 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. I'm a curator at the British Library and I'm the founder and curator of the food season. And this year I've had the absolute delight of working with Angela Clutton as the guest director and Angela tonight is also this evening's chair for the event Trading Places, which is in partnership with Borough Market. When Angela and I were planning the season, we really wanted it to be as eclectic and as relevant as possible. And tonight's event, which will explore the impact of COVID and Brexit and many other things I'm sure on food and the food we eat, food outlets couldn't be more relevant to the moment. Angela Clutton is perfect to be chairing this event. Her debut book, The Vinegar Covered, published in March, 2019, won the Jane Griggsson Trust Award. And in 2020 was shortlisted for the Andre Simon Award and Food Drinks Award. It won two awards at the Guild of Food Writers and won the debut cookery book at the Fortnum and Mason Drink Award. I feel like it's the most award-given book ever. Absolutely amazing. She really is the perfect person to host this evening's event, not least because she regularly writes for Borough Market, as well as being their recipe developer, demonstration cook and host of the hugely popular Cookbook Club and Borough Talks podcast series. And she is extremely knowledgeable about the food world. So over to you, Angela, one thing. Everybody, we would love you all to send in questions. The panel would love to hear from you. On your screen, there's a tab with questions. So please do submit questions as the event goes on and Angela will come to them, no doubt. In due course, over to you now, Angela. Thank you so much, Polly. That was quite the intro. So thanks ever so much for that. It is an enormous pleasure to be chairing tonight's event all about trading places and really thinking about literally what that means for all the places where we get our food, supermarkets, local markets, small producers, delivery services, really looking all of that. And we have an absolutely great panel who have enormous amount of experience and knowledge and passion about all different aspects of the food system and all of those things to do with trading places or about accessed food. I am just going to quickly whizz around and do some introductions to people before we launch into the event proper. So going to start off with Darren Hennehan, managing director of Borough Market, who with this event is in partnership with Darren, born and raised on a beef farm as Staffordshire, so roots firmly in the world of food production, works trustee of Environmental Charity Waste Watch, series of government advisory roles and joined Borough Market in 2016, very much focused on leading the market to the next stage in its evolution in terms of sustainability, seasonality and innovation. Borough Market itself, barely in these introduction, is London's oldest food market, not just a source of fantastic British and international produce, but also a place where people come to connect. It's owned by Charitable Trust, run by a board of volunteer trustees and there's a huge commitment to supporting local community around Borough Market, community events, cooking demonstrations, supporting local community projects and schemes and I'm sure Darren will talk much more about all of those things as we go through. Patrick Holden, come to Patrick next, founder and chief executive of the Sustainable Food Trust, organisation working internationally to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable food systems. Between 1995 and 2010, he was director of the Saudi Association and his policy advocacy is underpinned by his practical experience in agriculture in his 100-hectare holding. Now the longest established organic dairy farm in Wales, where he produces a raw milk cheddar star cheese from 18 native Ayrshire cows. Patrick is a frequent broadcaster and speaker, the CBE for services to organic farming. I feel like with these biogs I'm sort of barely scratching the surface. I feel like there's so much more I could say about 80 feet long, but we'll discover it as we go along. Jenny Linford, food writer and author of 15 books, including The Missing Ingredients, curious role of time in food and flavour, which is an absolutely fantastic book looking at time as the invisible ingredient in food. Also The Chef's Library, featuring the favourite cookbook choices of over 70 acclaimed international chefs. Excuse me, possibly most personally for the talk we're about to delve into, she has run tours of London's, some of London's most interesting food stores and her first book, Food Lovers London, the Cosmopolitan Guide to London's Food Shops was originally published in 1991 and is still in print seven editions later. Jenny writes for Sunday Times, Delicious, Modern Farmer, National Trust Magazine and I Have a Feeling, many, many, many others too. Tasha Makiyakura, co-chair of Bite Back 2030 Youth Board. Tasha is passionate about changing the way we talk about obesity and creating equal opportunities for everyone to have access to healthier food options. Bite Back itself is a youth-led movement established by Jamie Oliver. The drive is for healthy nutritious food to be an option for every child and every young person. Focus is leveraging the power of our communities and reaching out to ensure no one is forgotten when it comes to food no matter where they live, learning lessons and COVID-19 and using them to redesign a food system that works fairly for everyone. You may have gathered, I sort of nabbed that from the Bite Back website which I did and it's a perfect sentence I think to lead us into the discussion that we want to get into and we're going to start by each of our panellists taking five minutes or so to give us their own perspective on a particular aspect of this discussion about trading places. Darren, I'm going to come to you first. Buse talked to us about Borough Market's perspective on everything leading up to COVID and lockdown and maybe a little bit also about what happened when COVID and lockdown hit. So over to you, Darren. Thanks, Angela. So Borough Market's a fantastic place and what we do there is focus very heavily on quality food, on food from all over the world, all the best quality food from absolutely everywhere but what underpins it all is an absolute commitment to sustainability and promoting ethics in food and ethics in farming. So what we have is a group of incredibly influential and incredibly dedicated traders that put together this cacophony of food that I think is one of the best places in the world to be and it's certainly one of the best food markets in the world and the food establishments in the world to be in. It's based on hard work. It's based on agility and innovation and ideas and beliefs and all of those things come together into what is a very, very, very strong base, a very strong community, both with our customers but also with the traders and with the trustees and I work to a group of trustees who are dedicated and volunteers are dedicated to the market. And together what we do is we create this incredibly resilient body of people an incredibly resilient body of expertise that's been tested over the last few years. We've had two terror attacks. We've had Brexit going on for God knows long and it seems to still be going on now which is clearly in a market where you are focused on international food is a big, big issue and potentially a catastrophic issue for many of our traders but also that resilience and that hard work and that determination gave us a very strong background when we then came into the latest COVID crisis and I can remember in March, I'd just come back for some time in Canada when my son was at university and I'd come back and it felt like the ground was slipping away from underneath our feet because there was one announcement, then another announcement and for the people that have been to Borough Market we have a new hot food area at the back of the market and