The Socialist Chef Manifesto - The Socialist Chef

1. Eat for Pleasure

1.1. Cook with love, confidence and creativity

The best foods are vibrant, explosive, joyful and soulful. That first spaghetti bolognaise your mum taught you before you moved away to uni (I maintain that it should have mushrooms in it, and no, I will not be taking further questions on this matter), your granny’s plum crumble with fruit from her garden, that burger from that one place you went to with your best mate on a grey Tuesday in early January.

Food that’s fresh and tastes as it truly should, full of the life surrounding the table and the love that went into making it. First and foremost, cook with the seasons, but also take inspiration from the melting pot of culture surrounding you – it’s an exciting way to create new flavours and experiences.

Modern cooking is a reflection of our mixed culture, from the Korean bao buns at my local farmers market in Devon to the bear stew I had in a 15th century merchant’s house in Tallinn or the mooncakes and green tea in a tiny hole in the wall cafe in the busy Chinese community of San Francisco, it’s a blend that has never felt so strong. The incredible flavours, techniques, knowledge and ways of life are infinite yet uniting, a gift worth fighting for in a divisive world. Celebrating the awesome flavours of this beautiful planet, from the yakitori in the izakaya bars of Kyoto to the birria tacos in a Jalisco market of Mexico, helps us all support cultural diversity but also plant biodiversity, because of the immense range of ingredients used throughout all walks of life.

Some of us feel like we don’t have the confidence to play or have fun with a recipe or even just make our own. The secret ingredient to good home cooking is quality ingredients, loved and let speak for themselves. Something we can all do, with a little help. Confidence, creativity and having a play around, using what’s best at the market or what’s been languishing in the veg drawer at the end of the week, skills that will save you money and help you eat well without taking forever to cook.

1.2. Support diversity

I’m sorry, but I don’t think anyone can continue to sugar coat this crisis unless they have their heads deeper in the sand than Shell does in the Canadian oil sands. One of the most critical ways we can prevent a complete breakdown is to protect the biodiversity our planet, our lives and our children’s lives, our children’s children’s lives, all depend on. There’s a lot of ways we can, and inarguably, inescapably, imperatively absolutely must protect this complex web of life-support systems.

There’s more than 30,000 different types of edible plants in the world, including all sorts of weird and wonderful vegetables, ancient grains and forgotten fruit. The idea of a Root to Fruit diet is to tap into this biodiversity and celebrate it.

I’ve taken this shopping list and a lot of inspiration from Tom Hunt’s brilliant book Eating for Pleasure, People and Planet – think of it as a suggestion or starting point for enriching your diet with low-impact and environmentally regenerative food that hits the holy trinity of a professional chef (cheap, fast and good). The list has been put together using the Food and Agricultural Organisation’s definition of sustainable diets and the World Wide Fund for Nature’s ‘Future 50 foods’ list. Tom also uses the EAT-Lancet report Food in the Anthropocene, which sums it up with a planetary health diet is ‘mainly plant-based but can include modest amounts of fish, meat and dairy’. The report advises we eat no more than 0-28g of beef, lamb, pork or dairy products a day, or about 1 6oz beef burger a week or a medium-sized steak twice a month. 100g of fish is more than most of us eat a day anyway, but please do your research and make sure your fish is approved by the Marine Stewardship Council – look out for the blue stamp when buying or ask your fishmonger. I don’t know if the report takes into account the environmental can of worms to think about when buying fish, but 100g per day seems high to me. 0-58g of poultry per day is about 2 average-sized chicken breasts a week. Easy, right?

Oils and vinegar

Extra virgin olive oil is a chef’s best friend, and a good choice for the body and the planet. It can transform any dish, nourishing us with monounsaturated fat and omega-9 fatty acids, which can help reduce cholesterol and support normal brain function, supported by many studies of the Mediterranean diet. An incredibly diverse and intriguing ingredient to boot; did you know that there are olive oil ‘sommeliers’, who taste different olive oils like flavours of a good wine? You get what you pay for with quality olive oil though, so don’t go wild: I like to use EVOO for dressings, sauces and generally giving a dish a kick up the ass if it seems to be slacking, and organic sunflower or rapeseed oil or beef dripping from a local biodynamic farm for roasting, frying or other high-octane activities. It’s well worth spending a little extra for organic rapeseed oil because of the excessive pesticides used to grow it conventionally. Cold-pressed seed oils don’t lose their nutritional value during processing, which makes them good sources of omega-3 fatty acids and polyunsaturated fat.

Like all oils, if olive oil gets too hot it creates what’s called ‘free radicals’, which can be harmful and potentially linked to an increased risk of cancer. I tend to avoid deep-frying in my cooking, and remember to keep an eye on hot oil and don’t let it smoke: EVOO will burn between 160 and 200 degrees, so if your recipe calls for a temperature above about 175-180, use organic rapeseed oil, beef dripping or sustainably farmed coconut oil.

Cider vinegar is a good choice for adding acidity to balance a recipe – if you’re not confident with adding a touch of vinegar here or a squeeze of lemon there to lift and brighten a recipe, I highly recommend Samin Nosrat’s invaluable book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It’s an incredibly useful guide to seasoning with intuition, an indispensable skill for following a Root to Fruit diet. A good-quality apple cider vinegar should have all the fruitiness and sweet-sour notes of a good cider, with many well-documented health benefits and a well-managed orchard supports biodiversity too – there are more known varieties of apple than all the different types of grape used in winemaking, with just as many different flavour profiles of cider vinegar.

