extraordinary and it's an extraordinary opportunity because the government has practically been allergic to the idea of health intervention that sort of denounced and and decried the idea that they might ever tell us what to eat or or help us even with our eating because they don't believe in intervening in our health and that it's an individual's responsibility and that it's an individual's responsibility uh has has actually under has overseen and and and enacted the single biggest health intervention of all time as have governments all over the country but you know governments have now said we need to step in and help you all with this terrible pandemic well guess what's a bigger pandemic or epidemic anyway uh than covid 19 well it's obesity and it's been going on for a whole lot longer so let's take some of that readiness to intervene and pull levers and make decisions and change laws and tell businesses that they can do this and they can't do that let's take some of that willingness to act and let's apply it to this terrible problem of food inequality and obesity that's such a blight on this country and so many others do you think following on from that be and you jump in but that there's a particular challenge with food in terms of intervention because it is so intimate it's so personal that people feel like you know no one should tell me what to eat nobody should you know you get accused beyond the nanny state is like get out of my kitchen and so it's more problematic than intervening in perhaps other sectors there's a huge challenge and it's partly people don't really know what the intervention should be because there isn't just one intervention there are many many things that need to happen at the same time and the ones that people and governments usually focus on are ones that do seem very negative which is telling somebody not to put something in their mouth which is a really intimate thing to say to somebody or to say you should put this in your mouth which is a still more intimate thing to say and if you think back to how we were as hunter-gatherers in the past deciding is this very toxic is this one good to eat taking matter from the outside world and putting it inside yourself it's one of the most profound and intimate things a human being can do you do not want to be told what to do on that school by a government that's most going to affect your health and well-being so the stakes could not be higher but the discourse around it is really really difficult and I think I agree with Hugh that there's been a sort of coming together of lots of shared realizations and the question is where we then go with these shared realizations so Marcus Rashford and the Free School Meals suddenly as one lots and lots of people in Britain suddenly thought it's absolutely indecent and wrong that children or low incomes should go through the summer being hungrier than they are when they're at school and we haven't still solved that but at least we're suddenly saying well it's always been indecent and wrong but something about Covid has brought that to people's attention I do think food has become a priority as never before maybe there's something about that site of the empty supermarket shelves that kind of chilled us and made us think oh this isn't just a never-ending tap that comes from God knows where food actually has a source there are people who bring it to us there are these people who've now redefined rightly as key workers who are farmers and people who run shops where we go next in answer to your question yes I think food is uniquely problematic because if you're looking at the foods that people probably should eat less of it's not just like with smoking or with alcohol where you can just say well with smoking you could just say don't do it and what can we do as a series of policy measures to make sure nobody does it anything you do with food to say absolutely don't do it can have the potential consequence of backfiring generating eating disorders giving people an even more complicated relationship with food it's difficult and well it is very difficult intervention is very hard very very hard and it's really and you're absolutely right about that that intensity and emotion that's connected with what you put in your mouth but I mean let we have to face up to the fact that what we put in our mouths has been manipulated and handed down to us for so long and in such an aggressive way and so many billions of dollars and pounds and every other currency has been spent on persuading us to eat things that are really very bad for us and are harming our health and the amount of money going the other way or the amount the amount of spend going on advertising or promoting or marketing this stuff it's practically non-existent in fact I think it's about 1.2 percent and and that's extremely problematic so I think before we are to before we get I mean we have to be sensitive about intervention but I also think we have to be careful not to be too precious because it's pretty urgent and there are many levers you say that that needs that could be pulled and we need to start pulling all of them we need to pull all of them and we do one of them is junk food out I mean we've got a we've got a we've got a shopping list and yours and mine might not be exactly the same but it's a pretty good overlap but but you know we've got to curb the excesses of junk food advertising I would say we have to put something back the other way and put a lot of effort and energy and creativity and the genius of marketing into pushing this stuff because this is good stuff to push the green stuff the healthy stuff the whole grains the fruits yeah so if you look at the sorry Polly no go go go well I was just going to say if you look at I sometimes think in this country we are too parochial and we sometimes think that Britain has these unique problems with food and the part that we miss is actually it's a global story and again the pandemic has brought this home that these same problems are existing in every country in the world the same obesity the same type 2 diabetes and it's partly because we have the same six multinational food corporations shopping these products down about six crops yeah and about the same six crops exactly there's something like there are 7 000 edible crops in the world give or take aren't there and yet 95 percent of what we eat comes from 30 of them and if you and if you look at the world's calories around half of the world's calories are made up of just um rice wheat maize sugar soy beans and then I mean the sixth one bit of meat animal stuff yeah which is probably mostly processed meat and so and some of those some of those are sugar I mean sugar comes in twice over because of course the main use of maize now is high fructose corn syrup which people think they might be drinking sugar in their Coca-Cola and in some countries they might but mostly they're drinking corn which is an extraordinary thought um but Bea you've written brilliantly about uh some amazing stories in other parts of the world that we could learn some great lessons from looking around here and you were saying why can't we market wonderful vegetables well South Korea so sometimes we can get so pessimistic in this conversation as well and when I was researching my book I kept thinking there has to be some country that somehow I mean it's what these countries have in common pretty much every country in the world that we've passed through something called the nutrition transition which was named by a man called Barry Popkin who's professor of nutrition in the States and in some ways the nutrition transition is great because it what it's what happens as countries have economic development but the downside is you get this rise of diet related to health and you get the unfettered power of the ultra process food industry and I asked Barry Popkin is there anywhere in the world that somehow passed through this transition without that and the answer that everyone seems to come up with a South Korea and there's a whole host of reasons why one of which is kimchi which is that fermented cabbage garlic and chilli quite a whack of chilli yeah quite a whack of it yeah it's addictive I mean it is addictive isn't it I mean it's very cheering that that's a solution yeah we have ketchup we have ketchup they have fermented cabbage and fermented cabbage does it but we're getting a taste for it we are yeah I find now if I give talks and ask people I don't give talks anymore because that's changed but if I asked people in the audience how many people have had kimchi hands were shooting up and quite old people were saying I guess I had my first kimchi last so that's changing but particularly in the kind of places where you and I give talks give talks which is which is also you know we are sometimes preaching to the but there's cultural reasons in Korea which is yeah you're right they love kimchi the way that we love ketchup and they I mean something close to is this something like 200 grams of kimchi per person per day something like that something insane something insane but the government also saw as he was said that it had a responsibility to protect the health of its citizens through food and to protect agriculture at the same time so it's kind of win-win it's exactly this story that we're meant to be talking about tonight you and the planet and sustainability so they invested in cooking workshops so that South Koreans would not forget how to make the delicious traditional dishes of their grandmothers but they also put adverts on TV so that when children switched on TV instead of seeing some extremely clever advert to make them want to drink chocolate milkshake and buy tortilla chips they saw adverts telling them how great local organic farming was and the other thing I imagine I mean they didn't do this while banning imports of fizzy drinks and junk food they did it as a counter measure and they and they did it as out of a sense of responsibility for that for the health of the country and it's kind of for national pride and and you know this is the kind of intervention that must I think be on the cards now it's been shown to work but as have