we took away the big tables then we took away the small tables and then we took away the chairs and then we closed down the hot food businesses and then we closed down other aspects of the market as well and we were suddenly left with this core which is our spiritual core and the reason why Borough Market exists which is a produce market and what that produce market did then reacted and it reacted based on what it knows best which is to supply London and local Londoners and the people that live in our area and we have obviously Guy's Hospital just across the road provided those people with healthy, nutritious and fantastic quality food and it was really, really heartwarming at the beginning of lockdown that many people came out and cycled across London to then stand in queues for the ginger pig or for, you know, Elsie and Bent to buy their fruit and veg or buy their meat and really often we're used to seeing queues outside Padella and we used to seeing queues outside some of the hot food stands but to see it outside produce sellers was really, really heartening and really reminded us about who we are and why produce and why groceries and why cooking food is so important because I think that's one of the really good things if there are good things that can ever come out of the COVID crisis is that people did reconnect with food people had the time to reconnect with food many people planted food in their gardens for the first time in ages or at all and realized just how blem in difficult it is to grow food in your garden and so that you should have a little bit more respect for farmers as a result of all of that but that connection with the food meant that people were able to probably recognize more the value of food and that was done through changes in people's attitudes changing the time but also by us adapting and by some of the people that we work with and Andrew I'm gonna put you into this because Angela moved from a cookbook club where she had her own set up and an actual physical place to suddenly doing online and engaging with probably a bigger audience than maybe we engaged it before by using new technology and getting that message out there and it was a time of hope and that's done because we're adaptable we can change, we work hard and our customers recognize that they keep coming back and people have a genuine affinity for Borough Market and a genuine affinity for food and a genuine affinity for the lifestyle and the love of food and the sharing of that food with their family and if that's a positive thing to come out to COVID which is such an awful period I think that's a really, really good way. You've said so much there Darren which I'm dying to ask you about and I suspect the others on the panel are to kind of dive into but I'm not gonna ruin often that I'm gonna come back to some of those issues that you touched upon because you're so obviously right and we have a moment where people are more interested than ever before where their food comes from and it's what we do with that moment it is what we're here to talk about and Jenny I'm gonna come to you next because I think it would be interesting if you could maybe perhaps build on what Darren's been talking about and thinking about the role of markets and small producers and how they connect with communities and also about supermarket things as well because then we really want to look at the breadth of your food supply and how people get their food do you want to take us into that Jenny a little bit? Yeah I mean I think my first book was about food shops and I am a food writer I'm a home cook and I think if you're a home cook what you want to cook well is good ingredients and I think one of the things I've always sort of tried to spread the word about is how diverse food shops are. This is particularly so in London and my own childhood was spent I lived abroad as a child my mother's from Singapore I lived there for four years I lived in Italy for three years through two very strong food cultures and I got amazing memories of the markets there and I think it was that nostalgia that understanding of what food means for expatriate communities which probably led me to come up with this idea for Food Lovers London which looked at sort of multicultural food shops in London at a time when multiculturalism wasn't sort of as fashionable so the book came out in 1991 and it was this amazing sense I think one of the things I'd like to say is that food markets are very dominant in Britain and they are incredibly convenient and widely used but there is a whole array of different types of food shopping that takes place and actually especially within different communities in London this is one of the things that struck me walking around was there was a real character you know, you go into a secret greengrocer and it's things that are very proudly imported from Cyprus wonderful fresh vegetables and the grains and the pulses you sort of feel a country's culture through its cuisine and you feel that cuisine through its food shops it's very interesting because these community food shops in London whether from Chinatown or Brixton Market or the Japanese supermarkets they were sending to their communities so very different from the restaurants you know, the restaurants opened by expatriates in London often sending food to people not from their community but the food shops will really have this incredible range it's that really interesting thing you go into Chinatown you'll see things in those shops that are never on menus in Chinatown for English people so I find it absolutely fascinating and sort of my message is it's funny I do these tours around food shops and I did them to try and get people to understand that under their nose in the West End in Soho so Soho, especially when I started doing these tours about 20 years ago, you know, famous for its, you know quite sleazy, famous for sex shops and I was like, you know, hello they're lovely, lovely food shops in Soho Soho has some of the oldest food shops in London and I took a group around yesterday some cookery students and they just said I've walked up and down Old Comp Street I never noticed the Algerian coffee store, you know which is found in the 19th century but an Algerian businessman is still going this beautiful old vintage coffee shop I've always heard that every time I done my tour people just are rushing around they don't notice they're gems, you know where we're blessed and markets have a huge vitality which we'll see Darren spoke about and I think one of the things I'd like to point out is that markets are really important for communities because they, if you think of Queens Market in Newham Queens Market in Newham is pretty the most diverse market in London in terms of communities who are there and it offers a starting point, you know an affordable starting point because rent is such a massive issue, isn't it? If you think about shops and access you know, what's happening in our high street where the shops are can afford to stay there so a market, a market pitch is a more affordable way to start it's really, really important I've been involved in campaigns over the years I was involved in a campaign to save Queens Market from a very, very unsympathetic development that would have put a supermarket on the site this really vibrant market just sending ingredients you know, not one bit of, not even food to go literally just cheap, affordable, fresh ingredients for all the very different communities in Newham so I just, you know, I think we should have we should really sort of treasure what we've got and the way you do that is by shopping you know, spread your money is always my message actually Thanks, Darren it's a lovely kind of thing to lead us more in something and I'm going to come to Patrick now and also I want to make the point that there may be many things that connect to Jenny Linford and Patrick Holden but I'm going to loop on cheese as being the most immediate of them possibly because Jenny did a lot of work when lockdown first