 When I started an anarchist cookbook, I was trying to push ever so softly, a neglected debate in Britain, the politics of food. In many parts of the world this is a major issue in daily life. In our affluent culture though, it appears that many, even the anarchists, don't regard food as the guarantor of life, health and hence our very existence. In this mini-series, I'm going to explore the issue of food in the affluent world, how its value to our existence as free individuals is neglected, why people need to focus on the practical expression of food sovereignty, and I'll do that by cooking the simplest of foods, bread, soup and pie. As a Russian commentator said recently, you thought politics was something that didn't involve you, and now it's sending you to be killed. The emerging multi-faceted crisis of global food supply has been created by political choice, operating, for the most part, outside the political debate which most people perceive. Governments set food policy for ideological and economic reasons, and most of those reasons do not protect, as a priority, the well-being of the public or their long-term future. Instead, it enhances the economic power of the asset-owning class at the heart of the 1%. Archbishop Howard Kamaro famously said, When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. Why doesn't the popular discussion of food recognize its innately political nature? Why has food become a signifier of status and affluence, not a means to guarantee general human well-being? And conversely, why is the failure of states to guarantee a right to food, and the right to food sovereignty, the greatest political challenge to our future well-being? Unless people wake up to that, rather like those indifferent Russian citizens, the developing global food crisis will upend the presently insulated, indifferent and comfortable lifestyle of those in the West, for which the recent cost of living crisis has only been a brief taste of what is to come. The radicals of the 17th to 19th century knew this. Their politics was far more tangible. It was about food, shelter, and meeting the basics of life. As industrialism doled people's senses to the essentials of sustaining life, so the political debates which occupy people's minds drifted to Maud's more esoteric first world issues. This isn't a new problem. It was lamented by the anarchist Peter Kapokin in his 1906 book The Conquest of Bread. Whether the leaders belong to the middle class or the working classes, it was always the middle class ideas which prevailed. They discussed various political questions at length, but forgot to discuss the question of bread. I love food. I like growing it. I like foraging for it. I like preparing it. I like preserving and storing it. And for all of that practical effort, I like feeding it to family and friends. For me, food is the basis of all of the parts of our lifestyle. Food is a connection to our authentic biological nature as living creatures, sharing a world of a host of other creatures in a complex global ecology. Get that one thing right, and all the other parts of your chosen lifestyle are negotiable. It's taken a long time to create the materials in this mini-series. Truth be told, it's actually really annoying to have to interrupt the joyful process of food preparation by trying to film it, or worse, weighing the ingredients. Instead of rushing to publish this series, over 2022, I produced some cooking-free videos around the subject of the right to food, and how that intersects with the origins of the cost of living crisis, just to test people's reactions to these ideas. While positive, I felt the response to those videos was still ignorant of the innately political nature of food within our lives, and why the alternatives to that process are based within anarchist ideas, as they require us to collectivise and take control of the natural resources communities require to ensure their future, sustainable supply of food. Their future episodes will focus on food preparation. In this part, I'll talk about the big idea that a successful lifestyle must be based on access to sufficient healthy food. Our food habits and expression of our life I've perceived the politics of the land and food all my life, from learning as a child to grow food on our family's allotment, and why that was important for our family's well-being. That allotment doesn't exist now, it's an industrial estate, and if we have a crisis of food quality, food banks, and poverty in Britain today, it's because the local support mechanisms which once enabled people to feed themselves have been dismantled by neoliberalism's 40-year project to asset-strip the British state. Like those awakened in Russians mentioned earlier, I could introduce this series as some hardcore, but perhaps boring analysis to the politics of food. Instead, I'll just describe my average week while I was writing this script, in September 2022. We live on a minimal income, that's a conscious decision, a trade-off between being able to live and follow our creative passions, and living in a way where our material desires demand that we have proper jobs to fund that lifestyle. Therefore, like those who the media describe as being in poverty, how we feed ourselves, stay warm, and meet life's everyday material challenges, it's more significant for us than the average, i.e. middle-class family. On Monday, my week began by making bread, three large loaves of blended wholemeal white sourdough. Each probably costs around a pound a loaf to make, a few pence cheaper than a bag of sliced industrial white bread, and probably much less than half the cost of something similar in the supermarket. But the prices are relevant, it tastes lovely, it's way better for you than industrial bread, and making it is a joy. Over the summer, we feel a wonder of our freezer with fresh raspberries, picked from our small plot of next-to-no maintenance raspberry bushes in the garden. That four square meter plot probably produced getting on for a hundred pounds, shop-equivalent price, of raspberries this year. We five or six kilos in the freezer, we also ate a lot fresh, and then we distributed the excess to our neighbours. In return, a neighbour had just given us about six kilos of fresh pears from their tree, we ate some, and on Thursday I turned much of the rest into pear pies