Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking, and life. For our twentieth newsletter in this season, Radu Stochita writes about the Milk and Bread Programme in Romania, through which the government has provided a bread roll and a carton of milk to every school child for the past twenty-two years. In his essay, Radu writes about the failure of successive Romanian governments to provide food security for children, and how austerity policies have little to do with the sustained wellbeing of citizens.

This is also our final piece for Season 7. This season has tackled everything from the sugar tax to gastrodiplomacy, examined the labour of fruit pickers and domestic workers, and celebrated blue roll and the motorway service station. You can find the entire Season 7 archive here. We will be back with our new schedule after a two-week break. Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday will run as usual. To receive them, and to support out publishing, you can subscribe below for £5 a month or £45 a year.

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Breadcrumbs and Spoiled Milk

The Milk and Bread Programme, and how Romanian children were left hungry by false promises and neoliberal policies. Words by Radu Stochita. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

Every day during lunch break at our school in Pucioasa, the southern Romanian town where I grew up, one student from each class had to go and pick up a brown box filled with milk cartons and pieces of bread wrapped in plastic to distribute to their classmates. Each student was supposed to receive exactly one bread roll, one dairy product (sometimes ayran or kefir, but milk was the most common option because of its low production price), and, during the warmer seasons, a piece of fruit. The bread crumbled all over our uniforms upon unwrapping, and the milk, meanwhile, was watery and rancid – nothing like the thick, creamy, delicious milk my father brought from his village of Valea Lungă, twenty kilometres away from the town where I grew up.

These food deliveries were part of the nationwide Milk and Bread Programme, which was initiated in 2002 by Adrian Năstase, the social democratic Prime Minister of Romania at the time. The goods were offered as part of the wider ‘National Anti-Poverty Plan and Promotion of Social Inclusion’, which provided children with a healthy snack when their families could not. The programme was also created to support local production of milk, helping the producers who were being squeezed out by competition after the market opened up to global companies. Even though there were supposed to be routine quality checks on the milk and bread, these were mostly unsupervised; the only condition for becoming a school provider was to offer the lowest price, resulting very often in low-quality products. And while the Milk and Bread Programme had an educational component – intending to teach students about healthy eating habits, nutrition, and the path that food takes from farm to plate – this was neglected as well. As the years passed, the milk and bread was increasingly left at the back of the classroom, exactly where it had arrived.

During the 1990s, the transition from communism in Romania caused inflation and widespread unemployment, meaning families struggled to access and provide food. When I went to school in the late 2000s, I took a packed lunch: a white-bread sandwich with three slices of moist salami and occasionally cheese. But not everyone had someone packing them a lunch bag – during the financial crisis of 2008, many parents could not afford filling school lunches for their children. The pieces of bread and cartons of milk provided at school were whole meals for some and distractions for others. Today, they are a way to remember our history.

Prior to the 1990s, political and social life in Romania had been marked by an abundance of hunger and lack of democracy. Before its collapse, the communist government, headed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, faced immense pressures from its debtors (such as the IMF), who imposed tight fiscal austerity and rationed food. One of the starkest memories of life under communism is waiting in line for groceries. My mother, who grew up in Dâmbovița county, remembers having to wake up early to get the half-a-bread-roll-per-person-in-the-family ration, which she and her family would eat with simple dishes made from their crops and cattle, like cartofi prăjiți în untură (fried potatoes in lard) or ghiveci de legume (vegetable stews).

On 25 December 1989, protests against Ceaușescu resulted in the Romanian revolutions, when Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on public television. That Christmas brought more than just the usual family get-togethers; it marked the shift from over forty-two years of communist rule to an economy and society premised on the free market and neoliberal capitalism – one which promised freedom of expression, abundance and, most importantly, the possibility of individual profit and capital gain. Even though there was some hope on the eve of the revolutions, the bloody transition of regimes gave rise to a dissatisfied political milieu, with ​​miners’ strikes, general strikes, and the 1995 students’ demonstration against additional taxes on those who had failed exams. The protests were reflective of the sentiment of dissent against new systems that marked the 1990s; they showcased the desperation of Romanian citizens, who now had a whole new spectrum of challenges to live with.

Those who suffered most in this shift were the workers. People lost their jobs when industries like coal mining shut down, while the relaxation of import duties led to the closing of domestic factories. Between 1991 and 1997, inflation averaged around 150%. Wages did not keep up with the increase in prices, pushing Romanians to tighten their already-tight belts. More than 40% of the Romanian workforce lost their jobs in the 1990s, with the number of people legally employed falling from 8.15 million in 1990 to 4.76 million in 1999. During this time, Romanian workers also left for agricultural and industrial jobs overseas, primarily moving to Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (where they are now the country’s fourth largest diaspora).

These developments put pressure on families – especially those of the working classes – who did not have the means to effectively feed their children, while many students were also prompted to stand up and work to provide for their families. In 1990 alone, 152,530 children dropped out of school (a total of 4.9% of the entire cohort), and across the decade, a total of 834,000 children stopped going to school altogether. Even today, one in four students drop out before finishing middle school in rural areas of Romania. The Milk and Bread Programme was supposed to help to curb this exodus of students, but despite its laudable ambitions, the programme ultimately did very little to address the food poverty of Romanian children. Today, the programme’s trajectory represents the lack of attention successive governments have paid to providing adequate nutrition in schools, and also creating infrastructures of care for their citizens, both old and young.

Over the past months, I have asked many of my former classmates about their memories of the Milk and Bread Programme. Most recounted problems with the products’ taste, and noted that this could be traced to the lowest-price approach – a gradual decrease in quality that led to fewer students picking up the food. This has its basis in the programme’s funding, which was always inadequate. For instance, the amount allocated per student was 1.17 RON in 2008, and it remained unchanged until 2017 – even though, between 2008 and 2017, overall food prices increased by 30%. Bianca, my classmate from school, recounts how teachers would come and pick up the bread which children had left behind to feed the pigs. Her mother Elena, meanwhile, remembers that schools ‘received spoiled milk at times, some cream cheese that looked suspicious, and bread that was just crumbling everywhere,’ which meant that the programme did not always help parents to feed their children. (Even Năstase later acknowledged that the lowest-price acquisition mechanism led to food of inferior quality being offered.)