some more more have a heavy-handed interventions more even more I mean we've had our sugar tax it is being shown to have some effect but other countries like chilli has had an even more well a much bigger number I think 15 percent tax on a certain threshold and chilli's address food label but it's not like this country doesn't have a history of intervention which was very successful i.e rationing you know it's a radical kind of solution to a big food problem where the government stepped into the kitchen but also telling us to get telling us to eat more of what at the time was available meant to be the good stuff like milk there was a whole milk potatoes you know more potatoes eat more but it was so nice because it was positive I often go back to that ministry of war food propaganda and even though you we'd have different categories now they were sort of the bodybuilding food the protective food and what was so nice is that butter seemed to fit into every category I'm like yes please I'm signing obviously there wasn't much of that to go around but still the idea that butter was just seen as this golden pat of goodness but it was exactly saying to people this is good whereas now I feel so much government dietary advice in the UK is just negative it's just pick low fat cheese instead of real delicious cheese it's also inviting people to to try and solve their problem primarily by by picking alternative processed foods like you know if you're worried about this try the low fat version or the or the zero sugar version of this same thing which already exists in a brand that you that you know and perhaps fixated on rather than getting back to the basics and boosting our our agriculture by talking about real food whole ingredients I mean the wholeness in food to me is is it's is the quality that we should be really shouting about what do you mean by wholeness it's a good question because I realized as soon as you say the word whole foods it becomes you've got to bet you've got to pull the two words apart and make them into separate words because if you put them together people are immediately thinking of brown rice and lentils and beans but everything growing in this garden is a whole food a steak is a piece of a whole food milk it straight from the cow or or even pasteurized is and and of course there's a sliding scale some foods are holer than others and some are very very interfered with but once you once you start stripping bits out of the food and it's always the good bits you know you would just take the brown out of wheat to make white wheat flour a more malleable plastic which is another bug bearer moment it's essentially to make it a plastic ingredient that can be molded into many many different shapes and textures you take out the goodness um so we and there's not and there's so many ways of making food delicious where you where you don't need to do any of that well speaking of deliciousness I will be really interested in both you about the two sort of campaigns charities that you're involved in taste ed and veg power which is about connecting children to the pleasure of food the joy of food because I think we do get fixated on you know being critical and and doom laden and what's bad and these are this is the very opposite approach isn't it could you perhaps talk about because I think they have some genesis together they do and we've done it I've done events together with veg power in school veg power is great too can you talk about taste ed so taste ed which is short for taste education we were inspired by a system of education they have in finland and other Nordic countries called sapperer and the whole idea is pleasure and I think we get into terrible trouble whatever age we are when we put pleasure in one box and health in another because really you lead somebody to healthy food through joy I mean at which also is saying you lead them there through their own senses so the basic idea of taste ed is that you use you encourage your child to use all of their five senses to interact with food in a really non-judgmental way so we start every lesson by saying no one has to like no one has to try which may be very different from how parents including myself have spoken to their children at the dinner table where there's a kind of sense of I really want you to try this well you get no pudding but within that safe space saying no one has to try no one has like they feel the judgment is taken off their shoulders and then they can get stuck in and they touch things they smell things they listen to food like we never even talk about the sounds that food makes and it's a profound thing where sometimes a child doesn't want to eat something because it's too crunchy and too loud and you have children on the autistic scale who are quite terrified of certain sounds squelchiness different textures and what we have found and there's evidence to back it up actually from Korea again but also from Finland and France is that this method is far far more effective as a form of food education than the traditional teach them about five a day and then go away and hope that they'll use this very abstract knowledge to change their own behavior I mean it's not the whole part of the jigsaw by itself because you could give a child a full course of taste dead awaken a desire in them for delicious green vegetables we've then got to make those vegetables available affordable in the school and ideally we've got to give their parents the where was all to cook them and enough money to be able to buy them but it is a crucial part of the picture that physicality is key and it goes it goes back to it's really it's really investing in a very natural instinctive young children which is to pick stuff up shove it up their nose break it in half see if they can make it into something sticky and all those things and a lot of that's been taken away from us and and and and not only do children not get to do that they barely get to witness it happening in a domestic kitchen many children's first experience of solid food or nearly solid food is to see a jar being unscrewed or they don't know what food is at a really basic level it's not people sometimes they're in order to eat better you should study the label to see what's in something or you should find out where something comes from they don't know they're not even there they've never they'll make these kind of heartbreaking comments like I don't know we're going to have to adapt it for a time of COVID because obviously passing around jars of things and smelling them and everyone shoving their nose but you can do it you can't do it at home with your own kids you can do it at home with your own kids and also all you need to do is just place the things on separate little plates and it still works beautifully but we've we do these ones where you again it may change but it will come back where we were plunging our hands into socks and you have different things buried in the sock and it might be an onion and it might be a pomegranate and it might be an apple kind of playing with the christmas stocking thing and then just thinking it's actually I have learned from it like how different a papery onion feels compared to the kind of roughness of a pomegranate and you get them to describe it you get them to describe it and then the language they come up with the story so somebody said the pomegranate is rough like the playground you feel it is like I suddenly had this visceral childhood memory of sort of falling down in the playground and that feeling under your knees and pomegranate is like that asphalt pomegranate yes but they'll say I mean pomegranate maybe you're not surprised they haven't tried that or felt it but they'll say I've never felt an onion you think how has somebody reached the age of eight and they've never felt an onion because their parents as you say maybe have never had the time it's you see children making these comments at all ends of the social economic scale as well which I find interesting there's the parents who are super super busy and are putting the children in breakfast club and after school club no time to sit down and eat again the pandemic changed that maybe for those families and then there are the kids where vegetables are expensive and daunting and if the parents didn't grow up eating them themselves it maybe seems new and weird but I mean none of these things are are hard to do in a classroom you know classrooms have lots of really expensive kits in them I mean they don't all have what they want obviously but it's easy but you know to get a beetroot and an onion and a carrot and a lettuce it's incredibly cheap and it's and it boosts their literacy because what you find is that the children who feel they lack confidence in writing and speaking will come up with these extraordinary metaphors like the pomegranate playground without even noticing that's what they're doing does say these things like the pepper looks like a wax lantern or I mean the number of strawberry ones yeah I mean we've got to get to a point where these sort of activities in schools are not fringe experimental projects that have should be a basic entitlement basic right for children to be able to interact with food and understand what good food is and be encouraged to see it in a really positive way from the moment they go to school and in Finland they have it every child in Finland gets it but I think we could go further I think you could say you can teach the whole curriculum through food you can do history geography I mean you know there's almost nothing you can't teach through food using it as a lens to think about the world that we there is an amazing school in London Charlton Manor where they have developed an entire curriculum around history geography and also another school in Lincolnshire with the head teacher I work with Jason O'Rourke where every opportunity to get food in they do yeah so Tay said should be the start you make sure you actually know your fruits and vegetables and you you feel comfortable with them then cooking growing I mean growing history geography you know it's all in the food isn't it but this sort of brings me on this sort of relates to the