 Getting the most out of every ingredient. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid Blender Collection. Welcome to the British Library 2020 Food Season, generously sponsored by KitchenAid. My name is Polly Russell and I'm a curator at the British Library and the curator and founder of the Food Season. And this year I've had the huge pleasure of working with Angela Clutton as the guest director. For the Food Season, we've wanted as we have for every year to make sure that it is really eclectic in what we offer for events, but also that it's relevant. And this year in the context of COVID, which has so much shone a light on the problems and the challenges in relation to the food system, the food we eat, relation to the environment, all these things, I can't think of a more important event than this evening's. And particularly because of our two speakers who are two of the most incisive, interesting and knowledgeable people in food, Caroline Steele and Kath Dalmanie. Now, Caroline Steele, I met back in 2006 in the most unlikely way, which was that I was on a tube. I overheard a woman talking about an amazing sounding idea for a book and she was talking to her friend. She said, I don't know if I should do it. I don't know. And I didn't know her from Adam, but it sounded so incredible before I got off the tube. I said to her, you have to write that book. It's fantastic. It was Caroline Steele. She did write that book, which came out in 2008 called Hungry City, which is available to you now. If you want to just look on your screen, there's a tab where you can buy it. Caroline Steele, who I then came to know as a friend and a colleague, is an architect by trade and training. She draws from history, literature, politics, philosophy, everything to examine our relationship with food and think about how we can fix it. She's the author of two books, Hungry City, which I've just mentioned, and then this year, Cytopia, how food can change the world. Both are totally essential reading for anybody interested in food. They are great. I suggest everyone should buy them. The other person tonight is another favorite person of mine, Kath Dalmeney. She is the CEO of Sustain, the Alliance for Better Food and Farming. She is one of the most lucid, compelling and powerful speakers on food with years of campaigning and policy work, which is rooted in activism, passion and a commitment to improve the world. She is quite amazing. I feel so honored to be here and to be able to listen to them both this evening. Please do ask questions. There's a form at the bottom of the screen where you can submit your questions and we will be asking those to Kath and Caroline later on this evening. But for now, I'm going to hand over to Kath and Caroline for what I know will be a riveting conversation. Thank you so much, Polly. And I'm so glad you finally got to tell that story, which I will never forget. And actually it was, I was at such a balancing point when you rushed up to me, this mad woman rushed up to me on the tube train and said, you have to write this book. So you are partly responsible for the fact that I'm here in more ways than one. So thank you for that. And also for the wonderful pleasure of being here tonight. And I seem to have started talking. So I guess, no surprises there. I think we should explain to the audience that Caroline and I are very good friends and we spend quite a lot of time talking. So please do control us, Polly, if we need to be shot up. And Kath and I also had a very interesting original meeting because after Hungry City came out, which was in 2008, I remember I think it was the very first talk I gave about it was at a meeting of sustain and the slide machine wasn't working. So I can't imagine why that could possibly have happened. How could technology possibly ever go wrong? Maybe that's something we'll discuss later. So Kath was my kind of my slide changer that day. I think I was actually kneeling at your feet, Carolyn. It's very symbolic and rather wonderful summary of my relationship with your thinking. Kneeling and listening with absolute joy and excitement thinking, how on earth am I so lucky to have a job in which I get to be so close to someone? Oh, one of the first things I did when I was researching Hungry City was I basically went online. Actually, I don't even know whether it's online in those days. It's so long ago, but I found out about sustain and I literally just bought every publication you'd ever produced and read them all. I mean, that was one of my, I've still got a great pile of. So that was one of my very, very early introductions just to the whole idea of what food can be and... How did you first ever start thinking about why food is political and philosophical and about human life and happiness? How did you get to the point where you suddenly had that moment of seeing through food eyes? I know from experience that answering this question properly can take about 40 minutes. So I'm going to try to give you the... Yes, I have tried to change sometimes, Carolyn. Absolutely. Try and give you the three-minute version, but I mean, literally I was studying and then practicing and then teaching as an architect. And there just was this nagging feelings I had that there was something wrong with the way people discussed architecture and in particular cities. And it was all just about the buildings. You know, it was about the built staff and traffic flow and density and maybe if you were lucky a bit of public space. And I just felt, well, you know, I was born and bred in London and I loved London and I do love London, but I thought that's not what a city is like at all. You know, there was just something so obviously missing from the architectural discourse. And now I'm going to skip 20 years of struggle because that's how long it took me to realize that maybe food could be the missing link, you know, to bring human life, indeed, all of life back into the architectural discourse. So that was the idea behind Hungry City, my first book, the one that Polly actually really, really genuinely did hear me talking about in a very loud voice on the tube train on the way to King's Cross, on her way to the British Library. And so the idea was simply to try to describe a city through the lens of food. And I'd been interested in food probably for about 20 years before that. I'd read about food, my grandparents had a hotel, so I'd kind of grown up knowing what good food was and also knowing that there was this kind of mysterious space of the Green Bay's door, you know, the service door between the kind of the, you know, the glamour and the sort of the pomp and circumstance of a dinner being served and the chaos behind the door, you know, and the kind of grease running down walls and torn liner and people running around frantically and shouting at each other. And even as a small child, I remember thinking as something really magical about this, the fact that, you know, there's a two and a half inch wide door can separate these two worlds and what it means to have the power to move from one of those spaces to the other space, you know, and to be equally at home in both. So I suppose the idea of space, power, you know, literally structures shaping our lives, but also food being something sort of transformational. If I'm really gonna sort of lie on my own metaphorical couch and try to work out where it all came from, you know, it very possibly did come from there. But the light bulb moment, as I say, was in the year 2000, after I've been teaching at the LSE for a year on the city's course and just realizing that, you know, there was this cacophony of voices trying to talk about what a good city could be and everyone was in their silo. And I was just looking for something that would desiloify the conversation. And I just had this idea of food being that. And I'll never forget it because I got sort of goose, you know, goose pimples all over my body and my hair stood up on end. I mean, I just knew that was my subject and that was the moment that changed my life. And that's 20 years ago now. So it's what I've been doing ever since. Oh, I love those goose pimple moments. They're just, it's really important with it. But it finally gets it. The light goes on and you think, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I might actually just, since we know each other well through the same question back at