Another lesser-discussed issue with the programme, like other dietary policies in Romania at the time, was that it did not concern itself with the lack of nutritional education provided to families after the fall of communism. With the entrance of the free market in the 1990s, the new Romanian diet became defined by an appetite for over-consumption, which probably derived from the scarcity of food during the 1980s. Mara Mărginean, a historian of food and agriculture, calls this shift – from food shortages and penury to filled supermarket shelves – a ‘false abundance’. In the 1990s, ‘the supermarkets were filling up with undesirable products that lacked any nutritional value,’ Mărginean told me over the phone. There was little understanding of the make-up of balanced and nutritious diets in this new system, and Romanian citizens like my parents didn’t know what to pick from the supermarket aisles filled with new products boasting snazzy slogans they now frequented.

Growing up, I consumed cheese, milk, soups, stews, and cold cuts such as bologna and salami. Like other households of the same demographic, there was only one condition for our food – it had to be cheap. Adina Rusu, a nutritionist based in Iași, said that pre-packaged foods were also consumed because of the lifestyle of most Romanians, who worked long days to make sufficient wages: ‘People no longer had time to cook, to pick between foods, so they chose what was most filling.’

And so, providing a minimal meal in school did not make much difference to students’ lives. Even if the Milk and Bread Programme worked as a temporary Band-Aid for children who had nothing else to eat, it did not mean they were well fed for longer periods. Even when children could consume the poor-quality milk and bread at school, they went home to overworked parents, confused dietary systems, and a life in which expenses increased year on year. Rusu said that ‘No piece of bread or milk could keep children in the classroom’ during the years of the financial crisis, seconding what Peticilă and others call the ‘short-term’ narrow effects of the Milk and Bread Programme.

The programme also evolved during a time when social welfare was demonised by both the government and the mainstream media, as well as other citizens. While the government offered students goods of inferior quality, it simultaneously blamed their parents for not providing enough – relying on the state to provide food was perceived as a sign of laziness, which disregarded the structural challenges that people faced in securing basic needs. Traian Băsescu, Romanian President from 2004 to 2014, claimed that the social welfare system was putting a major financial strain on the state budget. Business groups decried social welfare too; RomPan, which represents breadmakers (some of which supplied schools as part of the Milk and Bread Programme), decried social welfare as ‘ruin[ing] the concept of work’. The message was clear: a poor child was the responsibility of the parents, but the poverty of the parents was their own fault.

Today, dining in Romanian cities is very different from the past decades. For instance, in Bucharest (the capital), South Asian restaurants have begun to emerge, piquing the interest of Romanian diners in international non-European cuisines. There has also been a push to mandate supermarkets to sell Romanian produce (even though a good chunk of this leaves the country to be sold in Western Europe). More crucially, in the past five years, there has been a resurgence of traditional Romanian food culture, as chefs and diners have started to reclaim their lost past, which suffered with the influx of industrially made food. In the capital, restaurants like NOUA. Bucătărie Românească, Kane, and Old Kitchen have been serving native recipes using locally sourced Romanian produce – dishes much like those my parents ate. However, beyond recreational dining and some awareness of ‘buying local’, there has been little progress in how ordinary people can access good ingredients and produce.

Routine culinary and household staples still remain at the mercy of escalating prices, and with a combination of highly processed foods, a lack of dietary education, and the high poverty rate, cardiovascular disease caused by poor diets is the highest contributor to mortality in Romania today. Even though traditional Romanian pastoralist cuisines and local produce are becoming popular in some dining spaces, little has been done to make this accessible for people who need it the most. Since the pandemic, Romania has faced some of the highest price increases in Europe, experiencing an average increase of 15% a year in 2022 and 2023, with prices for food oil going up 35% in 2022. Romanians remain amongst the unhealthiest Europeans, with 57.8 years of healthy expected years at birth compared with the European average of 63.6 in 2021. In 2019, it was reported that fewer than a quarter of all Romanians eat fruits and vegetables once a day (compared with the European average of 55%). And most importantly, one in ten Romanian children still go to bed hungry.

Since its inception, the quality of the Milk and Bread Programme has steadily decreased, with citizens repeatedly being told about the ‘lack of money’ from politicians on television. In the current school year, students in multiple regions throughout the country have not yet received a single piece of bread or any amount of milk, and healthy food education, despite being a component of the programme, is hard to come by. Following teachers’ strikes in 2023, the coalition government, headed by Nicolae Ciucă and later by Marcel Ciolacu, passed new reforms, such as the 2024 ‘warm lunch’ programme (later rebranded as ‘healthy lunch’). As part of these reforms, funding was increased to provide more nutritionally consistent meals, such as macaroni and cheese, chicken sandwiches, or stews. But the programme has already faced its hurdles; the government has been slow to publish a list of participating schools (not all will have the programme by the end of 2024) and, due to poor allocation of funds, only 18% of the allotted sums have been spent.

Twenty-two years down the line and the Romanian state’s attitude towards its children’s health is still one of neglect. The state’s policies are mediated by an antiquated system that promotes food as fuel – without paying attention to nutritional values, quality, or diversity – and also escalates the idea that food is a ‘reward’ in a system of competitive capitalism, not a basic human right. More than anything, programmes like Milk and Bread do not consider how children come from distinct backgrounds, some with more needs than others, and that adequately feeding children could be a policy that works towards uplifting the state of life for citizens from the very start. Romania’s people do not need idealism and missed targets; the state must provide measures that provide not merely survival but sustainable health and pleasure, too.

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Credits

Radu Stochita is a labour expert working closely with trade unions and progressive causes in Romania. In his free time, he writes about tech, food and society for publications such as Al Jazeera, Nation, and Jacobin.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn, and Odhran O’Donoghue, and is copyedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking, and life. If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free each week, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

For our nineteenth piece in this season, Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada writes about how nineteenth- and twentieth-century British dam-engineering policies on the Indus Delta have led to scarcities of food and livelihood for fisherfolk of the region. Zuhaib’s essay contrasts memories of an old-world that was flush with food, festivals, and song, and the present consequences of imperial systems of productivity, that neglect indigenous knowledge and redesign societies for their profit.

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Bittersweet Waters

How British dam engineering created food scarcity and submerged lives in Sindh, Pakistan. Words and photographs by Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada.

Chapter 1: Babu’s Lament

On a humid day in June last year, I boarded a small horho (wooden boat) in Keti Bunder – a historical port in Pakistan’s Sindh province – to go to Khobar Creek. Keti Bunder and Khobar are both on the Indus Delta, which is formed at the spot where the Arabian Sea intersects the Sindhu River (or the Indus River, as it’s more commonly known). The horho travelled fast in the wind, the heat escalating when it crossed mangrove-crowded nooks. These were the same waters upon which, three centuries ago, large Arab dhows laden with timber, charcoal, livestock, rice, and camels set sail for ports in the Persian Gulf. 