other question I want to ask you you know you've written that amazing book first bite which is about how we learn to eat and then the way we eat some strategies for how to eat better your forthcoming book eat better forever coming out in December 2020 both again looking at strategies for eating better but I wanted to ask you first of all a few questions but first is why is it so difficult to know what to eat it's so basic isn't it why is it so hard why do we need these books well I think one of the reasons is the extraordinary profusion of choice that the the way in which food has exploded and as B writes very eloquently in her book I mean that was that was about solving a very urgent problem of malnutrition globally and and diseases that were the result of people getting not either not enough food or not enough the right kinds of food and it's been an extraordinary successful project it's been globally I mean of course there are still calls the world where people are desperately undernourished and life is very very hard but if you actually look at the statistics the standard of living the food availability it's gone but the side effect of that is this extraordinary industry that learnt to do volume and has now become extremely skilled at taking those I mean the vast majority of that wheat made sure it doesn't it doesn't go to stop people going hungry anymore it gets spun and extruded to all sorts of different products that are put back to us with very catchy ideas and campaigns and and sold back to us as junk and what do you mean by that there's not really choice or it's not it's a strange sort of choice I mean so to give you an example I mean this was one that really stuck with me I mean I look at products I mean I think I hope that this product has sold less during the pandemic I kind of assume it must have done because of changing patterns of our lives but the snack bar aka the protein bar I mean to me this is a product it's a kind of nonsense it's masquerading I mean it's not it's it's maybe nuts and raisins and maybe some little bits of chocolate and it costs more than a pound each if you buy it at a gym and why does it have to be glued together why does it have to be glued together it's a piece of engineering it's been sold to us as the epitome of healthy eating and actually it's really not much different from a candy bar and in the States at the time that I was writing the book according to an industry insider there were 4 000 different iterations of snack bar on the market who needs that and who can even begin to compute there was what's wrong with a little snack pack with some actual nuts actual raisins and actual little bits of chocolate and then it's a crazy idea nobody makes money recipes in my new book oh my god it's not rocket science but it is one of the things you'll get is a recipe for the loose version of a classic squished grain that's that's gonna mean by fake choice I mean it that's an insane level of choice it's a cognitive burden to go into a modern supermarket where there are 40 to 50 000 separate stock keeping items and to choose between all of those um we need simpler choices but we also need more meaningful choices what do you think is the sort of relationship between our love affair with convenience and the problem of food because really that kind of squashed bar is it's kind of sold as convenience in a pack isn't it it's quick it's efficient it's healthy you know it's all there you don't have to do anything like take nuts out of a packet you know or anything like that but you know we're kind of wedged to convenience is that part of the problem as well sort of tearing ourselves away from that as a kind of narrative that's supposed to be so seductive it is really challenging that because we are we are absolutely addicted to convenience and we're going to have to do a little bit of reinventing and a lot of people are very busy what have very little you know results it's partly about working patterns I mean right so often I think with this will say something like we're addicted to convenience or it's almost moralizing on ourselves saying there's some problem with us and we don't see again I mean during the pandemic when suddenly you're stuck at home the desire for the protein bar I imagine I mean I don't have much desire for them but I imagine it kind of evaporates it's the desire for the protein bar comes around because so many people in Britain are forced to work in saying long hours and made to feel bad if they take a lunch break and made to feel bad if they take a lunch break whereas I interviewed this nurse who'd been a nurse in the 1970s who said it was obligatory everyone whether you're a nurse with your doctor you had to sit down and have a hearty two course meal with lashings of gravy followed by lashings of custard and then everyone had a cigarette and then they went back on the wards those were the days and it was now in a workplace unless you work for Google or something the employer has no sense of obligation towards the people they're employing to feed them and I interviewed a food writer from Denmark who said you know the there's a common sense that work stops I think she said maybe at five o'clock so then that's cooking time five to seven is family and cooking time that's a very good thing to try and get to click back into the culture because the yes people want convenience but you you've got a choice I mean the moment you need that convenience maybe if it stays like this in the work culture is because you've only got a few minutes for lunch but if you've taken a moment where you'd had a little bit more time in your kitchen the evening before you can make a wonderful lunchbox or even if you get up five minutes earlier you can put together some really nice things it can be super convenient you're in control you make the choices you'd put in the healthy foods that you know you like eating you can experiment and change things around I think the portable healthy lunchbox made with you know the ingredients that you gather from the supermarket a sturdy box grater is a very very handy tool I love the box grater it's a great undervalued utensil 97% of the time using the course sign of it absolutely I think explain why to those of us who haven't been converted because because in because in five seconds you can take a carrot into a great vegetable salad that you can put a grated carrot okay I thought that you were taking the box grater in your packed lunch no sorry I was thinking this is radical I mean people will be funny looks at work but you're giving five or ten minutes with the box grater in the morning putting the point is it's not even really cooking it's assembling but you feel and there's nothing wrong with that I mean I honestly think assembling is exactly what we need to become adept at good healthy things that go together well and when you put them together become a little bit more than the sum of their parts they speak to each other they mingle they exchange their juices you introduce a dressing you've got texture from nuts sweetness and you're not wasting the old vegetables in the bottom of the salad compartment you can use up anything in those kind of boxes you certainly can in a soup I'm not sure I'd want the really tired lettuce to get in there with my freshly grated carrots but yeah you could shred it very finely and it might be all right it might be all right it would become you could call it seaweed at that point so so both your books which are looking at kind of strategies for diet you said assembling having lunch boxes at ready what what other strategies do you do you think are absolutely essential or would you sort of you know gift to people if they wanted to change their diet or or just eat more healthily more easily with more pleasure well I think next after wholeness or alongside wholeness of variety I mean variety's a really interesting thing because variety can be dazzling and the and the extraordinary amount of choice that we have at any one time of foods that are not seasonal but flown from all all over the world but when it comes to fruit and veg just making sure not to forget that there are some really lovely things that you like that you might not have had for a while and just picking them up so one of the things I encourage people to do is to do a fruit and veg audit just write down all the veg that they like and then use a book with an index in it to find some more talk to the rest of the family and very soon you've got a shopping list of things that oh yeah god you know what we haven't eaten green beans for two weeks and we all like them let's go and get so if you do that audit and you find like I mean this is a huge hidden problem which I wrote about in first bite that actually you are somebody with really selective tastes even as an adult I mean like that is a huge hidden part of the story that we just don't talk about because in all of this government advice people are told eat this eat this come on don't eat that nobody stops and asks as with the children in taster do you like this what do you like and what you need to know is you can change your own appetites at any age I mean I think that's a crucial message not all of them you know you may have no go areas you may have tried beetroot for those 13 times and the chemical geosmin earthy taste in it just doesn't agree with you you're so right change it learning being open-minded and knowing you can change and knowing you can take something that you love and pair it with something you are uncertain of and that suddenly something clicks and you love the other thing too this is a question we could everyone could ask themselves and I'm going to ask you what's that what's that something fruit or vegetable that you used to hate and now you love I mean Col Robbie Col Robbie I don't love it but I used to find it really really boring and now I can see that textually it's very exciting I've got some basic I used to hate tomatoes and now I love them I can eat a mushroom and now and now I think they're one of my favorite things and you can decide to have you know most people don't like beer the first time they drink it but they come around to it fairly healthy and