 Playing with your food, that's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid stand mixer in attachments. Welcome to the British Library food season, generously supported by KitchenAid. I'm Angela Clutton. I'm the guest director of the food season and it's been my incredible pleasure this year to work with Polly Russell, who's the founder of the season and its curator for the three years that's been running and together with programs this season of events. You're about to watch the second event of our Saturday afternoon. It's an event called Beyond the Food Bank, exploring initiatives which are really empowering communities through food and with just finished session, which are looking at food solutions and problems in a slightly different way. We have a chair, Stephen Armstrong. He'll be introducing our wonderful panel, but I'm gonna introduce Stephen. So Stephen is a journalist and author. He writes for Sunday Times, a telegraph wired in the garden, suggestion five nonfiction books, including the new poverty for which he traveled across Britain to tell the stories of those who are most vulnerable. Before I hand over to Stephen, just a little bit of housekeeping. You can all ask questions as we go along. They'll be dealt with towards the end of the session. But if you scroll up on your screen, you can see where you can put your questions in. You can join in conversation on social media or the handles are visible. You can find out more about our speakers too. There are bios all there. And there is also a bookshop where you can have a look and see titles written by our guests. So I think the only thing to do now is hand over to you, Stephen, and I hope you all enjoy it. Thank you very much. So what I'm gonna do briefly is introduce our panel by name, but then ask them one at a time to explain the remarkable projects that they've really bootstrapped in so many imaginative and unusual different ways, but all using food to effectively change the world, really. So we have Barney Horton, who's the founder and director of Bristol Square Food Foundation. We have Mary Brennan, who's the co-founder of Community Unity in Leeds and the Cross Green Growing Together. We have Jess Thompson, who's the founder of My Grateful. And we have Kemi Akinola, who is the founder and managing director of Be Enriched and the Brixton People's Kitchen, so. So Barney, perhaps you could talk a bit about Bristol Square Food Foundation, how you came to do it and what you're working both. Yeah, hi there. Yeah, so we began Square Food Foundation in 2011. I think it's about the same time as the Brixton Kitchen, actually, that Kemi is involved in. So it's been going for now for 11 years, basically. No, whatever it is, I can't think even. And we're based in South Bristol, which is known as a deprived part of the city of Bristol, which is, of course, a city well known for its food culture and its sort of diverse and very eclectic restaurants and food projects. We're in a community center, which used to be a secondary school and we're in the school kitchen. So we occupy a very appropriate space in a way for a cookery school. And we're a charity and we've been a charity, I think now for about four or five years. Our kind of mission is really our sort of strap line is to teach people from all walks of life to cook good food from scratch. And as we all know, all of us on the panel and everybody involved in this conversation knows that there's a great deal more to that than just cooking and eating food. And I'm sure we're gonna be talking a bit about that later. We work with quite a number of different groups and organizations in the city. So we work with care homes, with sex workers, with young people, with we have a sort of Monday morning over 55s club. We work with young people who aren't in educational training. And we also work with children's food clubs. But perhaps at the heart of everything we're doing at the moment is a project with a primary school just across the road from Square Food Foundation, which in itself has huge deprivation problems on almost every indices that you would be able to look at. Mary, why don't you pick up and talk about your route to the phenomenal set of adventures you've been on to get here? I'm Mary Brennan and I live in an area of Leeds called Cross Green. It's made up of three areas, Cross Green, Richmond Hill and East End Park. But they're all quite, they're all linked to each other but people seem to live quite separately and stay in their own parts. We formed a group called Community Unity 17 years ago now and we've been a charity for about eight years. And in this we did family events, family parties, play schemes with the local children. And then the housing stock in our area seemed to change quite dramatically and quickly. And a lot of the, through the big old Victorian, through the terraces, but turned into HMOs. So there were a lot of single people living very lonely lives. And we noticed that quite a lot of them was hungry at times. So as a group we just started buying extra tins and so on in the supermarket and handing them out at my front door at that time. And we thought this was a really sad situation, you know, for people's dignity that we were doing it this way. So we asked St Hildes Church in Cross Green if we could use their communes to roam and they welcomed us for no charge to come in. So we started a Wednesday, the Wednesday meals and we cooked a meal together more or less. We didn't plan it that way, but we opened the door at 10 o'clock to prepare for 12 o'clock for everyone to eat. But everyone came at 10 o'clock. So it worked out quite well. We all did it together. Then we all ate together. And we've been doing that for nine years in January. And it's a really nice day. It's quite intergenerational. We've