I was headed to Khobar Creek to meet Babu Jat, a fisherman who lives there with his wife and three children, in a wooden hut on the river’s shores. Babu, who is in his late thirties, makes a living by ‘trash fishing’ – catching and drying juvenile fish that are then sold, through middlemen, as poultry feed to factories around Pakistan. Most of the Indus Delta’s 300,000 people depend on fishing for their income, but the majority of their nets and boats are owned by wealthy landowners on Pakistan’s coastal belt. Babu fishes using nets whose fine mesh prevents small fish from escaping. These have been banned in Pakistan since 2019, and Babu is aware that they are harmful for marine and riverine life. ‘But we have no alternative for our survival. If we can’t fish, we have nothing to eat,’ he says. 

Just a century ago, the Indus delta consisted of lands that were productive for agriculture and cattle farming, its ‘mithru paani’ – literally ‘sweet water’ or freshwater – produced fish and crops in such abundance that there are accounts of the region sending food to the rest of the Indian subcontinent. As in many riverine ecosystems of South Asia, sweet water is integral for cultivating crops and fishing, it feeds fertile soil that grow nutritional, indigenous varieties of grains, fruit, and vegetables suited to the land. In the Indus Delta, crops such as red rice, and fruits like mangoes and bananas were cultivated, sustaining local populations and supporting thriving trade networks. But now the water is mostly salty, except in the times of Sawan (monsoon), reducing agricultural practices, and riverine fish on the delta have declined towards extinction, forcing fishermen like Babu into systems of feudal hierarchy. 

The contemporary influx of saline water and feudal system both have their roots in the policies of British India, of which Sindh was then a part. Under the vast British dam-engineering project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which remains the largest irrigation system in the world), dams and diversions were made, and colonial intervention to the Indus’ ecosystem caused disruption to the flow of the river, as well as the surrounding aquatic and human habitats.

The deltas of South Asia have historically been associated with abundance and cultural exchange – consider the Sundarbans of Bengal, which were once places of bustling markets and agricultural prowess (before the region was starved by British governance under Churchill). The old tales of the Indus delta’s similarly feature bustling ports, rice mills, and festivals, a huge contrast to the its present state of barren lands that function at the mercies of landlordism, and food scarcities. Today, Babu’s lament can be traced back centuries – to  this British architecture of empire, and imperial systems that treat rivers not as members of the community but as commodities.

Chapter 2: Ruling the Indus 

There was once an abundance of industry in the Indus Delta, as Sindhi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai noted when he visited the region in the 1740s. He witnessed the life of the people and prosperity of the province:

There are also nineteenth-century colonial accounts that describe the bounty of the delta. James MacMurdo, a political agent of the East India Company in the early 1800s, described the lands fed by the Indus and their crops as ‘beyond anything luxuriant’.  Such accounts by company officials and the crown’s agents were part of the large colonial mission of translation and empirical production in Sindh; the project of cartographic demarcation and surveillance in the province was the largest ever undertaken by the British crown. As Manan Ahmed Asif writes, this ‘created a knowledge economy within which India’s peoples, histories, and land were shrivelled, archived, summarised, and operationalized’. 

In 1843, Sindh was annexed as a water resource by the British colonial government in order to feed the newly colonised agricultural land. This was followed by the Irrigation Act of 1879 and the Canal and Drainage Act of 1873. These aimed to enhance agricultural productivity by providing a legal framework for canal construction and maintenance of drainage systems on the Indus. The motivation for the policies was twofold: firstly, the British regime wanted to increase revenue through agricultural exports by harnessing the river’s water – using its canals and transforming arid lands into cultivable zones. Secondly, the introduction of irrigation systems allowed colonial authorities to mark and tax land, thereby solidifying their grip on the local population and reinforcing colonial hierarchy. British use of the delta’s land was undertaken without contributions from the people who had lived there for centuries – characteristic of the way that colonial rulers operate. ‘Colonial governance also declared areas where cattle grazed and water was scarce “wastelands” – forcibly displacing the local population, distributing lands, and resettling outsiders,’ Hassan Abbas, a Lahore-based hydrologist and water expert, told me. 

These policies not only reshaped the Indus River region’s physical landscape, but also had an enduring impact on its social, economic, ecological and culinary fabric, too. The colonial disruption destroyed the mangroves that controlled the river’s salinity, resulting in the encroachment of the sea and subsequently rendering four million acres of agricultural land unusable. Eventually, the use of dams and barrages for water storage and diversion meant only a fraction of the original volume of the river’s water was able to reach the lands. Furthermore, these policies established ownership over water resources. In this way, smaller farmers and traditional practices were marginalised and pushed to the peripheries, away from the river’s resources, foregrounding the inequalities that exist in the delta today.  

Even after the British left the Indian subcontinent in 1947, their water policies stuck around. Several additional reservoirs – such as Mangla on the Jhelum River and Tarbela and Chashma on the Indus River – were constructed after the creation of Pakistan. Alongside these reservoirs, Pakistan now hosts six barrages on the Indus, plus three major dams, twenty-three barrages, twelve inter-river canals, and forty-eight perennial canals. Today, this extensive water management system forms part of the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS), which irrigates – at the expense of the delta’s people and ecosystems - more than forty-five million acres of farmland across China, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

Chapter 3: The Disappearance of Food, Pleasure and Shared Histories

Each time I visited the delta last year, the lack of mithru paani was the cause of many troubles and complaints. Sindh’s famous palla fish, which swims from marine to riverine water, was a gift of the freshwater, but many residents of the delta told me that palla, and other similar fish like ‘dhangri’,  ‘do not swim to us now’. According to Babu, fishermen used to catch enough palla for their families to eat and sell the leftover produce at bazaars: ‘I could catch three–four kilos of fish in a day, easily. Now I struggle to even catch one kilogram’, he said. Abdullah Murgar, a seventy-year-old man who lives across the water from Babu, emphasised what Babu told me, adding how people need to buy fish from the markets bordering cities. ‘But of course, we cannot afford to buy delicious marine fish. People often have to scrounge what they can from the salty waters around them’, he said. Since a plate of fish and rice still form the basis of the delta’s cuisine (I was told that these two things constitute ‘a full stomach’), people must now turn to less nutritional alternatives: they eat fish like shodi and goli, which are small but expensive (shodi is priced at 350 PKR per kilogram, where goli is around 730 PKR per kilogram). For fishermen like Babu, whose families earn around 20,000 PKR a month, these prices mean that they often cannot buy fish at all. 