coffee same yeah and you can also the other thing you can do that I think is incredibly useful is wean yourself off a sweet tooth and I know this because I have a really sweet tooth I mean the cooking I learnt was to to cook cakes and biscuits and sweets and make the puddings for my mum's 70s dinner parties I was obsessed with sweet cooking and I used to have a lot of tea in my sugar sugar in my tea sugar in all isn't it the spoon was standing upright but I made several attempts to give up sugar in my tea and and they found it and I because I'd usually give up after a week then somebody just said to me it takes two weeks and actually after two weeks but also I think it's what you're setting out to do I like that phrase you use unsweetened your palate which is the same one I use this is why I think the sugar tax has been problematic although I think it's a very hopeful gesture because it shows that industry will adapt when it's forced to adapt and when government takes intervention seriously but what you get with the sugar tax is a whole load of artificially sweetened drinks flooding into the foods of my own set of problems have their own set of problems there's a lot of emerging research suggesting that actually they're just as much implicated in time to diabetes as sugary drinks for reasons we don't fully know there may be some way in which they're fooling the gut into thinking that you're consuming sugar but the bigger one to me is that for as long as like when I was a teenager I was addicted to Diet Coke and I also had a very unhealthy diet and then I just slowly stopped drinking it and now I it doesn't appeal at all but I'm really I feel lucky that it doesn't appeal doesn't make me morally superior in any way it's just easy to avoid it and if I pick up a cup of tea that's got a spoonful of sugar in I might spit it out whereas but I feel that for as long as you're coating your mouth with sweetness every time you drink something even if it's a diet soda it's then quite hard to actually kick that sugar habit I'm not saying people I still love cake I'm not saying people should wholly kick the sugar habit I think what's so interesting like we're talking at a kind of individual level but because our tastes can change they can transform it's actually incredibly positive you know we're very you know we feel very sort of anxious and concerned about the state of food but we know it can change we know that tastes can change we are where we are but we don't stop here and it has never been stuck in one place you know traditions evolve and and taste change in a way that is could be very exciting and positive having said that I was going to ask I wanted to ask I don't know if you saw last night the Attenborough program extinction we know that you know California is burning I think a recent report has just come out saying that Britain has missed 17 of its 21 targets for biodiversity pretty grim news in terms of the environment do you think we are finally at a turning point where the people that need to have to take this seriously and and having that's the kind of macro and then at a kind of small level what what can we all do what are the single things that you think we should be doing as individuals in relation to food and the environment well one of the things that's been interesting during this strange time is that our habits around food of you know maybe more of us have got around the table and that's because I think a lot more people have connected with nature in whatever way they could if it was an even if it's in their back garden or managing just because it was the only thing they could do even if it's just going for a little walk and actually one of the things I think the government got wrong was not encouraging us to go out into open spaces making it absolutely clear how to behave safely in open spaces and then saying go and find some open space because that would have been much better for all of us and those of us who are lucky enough to have it on our doorsteps benefited hugely so let's get that right if there's a next time round but I think that I think that it is becoming I mean one thing that's interesting and exciting is that the solutions that are right for our health are generally the solutions that are right for the for the planet eating less meat switching to not necessarily going completely vegan but to a plant-led diet definitely leads the way in terms of reducing our carbon footprint around food I mean yeah I just think we need to hugely reform agriculture in Britain and beyond to think what are the things that we could be growing more of here I mean Tim Lang is very eloquent on the subject you we could be growing amazing nuts in the UK we know that the almonds that so many of us love when they come from California they're implicated in drought but what if we were growing more delicious varied nuts in the UK I would be absolutely up for buying that and I think there's some sweet spot at which as Hugh says health and sustainability and consumer choice all should coalesce I mean there are so many varieties of fruit that we should have more of I mean it's kind of there is something so weird at which people like Hugh have been pointing out for years that given we're an incredible apple growing nation you go into the supermarket and you're just confronted by imported pink lady apples and air-frated golden delicious and not the just full array of wonderful juicy hard crunchy apples from the UK and you write about this so beautifully in in your book about how that then the pink lady or the kind of supermarket grape becomes the defining grape it becomes the defining apple the banana so which I buy a lot of for my children because there is no other thing other than the Cavendish banana but there's something people that know about bananas say it's not even a tasty banana I used to go to school with this a friend of mine from Nigeria and she used to bring back from Lagos these small bananas and they were different they weren't a banana and in my world they were extraordinary and I can always remember the bananas I eat are not those bananas and where can I find those bananas can only get one type of banana but that's a brilliant example of kind of taste and the needs of the planet and climate absolutely go together because it's not sustainable it's a monoculture of monocultures the previous banana that we had the Gros Michel was wiped out by Panama disease this one is on the brink of potentially falling prey to similar disease and the way to avoid that happening is to have a diversity of crops of the same and it's the same with things like wheat I mean we're looking at wheat crops were not great for this year that's another sort of feeling of food security on the precipice and those old land race varieties are much more resilient I was very excited by something you wrote in your book about I think it was Dan Barber who's a well-known American chef who likes taking all these problems on and finding solutions and he challenged he had a vegetable grower in his restaurant and he said guys why did butternut why are butternut squash so boring can't you make a better one and this guy took it to heart and and they've actually launched a really successful much tastier the honey nut miniaturized version of a butternut squash yeah and it's amazing and the skin's more palatable and nutrition it's got a better profile it's smaller it's it's got more nutrition it's got more flavor it's win win win and I just think Dan Barber is amazing because he's asking all these questions and saying well actually a recipe starts with a seed let's go all the way back to the seed and think can we find crops that are going to take all of these boxes I mean he also did this thing which I think is so clever which is one of the reasons I've already mentioned this but one of the reasons some children don't like beetroot is because of that earthy taste I love the earthy taste by the way but some don't help yourself yeah I'm just staring at the seed a lot of different varieties here actually about five but for people who don't he worked with plant breeders to say can we have the sweetness of beetroot without the earthiness and it turns out you can it's just that in his conversations with plant breeders most people never even ask these questions because the seed industry has not been interested but isn't it extraordinary when you when you go and look at the range of tortilla chips or crisps you've got a squillion different flavors now and actually it's very possible to have you know many many different flavors you can have a grape that tastes like a strawberry you can have a tart one a sweet one beetroots that tastes sweeter unless the possibilities are endless and we absolutely know how to do that and you don't need to modify these things genetically either to to achieve those ends so so that's something to be excited about the idea that we might seduce people into eating more healthy food by starting to make systematically grow it to be more delicious we have got a lot of questions coming in which is wonderful but i wanted to ask one more final question which is that if i gave you the the power to be all powerful and you can change one thing about the food system oh you gave us three on did i give you i told you three but there's too many questions one is fine you can you go first go off goodness i mean you've got two together so don't choose the same one well i was can i say education but when you go i would say education but education is in its most holistic sense and if you actually i mean i want taste ed as a universal entitlement for children in school but i can see that's not the whole solution if you really think about how we learn to eat most of the messages we're given about food from childhood onwards are given us by the environment which we learn to eat and therefore the chief educator of a child's palette is the ultra processed food industry if there could be a government that really really took seriously how would we engineer a food environment in which it would be easy for the healthy choice to be the kind of cheap automatic choice the healthy sustainable vegetable centered choice that's a