you, what was your... What was your goose pimple moment? I think people, once you see, we've had a conversation, I haven't had a conversation with you before, about seeing through the glasses, the lens of the food. I think I've had various moments where suddenly the light's gone on and one of them was when I was about 16 and I was working in catering for Debenhams in the staff canteen. And I stood on a piece of fish. There was a piece of white fish on the floor and I left an enormous great footprint in it. And then when I said, what should I do with this? I'm terribly sorry, I've stood on a piece of fish. They went, oh, just put it back in the pan. And I kind of took a great interest in food safety and catering. But I kind of stayed with me, that funny little event, because it became an anecdote. But it's one of those things where you're like, how did we get to the lack of respect for the thing you call footprint? Because I served a piece of fish later as a 16-year-old, somebody who, the footprint was still there in the batter. It haunts me still as I'm poor person, at a piece of fish with my footprint in it. But on a more serious note, also I saw a documentary, probably about a similar stage in the documentary and it was all about chicken production. So this was a way before Fast Food Nation and Eric Schlosser, and I remember watching it on the little portable television in my bedroom so my parents were watching something else downstairs. And it was all about awful chicken production. I remember it was so well made because it was also about how awful the jobs were and how much of the life that implied and the income of the people working in it. And it all felt so unfair. A fundamental value within the food system is fairness. And it's not being lived out at the moment. And yet, when you do do it well, it's blooming marvellous. I know, I know, that's so interesting because it's sustainability, you can do friendships, you can do health, and you can have enjoyable, wonderful relationships. As you know, and you've introduced me to these concepts at a more intellectual level than standing on fish in a Devon and Wisconsin. But it just, why don't we do it better? Because we're doing it more seriously. It's very, very interesting tracing why we don't. And obviously that's something that I have done a lot in my work. And I mean, your chicken story or watching a chicken documentary is so interesting because I mean, I began Hungry City with, I mean, I was right at the start of researching Hungry City. So back in 2000, I was obviously taping and watching literally every film that came up about food in any respect. And there was already quite a lot then. And I remember it's just before Christmas. And there were two documentaries that came up simultaneously. And one was Rick Stein and, you know, with Chalky kind of going around these beautiful landscapes, you know, with Elgar playing in the background, sort of going, isn't it marvelous? You know, sort of hand-reared turkeys that are being massaged with love, you know. And you can imagine the whole thing. Anyway, at the same time on channel four, there was one of those shock horror exposé type documentaries about, you know, what I call animal gulags, in other words, as you say, sort of birds literally being sort of, you know, unable to walk and sort of lame and that horror. Interestingly, as a normal person, you wouldn't have been able to watch those two documentaries at the same time. You had to have been so obsessive that you had to take one, watch the other one, because they would, you know, and then watch the other one later because they were broadcast at the same time. And I began Hungry City by saying, you know, how? As a sort of normal inhabitant, a normal citizen, just a well-meaning person living in the UK. Are you meant to make sense of this? You know, of course, you know, you want it all to be lovely. You want sweet, happy birds and lovely landscapes, but the reality is, I mean, I did the maths. I did, you know, the turkey maths, as it were. If you all ate turkeys raised the way that Rick Stein's kind of lovingly massage and hand-kills turkeys were raised, as it were, literally that would take the whole of the UK. I mean, that would be all we would be able to grow. So the dilemmas, the paradoxes, you know, I mean, they became very, very visible to me very early on. And I think, you know, in part, it's one of the questions that you suggested just now. I mean, one of the things is that we actually don't really want to think about the reality of what food is, you know. I mean, we've created this thing called Cheap Food, which, you know, you and I and many people listening, you know, does not exist, you know, by externalizing its true costs. And deep down, we know it's wrong. I mean, of course, COVID is one of the externalities of this bizarre system that we've created. You know, I mean, we're destroying the planet in the name of Cheap Food, actually. And, you know, to me, it's really interesting that sort of there's a kind of cognitive dissonance going on in our heads where we're sort of, you know, we want to eat well. I mean, again, like you, my metaphor for good society is one in which everybody eats well. I mean, I can't think of a better way of describing a good society, but to do that, to create the conditions in which that would occur would literally require a revolution, which I am arguing for. I mean, that's what Sitopia is, which I might come on and explain in a minute. But I- And there's no wonder that people find it difficult to know how to achieve that for themselves when the whole construct around us isn't about that. It's about a different relationship with food at the moment. I remember asking a very dear friend of mine who called Moe, Moe Burns up in Herfordshire. She was working with lovely women from low-income families to help them with cooking skills. And she would often ask them, what's the one thing you want to be able to make? And it was gravy. And she couldn't understand that first, why gravy was so important. And between us, we worked out it was the moment of pouring it and all of that implied. It meant that there were people around your table. It meant that your family could gather. It meant that you'd got a piece of meat on the table and could afford it. It meant that you had time on a Sunday to be together and that you were not fighting. It meant that people wanted to be together and that there was family and that there was somebody in charge of a warm, convivial space in which people could be together. And we got quite tearful talking about that moment of the gravy. It wasn't a bistro moment. It was a- Sorry. It was a joint. It was a cloud into a whole culture of having an enjoyable moment of family and food. Exactly. And just, so people stand on the edge of that, desiring it and not necessarily being able to because they can't afford it. But the bistro moment is so interesting, isn't it? Because bistro, I mean, if you like just that idea, everything you're talking about, which I absolutely agree, the happiest times in my life are the times when I have people I love gathered around and I've cooked for them and we're sharing food. There just is nothing. This is how we evolved as a species. This is what home is to us. This is what belonging is to us. I often say that the shared meal is the first and best economy ever invented, which is another conversation we might get into if we're given a series by the British Library. Anyway, maybe not exactly. But the bistro thing is so interesting, isn't it? Because the bistro thing is actually a corporation saying, well, you know you want this, but actually you don't have time to actually do this because you're far too busy doing whatever we're far too busy doing. Therefore, let's pretend, you know, you can put ground powder and make that the thing that matters rather than all of the other things that it implies. Exactly. It literally picks the wrong bit. Because one of the things I loved in your original Hungry City book was also in your subsequent talks, some of which I chaired and just sat there again going, oh, I love this book. But was this the idea of the implication of the type of food we buy implies the type of shopping and implies the kind of relationship we have with transport and with each other. If we are buying from large out-of-town boxes, then we're going to spend our Saturdays in a car going to visit them. And that that is all generated by town planning. So our choices aren't really our choices. Because often they're not. The impression that this plethora of choice in the supermarkets is a wonderful thing that's come down to us and it's actually governed by our choices when actually we are choosing from something that's been presented to us. And that is our culture. But the culture is defined by others, including the coca-cola of this world and the Heinz-Bake beans of this world, not one of the Big Beans, like a bowl of sugary water. But these things are defined. And then our disease patterns, our family relationships, our relationship with farming, the ability of the farmer to make a living is then controlled as well. And we also make food so profoundly political. But then that's a lot to take on if you're not as obsessed as me. You know, nobody will go away with me anymore, Caroline, because it takes so long because I keep reading all the labels. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I mean, I think the, you know, in a way, I mean, one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about tonight was the fact that, you know, it fascinates me that we both want the same things, we're arguing for the same things, we're trying to, we are both trying to change the world and to revalue food and to make it clear to people why there can be no such thing as cheap food and why revaluing food is the heart of, literally facing all of the issues that we sort of, you know, are confronting around the world. They're all linked to this. And that by revaluing food, everything can be made better. It literally sits at the heart of everything. And yet I've come to it from an architectural perspective, if you like, which has become also, as you say, a philosophical and now political and economic and sort of really multifaceted perspective. And, but I write books, you know, I try to change people's minds by talking about this stuff and by trying to understand how we got here, whereas you are on what I call the front line, you know, you're actually actively meeting people, you're saying, no, it's not good enough, you know, if we're gonna have an Olympics, we're gonna have sustainable fish, you know, and you're actually meeting the corporations who are actually making these enormous decisions. So that in itself fascinates me, you know, and I think one of the things that I would say is that, that is another extraordinary facet of food. I mean, the reason why food is so powerful as a medium for changing the world is that we all eat. You know, you can't opt out of food and it's absolutely multifaceted. So if you meet someone who gets food, like you and I met, it's instant. It's like you've known them all your life. I adore people who get it. I just, immediately, it's wonderful. You can tell it's like the lights on. I mean, I don't think I am front line. I think the people who are front line are the ones who run food banks and the people who are front line are the ones who are chefs and the people who actually get their hands dirty with this stuff. And then that's what I tend to do. I'm a connector between the world of policy and the world of practice and the policies and the fiscal stuff that would make practice much better and it would be easier to be a farmer or be a chef. But then I just see the disconnect between the two as well. So that the people who are in high power, I'm here to tell you now, don't really get it. As I said, the thing I really value in all interactions with you moving, is if they get the idea that food matters and the environment matters and sociability matters and fairness matters. I'm getting dismayed. And I mean, the whole experience of COVID has been is that we don't get it as a culture. And I'm not, well, am I not blaming anybody? I did sue a few people during COVID. So perhaps... Yeah, that sounded interesting. How did that go? Well, Marcus Rashford actually won in the end. Bless him. Bless him and his Nike socks. No, I know. Amazing. Because we were basically saying to governments, you can't let children go hungry during a national emergency. Yeah. Yeah. There's no alternative there, is there? You cannot let children go hungry ever, but especially in a national emergency. But of course, that wasn't getting through. So we were all throwing everything at it. There were campaigns with the policy people. Marcus Rashford came in with his wonderful authenticity and just actually forward, expert by experience. But we were litigating behind the scenes with Jolyne Mormon, The Good Law Project. And it just started making the time had come. Sometimes you can't play nice anymore. You just have to go... That's right. And I mean, I absolutely take your point about you're not on the front line. You know, neither of us is sort of getting up at five in the morning to pull potatoes out of the ground for less than a living wage. But I would also say that anyone who understands the true value of food and actually devotes themselves to trying to kind of revalue food in the culture is on their own front line, whatever it is. You know, it is a sort of... Yeah, every parent, every interaction with food and let's make all of that easier because it's so amazing to who we are. It's our interaction with the planet. Yeah, yeah. It's the only thing that if we got right, life would be better for everybody. You know, longer, happier lives, sense of dignity, mental... All of that. All of that. And I can't help thinking. I'm sorry. I'm sure that half the audience is male but I can't help thinking that it's also cast as a female issue. You know, when actually it's far more fundamental and that. But as you've always said, because it goes invisible, and because it's a domestic kind of a domestic subject, unless it becomes a logistical supply chain thing, in which case it turns back into infrastructure and tech and vehicles. I don't know anybody with that, but it just feels like it's diminished as a subject a lot when actually it's who we are. It certainly was. I mean, certainly when I started writing Hungry City, I would say it was largely invisible to most people, you know, and in fact, 2000 interestingly was the year that there was a very key document written by a couple of American academics called why food is a planning issue or something, you know, because basically for sort of 150 years, people's mindsets is just completely thought about food. So, you know, which is, it is astonishing. I mean, I am going to just try to explain this word I've invented, because it is really key to my thinking now. And it is the word sitopia, as Polly said in her introduction. And it just comes from the Greek word, sitos for food and topos for people. Okay, you've got more than I've got. So where do we go from here? I think you like to talk to people like that. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for that. I don't think the audience can see it, but I'm holding up two copies of this. Okay. Well, the reason I invented this word, thank you, darling. I think you can put this down now. Thank you. The reason I invented this word was that, you know, at the end of researching Hungry City, I come to realize how profoundly food shapes our lives, you know, and it's not just our waste lines and our health and our mind, it's, you know, our homes, our habits, our economies, our politics, our cities, our landscapes, our climate, as we're now seeing, you know, it's everything. And I often say it's too big to see, you know, because it's just, it's everywhere and we wouldn't be here without it. So, you know, I was actually researching utopia at the time because I was being an architect and interestingly, another thing I would say about food is that, you know, it connects everything and therefore if you understand it, it doesn't matter what you do as a day jog, you know, it literally makes the difference between doing something right and doing it wrong. You know, it's absolutely fundamental to a good life. Indeed, it is life because of course it consists of food is living things that we nurture and then kill so we can live. So that just, I often like to say that just to remind people that this couldn't possibly be cheap or if it is cheap, we're cheapening life. Anyway, so I was researching utopia because as an architect, I was looking for sort of multidisciplinary way of thinking about how we could live better