Because of the decline in freshwater fish, fishermen increasingly depend on fishing in the sea for their livelihood. But fishing in deep-sea waters is not a possibility for everyone, as it is dangerous and it requires stamina: fishermen have to stay for days to catch enough fish to make the trip worthwhile. In this struggle for survival, many have also become dependent on dangerous and precarious jobs, like catching mud crabs and selling them to merchants for low prices they cannot establish or control. The partition of the subcontinent also led to arbitrary and unclear borders on the delta, which create precarity for fisherfolk on both sides who still subsist on these shared waters of the Indian subcontinent. The delta’s fishermen are frequently arrested by the Indian navy for mistakenly crossing the borders of Pakistan and India in the Arabian Sea, and Indian fishermen from Gujarat often land up in Pakistan’s jails for this reason, too. There are currently 266 Indian fishermen in Malir jail in Karachi, and 68 Pakistani fishermen in various jails across Gujarat. 

Abdullah also referred to the 1960 Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan, which divided up the six rivers that flow between the two nations. The treaty, which was signed under the watchful eye of the World Bank, allowed hydroelectric power plants to be built, as well as further dams and barrages which divert the waters of subsistence, creating a scarcity for fisherfolk to fish for sustenance. ‘Our water was stopped for decades, rivers diverted, and our beautiful lands turned into a desert.’ Abdullah told me of the various post-partition legalities that determine life for people of the Indus. ‘Asaan jo doh kehro ah?’ he asked. ‘What is our fault in all this?’ 

In this world of scarcity, former dairy-based staples like milk, ghee, and butter are barely available in the delta, as there is little for cattle to feed on, and they therefore struggle to produce milk. (For context, this is the region where the act of selling milk was once deemed a moral transgression, for it flowed abundantly and was therefore expected to be freely shared.) 

Meanwhile, red rice, which is more nutritional than industrially produced varieties of white rice, used to be ‘cultivated almost without ploughing, as the river deposited large quantities of silt on the seeds that the farmers scattered on the mud flats between the delta channels’, Arif Hasan writes. But since the dams have reduced annual silt deposits from eight millimetres to just one millimetre, the crop can hardly be grown anymore, and whenever a little is grown, it is sent to the market and sold. Saiyaan, a woman in her late nineties who lives in Baghan, told me that, ‘For dinner, we used to have red rice and milk; now both those things do not exist.’ She remembered the past, and lamented these present days of scarcity and enmity. ‘Sokhi main Duniya vee Dunya, per Darya Khaee wayu’, she said. ‘My world was in Sokhi, but the sea swallowed it.’ 

Chapter 4: Submerged Futures 

Today the Indus Delta and its cities live in poverty’s shadow. Life on it is a daily act of survival for people like Babu, Saiyaan, and Abdullah. More than 88% of the coastal belt’s population lives below the poverty line, and 50% of children are malnourished. Many in the deltaic region must now buy bottled water, often spending more than three thousand rupees per month. Displacement due to sea erosion is a routine occurrence, and climatic changes have only exacerbated these tragedies: it is predicted that rising temperatures will cause water deficits and erratic floods in the region, leading to more displacement and disruption of agricultural production. Saiyaan’s husband used to have hundreds of acres of agricultural land, but this is now underwater. Babu lost his home and lands in floods in 1999 and was displaced again in 2022, during the Biporjoy cyclone that affected India and Pakistan. In the last fifty years, more than 1.2 million people have migrated from the Indus Delta to cities in Pakistan due to climatic shifts and lack of work, where they pursue jobs like construction. 

In 2022, more than fifty million people – including those living in Sindh – were affected by floods in Pakistan, as lands were inundated by water that was diverted irregularly by the canals. As Daanish Mustafa writes, the floods were ‘equally a function of the infrastructural and engineering choices driven by certain developmental imaginaries, which are certainly not indigenous to Pakistan.’ Today, witnessing the harrowing aftermath of unchecked greed, the delta teeters on the brink of ecological collapse, and its people suffer losses of livelihood, customs and cuisine. When I think about this, I think of Saiyaan’s stories, Ashraf’s fields, Babu’s lament. 

After many days in the delta, I made my way to Sakro town in Thatta district. When I arrived, I found myself amid wheatgrass mounds, accompanied by cows and buffalos. It was there I met Ashraf Kalmati, a forty-year-old graduate in agricultural sciences who has chosen his familial profession of farming over a city-based path. Ashraf’s family are guardians of two-hundred-year-old red-rice seeds and culinary traditions; their lands, which still get some rainwater and freshwater from the river, grow a variety of crops. With them, I ate a meal of red rice, milk, and fish – the way it must have been before. Despite Ashraf and his family’s efforts, these lands also hang by a thread. It is estimated that, by 2050, fresh water will not reach these lands or other cities on the coastal belt. As it stands, Ashraf’s family’s land, and along with it these culinary histories, are at risk of being entirely submerged. ‘Our lands too [will] be destroyed if the Indus river doesn’t get the water from the dams,’ he told me. 

The morning after meeting Ashraf, I sat under a neem tree in Sakro, watching two men who were from the same village in Kharochan (an island on the delta) reunite after years. As they reminisced about their lives in the island, one mentioned a giant ‘jamui’ – or jamun tree – in their village. (Jamun, as it is known in other parts of South Asia, is a beloved small, purple, sweet-and-sour fruit. Across the subcontinent, it forms stories of childhood summers spent under the shade of its tree.) The other man responded, telling his companion how the Jamui tree, once thriving with sweet water, had dried up – like many others across the delta. Sadly, he told his friend the news: ‘Just last week, they cut its wood.’ 

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Credits

Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada researches and writes on climate justice, politics, fascism and capitalism. He tweets and tells stories @zuhaib_pirzada.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn, and Odhran O’Donoghue, and is copyedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking, and life. If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free each week, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

For our eighteenth piece in this season, Robbie Armstrong writes about a new food venue on the Isle of Bute in Scotland that raises questions about neo-feudalism, the merits of aristocratic altruism, and the limits of land-reform policy in Scotland. 

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The Marquess and the Market 

Bute Yard, Scottish land reform, and neofeudalism. Words by Robbie Armstrong.

Note: this newsletter has been updated with comment which can be found after the article.

The Market

On a sunny summer afternoon in Rothesay, the main town on the small island of Bute, a modern market that looks much like any other in Britain is underway. The capacious modern barn that houses it is tucked half a kilometre up the hill from the promenade, with stalls from a gin distillery, local bakers, a small-batch cocktail company, and a coffee cabin. One vendor sells Largie, a Caerphilly-style cheese made in Argyll using Bute milk. Another, run by a pair of young Syrians whose family came to the island as part of the UK’s refugee resettlement scheme, sells dolma, kibbeh, fatayer, and baklava. Outside, in the courtyard, there’s a snaking queue for tacos and a line curling out of a smokehouse set up in a shipping container. Towards the back there’s a stall heaving with wicker baskets of fruit and cratefuls of vegetables.