to store in the freezer for later. Such examples of cooperative food culture are a natural part of human communities across the globe, and are innately political. They express the basic ideas of non-economic exchange and reciprocity, which operate across human societies, albeit one which Western economics has re-engineered into a hierarchical, non-recibical and exploitative process. We don't have access to land to grow food. The allotments where I grew food as a child are now industrial units, and our small house has little space to store or grow food. The situation where an economic elite controls access to land for their exclusive benefit is a political choice. It's not a technical inevitability, because that's not the situation which existed here locally just a century ago. The way we use our raspberries and the reciprocal pears, an example of time-shifting food calories, more boringly called food preservation. For centuries, human communities have stored food, shifting the calories available in times of abundance to support their lives in the hard times of the hungry season, and the closer those communities are to the poles, the more deeply ingrained these food storage practices become in local traditional cultures. In this alleged age of abundance, less romantically named the post-scarcity economy, that idea has been lost. People have traded work in this industrialized, highly technical society to produce an income to supply their engineered desire for goods on demand. But as was shown in the recent supply chain crisis, that's an allusion based upon the seamless operation of logistics chains, and if that seamless operation is perturbed, the supermarket shelves empty fairly quickly. After a supermarket shop in the middle of the week, I had to rearrange the Brexit box. As well as the freezer, to manage our more mundane urban existence, we have something recently named the Brexit box. Large plastic boxes stored in a cupboard containing bags and boxes of dried, tinned and bottled foods. In fact, we've used this tactic for many years, as a result of being members of the food cooperative during the 1980s and 1990s when we used to buy large quantities of food in bulk, until that kind of hippie food became fashionable, and was cheaper to buy in the local shops. Since Brexit, we've expanded our storage to deal with rising prices. It acts like a buffer. We buy an excess of goods when they're reduced in price, we store the excess in the boxes, and then we use our stock rather than buy full price goods each week to save money. Ideally, when the goods are on special offer, we buy enough to last until the next special offer, but with the important restriction that they will all get used before they go out of date. On Saturday, I had my regular walk out into the countryside. On the way back into town, I collected two kilos of blackberries, and on my return, before I even take my boots off, they're dunked in water to remove the cobwebs and fizzle down, drained, and then put in the freezer. Like raspberries, blackberries are a treat for the autumn and winter mumps, providing valuable vitamins and minerals on those dark, cold days. Yes, you could just buy orange juice, but these provide not only free nutrition, they're also an emotional, evocative, smell and flavour of the late summer that cheers the spirit in the dark days, way more than the glass of orange juice ever could. Why go to all this effort? Well, personally it's not an effort, it's fun. More importantly, it's about being able to freely assemble the lifestyle I want, rather than having to follow a prescribed pattern. When I tell people about our lifestyle, a common reaction is, I don't have time for that. That's precisely the point. By not having a conventional nine-to-five job, I have the freedom to do this, and in return, I can pursue the kinds of work I want to do. Of course, the cost of not having that regular job is that, willingly, I forego many of the material things other people consider normal. I don't drive. I don't have foreign holidays. I don't have a mobile phone. That one's getting hard these days. And I tend to wear what clothes I have to destruction. Friends who live a far more off-grid existence than me, based upon permaculture principles, often map their lifestyle. These plans illustrate how each part functions, sometimes to the level of individual plants or equipment, to enable their lifestyle as a whole to operate successfully. The diagram shows a fairly simple map of our home food system. If we had a large garden and storage space, we could expand this to favour the garden and foraging far more, and rely less upon conventional supermarket shopping. That would also significantly reduce our costs. In reality, we have to work within the restrictions the urban system places upon us, which ultimately means paying the higher costs that urban living entails due to the barriers British society erects to the self-sufficient options for living. If our everyday lifestyle is in doubt, be that because of Russian guest blockades, climate change, or an economically inept government, then the only true response is to focus on the real things in our lives, not abstract political or economic ideas. To adapt to inevitable future change, what you have to focus on is the boring, humdrum details of how we eat every day and how we sustain that. In the end, that all relies on one thing, practical skills. What we proclaim is the right to well-being, well-being for all. Politics is boring, even if you're in the 10-20% who the mainstream political debate addresses, it's still something not to actively participate in. Today, both politics and economics are abstract, operating outside of most people's direct experience, and in fact it's most people's direct experience which those in power rarely address these days. Worse still, those trying to change the world, then react to that irrelevant political debate, also talk in abstract ideas, and so don't infuse people's vision for change. There are always alternatives. If someone, for example, Margaret Thatcher, says there is no alternative, then inevitably there's some deeper ideological motive in that statement which seeks to restrict your available choices. That's what this mini-series, Bread Soup and Pie, is all about. It focuses on the basic issues of how we can organise our lives