very long answer i don't know that's very worthy no it's quite a short answer which i would which i could which i couldn't agree with more more more strongly that you can't top education is top of the list okay so that's number one it takes many many forms and and you know what advertising is a form of education it's not a great i mean so it's it's it's not a and it's an incredibly powerful for i mean it's it's influenced i mean you can describe education in in in many many different ways but i mean we talked earlier on about intervention from government and i would like to see the government put the put the the obesity crisis at the absolute top of its list of priorities it's causing devastation in this country it's causing so much sickness and unhappiness and you know one of the things that one of the areas of education is you know doctors are not very well trained in how to advise or help people with dietary problems there's a taboo in talking about diet when you go and see your gp we have to all be educated to understand that the food we eat is our primary source of health and well-being so that that's what needs to be top of the agenda food makes all the difference everything else comes after i think and i think both of your books and all your writing and your work are testament to the fact that you know all these things you're saying about that actually you know doctors need to help people learn how to eat they we all need to learn how to eat and it's it's a sort of lifelong journey isn't it to learn what to you know what our diets should look like that it isn't just natural and straightforward and i think there are many possibilities and reasons to glimmers of hope that that be identified and i think sorry there's one more thing but we huge point about wholeness the flip side of that is we should be much blunter and clearer and more urgent about where the problem lies which is with the ultra processed food industry in this country the phrase ultra processed isn't even on the agenda the food industry doesn't want it to be on the agenda because as soon as you identify that as the dividing line in the problem everything starts to look quite different especially as a point where in this country as in others we probably tipped 50 percent of all the calories that we get in this country come from ultra processed foods well i could ask you a million more questions but i've got a whole heap of questions on this ipad coming coming in live it's very exciting so i'm going to start reading some of them out i've got one here from jason heins of kneels yard dairy the artisan cheese farmhouse cheese retailer monger hello jason and he says hugh talked about preaching to the converted in my personal experience during lockdown communicating farm cheese to a public that had never been exposed to it the response of people eating great british cheese for the first time was amazingly positive i realized that i have been guilty of preaching to the converted for 25 years and consequently not been reaching this incredibly receptive public as communicators of great food do be in hugh think we should modify our approach to make converts of the millions of people in the uk who have not had a fresh onion or an amazing piece of cheese but they would love it if they did yes so changing communication changing how we communicate well we have to change we have to change i mean it's connected to the advertising thing and we have to change the way we communicate the story of food and i mean one thing that the cheese has going for it and kneels yard dairy has in spades is it can spend some wonderful yarns i mean not that they're not true i'm not saying they're making stuff up but they've got some wonderful stories about cheese and cheese is you know cheese it's a artisan product and also but talk about convenience it's about the most convenient artisan product you could because you just eat it yes we don't need anything else no that's right but but telling good stories around good food is an incredibly important thing and one of the things that i think is is you know what one of the pleasures of going to a farmers market is to meet the actual grower and and talk to them about what they do and they can tell you all sorts of stuff about what's in in front of you that you that you didn't know and and you that's something you take home with you and i would go as so far as to say that changes the taste of that food it certainly changes your emotional connection to it and you know taking away the anonymity of food and bringing back the story of how that food was produced also if that if that reemerges as something that matters to all of us it also puts the owners on producers to make sure their food does have a good story and isn't full of things that you wouldn't want people to know about because you're expected to be open and honest but it is difficult it is i mean it was great that the pandemic did put the spotlight on things like British cheeses and suddenly opened up the market to people who maybe might have felt daunted before or thought that they weren't the right kind of person to be buying farmhouse cheeses i do think it's hard that the stranglehold of the supermarkets means that sometimes people just aren't aware that these things exist or they feel they're maybe too posh or they're for other people or i think jason's question is a sort of challenge to those of us that are already converted it's about him as a cheese monger but all of us in terms of how i mean you are amazing communicators you make television programs that talk to everybody it's but it's how the the message gets through isn't it but we shouldn't be too complacent about that because it is very hard and i've long had a sense that you know loads of people out there who aren't the least bit interested in river cottage and frankly in this conversation and that's hard because i think it would be worth everybody's while to to be interested but if they're just not then that is a hard barrier to reach across i think more people are interested than ever before but i think it's i do still think these are these real structural problems that there are places in the country where somebody might have a desperate desire to buy some kneels yard cheese but they just think where would i go that's that's not an offer to me but we also we can't do it on our own and this is why we need education this is why we need government if kids work in school handling beetroot and carrots from the age of two or three there a lot of them would be a lot more interesting and exciting they will become very different consumers so it's all part of the same thing definitely thank you thank you jason here is a question from ray nightingale i already buy organic meat and dairy products from farms near me and kent and i grow my own veggies but i feel that unless i go vegan i'm not really doing the right thing by the environment do you think that converting to veganism is the best thing to do for the future of the planet oh you passed that ball here i would think well i think if anyone wants to go vegan for the i mean i think it's it's not like everyone has to do the same thing i do think it's really important to remember that being an omnivore doesn't mean that we all eat everything it means that different people eat different things in different environments there's been an argument that's been made sometimes i think spuriously by the meat industry in britain that not all meat is the same but it is very much true that the kind of lamb produced by someone like james rebanks who tweets so well as herdie shepherd is an utterly different product from something like a mass produced battery chicken i mean there is meat and there's meat there is vegetables and there are vegetables you could weigh up the carbon footprint of every single thing you ate but you'd get exhausted doing it and you might lose some of the joy of food personally i'm not vegan but i am convinced by the reports of things like the lancet report that eating far far far far less meat than most people do is the way to go i think that's absolutely right and i i mean i one thing i've got no time for is is is vegan bashing i mean some of my fellow chefs down the years used to be rude about vegetarians says i wouldn't serve one in my restaurant i mean that's an utter nonsense we all need to take a big slice of responsibility for improving the nation's diet and improve and and and one of as chefs one of the things we really need to do is make sure that the vegetables on our menus in restaurants are varied uh you know delicious and there's always lots and lots of them and then there's somehow front of people's attention there was a really interesting study that just came out from cambridge university i don't know if you saw it where they just changed the um architecture of a student canteen so the vegetarian options came first and because most people are naturally lazy that was all it took to make people choose amazing but the architecture is one thing and the terminology because you you just said quite reasonably the vegetarian options but you could just say the vegetables yes no and it wasn't sold as the vegetarian option that's the other crucial thing it was just the lunch whatever it is the lunch but the main the vegetarian main courses there were more of them and they came first and then you had to walk over to a different table to collect a meat of course normally it's the other way around yes once you've filled up with meat and potatoes and pasta and rice the salad bars over there guys guess what there's no room left on my plate i mean that i like in india they call it veg and non-veg yes and i really like that because that's again saying well veg is the thing that comes first but you might sometimes want a bit of non-veg as some delicious seasoning i just think also when you said don't vegan bash just not bash each other about what we eat altogether let's be a lot more tolerant across the board and accept that humans have diverse tastes that's a great answer thank you and thank you rey um here is a question from Joanne O'Rourke i don't understand how we are more now than ever aware of the problems with plastic and