How to Cook a Book

And change the world

Photo by Avi Richards on Unsplash

This time last week, I was heading to Paris for the Compassion in World Farming Food Business Awards. It’s easy to feel despondent about the broken food system, but recording some of the winners for the new Compassion podcast, it felt that we really are working towards a cage free future.

Pigs, cows, chickens, even rabbits, that wild, sustainable, natural meat that we prefer not to eat in the UK, but which has become factory farmed across Europe, are being set free to graze on pasture as part of a massive growth in regenerative farming, thanks to the courage and conviction of food businesses all over the world, hand held by the Compassion business team.

Coming home after a wander through Paris with this year’s Jane Grigson Trust winner, Chris Newens’ bespoke guide to the 10th arrondissement, which you may or may not read in his book-in-progress, Moveable Feasts, CEO of Natoora, Franco Fubini’s episode on Cooking the Books about flavour further embedded the idea that things really are changing in food.

Later this week, Elliot Webb, founder of Urban Farm-it, will tell us why mushrooms are so integral to understanding the true nature of the food system, and our place within it. A graduate in Aquaculture and Fisheries Management, his first jobs in traditional fish farming showed him the impact that it can have on the environment and food quality, and, like those winners at the Compassion Food Business Awards and the entire global Natoora team, put a rocket in his pocket.

Frustrated by the gap between commercial farming technology and home-level production, his book shows us how to grow mushrooms at home. Why? “To encourage and inspire a positive shift in our culture around sustainable food production and consumption.” Listen in on Thursday to a joyous celebration of the power of this extraordinary plant to burst through the doors of perception.

What do you want to say, to whom and why? Our three BIG questions in the How to Cook a Book community Franco and Elliot have no problem answering. I hope that the Spanish farmers who have restored their soil health by getting their animals back to the land, the caterers in France whose sourcing has regenerated local food producer incomes and kept kids in love with their own food culture, the British supermarket whose own farms show just what the food system could be will write their own books. Proper job punch the sky, feel-good books on how life through the prism of food can be.

As we head into the darker evenings, what are you planning to write? To whom and why? How do you change the world with your words?

Sometimes, it’s simply through kindness. I’m still glowing from the introduction to her book-in-progress that

Jane Hodson

read to us over the last lunch of this month’s How to Cook a Book food writing retreat. A glorious Steinbeck-style camper van tour through Spain and its food, her book, it turns out, is actually about her cohort - her dog, Devon. And for those of us who know that love, it’s also a book about how to change the world with kindness and compassion. And a dog by your side.

The next How to Cook a Book retreat is Jan 20-22. Do let me know if you’d like to come.