Nuts and seeds

Great things come in small packages – full of protein, vitamins and the good fats that are vital for our brain and body. Flax and linseeds, chia, sunflower, camelina and hemp seeds are all grown in the UK, packed with omega-3 and -6. Hemp is particularly awesome, because it doesn’t need synthetic fertilisers made from fossil fuels to grow well, it has a really unique flavour, makes the tastiest plant milk without relying on imported soy or almond crops, and as a bonus, the plant itself can be made into clothes so we don’t need to use even more fossil fuels to make polyester or fertilisers to grow cotton.

Sunflower seeds are easy to grow at home, plus the bees love the wide, smiling faces and who can blame them? Sunflowers are like the golden retrievers of the plant world, all leggy optimism and sunshine. Pumpkin and squash seeds make a pretty spectacular vegan pesto with some basil, garlic and olive oil, and even easier to get hold of since you can just buy a squash – free seeds! They’re loaded with antioxidants, which protect against certain cancers, zinc and manganese, which boost reproductive health and libido (oysters are an infamous aphrodisiac for the same reason, they contain a lot of zinc), and pumpkin seeds are a natural source of magnesium and tryptophan, an amino acid that can help promote sleep in some studies.

Walnuts and hazelnuts grow well in the UK too, thought to lower cholesterol and a quick, easy way to add some texture to a dish last minute – I’m a big fan of walnut dukkah for giving some crunch to pulses or hummus.

Try Fairtrade, organic almonds, cacao and Brazil nuts from conservation projects, UK hazelnuts, cobnuts or walnuts, hemp seeds, linseeds, flax seeds, sunflower and pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds or tahini from a good workers co-operative like Suma.

Sweeteners

Many plants, especially fruit, can be used as a sweetener without needing to rely on ecologically damaging sugarcane monocultures. Did you know that in Britain before sugar became widely available, we used parsnips?

Molasses or treacle are by-products of the sugar refining process that contains all the nutrients removed from the sugar cane or beet and is bursting with iron. Look for black treacle or blackstrap molasses in the UK, which is darker and contains less sugar and more of the good stuff. Dates, dried apricots and other dried fruits are perfect for lightly sweetening desserts or sprinkling over muesli or porridge and are rich in a huge variety of nutrients.

Honey is incredible stuff – light and floral or dark golden and flecked with pollen, set and spreadable and begging for hot buttered toast or crystal clear and smooth, rubbing shoulders with fresh berries and oats. Real honey has a mind-boggling range of flavours, even more so than olive oil, but make sure to support your local beekeeper, as it helps them to carry on helping their bees. Remember, if the bees go, so do we.

Minimally refined sugars like jaggery, piloncillo, rapadura and my personal favourite, Japanese black sugar, keep most of their nutrients and each lending their own unique, incredible flavour to different cuisines. Black sugar has been made in Okinawa, Japan, for 400 years, often made into a syrup for desserts like anmitsu or used to sweeten a hot ginger tea as an invigorating iron-rich pick-me-up.

Like all things sugary, these should still be enjoyed as an occasional treat.

Try unsulphured apricots, black treacle or blackstrap molasses, dates and local honey.

Cereals and grains

Support small farms and soil health by eating a whole variety of their offerings. Swapping common staples like wheat for spelt, corn for millet or rice for barley, boosts the range of nutrients available to us whilst strengthening our global food system (because let’s be honest, it desperately needs it).

Most grains are processed and bleached to improve shelf life and make them look uniform and tidy, which of course benefits absolutely no one but the evil corporates. This is wasteful, since the bran and germ are the most flavourful and nutritious part, plus the chemicals used to bleach flour can’t be good for you.

Whole grains are affordable, even when organic, and makes up a healthy and well-balanced bowl of food. Similarly, sliced white bread lacks anything good, is wrapped in plastic, goes mouldy if you look at it wrong, and after all that it still tastes like damp cotton wool. Wholemeal sourdough has a far superior nutritional value and flavour, although it is more expensive. I like to save money and make my own using spelt flour and it isn’t too difficult even if you’re short on time – no more lockdowns, please! Make sure you keep the ends and any stale leftovers, as these can be used to bolster soups and pesto.

Try amaranth, barley, buckwheat, heirloom varieties of corn or maize, einkorn, emmer wheat, Bulgar wheat, millet, quinoa, rye, spelt and wild rice.

Beans & Pulses

Protein-packed, cheap and biologically restorative, legumes are nitrogen-fixing and help to improve soil quality. They require less water and fertiliser to grow than other proteins, and they’re an indispensable staple of Mexican and Japanese cuisine; spicy, vibrant, massively popular and incredibly tasty. Soak a variety of dried pulses on a Sunday night and boil them to use in various applications through the week, or bulk freeze to use in future.

Try UK broad or fava beans, organic or Rainforest Alliance/Demeter certified soybeans, lentils, home-grown beansprouts, lentils, peas and chickpeas.

Fruit, veg and flowers

Not only essential for our health but it also helps increase demand for a wider variety of plants, making our food system more resilient and supporting biodiversity – remember, you wield the buying power here! We have access to an endless realm of intriguing plants to get creative and have fun with in the kitchen. Eating local, seasonal food is a straightforward way to achieve this, as the range of food you’ll get will naturally evolve with the seasons. Farmer’s markets, box schemes or allotments are great, especially when you explore exciting heirloom varieties like rainbow carrots and tiger striped tomatoes.