hit about supporting the work of British cheesemakers and Patrick, as I said to my introduction works in cheese, chooses cheese so Patrick, I'm going to come to you for you to talk to us maybe from that small producers perspective about trading places and how it happens of getting things out and what the, well I'm not going to tell you what you're going to say you tell what you're going to say Well, thank you very much I am a dairy farmer still milk the cows quite regularly and we produce from 80 cows a raw milk cheddar style cheese mature for about 12 months and I'm so happy that it's being sold in the bar market and has been ever since we started making it makes me feel very proud to say that during COVID is very interesting because even in prominence and localness a lot of our cheese is going abroad even to Australia and then of course a lot was going to restaurants some still is but a lot less and when COVID struck we had to stop making cheese for social distancing reasons in the workplace and demand more or less pros for a complete month and more but amazingly due to the kind of incredible innovation of people getting food to people who want it a lot of online stuff a lot of very committed wholesalers and retailers Niels Yard Dairy obviously being amongst them where our sales have now returned almost but not quite pre COVID levels and I think the direct sales people who are craving a better story behind their food are probably the reason behind this I think that the pandemic has really made people think about the story behind their food and provenance and it's interesting to think that if you go to a supermarket today and you have a buying prescription I'll only buy food if I know who produced it whether the production system was sustainable where it was produced and all that information would inform my buying choices you could go out with very little food indeed and I think one of the great challenges today is to reconnect citizens who want to buy better food with its provenance in a way which can go to scale not so easy and of course yesterday Minette Batters the president of the National Farmers Union a very good woman whose real campaigner met Boris Johnson at number 10 and they had a discussion about lower standard imports and what's gonna happen and I don't know exactly what happened you could imagine he made some sort of bland reassurances to her that they wouldn't lower standards but I shouldn't think it was in print and really it's up to us now to make sure that the changes we need to make in our food systems to address climate change, biodiversity loss all the things which are threatening the planet right now they're gonna play out on the farms because as Vandana Shiva the great Indian food campaigner pointed out last year to talk I heard her give the world used to be covered with pristine wilderness now it's mostly covered with farms and the farming systems aren't very good at the moment but if we, the food consumers and citizens of planet Earth use our electoral power and our buying power to insist on good provenance for all the food that we buy including in Borough Market of course then the world will change because we are the powerful ones we are the cells of the food system if we change we can transform our food system and I think there's a lot of grounds for optimism because even if Dominic Cummings doing his algorithms in the back office of number 10 thinks that there simply aren't enough of us who care deeply enough to worry the Prime Minister getting re-elected next time I think we need to prove him wrong I think we need a massive campaign around food provenance and about relocalising our food systems locally in a broad sense because if the provenance is intact food can travel some distance but I think this is going to happen I think there's a consciousness shift going on and maybe that's one of the silver linings of Covid Thanks Patrick, that's absolutely great very inspiring as well and I suspect the use of the word supermarket is a nice segue into what Ash is going to talk about because I think, I know Ash, you've been doing a lot of campaigning and work with the supermarkets it's interesting to build perhaps more Patrick was just talking about people having buying power I mean we are, you know, choice and obviously we will come into the aspect of we're also to time where people are really struggling to be able to make choices about food so we obviously do need to hugely factor that in but Tasha, maybe you would like to take up the baton Fantastic, thank you so much for the introduction after everyone has spoken I don't really know what to say Yeah, so one of the reasons why I joined Whiteback was because I wanted to change the way that we discussed and talk about obesity often the debate is solely focused on the role of the individual so it places an emphasis on the idea of it's their choice therefore it's their fault and it fails to acknowledge how the food environment in which people live in has dramatically changed and our obesity epidemic is the result of an obesity-genic environment that promotes unhealthy, calorie-rich and just high fat salt and sugar kind of food and so I really wanted to talk about the role of supermarkets and delivery services that they have in providing good quality, healthy and affordable food in our post or mid-COVID-19 world and my aim is to make sure that junk food and other, you know, high fat, salt and sugar options are taken out of the spotlight and that light is shone on healthy food and drinks at a really good affordable price Everyone knows about, you know, price promotions whether that's a temporary price reduction a buy offer such as, you know, buy one, get one free or offering extra free, you know times when the manufacturer creates a larger pack of size and states that, you know, a proportion of the product is free so it might say 20% extra Coca-Cola for the same price and that is those kind of promotions is the key driver of grocery shopping behavior and consumer spending I think the large part of price promotion as well and a lot of evidence does indicate that these price promotions are typically placed on less healthy options which obviously encourages the purchase of health which undermines the purchase of healthy food and drinks and ultimately undermines any effort that has been placed into improving the kind of foods that people are supposed to be eating Yesterday I had the privilege to talk to a Tesco representative at the Feed Britain Better Youth Summit back back and prior to speaking to them, we'd looked on their website and they had 2,327 items on offer of which only 106 was on unhealthy drinks so that included pizza drinks and your sports and energy drinks 72 offers were on chocolates 59 offers were on sodas and only four offers were on fresh fruits and vegetables and so this idea of always the person's fault is that they should be deciding what they're eating when the odds are so stacked up against you and are clearly used to encourage you to consume these kinds of foods we cannot blame people when it's really easy to get food that is unhealthy and when we look at food that is fresh and nutritious for us it is absolutely unaffordable for the majority of people and so especially when we're looking against the flood of unhealthy food options that pour up from the high streets, the supermarkets for children and young people especially young people who are at school and in my school canteen, like I said this option is completely taken away and so the question becomes what is the role for the likes of Tesco's and other retailers in using price promotions to give healthy, nutritious food a starring role in our minds? We know that obese people are significantly more likely to become seriously ill or admitted to intensive care because of COVID-19 compared to those with perhaps a healthy RBMI and while the role of supermarkets before COVID has always been to try and promote healthy food and healthy eating and healthy choices this has become more and more important now that