Since opening last June, the market, christened Bute Yard, has been celebrated in the press for providing ‘a platform to showcase the best taste and talent the island has to offer’ and cited as integral to the renaissance of one of ‘the world’s top under-the-radar islands’. It presents a modern and democratic image of Bute. Vendors of various backgrounds and ages – both established businesses and nascent passion projects – are selling produce from across the island, or from as far as Glasgow, some forty miles east. Bute Yard’s success has been so rapid that it now competes for tourists’ attention with Mount Stuart House – the grand, neo-gothic ancestral home of the Stuarts of Bute.

On the surface, Mount Stuart represents Old Bute, while the ultra-modern Bute Yard represents the New. Both, in fact, are the same Bute, since the market is the latest in a long line of projects by the island’s ruling family, the Crichton-Stuarts. Not only does the fruit and veg on display come from the market garden of Mount Stuart, but Bute Yard’s director is Cathleen Crichton-Stuart, the second daughter of the late 7th Marquess, John Colum Crichton-Stuart, better known as Johnny Bute. Bute Yard was founded by Johnny Bute and is owned by his second wife, Serena – the Marchioness of Bute. For centuries, the family has benefited from a quasi-monopoly on the island’s land and resources. Collectively, the Crichton-Stuarts and the Mount Stuart Trust (MST) – a charitable trust that the family retains close control over – own 89% of the Bute’s land. Bute Fabrics, a major employer, was started by the 5th Marquess. The Isle of Bute Smokehouse, one of the oldest in Scotland, was bought by Johnny Bute in 2014, and is now also run by Cathleen. But Bute Yard, according to a panel on the wall, is the crowning piece in her father’s legacy, ‘a testament to his dedication to the island’. 

The question asked by many of the island’s residents is, ‘Who does Bute Yard really serve?’ Parts of Rothesay are among the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland, although in 2022, the Sunday Times urged its readers to ‘look past the pockets of deprivation’ when it named Bute the best place to live in Scotland. Some of my earliest memories are of holidays spent on Bute as a child, in the mid-nineties, long after Bute’s heyday as a Victorian seaside resort had faded, but before the high street had sunk further into decline. I remember eating Zavaroni’s ice cream on the promenade, playing in the arcades, beachcombing with my dad – but I never forgot the grinding poverty in the housing scheme where we stayed. Returning to the island in 2019, I was shocked to see the extent of Rothesay’s abandoned buildings and crumbling Victoriana. Since then, Bute Yard has become emblematic of a new phase in Rothesay’s regeneration, improving the island’s general appeal to holiday-makers, day-trippers, and people wishing to move here to benefit from the relatively cheap rent and island life. 

However, given the MST and Crichton-Stuarts’ near-total ownership of the entire island, any serious conversation about regeneration on Bute – particularly when it involves food and farming – inevitably raises questions about land ownership. The ownership of Bute also places Bute Yard at the crux of many issues concerning all of rural Scotland. Since the Scottish parliament was reestablished in 1999, it has introduced a raft of policies to reform land ownership, including the much-celebrated Community Right to Buy (CRtB) legislation, as well as creating the Scottish Land Fund and the Scottish Land Commission. This month, it published its updated Land Reform Bill, which aims to ‘revolutionise land ownership in Scotland’, while previously the Scottish Land Commission has accused some of Scotland’s hereditary lairds of behaving like ‘socially corrosive’ monopolies. Meanwhile in 2022, the Scottish government also passed its Good Food Nation Act, by which it hopes to turn Scotland into a place where ‘people from every walk of life take pride and pleasure in, and benefit from, the food they produce, buy, cook, serve, and eat each day’.

Standing in the way of both food and land reform policy is the fact that around 433 private landowners own over half the private land in rural Scotland according to research by land-reform campaigner Andy Wightman. This unequal distribution of land has its roots in the Highlands Clearances, during which the predominantly Gaelic-speaking populations were forcibly evicted from the Highlands and islands to make way for sheep farming between 1750 to 1860. Since then, expulsion, landlordism, enclosures, and aristocratic field sports have all changed the relationship Scotland’s people have with their land. This bizarre state of affairs means that, according to Wightman, ‘Scotland has the most concentrated pattern of land ownership in Europe’, which dictates how people live, eat, and interact with the land. How can Scotland really become a ‘Good Food Nation’ with a neo-feudal oligarchy at the helm of its rural land? 

The Marquess

Although the island boasts warm waters and incongruous palm trees, Bute is Scotland writ large, with sparsely populated highlands, a densely populated central belt, and a patchwork of monocultural farmland in the south. It suffers chiefly from a lack of affordable and family-suitable housing (but no lack of holiday accommodation and second homes), as well as a depopulation crisis, a shortage of job and higher education opportunities, and stark inequality between its poorest and richest inhabitants. 

As part of one of Scotland’s oldest landowning families, Johnny Bute inherited an endowment somewhere in the region of £144 million when he became the Marquess of Bute in 1991 (as a marquess, he ranked above an earl but below a duke in the aristocratic league table). In 1989, his father, the 6th Marquess, vested Mount Stuart and the Bute Estate into the charitable MST. At this point, the family owned approximately 28,000 of the island’s 30,190 acres – 23,800 of which were to be run by the trust. (Andy Wightman has claimed that the MST was created ‘in order to avoid inheritance tax liabilities’). Johnny Bute soon sold the neighbouring island of Great Cumbrae in 1999 for £1 million, washing his hands of it just in time to circumvent new Scottish land laws that would increase the power of sitting tenants. (‘No,’ he told the Independent at the time, ‘I never considered giving the land to them.’) 

By the time Johnny died in 2021, the family fortune had swollen beyond £413 million, not including Mount Stuart House. Johnny Bute’s only son, John Bryson Crichton-Stuart, who goes by Jack Dumfries, is the 8th Marquess of Bute. He lives an unassuming life with his family, far from the island in London. He paints Warhammer in his spare time and describes himself as ‘a chef’. Since November 2020, Johnny’s sister Sophie Crichton-Stuart has been the chair of the MST, running the trust with a board of directors including her brother, Anthony. When I speak to Cathleen, she reaffirms that Bute Yard is her father’s legacy. ‘He ​really, ​really ​wanted ​to ​do ​something ​that ​was ​for ​the ​community. Instead of ​​trying ​to ​lead ​a horse ​to ​water ​to ​drink, ​he’d ​learnt to ​maybe ​just ​provide ​a ​space [Bute Yard] ​that ​could ​organically ​grow,’ she explains.