Try and find a box scheme that supports your local farm, I buy from the Apricot Centre near Dartington regularly and a friend of mine works on a farm that sends veg boxes out to about sixty households in the Cotswolds, but Riverford is pretty convenient and deliver nationally using electric vans.

My favourite annual crops include the many colours of beetroot including the leaves, purple sprouting broccoli, all kinds of cabbage, heirloom varieties of carrots, bok choi, chilli, mushrooms, squash, swede, tomatoes, celeriac, cauliflower, komatsuna (or Japanese mustard spinach, a brassica popular in Japan, Taiwan and Korea), garlic, turnips, parsnips, courgette and aubergine.

Perennial fruit, veg and herbs

Perennial crops, or cut-and-come-again to the home kitchen/gardener like me, can be harvested year after year, eliminating the need to till as often as annual crops. This means that carbon sequestered by healthy soil during the year stays undisturbed, locking it in and helping to build soil health and reverse desertification in hot, arid areas. The deep roots of perennials help to bind the soil together, so it doesn’t all wash into our drinking water every time it rains (you know who you are, South West Water)

My favourites include apricots including dried, asparagus, jackfruit, all kinds of berry, Jerusalem artichoke, mint, oregano, chives, pear, plum, rhubarb, thyme, some types of kale, all tree fruits including olive oil and nuts, and wild rocket.

Foraged foods

An untapped source of ingredients that are especially nutritious and flavourful – wild mushrooms are both the height and humblest of cuisines, from the finest Parisian bistro to the country stew I tasted in the dense forests of Estonia. Seaweed, for example, is an absolute hero of a vegetable. It grows en masse along our coastline yet rarely eaten outside of East Asia and some parts of Wales, despite being an incredible umami bomb of flavour and rich in iodine.

Dandelions and nettles are often thought of as weeds but are hyper-nutritious and will cost you no more than a leisurely Sunday walk and a pint! Living in the southwest, wild garlic is a particular love of mine – I used to sneak over the back wall of the big manor house in Padstow to pick bags of the stuff for pestos, oils, soups, and the all-time champion of steak night, wild garlic chimichurri.

Do remember to take only what you need, check local restrictions and avoid areas frequented by dogs, heavy traffic or pesticides. Do as I say not as I do, and don’t sneak onto “private” land though. Always err on the side of caution as well, and if you’re not completely certain you’ve got the right berry, don’t eat it! Remember to be careful near water or along the coast too.

Try blackberries, damsons, sloes, chestnuts, sea vegetables, rock samphire, dandelions, elderflower and elderberries, mushrooms, nettles, wild garlic and wood sorrel.

Stalks, leaves and other snacky extra-curricular activities.

Too often we throw away titbits that still have bags of flavour to give, like vegetable peelings, pasta cooking water and other by products. The best way around this is to not remove them in the first place, incorporating everything into the dish – try just not peeling your veg and see what happens or cooking pasta directly in the sauce. Cooking pasta like this is great, because the starches thicken the sauce without having to add butter or cheese.

Stretch your ingredients and love your leftovers. Most of my recipes have suggestions to turn any leftovers into something else or gives freezer instructions. A single portion of veg makes a nice snack or can be added ready cooked to a soup or curry to save time; one of my favourite sturdy lunches is leftover roasted root veg, a handful of cooked grains or pulses, some chopped herbs and a tahini or pesto dressing. It takes all of 30 seconds to put together when you keep your leftovers to hand. Half an onion, a fingernail-sized piece of garlic or a couple of leaves of spinach can go into almost anything even if it’s not in the recipe. This is where you’ll start to save the big bucks: by valuing every scrap and creating delicious and inventive meals.

1.3 Know your farmer

In the UK, four faceless supermarket giants control over 80% of food retail.

Aiden excitedly walks me along row upon row of chillies, some tall and upright, others sprawling across the paths, all of them laden with glossy fruit – mild, pale green Turkish Delight, vibrant wrinkled Lemon Drop, all the way up to crimson Wraith, blow-your-head-off Moruga Scorpion and my favourite, the pretty pastel pink Sugar Rush Peach. He explains the logic behind growing so many different varieties, that some tend to grow better in dry years or hot years than others, some more resistant to pests, some just tastier. This time of year, there’s squash too, tiger-striped Delicata, beautiful, teal-toned Crown Prince – this way of farming different varieties of veg improves the biodiversity and resilience of not just the crop but also the soil.

Baddaford farm is a cohort of small-scale land based ethical enterprises, of which Aiden’s business Green Ginger Organics is just one. Home of the Baddaford Farm Collective and tucked away in the Devon South Hams, Baddaford proves that by sharing land, buildings, machinery, knowledge, buildings and hard work, our food system has room for everyone.

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (quite literally, as a species we have one shot at this) to support our home planet by supporting our farmers. Like Aiden, most farmers really care for the land, it’s their job to. Growing your own food, even just a pot of herbs, visiting farms, farm shops and farmer’s markets wherever possible and talking to the people who grew, cooked, loved and cared for your food helps us to rekindle our lost connection with the land, nature and good food.