we have COVID in the space and I think even when I was speaking to Tesco's yesterday they were very adamant to say no, no, no, our ratio of unhealthy food and healthy food price promotions is about 50-50 it was clearly not the case because we wouldn't have this obesity epidemic if that was what was happening in the real world and I'm really glad that Jenny also spoke about access to healthy and affordable foods in her local market in the local area another issue that I think COVID has been able to highlight is the issue of food deserts the coronavirus has made it harder for everyone to buy foods and other essential items under lockdown orders and social distancing guidelines and limited delivery spots for online groceries but even before the pandemic millions of people in the UK were struggling to access groceries and the problem has only gotten worse more than a million people in the UK live in food deserts and that is essentially neighbourhoods where access to affordable healthy food options especially fruit and veg is restricted and non-existent due to the absence of supermarkets or grocery stores I'm really lucky, I live in Southeast London and I have a local fresh food market literally about 10, 20 minutes ago and I know that is a very rare feature of a lot of London boroughs and even just the UK in general so I've been able to get access to fresh food I just want that to be the experience of all young people, of everyone nearly one in ten of the country's most economically deprived areas of food deserts and research does say that typically large out-of-town housing estates and deprived inner cities are served by a handful of small and relatively expensive corner shops so when you don't have access to a supermarket the likelihood is you probably have a local corner store nearby and we know that getting fresh fruits and vegetables from your corner store is very, very expensive compared to going to your supermarket and so we think a lot myself and back as well we really do want to emphasise the importance of having access to food that is nutritious and affordable as well and this comes in, this is where I bring in the role of delivery services I think delivery services could work with healthier suppliers and offer discounts on healthier options but also in the way that they advertise during lockdown we did see a reduction in junk food advertising from the likes of JustEats and UberEats and it shows that clearly these companies as well are able to reduce the amount of advertising that is targeted towards unhealthy eating habits and actually replace those adverts with healthier alternatives so it is possible, so when people talk about oh there's going to be a loss of revenue if we introduce the 9pm watershed no, honestly companies are just going to replace their adverts with healthier options and that is really what Backback is trying to push how do we encourage and how do we place an accountability and responsibility for companies to make sure that they put health a lot higher on their priority list because we do know that these companies are businesses so their main priority is profit how is it that they're going to generate and increase their revenue so my ask for the food industry really is to you might not want to place health at the forefront of your operations but it certainly needs to be up there alongside profit Brilliant, I wish we had such a longer session because you all said so much and we're allowed to applaud Tasha by the way Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely I'm already looking at the clock thinking we have so much to talk about but I wonder if someone, any of you and I think maybe Darren and Patrick particularly you guys because you're so much working this aspect of things would like to respond to what Tasha has just talked about Patrick, I might come to you first for that possibly Well, I think one of the reasons why it's so hard to get healthy food at affordable prices is that current food pricing is dishonest we produced a report in 2017 called the Hidden Costs of UK Food and basically the headline of the report was for every pound we spend on food apparently cheap food there's another hidden pound split about 50-50 between damage to the environment destruction of biodiversity, climate change that sort of stuff and damage to public health which doesn't appear on the price of the food so the problem is that when people farm in a healthier and more sustainable way they're up against this economic headwind where they are not incurring those damaging hidden costs to society which we're already paying for through our taxes, NHS costs water companies taking pesticides out of the water, that kind of stuff but since it doesn't appear on the price we're having to compete with these apparently cheap food producers and it's not fair it's actually really a scandal that this has gone on for so long and governments don't want to apply the polluted pace principle because they think and they may be right, I refer to Dominic Cummings that, you know, they're worried about food prices going up and actually what we need to do is pay the true cost of food and if people in food deserts with low incomes can't afford good food, nutritious food which ought to be the right of every citizen then governments have a responsibility to intervene and do something about that not keep this dishonest trading environment where people are literally being made sick by this low standard food they're buying causing obesity, diabetes, probably cancers lots of food intolerances it's not acceptable and it's got to change and I think Tasha, you are brilliant and you're doing a great campaigning job we need you to be at the forefront of the campaign for better food in the future Yeah, Darren, I'm going to come to you to build on that because you, like me, I'm sure as soon as you say you work it or you do work with someone like Bromarket people say, oh, it's so much more expensive than a supermarket But the point is that it's an alternative, isn't it? And, you know, so much of the food landscape is dominated by very, very, very large players All the food in the UK go through about five or six buying desks It's a cartel, it's a monopoly and it's not just about creating a point of difference but it's also about making that difference then sustainable and what you find not just in markets but actually Tasha, there are some healthy local corner shops and there are lots of very, very good greengrocers around the place but they're often in the wrong place and they're often in areas where they're seen as a luxury rather than a necessity and I think that there is a huge, huge agenda here for us just to say to ourselves really that you don't have to be a victim of the major multiples you don't have to only eat the four varieties of apples that are in supermarkets you don't have to only ever buy farm fish you can buy wild fish that's been sustainably cooked, sustainably caught you can eat a more natural diet you can eat with the seasons and guess what when you do, it's cheaper, it's healthier and it tastes better and you know, Jenny's point about cultures being celebrated through food many, many, many cultures in this country know this already but unfortunately because the system is so dominated by those big players they often can't get access to the ingredients that they need in order to be able to cook healthy, sustainable food but it's, it's, it's pervasive and you know, frankly, it's, it's evil because you get advertising bans against children being exposed to junk food but what Burger King did is they sponsored a football team and that football team then went on to FIFA you know, the FIFA, the video game online and then of course all these kids are playing the football game on their playstations and also they can see is Burger King blizzoned across the, the chest of those football teams and then they backed that up with a little bit of clever stuff on social media so people got rewards if they went into Burger King they'd do it it is systematic and