yet still manufacturers are using plastic in our food i was shocked to find out about plastic in teabags and they're non-recyclable wider supermarkets and advertising agencies still encourage us to buy these things i.e the new product of coffee bags which cannot be recycled we just don't really need them apart from not buying them what else can we do to encourage supermarkets to stock items that are beneficial for the society for society and the planet it's definitely your well i've been i have been uh banging the gong uh with with my brilliant co-presenter Anita Rani on this and uh yes the supermarkets aware as as so often the multi multiple retailers the ones who really could lead on this and could do so much more and it's not this teabags it's sandwich wrappers and it's it's produce that doesn't need any sort of plastic wrapping around it and at the moment we then people are so incensed about plastic that the supermarkets know they've got to do something but i'm still a bit worried that there's too much uh you know just nibbling at the edges and a lot of what's happening is it's kind of window dressing it's not really addressing the problem and dealing with it there have been some big gains i mean what you really need with things like this is is one of the big supermarkets to come and do something radically different uh weight shows has opened a store or dedicated a big part of their store uh to refill shopping you can take in any containers and get not just dry goods but milk and and uh frozen vegetables and fruits and all sorts of other things tesco have banned the plastic wrap around multi packs now that was that's a no brainer i mean the idea that in order to get a discount on four tins of beans which have got no plastic on them they've got a there are tin with some paper labels why do you put a plastic and it's the crinkly hard kind of plastic that can't be recycled just so you can take that to the till four tins of beans the electronics can do the job you get your discount so there's various no-brainers that have to happen but we have to change the whole culture around plastic and supermarkets need to lead the way and i do think a lot as with all of this it's changing what's normal isn't it because if you get to the point as a consumer as cleat is joanne has done a thinking this is madness why am i bringing home like a piece of ginger that's wrapped in plastic when i would buy it at the local asian supermarket and you just buy ginger is ginger it's fine isn't it you peel it when you get it home but you need to kind of reach that moment of thinking this is madness and it's enough people collectively and and there has been progress and the government has made commitments on totally useless bits of plastic like plastic straws and stirrers and cotton buds we have unfortunately taken a bit of a step backwards because of the pandemic it's understandable people are looking for you know confidence and protection and all the big stories about ppe in the health system has made people feel that somehow having a plastic barrier between them and their food makes them safer and also the rise of delivery has continued hasn't it and i do think people you've written about this in the past as well like how we can have very different values of meat for example when we're cooking it for ourselves in the home or getting an indian takeaway thinking well we're not going to ask where that chicken comes from because somehow it's different i think it's the same thing with plastics you might be a conscientious consumer of plastics when you're out doing your grocery shopping and then suddenly you think i'm tired i want to deliver you and huge amounts which are in your control and i do just want to finish the point about the plastic on our food it doesn't make it safer you know if people have handled the plastic that's just as likely and not very likely but just as likely to transmit the virus arguably more likely they think the virus hangs around on plastic longer than it does on other surfaces so it isn't going to help us to get to move backwards on this vital issue and food is not a vector of covid thank god i mean no absolutely right thank you um this is a question from jill norman she says how it's sort of related how do we encourage the government to take steps to reduce the advertising of fast food and to persuade supermarkets to reduce the amounts on their shelves well the the government has said it is going to look at the curb the advertising of junk food to children the water shed because there are still huge family shows that have a massive impact on children that families watch together that are absolutely loaded with junk food advertising and the government's been rightly under pressure to address this for a long time and they've said they're going to so that that's good news but let's actually see it happen also i mean i'm looking forward to part two of the national food strategy from henry dimbleby which i'm hoping will address some of these things but our government really needs to be a lot more radical like chile where they said you cannot have cartoon characters on boxes of sugary cereals aimed at children that is an incitement to eat a breakfast fish and eat which it is when you think about it but we just accept those things as normal um but in chile they've banned that they've come up with much stricter food labelling i that yes they've got an actual flash on the front of the pack uh saying warning very high in sugar yes not not not a not just some traffic right thing when you've got to scan it and you've got to figure out what it really means it's just like no stop and you're still a free citizen you can still buy it you can still eat as much sugar as you like it's not you sometimes people say that's nanny state that's terrible it's taking away someone's freedom it's not it's just actually just some kind of counter measure to this fast flood because often that's what you need is a moment of reflection before you put something in your shopping trolley and you can see actually you're right there's a lot of sugar in that and i don't need it and it's really difficult because those children's cereals they may be very high in sugar but they will definitely say something like fortified with vitamins good for bones calcium so how are you meant to know as a i mean you need a sort of phd in cereals to buy a cereal almost and you know it is so you know it's just so complicated i think for everybody i think i do think our traffic light system is not entirely without merit people are getting the hang of it and and red should be a very serious cause for concern on on fat and sugar what was very inappropriate is that the two biggest manufacturers of cereals in this country nestle and Kellogg's ducks the traffic light labels for a long time they have finally come around to it which is something yeah thank you i've got a question here from in wilkinson could you talk a bit about the grow your own project you mentioned the grow your own yes i think he might mean the oh veg power you never talked about veg power veg power okay well thank you very much yeah well veg power is aimed at addressing precisely the power of advertising and it's trying to harness the power of advertising to go the other way and to promote vegetables using the same kind of creativity and getting children excited and this is something that some very brilliant people including Anna Taylor at the food foundation and dan parker and john hegety so john hegety's got involved with that have said we need to harness our creativity we need to recognize that advertising is very influential in getting people to change their eating habits and we need to champion healthy eating and especially for kids it was a huge campaign wasn't it I mean it was prime time yeah and ITV stepped up and and and gave us some free advertising to make it happen and the the the creative piece at the center of it was a campaign called eat them to defeat them an exciting story of we and the idea was to do something i hadn't been tried before and not just tell children that vegetables were good for them had a kind of sci-fi yeah tell the sci-fi that the vegetables were coming to get you and the only way to get away from the vegetables was to eat them and did you have a sense of how effective it was was that yeah the metrics the metrics are pretty good and particularly where supermarkets were directly sharing right you know the various materials to do with the campaign it was a very short window it was you know we were given it you know around the new year i think we got some uh we got some ads out on the on on anton dex uh one of their new year shows uh back in 2019 um this we can't allow something like this to be a flash in the pan you know we need to and nor can we allow it to be a sort of little kind of uh yes the ITV will do this once because we it shows willing you know this needs to be systematic and uh so a one-off isn't good enough we need to keep investing we need support from government and we need to recognize that creativity and advertising can cut both ways and needn't always be the bringer of doom and gloom in our food i'm really i'm so glad ian asked that question and we have that uh description amazing yes thank you to ian uh here's a really important sorry you can still see the ad on youtube if you uh google or use any other search ecosias are very good one by the way uh eat them to defeat them here is a really important question it's from professor harry west at exeter university and he says as the end of brexit transition approaches should our food economy look inward outward or both definitely both i think we've been far too inward as a food economy for too long i think we need to see the ways in which britain is interconnected with other countries but i do think i mean again i'm going to cite tim lang um um britain hasn't ever been and never will be self-sufficient in food but the direction has all been towards us importing more and more and more food becoming ever more reliant on these chains that begin to look extremely fragile and if you would none of us really knows the way that the pandemic is going to take the world but even