Don’t be afraid to ask your butcher, baker, candlestick maker, farmer, fishmonger or chef about the origins of your food and choose the more diverse farms that produce a variety of crops. Chances are, if like me they’re happy with where their wares came from, they won’t stop talking about it! Sustainable and regenerative farms are often certified organic or biodynamic but not always, so look for produce from grocers, markets and online stores that happily give information about how their ingredients were grown. Knowledge is power here and remember to question everything; always ask for as much information as possible.

You can find out more about the Baddaford Farm Collective here.

2. Eat Whole Foods

Whole foods are raw or cooked plants, meat, fish, eggs or dairy that have been processed as little as possible, ideally free from added chemicals from root to fruit. Sugars are unrefined, like Okinawa black sugar, still rich and dark, grains are unpolished, the bran and germ lending superior bite and flavour, fruit and veg eaten in its entirety including the nutritious organic skin.

Root to Fruit takes this a step further, thinking about how our food is part of Planet Earth in all its splendour, including geology, ecology and sociology. You are thinking holistically beyond your chopping board, your compost bin, thinking: ‘how can I support better farming?’ ‘What happens to this wrapper once I’m finished with it?’ ‘What happens to the cow that made this milk once she can’t anymore?’

If we are to eat from the whole farm, we must eat what the farmer needs to grow. It’s no good only eating wheat for example, because then the farmers can only grow wheat, and the finite land can only support so much wheat before it fails. Crops can’t be grown indefinitely without replacing some of the nutrients taken up by the plants, which leaves us with two options: put even more pressure on our dwindling and irreplaceable reserves of natural gas to produce nitrogen fertilisers and add yet more greenhouse gases to a planet that’s already starting to cook, or as consumers we work together to make rotation crops like rye commercially viable so that the farmers can grow more of them.

2.1 Produce no waste.

When you spend countless late nights and early mornings cooking for thousands of people over the course of a gritty, beautiful, joyful career, you really notice where the waste stacks up.

Lemon and lime marmalade with spent citrus skins, cauliflower kimchi with the leaves destined for the bin, herby tahini dressing with forgotten coriander stalks, coffee liqueur with yesterday’s coffee grounds; the possibilities are endless. It’s a really exciting part of my work, repurposing and redirecting ‘waste products’ and giving them a new lease on life.

It’s hard to swallow, but according to WRAP, the average household wastes about 30% of the food they buy in, whether it’s a portion of veg that grew old in the fridge or a wilted bunch of herbs. There’s a good reason food waste is the issue du jour among foodies and environmentalists alike: it’s somewhere we can all make a difference. By using everything we can, sharing what we can’t eat ourselves and composting what we can’t give away, we save a staggering amount of work, resources, water, land, energy and GHG emissions than if we’d just dumped it down a big hole.

When you make small changes, they ripple outwards throughout the world. If you’re reading this, you’re part of the collective push for better food. The solution is simple: we need to value and celebrate good food. By caring about what we eat and buying it from conscious shops, farmers and restaurants, we support a system that truly values food, people and our planetary home.

Use-by & best before dates

Sell-by, best-before and use-by dates are confusing, and often even unnecessary. The use-by date is important to remember and you probably should pay attention to it, although I tend to think of it as more strong advice rather than actual rules and I’m still here, so how bad could it be? The trick is to not buy too much at a time, make a meal plan of what you want to eat when and try to catch any stragglers before they turn. The best-before and sell by dates are more about quality, it’s there to tell you that the food won’t be as good after that date to shift liability, and unsurprisingly only really benefits the super(ficial)markets.

The Food Standards Agency has actually advised that sell by dates should be scrapped, since they don’t serve any purpose other than lining the pockets of Big Food, and that use-by dates should be extended and only used on products that could actually make you ill, which in all my years of experience is not as many as you might think.

Around 40% of all food produced is wasted, or about 1.3 billion tonnes, worth $1 trillion, a year.
About half of all the food wasted in the UK comes from homes. This costs the average household £470 a year, rising to £700 for families with children, or about £60 a month.
Just a quarter of all wasted food could feed the 800 million undernourished people globally.

Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, WRAP, Love Food Hate Waste and Food Tank.

Reduce your food waste:

Eat the whole vegetable. Peelings, stalks and greens all have their place and are all equally delicious.
Preserve food. Chutneys, jams, pickles and ferments have stood the test of time. Still just as tasty and keep just as well as they did in the days before refrigeration. They make great gifts too.
Eat local, seasonal food. The shorter the food chain, the less waste is created before the food gets to you.
Eat organic. Fertilisers and pesticides waste precious natural resources including fossil fuels and damage our soil and biodiversity.
Be creative. Don’t follow recipes to the letter and use what you have.
Cook it. Make a big curry or a smoothie to use up old ingredients
Freeze it. If you realise you can’t cook something before it goes, freeze it. Remember to use it as soon as possible once defrosted though.
Save it. Leftovers save time, like a culinary get-out-of-jail free card.
Compost it. Composting turns food waste into the very thing that sustains life – soil. Councils often have composting schemes, but if you have a small garden try composting yourself or build a wormery if you’re short on space.

Reduce your packaging.

Who else is sick of being bombarded with articles about microplastics in my brain and drinking water, then looking around and seeing pointless plastic wrappers strewn across the pavement or piled high on supermarket shelves? Fruit, vegetables, salad, cheese, even bananas and oranges – if only they already had some kind of completely free, biodegradable wrapper provided by nature? It’s free advertising space for them to make more money than God mainly, it’s almost like there’s a theme here.