never advertised it. But first we just invited people. Then other people invited other people. And it's just gone from there. And then we was approached about seven years ago by Hyde Park Source, a not-for-profit gardening organization in Leeds, to grow on the railway bridge, which we did, which took off really well. And as it was a walkthrough for the estate for people to get from one part of the estate to the other and to the school, it worked really well because then everybody passing got involved. And then we was offered a bigger piece of land by the council that had one time had some old garages there. There was still one person using one of the garages. And so we were able to have three of the garages, one for a social space and the other two for our tools. And it took us a long, long time to clear the area. It were really bad. You know, there were carpets, there were everything. And this is on another railway. We're still on a railway embankment. And at the time we were having a group repair grant in the area. So they helped us clear. Else we'd still be there clearing now, I think. So we have, with that's now last year, we knocked the garages down. And we, with the help of Hypat Sauce, they helped us find to get some containers. So it was actually two containers and they refurbished them and we have a kitchen. So that's been really good for us because now, because the land is quite big, so we're having enough. We can grow, we can grow plenty of produce and share plenty of produce. And the children always came on Thursdays when everybody gardened, the children joined in. But for the last two years now, Hypat Sauce again helped us out and got some funding for some activity workers. So now we can, the children can have their own time as well and learn a bit, you know, learn more about the garden. And so on. And we have quite a lot of fun. It's really good, it's really good time. You know, in the six weeks holidays, we have some real fun there. And now we've got our hub. It was quite different, obviously, this year. So we could, instead of trying to cook it outside, we could just have a star food, bring it in and cook with that. And so all the children got involved, cooking, washing up, eating the food. It's really good, the healthy holiday scheme. We've been really blessed with community foundation openers for that funding. It's been a massive asset to the community, especially because we're living in a community that's quite transitional. And for our refugees and asylum seekers, for them to come when they do live here, when they're in our area, it helps, you know, with the English and, you know, some really lovely friendships have formed that wouldn't have happened, you know, if we didn't have this, because obviously, now the camp all got school in our area because of the end of places for everyone, school in the same area. So this gives them an opportunity as well to meet children from other schools, you know, and they bring the friends along and the parents come along and sometimes the parents bring us food that they've cooked, you know, that we wouldn't normally eat. So it's, it all works in quite well, because then we can feed people on a Wednesday and ask them to work on a Thursday, so it's good for us. Brilliant. Thank you, Mary. Kelly, just about your route, I mean, both being rich and people's kitchen, which is sort of meshed now, I think. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, firstly, just thank you, British Library for inviting me to be a speaker. In this talk about community and culture, and I think that's the essence really of being rich. We initially set up the organisation actually as a youth charity. We were working with young people who were seeking asylum. I worked for another charity and all the young people who had British passports were basically allowed to do overseas projects, and the young people who were seeking asylum had to stay in the UK. So I set up a project where I would take them to Scotland, which really is another country, but it's also not another country. So they didn't have to leave via plane, and we just got a train and we went up to Scotland for a week. And I wasn't interested in food myself, too much at that point in time, but for some reason though, we went to work with a charity in Leith in Scotland that used gardening and growing as a way of involving young people with learning difficulties and other young people who were in the care system over there and engaging them. So we went to work up there, and that was a really wonderful experience for those young people, which kind of opened my eyes. Some of the limitations of, well, soon to be our limitations of having a British passport. So leaving that organisation, I basically had a charity and I had to do something with it. Well, actually I didn't get my charity status until two years ago, but I had an organisation. And it came to my attention that there was all this food being served away in some of our local, I live in Tooting, the best place on Earth. And it came to my attention, there was all this food being thrown away at one of the local supermarkets. And at that time, having experienced hunger very recently in that period myself, it seemed like a great idea as a way of bringing people together. So, you know, community and culture. We were all about the community, the culture of the community, so, you know, community and culture, we were all about the community before the food. So we sat up a meal, it was supposed to be once a month, bringing people, local people together, just to enjoy a lovely, a lovely hot meal cooked by volunteers. Not a new idea at all. Loads of people do it all around the country. So I can't claim that as like my idea. So we set that project up, and what was really important to me was that