it is pervasive and it is wrong it is morally offensive and it should be criminally offensive as well because these countries, these companies are exploiting people and they are breaking the rules and breaking the law so that they can promote their product and us as a society just need to say this isn't good enough I could rant about lots of other things as well I hope there's a point, Andrew, that I come onto plastic but it's wrong and something should be done about it and this is a political will thing to be able to challenge some of those very, very, very large very powerful agri, agri-petrochemical food businesses and this is only going to get worse if we do a deal with America to import all of this stuff that the way in which you solve food poverty isn't by just making food cheaper it's actually about challenging poverty in itself and that's about respect and it's about wages and it's about access to opportunities if Covid's done one thing it's shone a great big light on the massive inequalities in this country and food is one of the big symptoms of that and you saw that at the early stages lockdown where some of the more vulnerable people literally couldn't get access to food and were forgotten by society and it's just wrong, just frankly wrong and we should be ashamed of ourselves as a community to allow that sort of thing to happen but this is a massive, massive political thing and at the same time in Covid pieces of legislation like the agriculture bill are going through and slipping through so hardly noticed because of all the things that's going on with Covid this country needs to have a proper food policy and this country needs to have a proper food act that preserves those rights preserves the rights of citizens to access to proper, healthy, sustainable food and without that debate without people like you, Tasha and to be frank, like the rest of us as well frankly getting a little bit angry about this then nothing's going to change because it's wrong and what we are doing is we're not just making yourself ill we are dividing ourselves as a society and dividing ourselves of communities with something around food which should bring us all together and it's just, sorry I'm starting around here so I'm going to stop but it's just really, really offensive what goes on in the food industry and the big players You're completely right, obviously, Aaron that when Covid hit the focus became so much upon food access initially and then through from that and thinking a bit more about food productions and small producers and things Patrick, you mentioned something earlier we've been talking about political will and those things but you're also saying Patrick that people can kind of in their buying choices impact upon this as well and Jenny, I'd like to come to you to talk a little bit about that moment when Covid first hit and what happened with the supermarkets about people not being able to get things or all of that sort of stop piling and then people attitudes towards getting food what they were able to do and the role of small producers and markets kind of all into playing into that in that sort of March, April, May period Yeah, I mean it's very interesting and you're absolutely right, Darren that the terrible inequalities in our society I think are very highlighted because of this crisis what was striking for me I thought was all these pictures of empty shelves and supermarkets and yet a lot of the small shops these shops that I've always written about, these independent shops they still had food stock but it was like, oh, I need flour oh, you know what, my local Turkish shop still had it way after the supermarkets had run out so that sort of vibrancy which again brings my point that we need a diversity of different sort of shops the markets are really interesting because actually and we know how important it is to be outdoors now to fight coronavirus we're living we're now eight months further down the road it hasn't gone away it's not going away we have to think of how do we live with it shopping outdoors is a really basic interesting way of staying much safer and you would have thought that markets around Britain could have sort of stayed open and flourished and sadly a lot of them closed down because councils were really wary people worried about distance but I wrote an article from my website just out of interest because I wanted to know what was happening and there was this wonderful in Kent where most of the farmers markets closed but one in Shibam stayed open because the man you ran it was just incredibly organised and I wished he was in government because he was just really efficient and he came up with a sort of a dry through farms market he went online, he got funding he'd sort of it the year before because he thought it would be great for commuters he hadn't got the funding when the crisis broke he managed to get some funding put it online allowed people to shop and set up this incredible system you know one family one family group sorted the orders another family group to get to the cars and it's worked really well and he's sustaining it now because it's just a safe way of shopping and of course those markets that stayed open like Ultraman Market in the North West which has always sort of highlighted local food producers and supported them that stayed open in a sort of minimised way because a lot of it was eating out but that went but it was food and these were lifelines I interviewed the producers you know if they hadn't had that market I talked to one farmer and you know of the nine markets that he had sold at he only had one the only one was Ultraman and he's there he's a farmer so you know about that Patrick you know he's like the livestock are there but you know it has to be fed you know it has to be fed the work that goes on a farm has to be carried on all your fuel bills your expenses your staff they're all carried on so you need to make money you know and sustain it so I think that's sort of vibrancy of markets you know and in fact the range you know borough you know which I've you know I went to the very early days of borough when it was every third Saturday of a month and just actually grow and grow and I know how important it is for food producers to have access you know to markets and farmers markets often get a very bad press and they're written off as sort of you know privileged middle class indulgence and I just know from talking to producers across the country that actually those farmers markets are really important because they give them revenue they get they meet their customers they get feedback they try you know he has a new cheese watching to this they get feedback and often people enjoy it I think we just remember you know food is a pleasure isn't it you know this is one of the reasons why we're dramatic for you know I love it you know nearly 30 years of writing about food it's it's and it brings people together as we were saying I think that's that's sort of the joyful side of it is something that we should hold on to and it's really precious so if we're talking about supermarkets as Sasha was saying not having enough good food healthy food well-produced food that have the supermarket aisles as an option people when they're going up and down and I wonder why from both perspectives in the supermarket perspective and a small producers perspective how those connections don't happen I suppose and Tasha you were talking earlier about having conversations with Tesco and I'm sure other supermarkets as well as part of your campaigning is that something which comes up about the way supermarkets deal or don't with smaller producers Hi um that's with the conversation with Tesco is yesterday it was very much centered around you know we do provide option and we work together it's very you know they in their eyes they didn't see any problem in terms of you know the way that you know they present food or the kind of food that they get in it was very I didn't get the sense that there was any community work so they weren't