Appraisals of Bute Yard vary from positive to pessimistic, depending on whom you ask. ‘I think there’s a bit more confidence amongst the producers on the island because they’re seeing other people are making it, and it’s making other people believe in themselves more,” says Mhairi Mackenzie, who owns Isle of Bute Coffee, and is also one of the directors of Bute Kitchen – a social enterprise that aims to promote the island’s food and drink. Not everyone is so laudatory. ‘Who ​is ​using ​Bute ​Yard, is ​it ​the ​people ​with ​the ​most ​poverty ​on ​the ​island?’ asks Nadia Shaikh, a land justice activist based in Rothesay. ‘What ​I ​think ​the ​Bute ​population ​probably ​really ​does ​need ​is ​genuine ​equity ​between ​people … and ​the ​means of ​generating ​wealth ​and ​power ​ultimately ​is ​land,’ she adds.   

As I chat to people about Bute Yard, I am disheartened to find that almost anyone else with anything even slightly critical to say about the Crichton-Stuarts, the MST, or Bute Yard, is anxious to remain anonymous. A 2012 survey of tenant farmers on the island previously showed overwhelming dissatisfaction with the MST, mainly due to the short duration of their tenancies. Ian Dickson, an MST tenant and contract farmer (and the only farmer who would speak to me on record), admits the trust has made mistakes in the past, but is positive about the MST today (since 2019, it has ​brought ​in five ​new ​tenant farmers, offering them longer tenures of twenty years.) 

Long-standing Brandanes (residents of Bute) tend to be more conservative when it comes to land ownership, and are more likely to take a positive stance towards the Crichton-Stuarts. I got a general sense that, because an aristocratic oligarchy has ruled Bute for so long, they felt that this is the island’s natural order. I am repeatedly told that Johnny Bute was an approachable and unpretentious man, and that the island’s problems lay not with him, but rather with the system of land management on the island itself. Bute’s newer inhabitants tend to be more critical. One resident, who has been on Bute for the last seven years and wishes to remain anonymous, tells me, ‘I like living here, but it makes you feel like you’re still part of the feudal system – the UK is more like that than many realise.’ 

Another resident, Daniel1, who moved to Bute two years ago, is unconvinced that Bute Yard will fix any of Bute’s underlying problems. ‘It’s not a space that locals can rent at affordable rates … It’s not a community-based initiative, it doesn’t have community at its heart – it’s only got money at its heart,’ he adds. Daniel also explains that doing business is difficult without the backing of the Crichton-Stuart family. ‘Without a distinct change in land rights, and how it’s been consolidated into the hands of a few powerful people, as a community and public, we stand little chance of developing our lives and businesses,’ he argues. ‘We’ve got to hold these landowners responsible, they can’t just cream off the profit – their Instagrams are full of them at Harrods and obscene displays of luxury, meanwhile people on the island are using food banks. It’s morally bankrupt.’

Good Food Nation?

Last July, I paid a visit to the Anchor Tavern, a pub in the small coastal village of Port Bannatyne, just a few miles north of Rothesay. The year prior, 267 people backed a community share offer to rescue the vacant pub in the fastest CRtB Scotland has ever seen, coming together in fifteen months. A few miles further north is Moss Wood, Scotland’s largest community forest, which is part of Rhubodach Forest. In 2009, it was bought from its then-landowner, Richard Attenborough, using CRtB legislation. Johnny Bute had made a bid of almost £1.6 million for the forest, but the Scottish Government flexed its new land reform powers to block the purchase, giving locals the right of first refusal. The money was raised by buying Rhubodach Forest for £1.475 million then selling part to the Mount Stuart Estate for £1.25m. (Tallwood Ltd, owned by the marchioness, owns 1,316 acres of Rhubodach.)

CRtB legislation was introduced in 2003, giving communities the right to purchase land in their area, with funding provided by the government-backed Scottish Land Fund. This was a watershed moment for Scottish land reform, in which feudal tenure was also finally abolished. (In England, by contrast, the process to end feudalism began in 1660 with the Tenures Abolition Act.)  Yet on Bute, like in much of rural Scotland, there is little widespread desire for community buyouts. Far from progressive utopias, buyouts are sticky and tricky to achieve. They are often best suited to very small rural and island communities – Eigg, population eighty-seven, is the blueprint. While community buyouts make for compelling stories, they delegate to individual groups the impossible task of rebalancing the tipped scales of land ownership. At a micro level, there are many successes to celebrate, but at a macro level their scope is highly limited. Without a managed expropriation of post-feudal control of land, one in which landowners relinquish their control of farms, forests, and coastline so they can be run by and for the community, there is little prospect of rural communities across Scotland gaining greater access to the farms and market gardens through which they might grow food in an affordable and sustainable manner.

At the Anchor Tavern, Jenny O’Hagan, chair of the Port Bannatyne Development Trust, makes no effort to hide her pride as she tells the story of how the community got together to acquire the pub, rethreading an integral skein of community life in the town’s fabric. At the back of the pub is a community raised bed, run by Incredible Edible Bute. It is one of a number of free food-growing sites across the island set up by the charity Fyne Futures, which also runs Bute Produce, a six-acre market garden aiming to ‘grow ​the ​growers ​of ​the ​future’. Along with Bute Forest and the farms of Auchentirrie and Ascog, Bute Produce is one of only a handful of rural parts of the island not owned by either the MST or the Crichton-Stuarts, acquiring its site in 2020 after six years of protracted negotiation with the MST. The organisation employs locals with an interest in farming and horticulture, runs a successful veg box scheme, has an on-site kitchen, hosts cooking classes, and makes preserves and jams for sale. In making market gardening and locally grown food accessible, affordable, and part of community life, Bute Produce looks like the Good Food Nation Act in action. 

While at Bute Yard, wandering around on a busy market day, or sitting outside in the sun eating tacos and enjoying a beer, I felt the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the project. While it creates a nexus for food and drink on the island, and takes some clear steps towards enacting a Good Food Nation, it does so via a Smithian invisible hand. Bute Yard is symbolic of the Crichton-Stuart’s benevolent work, but it also speaks to the refusal to address the underlying issues of poverty and inequality on the island. Recently, the MST has advertised a number of long-vacant units to rent in Bute Yard’s immediate vicinity. These include the Crichton-Stuarts’ unoccupied seventeenth-century, A-listed Mansion House property overlooking the ruins of Rothesay Castle. Meanwhile, one vendor at the market tells me they’re already worrying about the rent going up this summer, which they anticipate will push out some of the smaller vendors. For all its apparent altruism, Bute Yard seems to benefit the Crichton-Stuarts first, then its partner businesses, and only then does it consider the interests of small business owners, if they can afford the rent in the first place. 