young people, that wouldn't normally be engaged in that sort of activity, would be involved. So I was mentoring young people who were at risk of violence at that point in time. I know they call them young offenders, but a lot of them haven't actually offended. So it was like some of those, and it was about taking them out of just gardening and painting walls, which is normally the kind of jobs that they get given and bringing them into the kitchen. The young people that I mentored, quite often would tell me that they were told by another child how to do the crime better the next time. And that was what really struck me as that, that's not, that shouldn't be happening. So we brought them into the kitchen, and we make them like make pastry and do very delicate things and they would get things wrong and they would cry and you would see these big boys with muscles crying because the pastry didn't come out the way that they wanted or they didn't think that the meal had been presented in the right possible way. And they were presenting food to a lot of people of the similar age of people that they had perpetrated their crimes against if they had or hadn't. Maybe they had really. And it was as if some of the older people who were coming to these meals knew that what they needed was this kind of encouragement. So they would like make them sit down in front of them. I never told any of the older people any of this. And you make them sit down in front of them and then speak to them about their lives. Again, it made these boys, mainly boys, they would run outside and start crying and just be like, I can't believe I did that to someone of this person's age. So that was great really in terms of reparations. But the project was really only supposed to last three months. And then it's now eight years, nine years, because word got out. That's really how I put it. Word got out and other organisations asked us, will you come and do a project with us? Will you do a project with us? And we realised that although our project was mainly about, we set it up about a community and our strap line is enriching community through food, we realised that we were also really affecting change when it came to hunger. And after hunger came the community building. Shall I stop there? Well, can you talk about the bus? I think the bus is such a brilliant idea. Right, well, OK, so nine years on. So we've got three community meals, two-ting, elephant and castle, Battersea, only one of which is in operation right now. And the other thing, I mean, as time has gone on, we've been part of the sustainable food cities movement and we've been looking at access to food. So, you know, we ask these people regularly, do you have access to food? Do you have money? So on so forth. And it became apparent that the issues really are around the cost of food and access to food. So what better way to bring food to people than a double-decker bus that we can literally drive to them providing the food that they need at a reasonable cost, which is like two-thirds cheaper than in the supermarket and allow people to buy food in a very, what do you call it, without the stigma of having to go to a food bank but you're able to pay for your food with a cafe on the top and also doing a bit of food cooking on the bottom floor and we should be getting the keys next week. And you also have the existence advice and doctors and stuff upstairs at the bus. So people, I think what you said is when people's bellies are full, that's when they can start to worry about the other parts of their life sometimes. What he said. There we go. So Jess, how, tell us about My Grateful and how you came up with the idea and what you're doing now. Okay, hello everybody. So My Grateful is a social enterprise where refugees teach their traditional cuisines to paying customers. So I think it was five years ago I graduated from university, went out to teach English for the British Council in a Spanish enclave in Morocco called Saita. I'd never heard of it before, but I was just allocated there. When I got there, I realized there was a huge humanitarian crisis happening. The enclave has a 100 meter high fence that migrants from all over Africa will try and climb over and it's like a gateway into Europe. But they're held there in detention camps. I got very involved in the charity work there. Lots of people coming over by sea. I had to attend a lot of funerals of people that we couldn't identify because they were trying to make this journey into Europe. And I think I became quite emotionally traumatized by the experience just being on the front line of the refugee crisis and hearing about the reasons why people were risking their lives to get into Europe. I was then in Dunkirk refugee camp looking after families that had been there for over five years living in slum conditions in one of the richest countries in the world. So I think I was feeling quite angry about the injustice of people being forced to leave their homes and then there's no kind of safe place for them to rebuild their lives. I think I came back to the UK. I was working in a refugee charity in East London running a time bank skill exchange project. And so one particular day I was asking a group of 10 refugee women what skill would you like to share with your community? And they were all women who were highly qualified had been forced to leave their countries left behind successful careers and were unemployed in the UK often because of language barriers their qualifications weren't recognised. And as we went around the room every single one of them said I'd really love to teach my community my traditional cooking because that's something I feel very confident with. So that was when I had the idea well why don't we try and make this your job? So that was three years