in touch with like local stores and other you know stakeholders within the local community that they could work together it was very much Tesco's we are you know one of the biggest retailers in the whole world is very much up it's very much us and then we're serving the community but I do agree in terms of like you know supermarkets and local communities working together to make these healthier options more available and accessible for everyone and I think it's definitely something that the food industry could could work on and improve on yeah Patrick I think I've heard you speak before about the relationships and the how things work between farmers producers and supermarkets and the challenges of getting getting what we're talking about in terms of good to be healthy food into supermarkets do you want to talk to us a little bit about that? Well I think this is a really crucial issue because one of the things that the supermarkets have done during my farming lifetime is they they're used to source relatively regionally and locally and just to give you an example I was a carrot grower for many years supplying supermarkets but then they progressively closed down all their pack houses some of which used to be available for producers in the west country of Wales like myself until eventually they only had one pack house for all the carrots for instance that they sold and in our case that was Peterborough 230 miles away from this farm so we had to give up but if you look at all the foods they sell say the beef or the lamb the lamb for instance that one or two very well known supermarkets source all comes from an abattoir down the road from here but that includes the lamb that comes from Scotland which is a terrible story and if you are now going to ask supermarkets to source more locally and regionally they've destroyed all the infrastructure that used to enable people to get local food into their into their supermarket and actually we are going to host a meeting with Welsh supermarkets quite shortly with the National Farmers Union and I hope that it's going to encourage them let's put it in the positive way and to rethink the way they source their food because at the moment I think it's in a very bad state and also just the number of young people who are going vegan or vegetarian part of it I think is their their feeling that they don't want to be any part of an industrialized livestock system which of course is absolutely right but they need to be able to differentiate between the animals which are part of the problem which is mainly industrially produced chickens and pigs and the mainly grass-fed rumen and tannels like cattle and sheep and dairy cows that are grass-fed and on small family farms which are not just part of the solution they're essential if we're going to support the shift towards more sustainable and regenerative farming systems because if we're going to give up nitrogen and pesticides and all those kind of chemical inputs you have to go back to what's called mixed farming which is based on crop rotations with the fertility building element and that fertility building element is normally grass and clover and the only way you can turn that into food and it might be 50% of the crop rotation even in the east of England is to have grazing animals on it so this is a very complicated question but we need to get these issues widely discussed and then we need to use our buying power to support those farming systems in the marketplace and that's another issue of course the labelling is not very good at the moment yeah before we go to Patrick sorry before we Judd, can I bring Darren in because you're very keen to chime in I think there's a place as well because we've talked a lot about markets as retail markets but there's a big place here for the wholesale markets and if you look what happens in places like France and Spain there is a whole network of wholesale markets where the supermarkets actually do buy from but also if you want your local corner shop to sell better food better fruit and veg or better meat or whatever else they need to have an alternative supply mechanism to be able to get it to them because they can't do what Tesco's do which is to buy a whole field of corn before it's even been planted what they have to do is they have to buy in smaller quantities from wholesalers and I think there is there is some positive signs and I think there is a this is where I talk about a food policy there is some positive signs within wholesale markets there's a very strong wholesale market up in Yorkshire and that supplies right the way across Yorkshire and Interlankisher and they do a very very good job up there but we need more of those and we need we need more support for them because often they are owned either by local authorities or by sort of like arms-length government bodies and their expensive places to run when I went across to Belgrade about a year and a half ago the government there which isn't necessarily a particularly wealthy fantastic country you know they're not exactly as wealthy as our society is had put an enormous amount of money into building a very very large wholesale market right next to their airport because they knew that what they were producing there was too much for their own country and they would be able to export it out and we need to have we need to have those sorts of interventions and investments as well to create an alternative food network an alternative food system to the one that has been dominated so much by the very very small number of people who buy most of the food in the UK often what wholesale markets can be is a little bit of a funnel for food grown in Holland and other parts of Europe and I think if there's one thing that could be beneficial that could come out of Brexit is that we do turn those systems round a little bit so that it becomes much more of an entry point for British produced food as well. Thank you Daryl we need to go to questions from our audience because we have we have many of them so I'm going to dive into those. The first one is Aime Square at U-Tasher so coming to you for this we have a lady who's saying a parent of a teenager who and it's always encouraged a teenager to eat well and they mostly eat home quick food at home but you think she has shares in Pringles or Doritos in the packets I find on her bedroom floor. What strategies does Tasha suggest parents use with their teenage children to lure them away from fast and processed food and take an interest in their diets? That's a great question I mean for me the way that my mum got me into more healthier diet is genuinely she just cooked healthy meals at home and so that was normal for me so when I got to school and I was speaking to friends and they were like oh yeah the chicken and chips shop down here all these things were like oh my god guys what are you doing what are you talking about you know so for me it's definitely I do encourage all my friends all peers as well and I think that's one thing that Jamie's been really good at is encouraging young people he's got a new book out seven ways to cook and so that looks at having normal ingredients and different ways that you can cook it and make it exciting so that kind of things just making cooking fun I think Jenny spoke about her being at home chef I love that you know I look up YouTube tutorials and how to make this and how to make that and so for me it's kind of like a social thing I get friends over post pre-COVID get friends over and we do cooking sessions together you know that's fun for me and it's a social element for it and I think that's that's another thing for young people when they meet you know at their local fast food store it's not because they want the fast food it's because it's a social thing for them what's different from you know the 90s and the 80s is that there's not a lot of open space for young people to hang around with after school to you know do activities and so the only thing that they've resulted in is we meet after school at this