as it was with phase one there were lorries that were going to spain to collect fruits and vegetables to come into the uk that were being stopped with brexit it's a giant question mark but it should be a moment for us to reflect and think what are the things that we could be growing in britain and doing better here and how can we sort of reconstitute the whole food economy to make it more equitable for people in britain and beyond and i think it's as you touched on earlier it's got to be to do with resilience from diversity as well as resilience from quantity uh because there are things we're incredibly good at growing here of course there's a lot of anxiety about the potential for trade deals to lower the standards of the food in this country and um you know and i think if you had if you had a referendum on that it would be absolutely whole i mean i don't think you know there is strong feeling isn't there incredibly strong feeling people don't want you know the chlorinated chicken gets bandied about a lot but there are many many aspects of this that we we should we're right to be worried about we're right to be worried about but i also feel again we could harness that in a positive direction that water motion is underlying that there's a sense of pride in british food which sometimes has maybe been misplaced but which could be gathered back again and turned in a positive direction as with the ministry of food during the war well can i bring in this question then from susannah which is sort of related she says what are your concerns around food distribution networks and brexit could such a disruption actually um could sorry could such a disruption of trade networks work in favour of developing uk based food production which has a reduced carbon footprint well i suppose it might i mean one wouldn't want uh the enthusiasm and support for local food networks to come by default through the breakdown of the whole structure of how we distribute food i think people should be very interested in in in sourcing and finding food locally for all sorts of reasons because that's often where the quality is if food doesn't have to travel far and it's so often where the the story is and that it gives you the the narrative to relate to your own community providing with food which which is something we could all do with i do think as well i don't know i find it heartbreaking if we think of the number of e u nationals that we are all indebted to you who have been our chefs our waiters our factory workers our fruit pickers and the people who are growing and producing our fruit in other nearby countries such as spain and france and italy and i sometimes feel there's this basic kind of relationship which plays out with food whether it's just a couple of friends sitting at a table or whether it's countries interacting with each other or and that there's this kind of profound ingratitude that we're somehow not recognising this huge debt that we have to europeans i'm not trying to make some party political brexit point here but i do just feel we have to recognise how important those people are a massive contribution to huge contribution they fed us which is the most wonderful thing they fed us good food and they also give us our local food because they're often the people who are picking it and packing it and you know getting it to us absolutely thank you this is a really important question from and a sort of comment from niamie uh do good and she says surely the most important thing to fix if you have ultimate power is to ensure that everyone can afford good food food made by farmers and workers who are paid a living wage so a guaranteed minimum wage must come first surely to build a strong base for the food system what's your response well i absolutely agree with with with the first part of that uh that that um healthy food for all um should be the primary objective and if you can absolutely wave a magic wand then that would be the thing to to go for um but i think when we were asked earlier about what would what would be the policy change i think it's not it's not entirely straightforward to know what it's more than one policy change that you would need to to deliver that but you'd first need a government that was determined to make it happen but i like the way that nami has said it's a right to good food it's a right to nutritious food not just a right to food and i think coming back to this post war story that we keep alluding to which is that governments after the second world war piled investment into producing as many calories as possible which probably at the time was a legitimate focus because there'd been such terrible hunger during the second world war but now we need to think about is food actually food is it are people earning enough to be able to buy the food that their bodies need and that's a basic thing and it should be happening at both levels it should be happening at a supply level of is our food supply giving us what our bodies need but it nami's absolutely right that it's also a question of economics i think one thing underlying that question that that's really absolutely fair fair pay for the hard work of everybody in the food sector but one thing that we do have a problem with in in in this country and other countries have it too is that we've come to believe that somehow food might be a really good area to save a bunch of money that it's that we've had this thought for a long time i recently researched an article for the tls on the concept of cheap food in victorian england and it was all about the life of the costamonger who were these street sellers and it was the same then because people were desperate to have a cheap sort of bag of welks or a cheap oyster or a cheap apple or a cheap apple pie what there's a case might be and these people were starving because what has changed is that the amount of our income that we're prepared to spend on food the portion of it has steadily gone down has been eroded and so i mean it's a bit like someone i remember in your book who was asked how do you find the time to cook and how do you find the time to watch televisions what how do you find the money to buy food well how do you find the money to buy a new car i mean we do have to question sometimes what you know what what's going to be top of the list but i think the question i think namie's question is right which is like when we talk about cheap food it makes people very angry at both ends of the divide because some people say how can you be talking about cheap food being a bad thing when there are food banks some people can't even feed themselves the question is what's affordable i mean food should never be so cheap that the people who produce it are themselves in a state of penury or misery um but it's a kind of it's a circular thing between the producer and the consumer it should be affordable at both levels and we do have an ironic situation where the foods that have had the most interference have somehow become the cheapest whereas the foods that are whole and uninterfered with are more expensive and in some cases more expensive than they need to be you have given us so many things to think about this evening so much kind of complicated but also sort of solutions to thinking about these incredibly complex problems and i think the questions reveal how engaged everybody has been and and such kind of you know challenging questions interesting questions i'm so sorry to everyone whose question we were not able to get to but i'm being told that i need to i need to bring things to a sad close so i'm very very has got dark in house but thank you thank you so much for the most fascinating discussion really sorry yes please can i just say one thing i would love you to we have touched on some really demanding questions about food and we've done our best and and often not probably not well enough but if you really want to understand where we're at how we got here and what some of the ideas for the future are this book by b is brilliant everything that we talked about is is addressed in brilliant writing and with a lot of exciting answers thank you his book which is out in yeah he was out in december 2020 but that's brilliant book of bees and other books of hers and hues brilliant books are available on the tab on your screen right now thank you so much thank you to all of the team at river cottage who've made this possible thank you again to kitchen aid for your generous sponsorship if you have enjoyed this evening's first event of the 2020 food season do come back and join us for other events i'm going to just tell you about a few which if you have found this discussion interesting you will find completely riveting tomorrow evening for anyone who's interested in the future of restaurants the future of eating out we have a wonderful panel discussion with tim hayward tim ship tim hayward tim anderson jimmy ferro era the food critic and the chef asma kahn then a week today we've got the historian simon charmer in conversation with claudia rodan talking about the history and the culture of jewish food which i just cannot wait to hear and then we have an amazing double bill on saturday the 26th um on an event called the future of food which is d woods and tim lang and that is then followed by an event called beyond the banks which looks at different organizations um charities activists across the country who are doing the most amazing work to connect communities to food in a positive way we would love to see you there and then there are many more events coming up through the rest of september and uh october if you would like to support the work of the bl please do go to our visit um our donate screen uh on the um on your screens thank you so much everybody thank you be in hue for being as wonderful as you are in talking about and being an intervention in food and helping us to to work out what we all need to do to make to save the environment and to eat better thank you thank you poli thank you thanks everybody