ago and we've now run 900 cookery classes. We have 45 chefs. So the idea is any refugee with a passion for cooking we train them to become a professional cookery class teacher. And the main benefit that we see is the confidence that it brings to them in sharing their skills and being the leader and the teacher developing their English skills a lot of them will then go on to pursue careers in the food industry or setting up their own business. Currently half of our chefs don't have the right to work because they're asylum seekers and that is also really that's kind of where we see the most benefit at the moment is just giving them a sense of dignity through a really difficult time. So yeah to give an example our Nigerian chef she had been waiting for over 18 years to get her status in the UK and taught her first cookery class and said it was like this beautiful healing moment for her where she remembered that she was a human that could really offer something and was she I think it was what she said was she felt very celebrated and yeah I think that's I didn't have a background in food at all but the same time that I set my grateful was also the Brexit vote and a lot of stuff in the news around migrants being an issue for society and that was something that I didn't agree with at all so I also have observed how food unites people it's for us we find the cookery classes are a really good way to challenge negative perceptions of migration because it offers this very positive interaction where people unite over food rather than thinking about their differences yeah and I think what's been good about the model is that pre-COVID 85% of our income came from the cookery class sales so we operate as a business not so easy now but we are a registered charity but it has been a real success in terms of how a social enterprise model can get its income from sales rather than grants great and so for all of you really maybe in a different order maybe on my screen it goes kemi, Jess, Mary and Barney so let's do it in that order food all of you almost perhaps with the exception of Barney almost came to food almost accidentally not quite but it wasn't necessarily what you were doing at the beginning what is it about food that allows you to build community draw people together add all this other stuff restore self-esteem unite people in a way that if you were handing out books perhaps you might not have the same response what do you feel what's particularly special about the relationship people have with food and with people who share food kemi, would you I think that well food is a basic need you need food you need warmth you need shelter so if you satisfy one of those needs then I think people feel like they're ready to open up I definitely find that when people have sat sit down at a community meal and they eat it's after they've eaten that they feel ready to talk or even while they're eating there's something about the ritual of eating in a group as well it's like one of the most natural things that humans do really sit down together and break bread I feel that that really restores a lot of humanity for it's not just elderly people that come to our meals we have like people at risk of homelessness, people recovering from substance abuse and just people who just live nearby and are pretty lonely middle aged white males as well who don't know how to cook they also turn up to eat and everyone it's just a hodgepodge of people just sat around and you just feel able to talk I think and then from that what we use it as is a way to signpost people to deal with other issues and things that they may have Jess how about you what's food special I think for the group that I work with particularly when English it's not so easy for them to communicate with the host nation in English food is like a language in itself so that's being really nice kind of seeing how relationships can develop through teaching others about your food kind of the everyone loves food so there's that like instant gratitude and connection that people feel when they try someone's food yeah so I think it's more about the it being like this food being a uniting thing that everyone can enjoy and I think even whenever I tell people about the Migrate for Cookery classes it's very rare that someone says I don't want to go to that because everyone likes to eat they might not like to cook necessarily but they definitely like to eat so it's one thing that everyone can get involved with Mary why is food the way that you've connected with people even everybody likes eating everybody needs to eat but I think when it's in a such a relaxed atmosphere that people know they can just come you know it's not out there they can just pop in it becomes very intergenerational so the younger ones can learn from the older ones and vice versa and it just becomes something that everyone can look forward to from any walk of life you know just come join in and I think that's what makes so many unlikely friendships formed and changes people's perceptions different people and it just naturally brings everyone together in a natural way you know not in a uniform way it's just a natural thing that everybody comes through that door and gets a welcome gets a meal gets someone to sit next to to talk to so it just it works out really well I think that food is the centre of most things it's what we all do as families so then losing your room they become your family and that's the feeling you create and everyone's relaxed eats and gets on with it Barney what about you I was just echoing everyone else's perceptions of what changes what happens when people cook and eat together there's something about the psychology of it and we use words like empowerment and confidence and inclusion and they're all real they become real in the act