place and along the way we pick up you know this to eat and so when you have like a high street that's completely plagued with junk food stores you don't really have much option in terms of what is it that we're going to eat when we get to the park so yeah definitely encouraging just cooking at home making new meals trying out new recipes make it fun make it sociable and I think everybody will be cooking soon Brilliant thank you Jenny the one for you which is very much about independent shops especially in London from the questioner recognising you've been working you're looking at that for more than 20 years and asking what are the biggest changes you've seen so independent shops and do you feel optimistic about the future for such a short time? Oh well that is I mean the sad thing is that I looked at the first edition of Food Lovers London in 1991 and I was saying if we don't you know these shots under threat because rents are going up I mean so sadly I think some of these very negative things you know high rents congestion charge is a massive issue you know I think London the whole parking thing how do people who you know if you're buying food and you want to buy quantities of it you probably you know transport is an issue and so that's just sort of watching that that change over the years and what I've noticed is those shops in Soho the older ones that I talk about the Italian Denny's they were sort of community shops and actually very mockably forward was one of the feet that I always get from people is like oh I never I always thought it'd be expensive I'm like no no look you know look at the price of this these owners compare them to a supermarket price they're actually cheaper you know and better you know it's certainly on a par it's very interesting but I've noticed that the new shops they've opened up the new food shops in Soho are treat shops which is really sort of telling of our times I think you know so it's like any Claire specialist beautiful chocolate wonderful donuts you know and that so it's sort of you know those the the everyday shops for me those shops which I really love that are more reeded are being driven out so I think you know rent is a massive issue in terms of optimism so which we can be as well is I do think I'm always encouraged and it's lovely to hear you Tash you're talking about your love of food and cooking because when I go to markets of all sorts around London it's always I love seeing the fact that I see young people there you know and that's um and you know shopping for food I think this is the thing that when I started about food it was actually it's really odd to be interested in food in the early 90s was actually quite eccentric and now you know I think there isn't interesting food and I think it's sort of got you know look at Instagram look how much food there is you know people like food I think there is this idea that you know and Jamie's been a great ambassador for that I think of making accessible so I know you're all these lovely young men I know you're all making sourdough you know that was unimaginable you know my the young men I knew when I was in my dreams they weren't making sourdough and so I sort of feel like there is you know if we get tap into that sort of interest in food and make it accessible and and yeah that joy of it you know that the fun of it and which we control it you know cooking is controlled about what you put in your mind which I think is really important brilliant this is one which I suspect is going to start with you Darren but then I'd like to kind of move around the group as well and talking about markets not specifically about market broadly about food markets and positing that their own place not to justify food but also place a social purpose and a very mental purpose social interaction community cohesion and to question it is wondering about how that is managed during such moments of you know intense pressure in the system and whether those things can be continued and protected and whether or not they matter well absolutely and markets one of the joys of them unless it's throwing it down with rain on a Wednesday in March is that there's very very little infrastructure so you can adapt and change and you can reflect your local community incredibly easily and I would argue that often market traders are more in contact and more in touch with what's needed in the local community than a lot of a lot of the others of the other sort of more majors are so I think it's it's it's a kind of it's a great opportunity when you're able just to pull up one day with a van full of stuff and to open it up and see if it sells because you get absolutely immediate feedback because it either sells or it doesn't sell and and sometimes in a way that's what creates that kind of leveling and that that that understanding it becomes relevant to the local community the community find it and they develop a shopping habit where they go there and then something survives and something flourishes you know borough market flourished because people discovered it and because people liked it and they kept coming back and it became part of their life and that's the same with with with all with all retail outlets particularly ones that are based very closely in and and and very close to their local community so it can be quite an organic thing it could be quite a sort of natural thing that evolves in some instances you have some very very forward-looking local authorities that are in touch with their with their local community and are able to attract both the facility provide the facilities but also able to attract the talent that's needed to be able to make that critical mass that gets the market going or or gets either the street market or the covered market going and that's often because you've got some very charismatic individuals within there that say hold on a minute I've got these great ideas I want to do something that looks like a good place to start off and they go there and then people come around I always say that that market traders their best path path of their market research is to see what other people sell and if it that's selling they then go along and they sell more of it so it's very organic but I think there's also a real place for particularly local government and there's some very good people in local government that are making markets important in London the mayor has established a markets board to try and coordinate all of this stuff and to really give markets and they're linked to communities a real focus Sarah and I think you have helped me answer another question once you're answering the first one because we have someone else who's asking about touching on Tasha's point about food deserts asking about how the people in that area can try and revive what this she's saying the area used to have a fantastic market local foods and small growers and you're wanting to sort of you know do something to inject a bit more of that back into the local area and it's interesting you say it can be quite organic if it can come from people who have energy and creativity and desire and you have to do that in an area I'm going to move on to other questions because we have we have a lot coming in Patrick I'm going to come to you for this we have someone worrying certainly unfortunately correctly about the impact of furlough ending and people having less and less money to spend increasing job losses and this person is wondering and worrying about the impact on that on farmers and producers having to cut prices in this scenario yes I think it is this is a worry you know food prices already come up and a lot of farmers have just become the big bigger farmers have just become commodity slaves selling food or even below the cost of production and they just don't know what to do at the moment and I think that the alternative which is what the road we've gone down because it may sound strange to say this but we've got an 80 cow dairy herd and a lot of the family farms with that number of cows in the herd