News 18, India. One thing related to the job market, especially, if you look at the campus recruitment in engineering colleges and MBA colleges. So on one side, there is this, the economy is doing well. And all indicators point to that. But on the other hand, the campus recruitment this year has been muted. Salaries have been lower. Many students have not got a job offer yet. How do you see this in relation to the overall big picture? The question about employment, I am afraid, we are repeatedly focusing only on those indicators, pertaining to the formal economy, which is important. I am not denying its role. So college recruitments, IM like campuses, are important. But equally, the jobs that are getting created in the middle and lower order are not getting counted at all. I would look at the way in which banks and their credit of take is happening in small and medium businesses. The new companies which have got registered, which is a data which I have put out from the MCA, the number of new companies which have started are certainly not people who are being recruited for jobs. They are people who are investing money, believing in their skills, registering a company, and probably giving jobs for others. Why would new companies get registered in a bigger number than before if employment is not being offered? Companies cannot operate in vacuum without human beings in them. So I think a fairer, open and an exhaustive picture of India's employment, both in the formal and non-formal areas, will have to have some kind of a wider base with which we need to bring in such data so that the discussion can be more informed. And some of I think the global slowdown is also having an impact on our jobs, especially at the higher end, right? I mean, IM campuses or engineering colleges, et cetera. Equally, because of the way in which artificial intelligence is coming, the kind of job requirements that are expected of new recruits are also changing. So the people with old skill sets are now expected to have additional newer skill sets for entering into a certain area which still now did not exist. So lots of calibrations are required in understanding this. That's right. You know, yesterday in your budget speech, you were very appreciative of income tax payers. You, in fact, the number of income tax people paying income tax has gone up. Collections are up 2.4 times. You were quite appreciative. In fact, I thought you just stopped short of sort of giving them something back because it was a vote on account. My question is that, you know, salary people are paying 30% today, whereas corporates pay 22% tax. In the longer term, directionally... Corporates meaning as an entity. Yes, that's right. So I'm saying in the longer term, directionally, do you think you would align this in some way or the other? And I'm talking about the longer term. Well, the direct taxation reforms are a steady job in the pipeline and some results come out and more work is happening. So direct taxation is something on which we want ease of the taxpayers' facilitation which has to be improved. And also one of the things happened yesterday, one of the serving the customer better business in the taxation regime happened yesterday. But more work can always be done. Yes, so salary can be more hopeful in the coming days in your July budget. I'm not saying anything now. No, I know that. I mean, directionally over the long term. You managed inflation very well in the past few years. You know, what about food inflation? You know, that's really pinching the common man. Pulses are up 20%, vegetables, 27%. Any plan to sort of rein in food inflation? See, food inflation cannot be spoken as one basket or one item. It has so many different components. If pulses are becoming more expensive, we are import dependent to meet adequacy in meeting their demand in the sense we are not self-sufficient. We need to import to meet our demand. And when you depend on imports, the prices are determined by the supplier, not by us. So when it is pulse or dal, where the prices have to be controlled, so much has to be done well in advance. If you know your crop is only X and not what you need, then you pre-plan imports. You have to touch on very many countries to get the imports and so on. And in that, of course, the role of the traders is very important. That is one thing. Second is you're looking at other seasonal vegetables which can equally be affected by drought or by excess rain. No import substitution or no import in the last minute can help us if suddenly one particular crop, say of potatoes or onions or tomatoes are lost, the last minute procurement from somewhere else is also fraught with difficulties. So the treatment for controlling price for pulses and the perishable crops and let's say rice which can be stored are all very different. And that is why there is a committee in government of India which looks into this and makes sure that periodically you're able to get in time those based on estimates. It's an ongoing job. It's not with a deadline. It has to keep happening. And I think largely the committee has been successful. Otherwise we couldn't have been closer to the policy range. That's right. I had interviewed the Prime Minister in 2016 as early as that and he spoke about the white paper. He said that we should come out with the white paper because we inherited an economy which was in the fragile five. And that was early, just two years into the government and what we had to really do to drag it out of the levels it had reached. You spoke similarly yesterday about the white paper and you said it was a Herculean task to bring the economy back from the brink. What is the idea behind the white paper? Why now? And will it be another stick to beat the opposition with? See, you're right in pointing out that the Honorable Prime Minister has spoken about it even in 2016 in your interview. Then it was so many different sections of our society themselves suggested to us that you better bring a white paper out. To say why Indian economy has reached the fragile five. To say why our banks had become such a black hole, nothing could be restored of the banks. Banks were all in deep trouble. Look at the number of NPAs and the value of the NPAs. Meaning what was the original value and to what extent they had reached almost close to valueless positions.  Why? Even minerals, every area was ridden with problems. Now, if you're talking of corruption, well, it's one thing, it goes to the court, people get punished and then the monies are given back or not given back. Values are retrieved or not retrieved. That's one side of the story. But what impact it left on the economy? To restore your banks back to health, to make sure your country is safe with adequate strategic equipment given to defense personnel. To make sure that your minds which are wealth under the earth. Meaning inside the earth under the soil. To use them for the benefit of the country rather than to use them as one instrument through which you line your own pocket. What implications it had on the economy? Banks not being healthy, minds being given to brothers and sisters who did not want to extract the mineral for the benefit of the country. Spectrum allocations, if it had happened in time, I didn't have to spend so much to restore BSNL to have 2G or 4G in time. And what implication does it have on the country when 4G is not available in time whether whereas the whole world is talking about 5G. So the kind of impact that it had, the mismanagement, it is not just talking about policy paralysis for a fragile five. It's talking about every one of these steps which one in morally, which number one morally was immoral in the sense was not right. And equally the kind of positive effect if it had happened very well in a transparent fashion it would have had on the economy. We lost 10 glorious years and to restore it to that position back and then to pull it up to now get closer to the world's third largest economy is a herculean task which I'm grateful this country had a Prime Minister like Modiji who single-mindedly said I will restore this economy back. It's my service to the nation. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened. So why the white paper now? We've had 10 years and prior to that there was a 10 years where you saw all this happening. Policy paralysis, corruption, nation losing its endowments and so on. 10 years under Prime Minister Modi. What kind of course corrections had to happen? What kind of restoring confidence had to happen? What kind of pulling back from rut that had to happen? And equally making sure you're purchasing the equipments, you're removing BSNL from distress, you're making sure BSNL employees are given their due, you're making sure the country gets 5G, not just 4G. Look at the coverage India has in 5G today. I agree. All this and to make sure that the investor confidence is not just intact but is growing that within a matter of eight years I would say we've reached 596 billion US dollars as our foreign exchange reserve. Just compare that with the last 10 years. At least for the sake of the elected honorable representatives who are sitting in the parliament, they should know what was it then, what effort it took to restore it here and what we should not therefore ever imagine or dream of doing in personal interest, forgetting the nation. Why now? Parliament should know. Two, at that time had Prime Minister Modi not taken the call that in the interest of our nation, I would not bring it out. He didn't bring the paper then, white paper then because you put the nation first. You say, if I do it now, ha, I can be happy but the confidence in our country would have been lost. Investors wouldn't have come. Our own people would have lost faith in the systems. They would say, oh my God, this government will come each away and go, that next government can come. It'll do its own, but we're all languishing. The faith in institutions, in government, in leaders, in politics would have been lost in the minds of people. And I'm so grateful that the Prime Minister didn't do it then. He restored it all, put India on such a wonderful track towards becoming third largest economy and then so that all of us know what it took and what we shouldn't do in the future, this paper. So when do you table it? Well, soon. The passionate reply from you, I must say.