of cooking and eating together and it gets rid of so many inhibitions and in the case of the work that we do in Bristol it's really about we're working with a lot of people who don't have any kind of voice who are not used to talking about anything least of all themselves or each other and sitting around a table or cooking together enables that conversation to begin and so and that of course is the beginning of something else it's a gateway into understanding other things about each other it's about trust and about respect and it's about removing those areas of shame and despair so there's something about the simple act of cooking and eating which brings hope as well so thank you now we're in the Covid years and in one sense the need to come together has never been more important but it's much much harder and also we're finding a lot of people who are falling through the gaps who are reaching the end of the furlough who have found their lives made immeasurably harder by the process of the virus and I wondered what effect you've noticed things that you can't do that you used to do things that you now have to do just to keep people going what effect has Covid had on the way that you work maybe start with you Jess and then go Kemi, Barney, Mary so pre lockdown we were running 80 kukuri classes a month with the migratory chefs who were teaching the public but we had to cancel all of them so that was quite a scary time but the whole chef community agreed that they wanted to try teaching kukuri classes online so within a few weeks we actually were teaching or we were running 10 online kukuri classes a week I think we kind of caught the wave of the zoom craze because all our classes were selling out everyone was in lockdown quite bored so people would buy their own ingredients one of our chefs would teach a dinner how to cook it around an hour and a half so that was going well and then in July people started going to the pubs everyone got a bit fed up of zoom so now online classes are not selling so well can't really go back to running real life classes just yet so yeah it's a bit of what's challenging is that we really want to keep our community earning money but also connected and out of isolation so it's just quite hard to do that especially with all the different regulations changing and so making plans is difficult yeah but I don't want to sound too negative but it is a challenging time yeah Kevin how about you so I'm also involved in another organisation a social enterprise Brixton people's kitchen and what the difference between both organisations is being rich goes into areas and sets up these community meals Brixton people's kitchen as a social enterprise has a cafe space in voxel the aim of which is to help train people and educate people in the hospitality industry so what we did is brought both of these organisations together because that meant that we had a venue and we actually did a lot of we got some funding from charities councils and we managed to send food out hot food out to people as well as buying some food and using surplus food to send people packages of food so we had like in the height of the lockdown we had 400 volunteers helping us on a weekly basis it was incredible and I can't even believe that we did it I haven't even had time to really process everything that happened there and so we sent out five or six thousand boxes of food some of them with the council as well out to people around Lambeth and Wandsworth which was amazing but obviously doesn't have it's not sustainable so what we did is we put our cafe into a community shop again thinking of those ideas around dignity and allowing people choice because that was something that wasn't very clear it wasn't there at all when people were just being sent these boxes of food so we turned it into a community shop bought our own food made sure that there was some culturally relevant food available for people to buy and we make a total loss on it it was propped up by grants and we're enabling people to eat long term and what we have seen is that a lot of people who are like Uber drivers a lot of them started coming to shop with us security guards were shopping with us because they were all out of work but they also didn't have enough money so they were able to purchase the things that they needed for a fiver for a fiver and we haven't seen an end to that a lot of parents as well parents with young children or with multiple children coming to do their weekly shop with us I don't see that disappearing in fact I see that becoming more and what we have to do as an organisation is work out how we can make it sustainable or find someone to just like give us loads of money Barney how about you well as soon as lockdown began obviously all our classes ended as Jess was saying as well and so what we started was to feed the families of children who would have otherwise been getting free school meals we started feeding maybe 20 or so families a day and then ended up within about three weeks feeding maybe 300 people one way or another every day a two course meal and we were supported amazingly by chefs who obviously didn't have any work and also by restaurants who had a lot of ingredients in their freezers and fridges and store cupboards and so we were able to sort of draw on all that and it was a really incredible moment in time when it felt like the whole city and I know it wasn't quite like that came together with a sort of common purpose and put value on humanity and food in the same moment it was you know people in production in retail local growers and of course restaurants and it felt like there was something in certainly in Bristol felt like it had the potential to become something much stronger was it felt like there was a foundation of a new food culture in the city