How to Cook a Book

And change the way we eat

This week, I’m heading to deepest Hertfordshire to present a Cooking the Book Live at a very cool festival indeed.

Groundswell, the Regenerative Agriculture Festival may not appeal yet to the Glasto crowd, but now in its ninth year, it’s become THE forum for farmers, food writers and anyone interested in food production or the environment to learn why we all need to be buying and demanding food farmed in regenerative systems. That includes no-till, cover crops and re-introducing livestock into arable rotation. It’s the only way to restore our soil that has been ravaged by inputs - pesticides, fertilisers and an industrialisation of the work that has for many farmers broken their more grounded connection with the land.

I remember iconic farmer and literary giant, James Rebanks telling me how his grandfather hated the new fangled tractors that were changing the face of farming because he said that they raised the farmer too far from the earth. James’ books The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral beautifully and powerfully remind us of the connection between what we eat, where it comes from and the relationship between humans, nature and climate change in a way that will make you punch the sky and cry your heart out, probably at the same time.

He and Philip Lymbery, whose brilliantly titled books, Farmageddon, Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were, and Sixty Harvests Left have probably been my biggest influences of the last decade. Add Isabella Tree’s Wilding and more recently, Stuart Gillespie’s Food Fight, and my food books have transformed the way I shop and eat.

I remember interviewing Philip, who’s the Global CEO for Compassion in World Farming, for the delicious. podcast about Dead Zone back in 2017. It all felt so bleak back then, but he told me something then that has stuck with me and completely changed the way I buy my food to pasture fed, free range or organic. “We all have the power”, he said, “to end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty and save wildlife three times a day through the food choices we make”.

Eight years on from that interview with Philip, my session at Groundswell is about the influence of cook books and food books more generally on how we eat - what we buy and why, how invested we are in the stories behind our food all the way down the food chain, bumping into food justice and carbon footprint to the impact on indigenous people on the plundering of their medicinal foods for our pleasure. (There's a must-read article in the soon to be out Whistler, Brighton’s community magazine for Seven Dials and West Hill run by my husband, Jed about cacao; you may be asking some serious questions about your next cacao ceremony by the light of the full moon once you’ve read it - I’ll post it on my Instagram. What’s the betting it’ll be picked up by the nationals…)

My Groundswell panel are the kind of influencers I doff my cap to; Thomasina Miers whose Wahaca restaurant chain has brought properly sourced, exotic tastes to high streets across Britain. When I was writing my book, Taste and the TV Chef: How Storytelling Can Save the Planet which examines how TV chef shows taught us to eat in the UK, I almost subtitled it How We Got to Wahaca. I wish I had.

Thomasina uses her platform to campaign for a better food system, and will no doubt have a reflective hat on as she tells us about her latest book, Mexican Table, a return - with her family - to Mexico, 30 years after she first took her taste buds off the beaten track as a backpacking teenager and changed the UK’s demand for flavour.

Alice Robinson tells us everything I think is important in food in her book Field, Fork, Fashion. She’s the fashion graduate who bought a bullock to make her leather collection for her final show, and used his meat in supper clubs and tasting sessions with everyone from neighbouring farmers to school kids to show the connection between land, animal, food and fashion.

David Finlay is the farmer who with his late wife, Wilma, created The Ethical Dairy and pioneered a whole new system of cow-with-calf dairy farming. He tells the tale in Our Dairy Story

Amelia Christie-Miller is the Duracell bunny of the beans revolution. The founder of Bold Beans in 2021, she’s on a mission to get the UK eating more beans, and is using social media, storytelling and her cookbooks to give them the kind of makeover that have transformed the artisan gin, chocolate and coffee markets.

How and why they cooked their books will be on the pod next week. Do let me know if any food or cookbooks have changed the way you eat, or if you’re writing yours to change the world.

Image by Groundswell