We’re a society on the move, rushing to work, rushing home, rushing for the train, rushing for a coffee, and we love to grab a snack and go. But this encourages food vendors to package things that never needed to be packaged up in an unrecyclable ball of planet-trashing junk. Making a conscious decision to avoid plastic-wrapped items takes planning to execute and often requires a trip to a specialist store. However, the good news is that it is entirely achievable and will almost certainly improve your diet.

Buy less. The ultimate solution to reduce your packaging impact is to just buy less stuff in the first place!
Make your own packaging kit. Tote bags, tea towel wraps and cloth bags store ingredients just as well as plastic, if not better. Keep jam jars and containers for filling with ingredients at home, and go a step further and look for farmers who will let you return milk bottles or egg boxes for them to reuse. ReRooted plant milk are very good at doing this.
Shop your local market. I’m lucky enough to have a good local market twice, sometimes three times a week, and it’s by far the most enjoyable aid in reducing my plastic waste. Most of these farmer’s markets sell loose products by weight that you can take home in your own packaging; often people at these markets are really happy to help. If there is a product with packaging, consider if you really need it or if you can find an alternative that doesn’t have packaging. Or do the environmental positives of that thing outweigh the impacts of whatever it’s packaged in? If the only option is to buy a packaged item, buy in bulk to save some money and make sure to recycle or reuse the packaging.
Buy from unpackaged stores. Nuts, grains, dried beans and pulses, or cleaning products are available from ‘bulk buy’ or ‘zero waste’ stores and usually cost far less than their packaged equivalent. Around 15% of the cost of any product is usually paying for the plastic it’s wrapped in. This style of shopping gives you the freedom to buy as much or as little as you like into your own containers, avoiding unnecessarily expensive oversized containers and further waste. The shops often get a wholesale discount from their suppliers as well, making organic and more sustainable choices more accessible to our own varying budgets.
Carry your own bottle and cup. Reusable water bottles and coffee cups are an easy swap to make – it will also save you money in the long run, as a lot of coffee shops now offer a discount for bringing your own cup, as well saving you buying unnecessary drinks out when you could just bring some with you.
Buy from shops not online. When ordering online, a lot of extra packaging is used at every point in the supply chain. I like to plan my meals on a Tuesday when the Apricot Centre make their rounds, then make a list of items you need throughout the week and hit the town on a Friday morning for the market, taking my reusable bags and collection of jars and bottles with me. Otherwise, use online shops that only use recyclable and reusable packaging for deliveries. I highly recommend family-run business Sous Chef for their range of ingredients and sustainability: throughout the website you’ll find stories about where people are doing better, including songbird friendly extra virgin olive oil, spice traders who guarantee good prices for their pepper farmers years into the future and chocolate producers who’ll only source sustainable cocoa. Their deliveries are carbon neutral as one of the first ecommerce companies to only use paper packaging. Every time you shop at Sous Chef, they give towards the United Nations sustainable development goals. Sound good? You can read more here.
Toothpaste and cleaning products. Conventional versions are often pretty awful stuff, especially chlorine bleach (they literally have to write ‘harmful to aquatic life with long lasting effects’ on the bottle, and we know the drains go into the ocean eventually, so what’s up with that?) and come in weird little squeezy tubes that can’t be recycled. Look for environmentally sound products in recyclable packaging or make your own. I shave using an old-school steel razor instead of disposables and I recommend Stag & Seer, organic skincare crafted with foraged healing plants, Truthpaste, an SLS-free, cruelty-free, plastic-free toothpaste that offer money off when you return your jars, Salt of the Earth, an organic, natural deodorant and the first deodorant company to offer bulk refills, Wild Sage & Co, for their hand-made, SLS-free, paraben-free, cruelty-free shave soap in a reusable aluminium tin and olive oil soap from Zaytoun, a social enterprise founded to support Palestinian communities through fair trade.
Reuse and repair. If you do have to buy a packaged product, up-cycle it into something good – olive oil drums or tins with colourful labels can become cacti planters, glass bottles can be easily reused or paper wrapping can become bookmarks. My mum cuts her plastic milk bottles in half, then fills the bottom half with soil and seeds and replaces the top half of the plastic bottle – a mini greenhouse! Maintaining and buying goods built to last, ideally second-hand, is a big one. I’m the proud owner of a leather jacket from the 1970’s I picked up in a vintage store, and immediately taught myself how to stitch leather to fix up the seams and rub coconut oil into the shoulders to protect against the elements. I have an orange enamelled cast iron pot given to me by my grandad, and it’s sturdier and infinitely more useful than any other pan in my home. Learn how to repair what you already have, and you’ll save yourself a lot of money as well. There’s a really interesting book by BuyMeOnce founder Tara Button called A Life Less Throwaway; exploring not just a focus on longevity of items but a history of how our items became so throwaway to begin with. The last thing you’ll ever need to buy!

2.2. Eat mostly plants.

Eating mostly plants has led me to explore a huge variety of intriguing ingredients I never knew existed – from near and far, laverbread to shiso to doubanjiang – each with its own unique flavours and colours. These discoveries have inspired a new creativity in my style.

Plant-based diets offer all the necessary building blocks of life and are higher in fibre, necessary for good gut health and protecting against certain cancers. They are also higher in phytonutrients such as carotenoids, flavonoids and glucosinolates, which act as antioxidants and slow the aging process, as well as being a more interesting, vibrant and affordable way to cook.