I don't know for so now we are we've turned a lot of what we're doing into working with with the parents of some of the children in the school who are helping us continue to produce these meals not on such a volume as we were doing we've also introduced a sort of DIY meal kits where we do a little video and send it out to the school and they come and pick up the kits and then they look at the video and get the recipe and so it's kind of a move slightly beyond just giving the families ready-made meals but certainly we benefited from a connection with the hospitality industry which I feel has a future and we are really looking to work with restaurants in the future now to see if we can kind of build on that on that relationship Mary how about you how has Covid affected we had to stop the Wednesday meal because the room the church's community room isn't that big even though we managed to fit everybody on the Wednesday previous to Covid but so we have them we started off Monday, Wednesday and Friday we gave out food it was very important to us that we gave out fresh food instead of just handing people a package with tins in and dried food so we we got funding and we gave out some meat vegetables fresh fruits and then fresh bread fresh milk and added some tins to it to last them through and we was doing that Monday Wednesday and Friday and now we just do it on Wednesday and Friday we don't know how long we're going to be able to sustain it and at the moment for us in Leeds it's not any going to be any easier on people because we're in a strict from midnight last night we've gone into a strict lockdown but so on some people it's going to be really tough and I think a lot of the older people we used to deliver to them so a lot of the older people and some of them want the fact of the food the families if they were lucky enough to have a family they drop the food for them you know at the doorstep but for some they want the food we just seen a different face from the end of the path in the week and so on and it was very very difficult for single parents I felt at first because they couldn't take the younger children to the supermarkets so that's why we needed to you know have the fresh food and like now some people that we did feed have come off the furlough and gone back to work but we feel now that the furlough is finishing there would be so many more people that don't have a job at all so it's been pretty difficult on the older generation as well as the younger children as well because the older people have stayed in so long that they can't walk as well and they've got more frightened to go out the younger children are just totally confused why they can't come and do things but I think it's just a matter of keeping going and keeping everybody's spirits up our lovely tomatoes fed everybody last Wednesday we managed to give everybody some homegrown tomatoes and we had a queue of about 30 and that was single about 10 single I would say 10 to 15 single people and 30 families so it's it's quite a lot of people that are going without food at this moment in time I would think not just where I live I mean everywhere that leads us neatly on to the first of our audience questions we've got a lot of audience questions actually thank you very much particularly the one that I'm going to start with because it's a nice segue and I'm always grateful for a segue so what I might do just to try and get as many of the questions answered as possible so that people we only got 15 minutes is to ask a couple of them together because they sort of cover the same ground the first one that's twinned is what would you want people who are lucky enough to be food secure to understand about the impact of food poverty on people's lives and I guess that's whether that's long-term or this current sudden shock and do you think what do you think the role of government or local authorities should be in supporting initiatives like yours in tackling that so I don't know if all of you have a point or whether maybe two of you wanted to answer that or do you ever feel particularly strongly that they'd like to talk about the okay brilliant can we do a start and then we'll do someone else and then we'll move on to the next question so yeah what would you want people who are lucky enough to be food secure to understand and what do you think should be the role of government or local authorities I'll be very short so it'll be fine I think people who are food secure have a misguided idea that people who are food insecure don't know how to budget in fact that's inaccurate they know how to budget incredibly well they have so much to like balance and the fact that they've chosen not to eat because they've had to pay all their other bills and things doesn't mean that they don't know how to manage money at all and I think government need to take a responsibility for food and security we're here for organizations and none of us are a government organization because they won't take responsibility food should be a human right in my opinion we didn't want to have anything to add to that I was just going to say I think what food secure people can do best of all as far as I'm concerned is come and work with us at Square Food Foundation as a volunteer because that does so many things on so many levels we probably have about 60 volunteers you know on our database who come on a regular basis and they are part of the community of Square Food and they learn and we learn and it's a really really important connection so if anybody has the time get involved in any one of the projects that were on this panel or indeed anyone that they might be near so it's a but I yeah and that's oh yeah I was going to say something about about policy I think what what on top of my wish list for this country is that we