The Crichton-Stuarts might draw some inspiration from a member of their own clan, Ninian Stuart, who has begun to slowly transfer ownership of his Falkland Estate in Fife over to the community. It will be the first of its kind in Scotland, in which a landowner gradually divests his patrilineal inheritance to the community to steward the land themselves. Bute Produce and the Port Bannatyne Development Trust show that when land is more equitably managed, food can once more become a meaningful part of rural living, improving quality of life and fostering a sense of community. But without this also being coupled with greater land-acquisition powers, there is no route to land sovereignty, nor any meaningful ‘Good Food Nation’. 

So aye, Bute Yard is pleasant enough. But what about that land of yours? 

Note: This article has been updated with two factual corrections. 1) Cathleen Crichton-Stuart is the second daughter of Johnny Bute, not the first. 2) During the writing of this article, Cathleen Crichton-Stuart stepped down as a director of Bute Kitchen.

As stated originally in the piece, Bute Yard and the Mount Stuart Trust are separate entities. In response to the reporting in this article, a spokesperson for Bute Yard writes: “Bute Yard was set up to foster and to build economic growth in the local area, and is part of a number of projects helping to regenerate Rothesay and the island as a whole. Our focuses are local job creation, social accessibility, island repopulation and providing something positive and year-round that’s entirely new to the island.”

Toby Anstruther of the Mount Stuart Trust writes: “Since 2020, we have welcomed six new farming families to Bute on modern long-term tenancies and have been widely praised by the Scottish Land Commission and Scottish Ministers for creating a positive model of land ownership that benefits many. We were one of the very first charities – and remain the largest – to manage an Island for public good, preceding Eigg and Gigha by many years. We are also very proud that the approach adopted at Falkland was inspired by the model we pioneered. We believe strongly in the value of charity ownership for public good even while recognising that balancing competing demands is always challenging.”

Credits

Robbie Armstrong is a journalist, reporter and audio producer from Glasgow. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn, and Odhran O’Donoghue, and is copyedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking, and life. If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free each week, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

For our seventeenth piece in this season, Max Walker writes about the relationship between Devon and its clotted cream, and how the development of the British railways brought ‘railway milk’ from the county to London, changing its relationship to the capital. Max’s essay also looks at Devon’s beloved cream-filled, jam-studded split, which, although past its glory-days, is possibly due a resurgence.

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Cream is thicker than blood: the rise and fall of the Devon split

A story of Devonian cream and London railway milk, by Max Walker

Cream runs thick in Devonian blood. It also flows through historical accounts of Devon’s food culture: James Caird wrote in his book English Agriculture in 1850–1851 that Devon was ‘justly celebrated for dairy management’, while in 1932, the food writer Florence White observed schoolchildren in Tiverton ‘trickl[ing] golden syrup over substantial slices of bread and cream which they called “thunder and lightning”’. Today the county’s dairy production is the UK’s third-largest, accounting for 7.5% of the nation’s milk delivery, and the small number of dishes considered to be Devonian often involve dairy, like junket topped with clotted cream, Devonian cream tea, and the Devon (or Devonshire) split: a sweetened bun filled with whipped cream and topped with a dot of strawberry jam (also known as a ‘cut-round’ in North Devon, a ‘chudleigh’ east of Exeter, and a ‘tuff bun’ in the south-west).

Yet the specific association between Devon and dairy is a relatively recent tradition, predicated on industrialisation, the arrival of the railways, hygiene policies, and the county’s symbiotic relationship with a city 200 miles to the east – London.

At the end of the nineteenth century, London had a population of around 25,000 cows, which until this point, had served the city’s dairy needs. The cattle were an economy in their own right, and nothing went to waste: their sinews were melted for glue, carcasses butchered for meat, skins sent to Bermondsey’s massive tanneries, and their bones ground to dust for manure. Islington in particular was dominated by cattle; in his 1811 book about the area, J Nelson observed that ‘The milk is conveyed from the cow-house and sold, principally by robust Welsh girls and Irish women’. Even St James’s Park had a milkmaid until the early twentieth century. While other counties made their names in the capital by supplying perishable dairy goods like butter and cheese, the West Country remained somewhat insular.

All that changed after the industrial revolution, when Devon’s cottage dairy industry could easily have been wiped out. Instead it flourished, becoming an essential part of London’s dairy supply chain. With the arrival of the railway from the capital in the mid-nineteenth century, perishable milk and butter could be transported from Devon’s dairies to London via the Great Western Railway (GWR). And this was a two-way revolution, as London’s Victorian elite could also be taken to a new corner of England to seek out its sea air. A circular economy based on the innovations of steam introduced steam separators to dairies in the 1880s; this industrialised the milk-production process and conveniently provided cream, which had been skimmed from the exportable milk. As a result, tourists were often refreshed with the ethereal yet indulgent Devon split.

London was utterly transformed by the flood of railway milk from Devon and other parts of Britain. The first instalment arrived at Liverpool Street Station in 1845 – an order for ‘country milk’ for St Thomas’s Hospital from Romford, which was then a ‘rural’ town. During this time, George Barham – a businessman, and later Mayor of Hampstead – recognised a public desire for ‘cleaner’ rural produce, given the adulteration of city milk with dyes, chemical preservatives, and hot water (which gave the illusion that the milk was warm from the cow). Barham founded Express Dairies in 1864, pioneering the use of railway transport to bring rural milk supplies to the city centre. Owing to its proximity to large railway terminuses at Victoria and Paddington, West London was able to most quickly replace its intra-urban milk supply with railway milk. With urban dairies forced to meet increasingly rigorous tests for the cattle disease to which their herds were increasingly susceptible, railway milk came to dominate the market by the early twentieth century.

Initially, milk churns were loaded into any freight carriage to transport railway milk, but the risk of contamination – and recognition of an opportunity for profit – meant that railway companies began to adjust their timetables, putting on better-quality rolling stock and scheduling ‘milk trains’. According to Durham University’s Prof Peter Atkins, the GWR had the biggest market share of this milk supply – about 18% until the 1880s, rising to 30% by 1910. They even opened a platform at Paddington in 1913 that was dedicated to railway milk. As the journey from the West Country to London was slashed from a sixteen-hour coach ride to a four-and-a-half-hour train journey, enterprising dairies sprung up, and rail depots were established at Cullompton and Seaton so that milk could be dispatched to sites like Walford’s Dairy in London. The Culm Valley Dairy Co even operated its own light railway so it could be connected to the GWR’s main line. In 1861, just 6% of London’s milk supply had arrived by rail, but this figure rose to 96% by 1914, when milk flowed to the capital from all over Britain.