basically. And I remember reading in the introduction to my copy of Thomas Moore's utopia that the U in utopia can either mean a good place from the Greek EU, which means good or no place from the Greek OU, no. In other words, it's an ideal place that can't exist. And I remember finding it's really depressing but and that was when I had the idea, I thought, well, we live in a world shaped by food already, we just live in a bad one because we don't value the stuff from which it's made, are you food? So maybe sitopia could be a kind of, a real life practical alternative to utopia about thinking in a complex connected, systemic, multidimensional way about how to live better. And that's what I believe it is. And that is why I'm so passionate about it because I literally have been at this for 20 years now and I haven't found a single thing that you can't address through food. I mean, it's just sort of miraculous stuff in a sense. And so, and to me, that's what you do at sustain as well. I mean, in fact, I should ask you a little bit more because people might not know. I mean, I know the amazing work you do but I mean, just what sustain is and to me, you're building a better sitopia. That's what you're actually doing in my terminology. But you know, what is it from day to day? I mean, what does a day in the life of a CEO of sustain look like? That's a really good question. I'd love to know the answer. It's my immense privilege to work with sustain but it's also quite bonkers because it's about bringing together hundreds of people and organizations to try and fix stuff together. But I work with gloriously great colleagues who I wish they knew how wonderful they were. I keep saying it, but they go, oh, Catherine says that all the time, but just people who do get it and therefore are trying to, what do we do? We run campaigns, we run policy projects, we bring together people who care about particular issues like sustainable farming or children's food or food poverty, as in people not being able to afford the means of a good life. We come together around community food growing in community gardens and we talk to local places, local authorities and to government ministers. Sometimes we shout at them. Sometimes we work very kindly with them. Anything that works to try and make the food system better. But always I think trying to find the gatekeepers to that to say which can be a gatekeeper in a school kitchen. I mean, somebody who is actually preparing the food and the work well by getting them the right budget and the right standards that will then be applied so that people aren't always whittling the quality of the food away. But also at the moment, very much involved with all the legislation that's gonna be, sorry to mention it, I'm going to say the B word. Yeah. You know, talking about all the legislation. I'm not saying that actually, just any, yeah, in our country for the next decades and so trade policy, agriculture policy, what replaces the cap, common agricultural policy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we gonna fish the seas dry for our fish protein or are we going to look after the marine ecosystems? Yeah, yeah. It is ours and we're not making good choices right at the moment and that just, I mean, that has to get me out of bed every morning because we can't do this. I have deliberately, sorry, I don't know how to point on Zoom. I keep on, I always bring something from my, I can't point in the right direction, Carolyn. My daughter's healthy and I always have some memento of my beautiful six-year-old daughter in the room whenever I'm on Zoom. Aww. Because it's a wonderful audience for the British Library because it always reminds me that it's about her future. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's so interesting in the UK because again, in my work, I've gone in great detail into kind of the reasons why we have such a screwed up food system here. And it's really, really interesting tracing some of the reasons. For example, the Industrial Revolution. Where does food come from? The country side. What did we do in the 18th century? Moved all the peasants off the land into factories. So we severed our relationship with the place where food comes from. And then, again, very interestingly, French Revolution, basically the diaspora of French chefs that was global came to the UK. And we really adopted French cuisine as the sort of, as oat cuisine, the top of our, the highest that the food culture could be. So if you think of a healthy culture as something that's vertical, that comes from the soil, and comes from the land and has an aspiration to be corpally and wonderful and everyone else is kind of somewhere in between that, we cut ourselves off at the knees and then we chopped ourselves off at the head. So we just had this weird little band left. And last but not least, the special relationship with America. So for example, in the 20th century, when, I mean, again, like I say, so much to talk about in so little time, but I mean, it fascinates me that when supermarkets came to Europe, Britain was the only nation in Europe that did not put legislation in limiting, how big and where supermarkets could be built because we simply didn't see or didn't want to see if you've had the big to have on city centres, for example. And it's no accident at all that we, Britain eats more ready meals than the rest of Europe put together. We spend less time eating than anywhere else in Europe. We spend less time cooking. I mean, COVID's been a very interesting sort of mirror onto some of this, because of course, some of this has been shifting in certain very limited sectors, of course, it has to be said. But I mean, I think, and also this idea of being a sort of brave, trading nation and the idea that we can always just go off and get our food from somewhere else, which actually, I mean, to my utter astonishment and horror, you know, led a Tory MP a few weeks ago, I'm sure you remember sort of saying, well, we don't need farmers in the UK because we can just, you know, go out and buy the stuff. I mean, the astonishing mentality, but there are very clear reasons for where it's all come from. And, you know, that's where we are. I mean, in Brexit, I mean, no, absolutely no one's given any thought to this at all. It's just sort of desperately buying up kind of car parts in the end. It feels like our great leaders treat food as if it was television sets or washing machines or something. You know, this is our fundamental relationship with all of the land in the, well, 75% of the UK land mass. It's a fundamental relationship with whether we have a secure food, I'm not a massive food security advocate because it will do import and we will trade and that's fabulous. Yeah, of course, yeah. You know, the idea that you wouldn't know where your food's coming from as a whole nation, let alone as individual households. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just insane. I mean, it's this idea, I mean, again, going a little bit philosophical. For me, this also comes from this, you know, the ancient peasant dream of not having to work to feed yourself. You know, the land of cocaine, where you just kind of lie around and, you know, houses are made of gingerbread and rivers flow with wine and pigs run around with knives and they're basically just saying cut a slice. You know, seriously, oh, this is quite wacky now. You know, the very famous Breugel revolution of this. But, you know, so it's always been, since hunter-gatherer societies, interestingly, when it was very different, but ever since then, it's been high status to not have to think about where your food comes from. And of course, one of the false promises of industrial food is that, oh, we can all be like kings now. You know, we can all eat whatever we want, whenever we want, and nobody has to think about it. You know, so there's a really interesting kind of a status thing, kind of sneaking in there as well, which again, may be very subconscious. And also, it is rather good that we're all de-skilled in cooking and using food from fresh, because actually it's more profitable for there to be buying meal kits, you know, the way everything's been decided for you, if you're not to really engage with these things to have ready meals and then be able to be available for more, a low-paid work, which is not a life that, you know, we should be aspiring to. No, no. In our power to make life better for people and for there to be more leisure for more people. Yes. So that you can actually enjoy conviviality, enjoy a better life, have better mental health, enjoy green space, all these things. We have it in our power. We invented the economy. We do have it in our power. And I mean, you've brought it up. You're not literally with age. I really am, Carolyn. You know, I'm just, I feel like I started singing while I was doing my teeth this morning, I started humming in 1649 to St. George's Hill Ragged Band. Yeah. Yeah. It's on a bit of a slightly event. But there's an element of why are we not just saying the land is about our futures. Exactly. It comes back to some fundamental things about, you know, sorry to use an old-fashioned phrase, but the means of production. No, it really does. It goes about our relationship with premises, with land, with the ability to move stuff around, the fairness, the trading schemes. Yeah. You know, on the board of a fruit and veg trading scheme in North London, in hack and play communities. I am so proud of them because they make fruit and vegetables possible. Yeah, yeah. They do it with living wages. They pay the farmers profit. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. They did really well during COVID because the farmers were actually being paid properly and the whole thing worked, partly because they had mixed farming as well. So there is a year for the people that are working on the farms and they're paid properly as well. It's completely possible. It's probably like mixed-of food production. I mean, it's totally doable, as you say. I mean, and you've raised something really important, which I think, you know, needs to be restated, which is that, you know, the big question that nobody is asking at the moment, and particularly not people in power, is what is a good life? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And we have this kind of weird, inherited, you know, you could say 200-year-old idea of what a good life is that comes partly from industrialization and partly from empire and partly from, I don't know what it comes from, but, you know, the idea that, basically, it's running around like a mad hamster on a wheel to get rich, so you can buy handbags as far as I can make up. Well, do you know what I'm saying? You know, this is not my idea of a good life. You know, this sort of, somehow, we're just not asking a question. And what you just- Yeah, and at the moment, the good life that's been presented, again by our dear leaders, is the impact of our story. All the things that we know are impossible, like infinite growth and so on. And, you know, absolutely right, it comes back to land. I mean, I think this is fundamental. And I mean, actually, when I was researching Satopia, I got really interested in Henry George, who was the American economist who basically came up with the idea of the land value tax. You know, I mean, if you really- Many utopians, I mean, well, I mean, if you go back to Adam Smith, of course, one of the most interesting things is that, you know, he says, well, all wealth comes from the land, obviously. But luckily, it comes for free. You know, this idea that nature comes for free. You know, so if you like, you've got this kind of two-and-a-half century old system based on a totally false assumption. And that you can keep on extracting forever without having anything to do with it. Yeah, so it's very- So Henry George is super interesting. And the basic premise is that, and it actually comes out of anarchism to an extent as well, which is also super interesting. But the idea that, you know, nobody has the right to own land forever, you know. Yes, you can sort of farm it and live on it and build houses on it, but you need to pay a rent to the community who really earns the land, you know. So it's actually something that Ebenezer Howard got really interested in when he was kind of coming up with his garden city concept was essentially a radical proposal of incremental land reform. And it's very, very clear to me. I mean, this isn't coming from me. You know, it's coming from Thomas Piketty. It's coming from Kate Rayworth. It's coming from Joseph Stiglitz. I mean, a whole kind of bunch of economists kind of going, hey guys, you know, there's something wrong with the maths. And we actually need wealth redistribution. And I mean, to come back to my thing about what is a good life, you know, we've seen it under COVID, I think. We've seen that if people have a nice home, ideally with a garden, but not necessarily, or some shared outside space, but just enough space to thrive and enough money to sort of grow food, feed themselves, do something productive, you know, make stuff. I mean, I think the whole rediscovery of cookery. And again, I know it's only in a small slot of society and there's been horror stories going the other way as well. But, you know, this idea that people are going, oh, you know, it's actually quite nice taking three hours to cook, going back to your gravy thing, you know, taking three hours to cook for my family and cooking with my kids and actually... You can only do that if you're having proper living wages. You know, and I'm a bit of a shock at the weekend because I went down to the Museum of London because she's doing the Great Fire of London at school. So we popped down to go and see some of the artifacts. And there was a poster in the Suffragette exhibition which was about women asking for a living wage and it said one day we'll get the living wage. And of course, in 1911, I was thinking, good grief. You know, with stuff, you argue about people being able to just pay the bills. Struggling with this stuff. Raising a family. You're arguing about that now. I mean, that's only 100 years or so, isn't it? And it's just really, it makes me feel like, what do we have to do to make things fair? What do we have to do to make things sustainable? And it makes me really feel galvanised that we've got to step up action on it. I think there's never going to be a better time than now. Now is the moment. You know, now is the moment. And, you know, going back to this metaphor of a shared meal being, you know, a shared meal being the best metaphor for a good society because if everybody eats well, that means they're living well. You know, it means they can afford to eat good food, which is food that's been produced without the spoiling landscapes, without slavery, without cruelty to animals and all the rest of it. And without the extractive relationship with... Exactly. Regeneratively. Who are producing our, you know, high-value treats and, you know, actually returning cash to the communities who grow the stuff in order to live a good life themselves. I mean, it just feels like we've got to get this right. You know, and as you've always said, food is so fundamental to that. Yeah. But I think what we... This is not about food, ironically. It's about life. Yeah, of course. Being through the lens of food. So the really big question that we have to use food in order to ask now is what is a good life? And a good life is one where, you know, I mean, it's basic, basic stuff. It's where you have, as you say, the wherewithal to support yourself. You have a supportive community. You have safety. You can afford to eat well. You have something meaningful to do that gets you up in the morning. So by the time you go to bed, you know, you can feel good about yourself. And, you know, that allows you to grow not in a kind of a cumulative way. As in, oh, my God, I must have another handbag. But sorry, I didn't want to fixation about handbags. But some growing skill, you know, growing knowledge. I know. And it's been one of the wonderful things. Over the last 10 years or so, we've been running things like the real bread campaign. My dear friend, Andrew Whitley, who wrote the... Yeah, yeah. ...bread matters. Wonderful, wonderful man. And he came round from breakfast at my house once and just started talking bread. And we've been running this real bread campaign. This isn't just a promo. This is also about the idea that people want to make bread and want to make a living out of it. And that was somehow a bit considered a bit weird at the time. Yeah. Going back in time to a tiny wood, white slice, like this is driving me nuts. Making bread and a decent living. And across, we're craftspeople as well. Look at these