have a food literate government and a food literate public health policy at the moment it isn't and I feel that would that would make a big difference to the whole connection and the reality of food poverty and actually that is another beautiful segue loves a way to a question which is great discussion amazing projects thank you very much question really inspiring what change in terms of food policy or attitudes towards food would the panel like to see happen in this country and just we start with you and then maybe Mary see what you think so what yeah what change in terms of food policy or attitudes towards food would you like to see happen in this country yes you may be on I mean I guess where my grateful is involved in this the sort of policy workers more around destitution which is like an extreme well just that a lot of our chefs aren't eligible to benefits and they don't have the right to work so it's a lot of them wouldn't be able to feed themselves so that kind of I think there's just generally a lot of the government needs to make sure that the policies that they introduce enable to feed themselves and yeah I mean I think it feels like in terms of where my grateful differences in organization is that we are not necessarily like we haven't been feeding people during the pandemic or kind of tackling the poorer communities that aren't able to feed themselves and our mission is more around integration so we are where refugees teach essentially the middle classes or the anxious middle who may be skeptical about migration and we are challenging those negative perceptions so I feel like I have slightly less to say on the food policy front I've got another question for you later so there's one Mary what about you do you think that there needs to be a change in terms of food policy or attitude towards food in this country a change in the policies towards the benefits system in the lack of space in between going from one benefit to another people waiting for universal credit eight weeks people when the we first went into the pandemic being 3,000 in the queue on the telephone and everyone talks about the choice between eating your home and eating food well that's wrong there shouldn't be any choices there I feel that people should be able to do both I don't feel it's right that parents are having to go to bed at the same time as the children because that's how far the money will go and I totally agree that it isn't people's inability to budget it's the inability to have enough money to live on I'm not talking about any extras I'm speaking about having just sufficient money to live on yeah yeah so we have a question from someone who's also watching the previous session which was about the problem with the food system as a whole and they ask how do you weigh up the importance of people having access to food even if that food is cheap and not nutritious or the importance of food being sustainable fairly sourced and ethical is there a conflict between just getting the food out to people no matter how low grade it is or should we be making sure that food is sustainable I mean given what you guys have all said I can sort of guess I think your answers but why don't you all take that one and see what you have to say Barney should we start with you and then Mary then Justin I don't think there's a contradiction I of course would say that I think the food should be in itself coming from a good place and sustainable and all the rest of it and I was thinking that there was a UN conference last year on the Convention of the Rights of the Child and I was reading it this morning and it was about getting a legal framework to protect a child's right to a healthy food environment and one of the things they said and I'll read it out is if we are to meet the malnutrition challenge full on we need a scaled up approach that puts children's nutritional rights at the heart of food systems and prioritises nutrition outcomes and other systems and food systems bottom up as well as feeding people so I feel very strongly that we need to look at the whole the food system as a whole not just whether or not children and indeed people who are in food insecurity just getting enough to eat I don't think that's good enough Mary you were taking making very clear that just handing out food is something that you felt comfortable with do you think that which is one more important than the other or should they go hand in hand getting out the food or getting the nutritional food I think we all need to make a stand and try and get nutritional food out there not just for the children for the parents just so a family can not in an evening sitting down and having substantially balanced lovely meal I think every family should be able to do that or every single person or every older person as well because a lot of the older people in society they don't have enough money either I'm coming across that more and more people that just have a state pension that they're finding to pay everything and to be able to find by fresh nutritional food they're struggling Jess how about you well I've learned a lot working with the refugee community that I do around how you can feed yourself nutritionally on a very low budget it has made me reflect on how culture and education do play a big part in what people eat particularly in Britain our national diet is considerably less healthy than a lot of other national diets so even like a lot of the chefs that I work with are very much living in poverty but when they tell me about what they're feeding their family it will be very nutritional soups but I guess that does come down to education where work like Barney's organisation does of trying to educate communities about how they can cook healthy food is so important can we have a few oh yes well that's