Data presented at the 2018 American Association for Nutrition conference highlighted a study from the Netherlands that confirmed the link between eating a high ratio of plant protein to animal protein and a lower risk of coronary heart disease, as well as a 50% reduced risk of diabetes.

I say mostly plants here, because I think animals are a crucial part of a circular farming system. Their waste is absolutely necessary for soil health if we are to shift towards organic, plus pigs especially are a convenient way to recycle unavoidable food waste when it’s too cold to compost effectively. Vitamin B12 is also not found in any plants except mushrooms and nutritional yeast, so I think a modest amount of well-farmed meat is more beneficial for our environmental and personal health than many of the ultra-processed, lab-grown, plastic-wrapped plant-based meals we get in the supermarket. Remember it’s not just what we eat but how we farm it.

Avoid intensively reared animals. 95% of meat comes from factory farms in the UK. In the US, the 5 biggest meat producers contribute more to global warming than ExxonMobil, Shell or BP. Globally, the twenty largest industrial meat and dairy producers produce more greenhouse gases than the entire German economy. This kind of farming is one of, if not the biggest driver of climate change. Rob Percival, head of food policy at the Soil Association, talks more about this in his enlightening and empowering read The Meat Paradox, a discomfiting study of the food chain interrogating our complicated attitude to eating animals, so I won’t go into it too much right now. To make better quality meat more accessible, my recipes favour cheaper cuts like skirt steak, lamb neck, offal and liver, or by bulking the protein out with more affordable, low-impact ingredients like lentils, mushrooms or beans.
Choose organic, pasture-fed meat and dairy. If it’s not certified, question the animal welfare, hormone, antibiotic and feed policies; feed should be non-grain-based, chemical free and locally produced, animals should preferably be grass-fed. Pasture for Life UK is a good one to look out for when buying beef.
Explore and favour wild and invasive animals. Now that we’ve got rid of the wolves from the UK, deer have no natural predators and cause carnage for farmers by spreading disease or snacking on the precious crops, so they sometimes need to be culled – often going to waste. If you prefer to eat meat, wild animals like deer, boar, rabbit and wood pigeon are often the most sustainable options. No bears here unfortunately.
Visit an abbatoir. It’s important to understand and acknowledge where our food comes from.
Buy dairy from farms that don’t cull their calves and kids. Ask your milk provider, if you can, about their policy and favour farms with better practices. Riverford Dairy is very hot on this topic, while giants like Arla, supplier of Tesco, Morrisons, Aldi, Asda and Starbucks can be pretty horrendous. Check out this article by the Animal Justice Project.
Use the MSC Good Fish guide. Identify fish species with safe stock levels, caught using sustainable methods, or certified by MSC or another local, reputable, scientific certification like the Cove Discovery Project in Brixham, Torbay.
Avoid farmed fish. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, I know, but farmed fish is generally worse for the health of the ocean in general than wild fish that’s been line caught or otter trawled. The small fish used in the fishmeal to farm larger fish is usually caught by beam trawls, a huge net dragged along the seabed devouring everything in its path. Many small coastal communities in developing countries, such as those reliant on Lake Victoria in West Africa, depend on these small-fry fish for food as well.
Avoid overfished species. Including cod, haddock, eel, monkfish, prawns, salmon, sea bass, skate, tuna, unless MSC certified. Sardines, mackerel, gurnard and plaice are usually pretty safe bets.
Question everything. When ordering from a takeaway, restaurant, butcher or fishmonger, ask how it was farmed or caught and where it came from. I love being asked this question! If they can’t tell you, assume it isn’t sustainable and order elsewhere or have a plant-based meal.

2.3. Eat local, seasonal foods.

‘Seasonal food’ to me means produce grown within a certain radius without carbon-heavy inputs like heated greenhouses or gas-regulated refrigeration. Hydroponics, a method of cultivating tomatoes, cucumbers and salad leaves without soil by keeping the roots of the plant in a flow of nutrients in water, is a term criticised a lot in this area – it can be more energy-intensive, but I would argue that this method has its place, since plants without soil are invaluable for living walls and roof gardens and the shift towards net zero buildings.

It’s up to you how you define local. I like to buy fruit and veg from a farm two miles up the road, although I sometimes buy food transported from elsewhere in the Southwest and occasionally the rest of the UK. I might also argue that buying certain types of fresh produce from north-western Europe is still local, and often is the better choice when it has come from an agroecological farm. I steer clear of air-freighted goods as much as possible.

Smaller growers tend to cultivate more varieties of plants and rarer heritage breeds – I have family who keep Leicester Longwool sheep on their farm in Berkshire, a hardy, long–lived, easily managed traditional breed with minimum impact on the land. The variety of plants and animals helps wildlife to thrive more than on a conventional farm. Eating seasonally reconnects us with the rhythms of the land and inspires us to explore a full range of ingredients a farm has to offer – the latest advice for good gut health is to aim for 30 different types of plants a week.

Base your weekly meal plan on veg first, as they tend to be cheaper. The important thing to remember is that your food is transported by land, not air, and not grown with energy-intensive means or excessive fertilisers or pesticides. Seasonal and local produce can be just as damaging in some cases.