hands. Yeah, well, this is how we evolved our intelligence. You know, sometimes I do have a ready meal or a thing that I'm opening its way to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We all have a conflict of lives. But when I do that, I think I'm sort of slightly betraying all the effort that millions of people before me put into creating these hands. Yes, yeah. All the effort that went into making these things that can make food. We became intelligent through the use of our hands. Absolutely. And I mean, if I want to meditate or something, I chop up an onion. And that's literally what I do. And, you know, cooking is the low-hanging fruit, but I mean, you know, I mean, I really believe strongly that humans need to create. They need to make stuff. And, you know, since we have to eat every day, you know, the idea that we've evolved this kind of concept that we're too busy to cook, you know, and we've evolved an economy that actually makes it the case that many people are too busy or exhausted to cook. And that's the C word that, you know, we can come back to, no doubt, many more times. But, you know, as I said, weirdly, under lockdown, people have rediscovered that actually getting off the hands to wheel and just kind of making bread and growing stuff is a very, very big part of a good life. And it just doesn't even show up on the economic radar. Yeah, it's one of the things I'm most proud of with working at Sustain. So it's not, I'm not claiming credit for this, because I've never done it, but it's to get, we run the thing called Capital Growth, which is a big scheme to get spaces across the city. Yeah. Just the pockets of land that people were not, you know, not able to get access to. So if you live on a housing estate, you'd be looking down at a nice green space with a fence around it and you end up out in it and there was no water at the point and all this kind of stuff. Once you get coordinated into a campaign, they, to the Housing Association, this is a respectable scheme. Why don't we let more people down into this grass and allow it to be dug up to a gross of potatoes or have a party and occasionally, you know, there's a shed and we can actually store some things in there and, oh, some educational activities can happen. Oh, people are talking to each other. It's transformative. Yeah. And it absolutely makes me just so happy when I see the face of thriving. I've cycled, when we're allowed to go into work, not at the moment, obviously, but I cycled past about 12 of them and it makes me just, there's a bit of joy in every, every single time I see an allotment site or a community garden. I think, I mean, it's interesting. They're bringing themselves. This stuff and also something I call, you know, a landscape for human flourishing. And obviously, human includes non-human because there is no human flourishing and not human flourishing. But I believe a big part of it is bringing, and I often talk about Aristotle's term, political animals, you know, and this kind of dualism that we have that we're political, which means we need sociability, which is why we build cities, but we're also animals, which means we need nature. And how do you bring society and nature together? And I mean, in a way, that's my architectural project now is how do you do that? Because as you rightly said, it can happen at any scale. It can be community gardens in a housing estate. It can be me growing herbs on my, you know, windows sill or on my roof on my way up to my flat. And profoundly, it has to be about the relationship between the city and its productive hinterland, wherever that is. You know, and again, I mean, we haven't got time to go into the complexities of what that means, but you know, I think reconnecting the city and the country and bringing society and nature together are their key design ideas, really, that are fundamental to it. Now I'm really fascinated by the mechanics of that. How do we make the land available? How do we make the supply chains that support horticulturalists who are in peri-urban areas? And I, you know, there are fantastic pioneers of that who are making the work. And they're in a way, in an enterprise way that can really make good jobs as well. That is what we're going to spend the next decade doing is making the sustainable food supply system actually work. And it might be despite policy and despite the money, and maybe it will involve some revolutionary acts of just getting onto land and starting to use it, because it's gotta change. Land reform is critical. None of this can happen without land reform. And waking up the owners of that land to being part of this ocean only can be a lot of fun as well. I think it's everybody. Absolutely, I think it's how, I really think a lot of this stuff is also about how you present it. So, you know, I think a lot of the problems around the way people sort of discuss climate change and ecological destruction and so on is it's all about stuff we can't do anymore. But this is why I'm so obsessed with this idea of coming up with this new vision of a good life that is so wonderful that you want it, you know, if you like to be, you know, if you want, exactly. You're so busy baking sourdough loaf to make it a little bit kind of cartoonish, you know, that you forget that you didn't get that Louis Vuitton handbag. I mean, you know, it's your funny, it's your funny, it's your funny handbag at some point. Nothing, Marilyn. And I'm so sorry, I am fronting in. I do not want to stop you for one moment because I could just, I'm sure everyone here could listen to you for hours. It is fascinating, but I think at the point at which we are baking a sourdough loaf not buying a Louis Vuitton handbag is it's a really good moment because we've had so many fantastic questions which are all related to the things we've been talking about and I'd love to just throw them out to you. Please, absolutely. I'm going to start with one from Judith who sent it in right at the beginning and she said, what city or cities have the best possible relationship with the surrounding countryside? What are the examples of kind of best practice in the world? I don't think I've seen any way that's doing it perfectly but I could name you immediately a hundred wonderful initiatives all over the country. Take a look at sustainable food places, formerly sustainable food cities where there are people keeping this stuff alive and they are creating sustainable supply chains, you know, fair food initiatives, really creative saving food from going to waste, making it happen, you know, really. And there's these lovely partnerships join with where people are joining together to make it happen and just it's very creative and of each individual place so each one has a characteristic and when we're allowed out, it's my favorite event of the year to go to their conference and I get to stand up in front of friends and I feel like it's like going to a glorious wedding every year because it's all your favorite people in the same place. What about Kath or Caroline? What about more kind of globally, like in the planet? Is there a kind of city that's doing it well outside of the UK? Yeah, I mean, I think what I would add to what Kath's saying and this is the profound irony as far as I'm concerned is that if you go to so many places in the world where they haven't basically done the whole industrial stick yet, you often have a really, in my view, quasi-ideal relationship between city and the countryside. So, you know, for example, I was in Nairobi recently and you know, I mean, in fact, it's just about to close down but they've still got their main central market. And this place is absolutely heaving with people and with local produce and with people coming and loading up their wagons with kind of amazing piles of onions and melons and goodness knows what else and then trundling it by hand out into the city to be sold. Now, you know, on one level you can say, okay, that's a bit kind of antiquated and so on and there are clearly issues with it but the model itself, because it's small-scale, it's intricate, it's actually related to ordinary people's lives and you can make a living doing it, you know. So it's almost the stuff that we've lost that the kinds of places CAFs describing are trying to bring back after 200 years are going, oh, we'll just import it all from Brazil, whatever, do you know what I mean? So those