partly why we started this boss project and I guess the community shop is a bit of a test bunny I don't know what the term is it's a bit of a test for our bus because we realise that there are places where you can't buy nutritional food places like Tesco local and all the locals the food is very expensive so if you can't afford to buy nutritional food you're not going to buy it so by offering another way ensuring that there's another way that you can do community shops as ours what we've seen is that people do make those nutritional choices of their own accord as long as it fits within their budget so partly maybe some of it is about education but I think a big part of it is about price and cost and when it comes down to sustainability of the food that we're buying we definitely keep that in mind and where possible we make those choices right now it seems that some of the choices that we would normally make we're not able to make because we have to make sure that we can afford the food especially because we're basically giving it away and others we've had lots of conversations within our team about organic and local and what is local when it comes to London because it's not really that local and is it that organic so these are conversations we are constantly always having making sure that we can balance the price so four people who are making different choices we've got three minutes left so I'm going to ask one we've got two questions the last one first I'm sorry if you were the first question and we hopefully will get to it but the last one I think that they could value the panel's advice it's from Jude who worked with a team of people running a Covid meal service in Surrey and they offer up freshly cooked meals prepared from surplus foods from supermarkets they know that in their area there's a great need in the community but they're struggling to reach the numbers they know are out there and they know are in need can the panel from their experience suggest an effective way of reaching out and encouraging people to need to accept help and to come to them and I guess part of this about the stigma and so forth so Kemi you seem keen to answer that let's start with you and then anyone else who has anything to say I'm clapping because I know Jude and he volunteered with us for a year to learn how we ran our projects and then set up a project and sorry and I'm so pleased that it's been doing so well it's like it's like wonderful so how do you reach people who are hard to reach you've got to like go to where they are you've got to hand out flyers speak to speak to social workers go to doctor surgeries you know very quickly I would say that's how you do it I agree with Kemi I was just going to say I think you need to connect with other organisations and other people who are already in the work I think that's a really strong way and I think that goes for pretty well all of this this work that we need to build collaborations and partnerships within our cities and our communities I think that's a really effective way of increasing your exposure and your kind of the work that you can do with people Mary yeah I think quite right there I think for us it's been especially in this pandemic it we've been so fortunate that we've been able to work with Richmond Del Aldo reaction the school and main cap you know did all beings we've just all done it together and that way I think you do involve you do find the hidden poverty you know and just walking about your own streets I think you do all the time build up this instinct to know when someone's struggling and you don't make that the point of your first conversation you just talk about anything and then you really do find you know with that encouragement and the trust you know it's all about trust but you do find you know that you would find the hidden poverty because it's very difficult to tell someone that you're not managing you feel such a way about yourself and Jess how do you find people to work with and how do you find people to learn from them how would you encourage him to reach out and get yeah I guess what comes to mind for me is that it's kind of when the migratory chefs come they we're offering them this very kind of dignified way to be involved so essentially they are like very impoverished unemployed, isolated but what they say is that when they come to train as chefs they don't feel like a refugee anymore they don't feel like they have to own that label so it's kind of finding a way to engage with people so that it doesn't feel like a loss of dignity happens that when they reach out but yeah in terms of how we meet our chefs just through referrals from other refugee charities yeah well thank you very much panel I can hear the imaginary applause rising to such a degree that it's almost impossible to be heard right now you can hear the British Library on its feet but all the same just to try and shout it out thank you very much to to Mary Horton to Mary Brennan and to Jess Thompson and now I think we are about to transfer over to Angela thank you Stephen and thank you to all the panel what a completely extraordinary powerful event I think you're absolutely right if we're at the library everyone will be absolutely kind of storming today so huge thanks for everybody there's loads more to come from the British Library food season on Tuesday we're continuing a conversation about food futures carried in steel and kept our many thinking about ways we can better understand and value our food and then next Saturday we have another double bill so we have Jack Monroe, Kimberly Wilson and then Melissa Hemsley and Gelf Alterson if you would like to support the work of the British Library there's a donate button on your screen but for now huge thanks and goodbye to the British Library food season