3. Eat the best food you can.

There is no such thing as cheap food – someone, somewhere, always foots the bill. Megastores promote excessive purchases, throwaway cultures, unnecessary UPFs and the endless, mindless stream of advertising that end up costing us more while somehow making our food seem value-less and disposable at the same time. The perceived lack of worth means we actually throw away up to half of the money we spend on food. The really interesting part is that food from well-managed farms costs 20-50% more than their industrial counterparts, so actually stopping for a minute to think, considering whether you really, really need more stuff, means eating this way won’t necessarily cost a thing. I actually started to save money like this! Another interesting point here is the idea of ‘greedflation’ – supermarkets hiking up their prices again and again under the cover of a ‘cost of living crisis’; weaponising inflation in the name of fatter wallets. One analysis found that rises in the cost of food in the UK between 2019 and 2021, was accompanied by Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda raising their combined profits over this period to £3.2 billion, nearly double pre-pandemic levels, according to a report by the Unite union. At the same time, the eight top UK food manufacturers made profits of £22.9 billion.

Cheap food costs more than we think. Its value is distorted by the massive buying power of Big Food, pushing prices unmanageably low for the growers, neglecting people and planet.

A report by the Sustainable Food Trust found that the average UK shopper pays twice as much for food as they realise: for every £1 spent on supermarket food, consumers incur hidden costs of £1 in pollution, soil and biodiversity loss and the health impacts of UPFs and the conventional food system. When we take the leap from profit-driven corporations to buy from real people and community, we can see the difference.

Shopping locally doesn’t have to take up much of your time. It’s always time well spent, and the kimchi cheese toasties at my local market make it worth getting up early! If you live somewhere it’s hard to find good local shops, find a national or local veg box scheme. . If you’re lucky enough to find a local box, look for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) approved scheme, which gives small farms financial security and you get the opportunity to volunteer on the farm – growing food is great fun, and it helps to understand the work that goes into your food. Most of these veg boxes have carry seasonal and organic essentials and often stock other essentials, the Riverford app makes it very convenient.

I’m a full time chef, a part time student and a part time writer, which keeps me busy, so I try to limit my shopping time to one enjoyable hour a week on a Friday or Saturday morning at the market, which has a brilliant variety and a great atmosphere.

3.1. Support better farming.

If the oligarchs won’t help solve this crisis, then we’ll just do it ourselves. Regenerative agriculture is built on years of research and agroecological farming practices – it works with nature, not against it, valuing wildlife and ecology. It protects biodiversity, builds and enriches soil, protects the land from erosion and improves our health. The ultimate aim is reversing global warming trends by sequestering carbon in healthy soil, plants and trees. It creates competitive yields, provides jobs, produces healthier food, answers the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis and the climate crisis.

Learning about food, sustainability and business has naturally led to exploring agriculture through organisations like Emergent Generation, visiting farms like Baddaford, gardening and seed saving.

Sustainability is very much the ‘catch of the day’. It’s no longer a niche concept practised by a few forward thinkers. You don’t have to sell your shoes, stop wearing deodorant and live in a yurt to do it, it’s now well-known and considered absolutely critical for avoiding catastrophe. It’s time for us to become the first generation to go a step further and begin the clean-up job like in Wall-E: we need to begin repairing the environment, regenerating our wild spaces, cleaning up our oceans and giving back to our mother Earth.

The Rodale Institute wrote a paper in 2014 about how regenerative organic agriculture could completely stop or even reverse climate change. “Simply put, we could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic management practices.” Incredible stuff, no? We have a chance to literally save the world.

We can support ‘regen ag’ wherever possible simply by buying their produce. Easy. Superman had to fly into the sun to save the world, all we have to do is eat more carrots. We can also volunteer on community farms, food banks and community projects, and we can speak to our supermarkets, MPs and local communities in favour of regen.

What to listen out for:

Crop rotation. Rotating plants with cover crops and crops with restorative properties, such as beans, helps maintain biodiversity and keeps the soil healthy. Crop rotation helps to replace nitrogen without carbon-heavy fertiliser, naturally protects against pests and soil erosion and helps the soil to sequester carbon.
No (or low) chemical fertilisers, pesticides or fungicides. Chemical inputs in farming cause all sorts of problems including the breakdown of healthy soil, loss of biodiversity, CO2 emissions, water pollution and release of carbon stored in the soil itself. Broad-spectrum vs. specific pesticides is an interesting distinction to mention here: broad-spectrum pesticides like DDT cause all kinds of problems by killing indiscriminately, whereas specific pesticides are formulated to target a certain group of insects. Specific pesticides are generally the lesser of two evils here. Also be wary of the term ‘regenerative’ without an organic certification, as this often means a lot of glyphosate instead of manually tilling by tractor for annual crops.
Cover crops. Cover crops in between the main cash crops help sequester carbon and maintain soil health. They also reduce nitrogen leaching out of the soil into lakes and rivers, leading to damaging algae blooms called eutrophication, and protect against soil erosion by wind and water.
Compost. Composting is the best and simplest process for breaking down the billionaire class- sorry, food waste, into nutritious fertiliser. Compost reduces the need for synthetic nitrogen-based fertiliser and pesticides.

3.2. Buy Fairtrade

Everyone should have access to good food – I’m trying to not get too political here, but I am convinced it is a human right. Anyway, as individuals, businesses and collectives, we can help global equality through our food, clothing and energy choices, which all affect people locally and globally on an economic level as well. Buying Fairtrade-certified ingredients sends a clear message to Big Food that you care about the people that put their heart and soul into your food and makes sure that a fair amount of your money goes to the farmer. It shows them what we will stand for and what we will not.