have just gone out of business because the milk price they got was below the cost of production we've only managed to survive here by adding value to the milk by making it into cheese but of course even our cheese is out of reach of a lot of people who would like to eat good cheese but just simply can't afford the price difference so this is a huge an important issue and I think that the conversation you've just had with Darren about the importance of local markets and farmers markets cannot be overstated and in a way we need the farmers market movement to get bigger because if you only have a market once a fortnight or something like that then you can't form a habit of food buying in your local farmers market and certainly around here in Wales as Darren was just saying some local authorities were really enlightened and some of them were just struck with fear about social distancing and a lot of them got closed down for that reason and yet the ones that have stuck with you know keeping the markets open and maybe even increase the frequency of the markets this provides a genuine alternative out there for hard pressed farmers who need to add value and sell direct to consumers so I think there's a huge question here what is the if we get to completely transform our food systems is it revolution with kind of orthodoxy challenging disruptive new models of getting food to people who want to buy genuine food or is it evolution through you know shaming the supermarkets and getting to adopt better practices which they are definitely not doing at the moment it's probably a combination of both but I think we need a lot more ground up stuff and it is a worry that as burlows burlowing ends and people get you know made redundant a lot of people will no doubt then people are going to have less money to spend on food Yeah Darren do you want to say something? It's also about you know what you do there is you shorten the supply chain so you have a smaller number of people taking a bite out of every cherry before it ends up and in your shopping basket and we talked a lot about physical markets here but one of the other things that's happened it's accelerated significantly during COVID is people buying through online means you know you can now buy fish straight from the key in a way in which you couldn't do before and some of that's been born out of necessity because those fishermen would be able to move their catch on bulk elsewhere and they weren't able to do that and I just hope that kind of thing sticks with people I hope that becomes a new way of life that you know you might not do it for your routine shop because you know at the end of the day we all need to buy loo roll but for the stuff that you know is that brings that joy to your life Tasha that that's that fun stuff that you can buy it through the internet and you can buy direct from suppliers and then it becomes you know it becomes more affordable you know clearly if you produce food in a low yields very high quality way that food is going to cost more than something which is pump full of hormones and pesticides and God knows what else to maximize yield that's going to cost more money but I think Can I say something about that we need a new way of measuring food quality based on nutrition per acre not just yield per acre absolutely and if we could if we could measure food nutrient density in a reliable way and give and power people who buy food to know the difference that would be really amazing because I think so many of the smaller artisan producers produce more nutritionally dense food than all these huge sort of monocultures of say carrots in the east of England where actually a carrot isn't what it used to be and there is evidence to show that the mineral and trace elements and micronutrient content of food has gone down by maybe 50% in some vegetables during the time I've been farming but also Andrew if I can't if you buy loose if you buy loose weight you buy what you need rather than what somebody else tells you you need so therefore it might be more expensive by the kilo but you buy what you need so you don't end up chucking half of it away so you know Tash you were talking about this sort of the two for one offers and things like that and the discounting that goes on in some areas of the retail trade that's encouraging to buy stuff you don't need that doesn't that it looks like it's cheap it looks like it's good value but it's not because that stuff's perishable and you end up throwing it away so if you buy only what you need if you buy in season and if you buy it direct from the producer or from a very very short supply chain it can become much more affordable if you look at your diet overall Diane I'm sorry I'm just going to quickly interrupt because we are already over running but that's not what I'm interrupting because we're going to we are going to overrun now because we have a question which I really do want us to get to and Tash are going to come to you for this this question about no-deal Brexit and I think it's important to to raise that given everything in the last couple of days and the question is specifically about no-deal and the potential impact to the lowering of food standards and the food retail landscape Tash would you like to tackle that? I'm so glad this question is coming I knew you were going to love it I'm so glad honestly I do believe that the trade deals the negotiations that are going on right now could be the biggest change to young people's health to Britain's diet in general I'm especially concerned about any trade deal that comes out of you know the US you know Trump is very much vocal about him being anti-clear relations he's not interested in warning consumers you know when food has been genetically modified or when it's high in salt fat and sugar so I do think we need to use our voices to make sure that even when there is a deal that deal still prioritises health it maintains animal welfare it maintains environmental standards because we do have really high food standards in the UK compared to other countries and it's about making sure how do we maintain those and also you know I do hope that no I don't hope that I know trade deal you know situation does go on because that would be terrible but also it's it's all very uncertain really isn't it it's all very uncertain what is it that's going to happen but whatever outcome it is I honestly do pray to the gods above that our health our food standards everything is somewhat maintained and protected Tasha thank you very much we obviously could go on and on and on and the thing is this conversation is going to go on and on not just with us tonight but happily we are in a time where this is a very very live conversation and incredibly important and increasingly important and certainly one of the things here which I think has really come out today is the message of you know there is no such thing as cheap food and I think you know there is a growing understanding of that in the food system and how we can all the impact upon those things and make those choices that are better for us and they're better for better everybody huge thanks to you all Darren Hennah and Patrick Holden Jane Lindford and Tasha Makayakora it was an absolutely fascinating session so so many questions and not just questions but lovely feedback coming in from the audience as well so I think you've really kind of got people thinking you really got people very engaged in in the subject huge thanks to you guys a huge thanks to KitchenAid who are our supporters of the food season only one more event to come in the British life of food season that's on Tuesday next week where we will be with Tom Courage at the Hand and Flowers a very interesting discussion I'm sure one's going to be you will find on your screen a place to leave feedback about the event if you'd like to and also to donate the work of the British Library if you'd like to support that but for now huge thanks again to the panel and thank you all for watching the British Library food season