to meet our basic need for food, and by meeting our basic need for food, enable those other options to take place, irrespective of the options we are told to follow by the suicide cult of the dominant consumer culture. The quote above is from Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, as Kropotkin says at the beginning of that chapter, Well-being for all is not a dream, it is possible, realisable, owing to all that our ancestors have done to increase our powers of production. In order to have choices outside of the conventional consumer lifestyle, what is required are practical skills, the sort possessed by our ancestors, not simply cooking or gardening, but more generally the ability to anticipate and plan what we do right now to enable our lives to be easier in the future. For example, the diagram of our home food system shows travel food. When travelling we can't afford to stop at cafes or chain coffee shops, we take our own food. That idea was taught to me in my childhood, when on long journeys we'd stop and cook food on the side of the road. Over the years, with my love of the outdoors and camping, I've developed that basic skill to the point where I can cook many of the things I make in the kitchen outdoors on a stick fire. That's another skill level that creates greater freedom to choose. It enables you to leave behind the conventional cooking process, be that by choice or because of future power cuts or economic crises, to improvise how you cook the ingredients available to feed yourself under any circumstance. Why then choose bread soup and pie to illustrate this process of developing our skills? Bread is something innately human. It represents the use of cereal-based agriculture to feed society for the past 12,000 years. Now there's a lot that's bad about that system, especially in its recent industrialised form, and despite the protestations of primitivist types against eating cereals, the fact is people will be forced to continue using some cereals in the near future as a means to feed themselves. A kilo of raw wheat, the weight of a loaf, doesn't give a lot of nutrition. You can boil it and eat the gruel produced to get some calories from the starches. It's possible to sprout those seeds to get some calories from the liberated sugars and some better levels of nutrition as the indigestible components are broken down through germination. But the greatest level of nutrition is produced by fermenting those grains, which magnifies the nutrition available to a higher level than in the wheat alone, with the assistance of the microorganisms used in breadmaking. Breadmaking is the foundational skill in a society based upon cereal agriculture, and if mastered, it enables people to convert a supply of cheap raw grains into highly nutritious food. By soup, I don't simply mean a watery broth. About 800,000 years ago, long before the development of settled agriculture, one of humanity's most important developments was the use of fire to cook food. In particular, first roasting and later boiling was essential to breaking down the fiber and carbohydrates in food, making more of the calories they contained available to our gut. Soup, therefore, means boiling things to make them more nutritious, from grains to root vegetables to forage greens. That includes watery soups, but also the more traditionally lumpy stew. Finally, pie isn't about the pie filling. It's about pastry making, which was humanity's more recent food invention. When pastry was made in medieval times, it wasn't usually eaten. It was basically a container made of flour and water used to hold meat or vegetables that could be baked and then consumed, with the hard, often burnt outer pastry case thrown away. From the 16th century, what made pastry edible was the addition of fats, varying levels of which, in combination with different grades of flour and leavening agents, created the range of pastries traditionally used today. Pie is therefore really about pastry making, because once mastered, this allows you to create sweet or savoury pies, either in baking tins or freestanding like old-fashioned baked pies and pastries. Essentially then, bread soup and pie is about learning the foundational skills of cookery, where possible, not just in the kitchen but outdoors too. That's because, in usual circumstances or in emergencies, once you have these basic skills in your head, it's possible to feed yourself and others under any condition. If I were to summarise those ideas as a slogan, it would be better living through anarchy. Return into the political. The deeper motivation behind this process is to liberate people from the consumer lifestyle. To help people avoid eating products where convenience or fashion is used to extract more added value from consumers and instead enabling people to use raw ingredients to cook either conventionally bought or better still grown, traded or foraged foods. Recent academic research demonstrates that allotments, and integrated polyculture systems, like permaculture gardens, produce as much or more food than intensive agriculture, emitting less carbon and demanding less material inputs in the process. Likewise, food cooked from raw ingredients, where that takes place as part of a whole system of food buying, storage and use, is more efficient than the conventional highly packaged ready meal or pre-prepared ingredients option. If we're going to adapt to climate change and resource depletion and still live in a civil manner, then we need to cooperatively produce more food and where possible, that has to be through direct production rather than relying upon the food industry to supply that for us. That means people relearning the skills to produce food and as part of that process living more simply and communally in order to satisfy their need for food. Bread soup and pie is not meant to be a solution. It's a start. That means to learn the skills to create food independence and from there develop those skills to whatever level suits a person's chosen lifestyle. It's about options, not pure ideological outcomes. It's about personal choice, not brands. Most of all, it's about realising that good nutritious food is the prerequisite of any lifestyle and therefore it has to be at the forefront of our future plans, not a vague, assumed outcome of some upper-ground vision for change.