It’s hard enough to navigate our own money sometimes without worrying about where it’s going. But when we eat mindfully and take the time to learn about what’s on our plate, it gets a lot easier.

Think about who is getting your money.

Food brings people together and creates and strengthens communities, not just around the table, but builds whole communities of farmers, growers and traders around the globe, reflecting and working together, trading money, resources and knowledge. It’s a small world, we’re all of us woven together with every bug, every fish and cow, every tree and every blade of grass, in an infinitely inseparable web as old as life itself. Act like it!

Environmental protection is a cornerstone of what Fairtrade would call sustainability. Fairtrade Standards require farmers to meet their standards in key areas, such as energy and emission reduction, soil and water quality, pest and waste control, and a ban on GMOs harmful chemicals. The standards also ensure that personal protective equipment is provided, that farms are free from dangerous waste, and encourage activities that support biodiversity.

The Standards also promote training for farmers, including advice on switching to environmentally sound practices, such as developing healthy soils and encouraging wildlife to help control pests. Small-scale farmers around the world are facing the first effects of climate change; the unpredictable weather, emergence of new pests and spread of new diseases. The standards guide farmers in adapting to climate change and minimising their impact.

Big Food is corrupt and fraudulent, particularly the UK and US systems. Remember Tesco’s horse meat? What about fake honey? Shortening the food chain and buying direct is one way we can improve the traceability of our food. Sometimes we’re given clear and honest information about imported foods, but often we need a more trustworthy third-party guarantee. Accreditation bodies become invaluable when buying from overseas, vetting the ethic’s of our food production for us. The Fairtrade Foundation, Soil Association, Slow Food, Marine Conservation Society and the Marine Stewardship Council are all good examples.

Think about the social, economic and environmental impacts, as well as the food miles.

3.3. Act like your actions matter.

“We are not consumers! We must discard this label. We are citizens, makers, and artists.” Satish Kumar, founder and director of the Schumacher College international centre for ecological studies.

If I can add to this, we are angry. We are angry at the state of things, and we hold all the cards. The collective impact of our actions should not be underestimated. How do you think we got free-range eggs? Or unbrominated flour? Together we can make a huge difference to our local environment and humanity’s lasting legacy on the world. The future of our planet depends on us – do you really want to be the generation remembered by alien archaeologists for labubu, TikTok dances and ChatGPT? We desperately need a new food system that embraces both modern and ancient technologies which support life on Earth. Learning about where our food comes from, making informed choices and challenging supermarkets and policy makers is how we make change.

Small farms are diverse and adaptable, yet they live and die by the support of local communities like you and me. Some of us are able to do more than others, depending on our own very different situations. But trying is already an act of change. And by reading this far, you’re already trying.

4. Good food for all.

4.1. Share your knowledge.

Skill share. Learn a new craft. Ask a friend to show you how to fix a wobbly table, your favourite jacket, a battery radio, rather than immediately throwing it out and buying a new one. Learn how to grow your own food too – it’s a lot of fun, you can play around heritage varieties to support biodiversity and put some cool colours and shapes on your plate, you can save yourself some money and most importantly, share a bumper harvest with the community.

Go to the library; it’s free, you can sit with a coffee and your laptop and pretend to be doing something intellectual (not that I ever do that), you can meet new people and learn about whatever topic interests you, anything in the world. There’s so much this world can offer you. I love the feel of a paper book, and you can take pleasure in the knowledge that supporting your library instead of streaming does not allow Jeff Bezos to go to space for twelve minutes or rent Venice to show off his private jet.

I bake cakes for a pay-what-you-can cafe organised by my local food bank to create an accessible and affordable space where anyone can have a nutritious meal or catch up with a friend over a coffee, and I have friends who have volunteered with Moor Trees, an organisation restoring native broadleaf woodland on Dartmoor, or run Wild About Devon, supporting community action for nature as part of Devon Local Nature Partnership. Not everyone will have time, but do try and get involved with something nearby – it’s a lot of fun!

If you’ve grown your own, you could organise a barbecue or a potluck for your friends and neighbours: talk to them about how this food was grown, why it tastes so good and how they can support farmers doing this on a larger scale. Use your gifts, whether you make art, music, or food, whether you organise, teach, or build, your skills matter. Help spread the word.

4.2. Stay informed.

“I don’t really do politics.” My brother in Christ, politics is doing us. Get loud about it. Start with your circles. Friends, family, workmates. Share the full reality of what’s happening without sugar-coating it. The system is violent and unsustainable. The goal is to wake people up, not with fear, but with clarity and tact. I find that the Knowledge, a daily email newsletter focusing mainly on geopolitics, or the Big Issue are a nice length and have a good balance of positivity and whatever is happening in the US right now. The Big Issue is one of the UK’s leading social businesses working to end poverty and homelessness in the UK. Wicked Leeks or Sustain are reliable sources focusing on food and farming in the UK.

4.3. Go grassroots.

Thousands of voices are louder than one. There’s a lot of organisations out there, from Devon for Europe, campaigning for the UK to re-join the EU, to Slow Food, promoting a better way to eat for community and environment, to Bite Back, a youth activist group campaigning for a ban on junk food advertising. I have friends through Emergent Generation who are doing amazing work with the World Food Forum on all aspects of improving the system from education to innovation.

If politics isn’t serving you, collaborate and work locally, creating alliances with people, businesses and organisations in your community instead.

Together, we have a voice.