are the two big sources of inspiration for me are markets are sure sign things, something's going right, aren't they? And also there's a lovely network called the Better Food Traders Network, which is linked in with the growing community scheme that I mentioned earlier, growing community scheme sounds like a small thing, it's a million pound turnover fruit and veg scheme linked with fair trading. So it's not no small bear, but although we do enjoy a beer occasion, but I think the Better Food Traders Network is also about that kind of mutuality and the support. Oh, hang on, sorry. I mentioned something that sounded anti-capitalist, I think that's banned these days, and not yeah, I think that's not precisely on this. I'm so sure of this library, and you're an anti-capital public body, I shouldn't have mentioned it, I wish I had that, but there are lots of cooperative initiatives like that. The Better Food Traders people are very much about mutually sharing, like the Breel Bread Campaign as well, mutually sharing business models, to make it really work in a practical way, I love them. I think it's small scale, it's small scale, not in terms of actually how many people involved or turn over, but in terms of intricate networks, what really, really work, because they allow smaller producers to thrive, and they actually support communities. I mean, again, as an architect, I would point to examples like, I mean, I only discovered this fairly recently, actually in Tokyo, there was apparently a land use act in 1952 that preserved farmland in the city. So as the city expanded, these organic family farms just stayed put, and they still feed local neighborhoods today, and I mean, this is just such a beautiful thing. So it absolutely can be done, but as Cass said, we need different economic models and different ideas of what a good life is, and land values are critical here. Planning is a socialist idea, because if you just let money decide what gets built where, then you're just gonna get skyscrapers, and again, that's something very interesting about COVID, of course, is what's gonna happen if nobody can get any higher rents in the middle of a city anymore? I mean, that's a completely huge and fascinating question that I would love to answer, but we're not gonna have time now. Right, we might. Let me just ask you this other, before we go on to COVID, I've got another question, which I think rolls on from that first one, which is, and a couple of people have asked this in various ways, but someone says, Caroline, you recently did the most brilliant food program with Sheila Dillam, where you imagined, they imagined that you were Prime Minister, I have to say, everyone should go and listen to that, it was such fun. It was wonderful. So you were Prime Minister, and you were in charge of rethinking the world, the country along sustainable food lines. If you, Caroline and Kath, were made PM tomorrow, what is the first thing that you would do to improve the food system? One, to ask for quick answers, please, ladies. Wow, I'm just gonna take a moment to enjoy the food. Yeah, well, I know what mine is, so I'll just say it, which is introduce the right to food in UK legislation so that we would become this society that doesn't let people go hungry. Yeah, I would say something very similar. I would say, yes, the right to eat well, because everything flows from that. I mean, I talk a lot in my book, and thank you for the question, by the way, that program was, I have to say, incredibly good fun to make. Just spending three hours imagining that, you know, kind of, there were actually hopscrawling around the houses of parliament. Anyway, but basically my main proposal is that we revalue food, which means that we put the true value of food back in food. This means that food becomes expensive again. If you have a similar, if you also have a policy that says everyone deserves to eat well, then you need a more equal society. You need wealth redistribution. You know, everything flows from it. It is a revolutionary idea. But yes, so I would have a similar policy. It would be the human right to eat well with every measure of the program. Well, I don't know if I'm going to do it anyway, Caroline, because I don't need to still sit at your feet, so. Can we kind of do it together? I quite like that idea. Oh, I could sit on the, it's a wall pack, isn't there, in the House of Lords. Perhaps we could borrow that as my little seat. I'm sure it could be arranged, okay? Listen, here's a lovely question from Annie Gray. So hello, Annie. She says, this is fab. Two questions in one, not least, because I think others may have asked one. It's a pot boiler. It's quite clear that the government, especially the current one, has only the most tenuous grasp on current British food ways in the way they are linked to global issues. But it's also clear that this is an excellent, and sorry, it's also clear from this excellent discussion that a change needs to come from both official policy and individual pressure and action. So, quick far, what three things would you have the government legislate on? It's quite similar. What three things, as individuals, let's focus on what can individuals do to get a balanced cytopia? Yeah, I mean, individuals with money can obviously do quite a lot at the moment. Individuals without money are a bit stuffed. So, I mean, actually, quite interestingly, it seems to me made two radio appearances recently, which is a very, very high hit rate for me. But on the Today program a few days ago, and basically Sarah Smith was sort of saying to me, well, no government could possibly give you people the time to cook a decent meal. And I thought to myself, but only a government can give people the time to cook a decent meal. Because only a government can say, we are going to organize the economy so that people basically earn enough in 30 hours, 35 hours, or whatever it is, that the rest of the time they can do what they like. And it's just this idea that somehow the market has to sort everything out and governments can't do anything. I mean, I would say, again, it's mostly to do with economics. And it's mostly to do with land reform and planning. And I would, I mean, I would look very, very hard at who owns what land. And I would start putting actually, but at Henry George's land value tax into action. And it's very, very delicate stuff this, because you're literally saying to very, very rich people, we want some of your pony park, please. But I think it's kind of essential. I think, and it can be done sensitively. And as I said before, it can be done around a vision of a good life that could be sold as something that people would actually want to buy into. Cap, do you want to add anything? Oh, can I be a deputy prime minister? Would that be all right, Karen? It's hard, because at the moment, there is so much law to be fought for. There is a huge amount going through parliament at the moment which will fundamentally affect our food and farming system, which is the agriculture bill, the fisheries bill, the trade bill and trade policy, which is actually being largely decided in private. So we aren't going to get a say on that anyway. So a bit of me, my heart sinks a bit at the idea of an ideal situations, because I'm right in the middle of the fight at the moment about whether or not, you know, any minute now, the MPs will vote on whether or not it says in the agriculture bill that we should maintain British standards of food and farming production by law. And that's our antibiotics, our pesticide use, it's about our food standards, our labelling, it's about the farming, it's about the farmers livelihoods, it's about fair dealing. It's so much at stake at the moment that I almost can't think about the visionariness of how we would like it to be, because we're right down in the engine room trying to make sure that the right things are happening and that we're steering in the right direction. Because, and I do see that some of the ripping up the standards in trade deals stuff, which is imminent, is something we have to fight back against. It's all very well wanting to build Zootopia, but one must also prevent the wrong kind of decisions being made as well. I'm not against trade, but I am against standards being ripped up and pro-antibiotics working forever. And actually at the moment we're thinking of incentivising dirty production in other countries and doing deals that favour it. So I don't mean to be negative because as you probably gathered, I am very bought into the idea of working towards Zootopia, but there is some hard work to be done also on the defensive. Yeah, no, I mean, everything you say is critical and Zootopia can't exist without everything that you've mentioned maintaining standards because it's fundamental to a good life. There is no good life with bad food. And it's all about looking at those values right at the heart of everything. Yeah, values are at the heart of it, yeah. Tons of values and the kinds of people we'd like to be. You know, talking about the good life in a Aristotelian way is not something I do in my everyday work, but how do we actually apply some philosophy to this of how we would like to live our lives? How will we, you know, in a wonderful moment when the UK could be taking back control as a phrase we've heard from... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what does control look like? Does control look like then bending to the next Trump deal and saying, yes, let's have chlorine chicken and hormone beef and, you know, Twinkies? Or is it that we say actually we've got some values to this and we want to be supporting a race to the top? We want to be supporting agroecological farming because, funnily enough, our entire future depends on it. I mean, you're arguing for that in your way. I'm arguing for that in my way. And, you know, as I said at the beginning, what amazes me is that we're doing precisely the same thing. We're just doing it in very different ways. You know, you're a campaigner. You're brilliant at policy. I'm an architect and a thinker. And, you know, I like to conjure up the vision of what it could be like because I think if you do that, then it's easier to get people to buy into it. So it's all essential. It's all got to be done. We're just working like a pair of velociraptors coming from different angles at the same goal. Of course, it's also deeply human at the same time because I can hear in the other room my six-year-old refusing to eat her vegetables. So, you know, this sort of ordinaryness of all of this as well. Let's remind ourselves. We're not talking about high-level stuff. We're talking about the stuff of life. Yeah. Yeah. But I think giving ourselves permission to ask the big questions, that is the great beauty and power of food. It gives you permission to ask the really big questions. In fact, it makes it imperative. And, you know, I would never have had the courage to be talking about this stuff were it not for the fact of having food, having been my guide. So that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking on that, Caroline. Yeah. I am... I'm so tempted to ask... There's so many other great questions. I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm going to ask one more question, even though there are, like, ten more questions here that we could ask. I'm going to ask one more because we are... I don't want to meet everybody on this call. Can we... I can go to the pub or something. I've got to see. Exactly. Rule of... Rule of 30. Some days we'd all go out to the pub now, but we're afraid we can't. So, I'm just picking, really, there are so many great questions here, but this one... Here we are. This is from Angela. When lockdown first hit, there were people shopping more from small producers, and at the time they said they'd never go back relying on... to relying on supermarkets so much. And we'll keep on supporting small cheese, meat, veg supplies, but that doesn't seem to have quite happened. And now we hear small producers are losing customers back to the supermarkets. What could have been done, should have been done, and what could we do to stop that drift? I have been shouting about this throughout COVID. I'm not going to shout at you, lovely people, because you tuned into a good food talk. My Zoom screen throughout COVID was full of policymakers who were moving enormous amounts of public money into the supermarkets through things like multi-million pound free school meal vouchers, like healthy start vouchers. You know, a lot of the money that you and I pay in our taxes gets used badly to not support the kinds of farming and food production that we'd like to see. And it's called technically public procurement, but actually millions and millions of euros in my pounds should be being spent better. So absolutely there are things that we could have done right from the start that would have been better. Why did we leave it up to individual choices about whether the farmers were doing all right or not? Why were we not buying up very large amounts of catering supply chain food and making it sure it ended up with people having been paid for properly and ended up with people who needed it the most, rather than expecting poor people to receive the scraps from the supply chain and fed out through poor food banks who were working their guts off to try and, I'm sorry, you're getting me on a really cross hobby horse here, but I, it was really tough going for the food banks during COVID and that's absolutely ridiculous. And it was partly because vulnerability to COVID was only defined at first as a medical need, not as a socioeconomic need, as in some people who didn't have enough money, therefore couldn't have food. And it took us probably eight weeks to be letting people out of the Trussell Trust, the independent food aid network, wonderful people, literally in tears sometimes saying vulnerability is also about whether or not people can afford good food. This is about the welfare system, it's about housing costs, it's about, you know, addressing this in a more civilized way throughout society. I could go on, I'll stop because it's not fair, but it really, honestly, there are so many things we could have done better. Cap, actually I think this is a perfect place to stop, not because I want to, but because I think it really draws attention to the work that you do at sustain, what your books have done, Caroline, which is to point out that this is structural, it is not down to individual choices, it's to do with structural problems, which can be solved through structural solutions and that there are solutions out there, that it's not an accident that we end up back at the supermarket, that the food banks don't have enough money, that people go hungry, this isn't an accident, it can be changed, it can be challenged, and that is the work that you're doing. Everyone who's watching tonight, I implore you go and have a look at the sustain website, it is quite amazing, it's inspiring, there are incredible projects there. I mean, if you do not have Caroline's books, do yourselves a favor and get them because they are wonderful. Finally, I'm just going to read out one point from Caroline McQuarr, which she says, please could you both do a book with George Montbea on land in the UK, and then please go into politics. I would like to thank you both for the most riveting discussion, it could have gone on much longer, I wish we were going to the pub. Thank you, thank you. Also thank you to KitchenAid for sponsoring this. If any of you who have been listening would like to support the work of the British Library, please look at the sponsorship button on your website. I just want to draw your attention to two food season events that are coming up this Saturday, both of which are wonderful. One is in the middle of the afternoon with Jack Monroe and Kimberly Wilson in conversation with Zoe. She's one of my friends, I've just completely forgotten her name. Oh my God, I can't believe it. Oh, it's coming back to me in a second. She is one of my great friends. Anyway, Jack Monroe and Kimberly Wilson talking about food and mental health, which would be very interesting, particularly in light of COVID and how the strains that put on individual people and families. And then later in the afternoon, coming from River Cottage, Melissa Helmsley and Ralph Anderson, a cookery demonstration, which is absolutely delicious and wonderful, about how to have more taste and less waste, which is wonderful. I've already seen it. So thank you very much, everyone. I'm going to leave you with the thought that there isn't a single thing that you can do about food, the words of Carolyn Steele and the words of Kat Del Nene ringing in my ears. Thank you, everybody, for a wonderful evening. Thank you so much.