Meanwhile, the mid-twentieth century also saw tourism open up to a more diverse crowd. At the time, there was an increased awareness of wellbeing and leisure time; this culminated in the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 and brought holidaymakers of all classes to the south coast (by 1930, 150,000 people a year went to Torquay alone). On the south coast, teahouses like Deller’s and Addison’s Royal Café and Creamery opened to service leisure seekers, as the population of the ‘English Riviera’ – a new term coined to make favourable comparisons to the more famous French equivalent – almost trebled. The Devon split was the weapon of choice for any high tea-goer; one advertisement for Fortt’s Lido Café in Torquay read ‘Famous Devon Splits (for our noted cream teas)’, while at Deller’s, ‘cream buns’ or ‘rolls’ were advertised with almost all of the eighteen tea options (only two offered a scone). The heyday of the Devon split coincided with the county’s prominence as a tourist destination, as well as the time when ambitions for its dairies were most strong.

The decline of the split occurred at the same time as the decline of the railways, and of railway milk from Devon, in the latter half of the twentieth century due to competition from road haulage and underfunding. The ornate art deco ruins of the Torrington Creamery, founded in the 1880s, are a forlorn reminder of the fickle market that pushed Devon’s dairy industry into anonymity: a 2011 study by Exeter University stated that ‘small dairy herds are vanishing’ in Devon. The same preoccupation with cleanliness that killed off London’s intra-urban milk supply in the 1800s eventually reached rural farms too, pushing them towards industrialisation. Now, milk from ‘smaller’ farms is purchased by processors, homogenised, and pasteurised at modern facilities run by Arla or Müller, and sold, with generic labelling, in supermarkets.

The Devon split, meanwhile, is well past its glory days. Its moment in the spotlight was curtailed by the rise of the scone, whose minimally worked and artificially leavened dough needed significantly less input than the yeasted, kneaded, and proved split. The split is a product of my grandmother’s Devon, when a milkman still came to the door with a milk cart and a great churn to fill the milk jugs. The family would set a pan of milk rich unhomogenised milk over a low heat until the cream ‘clotted’, and it would be stored in the larder in the wall, without refrigeration.

According to seventeenth-century accounts, clotted cream prepared this way was characteristic of Devon’s peculiar relationship to dairy. The product was not found in neighbouring counties like Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Wiltshire until the twentieth century; in these places, Prof Atkins states, cream was left in the milk to make their best cheeses. Devon’s long-standing tradition of clotted cream, therefore, resonates with a very Devonian obsession: this is a county that concocted not just one, but a whole menagerie of products with bread as the vessel and cream as the topping, like splits, sponges, and doughnuts.

Today, the Devon split cannot be found in Greggs, or in many village bakers. At Teignmouth, at the end of the South Devon extension to the GWR, you can still just about guarantee a Devon split from The Wee Shoppe Bakery, an antiquated spot where the staff call you ‘darling’. When you select a split at the counter, the pinnied lady might tell you that she prefers a custard slice, but don’t be deterred from your path. The split is the full stop, the complete package – what my grandad called a ‘proper job’. There’s a time and a place for a custard slice; this is not it.

@tasteofsurpriseLondon’s softest italian cream bun ft vyTa bakery #vyta #maritozzi #italianpastry #creambuns #fyp #coventgardenlondon

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In London, the untrendy Devon split’s legacy and form can be glimpsed in the maritozzo, an Italian cream bun that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the split. Personally, I resent the Italophiles who exalt them, and Oliver Costello, the co-owner of TOAD Bakery in south London – who, by his own admission, ‘loves beef and beefing’ – shares my resentment. When TOAD recently posted an Instagram photograph of their Devon splits, one popular Italian bakery commented a sloth emoji. Costello tells me he took this to mean that TOAD had been ‘slow to the game’. Costello recognises that a maritozzo has some inexplicable ‘algorithmic magic’ – which, since it is almost identical to the Devon split, bar the dot of jam (a simple quantitative improvement that renders the latter superior), helps the split’s case. But something about tasting the split at its point of origin makes it uncannily memorable, like recalling a forgotten childhood holiday – to the point that, upon tasting it, you might think (as I did), ‘How did I forget that?’

Promising appearances of the split at other bakeries last summer, like Fortitude Bakehouse in central London, hint at some fresh interest – perhaps from digressing maritozzo enthusiasts – for this timeless combination of yeasted bun and fresh cream, so it might be through London’s trendsetting channels that the split renews its popularity. And whether it’s the internet, the A303, or the railways, Devon has proved itself a malleable place, informed by the demand of the capital. That said, occasionally a changing wind blows from the West too.

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Correction: This article initially stated that Devon accounts for 39% of England’s dairy output — this actually refers to the entire south west of England.

Credits

Max Walker is a writer based in London. You can find him on Instagram while his website gets an overhaul.

For this piece, Max would like to thank Prof Peter Atkins at Durham University, whose book Animal Cities examines the history of the exploitation of animals in urban contexts.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn, and Odhran O’Donoghue, and is copyedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking and life. If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

For our sixteenth newsletter in this season, the author and gig economy researcher Callum Cant writes about the recent wave of delivery rider strikes in the UK, and the internal and external policies that have put food delivery at the forefront of labour issues in the country today.

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Long days, longer battles

The lives and protests of food delivery workers, by Callum Cant

First Picket Line, 8pm, February 2 2024, Forest Hill,

On a light industrial estate at the edge of zone 3 in southeast London, a picket line is forming. The noise of sirens passing by on the nearby South Circular blends with the low hum of moped engines and conversations in Polish and Brazilian-Portuguese. Twenty delivery riders have parked up and gathered in small groups around the entrance to a building made up of ‘dark kitchens’, in which restaurants like Dishoom, Five Guys, and Wingstop operate delivery-only. The building itself is owned by Deliveroo, which, alongside Uber Eats and Just Eat, is one of the country’s biggest food delivery platforms. Tonight’s strike against the delivery apps, during which the riders will refuse to pick up food from the dark kitchens, is one of many taking place across London and further afield. They have been initiated by a small but influential group of riders to protest what they perceive as a recent fall in pay. 

On the picket, the clear consensus among riders is that wages have been going down for a long time. Riders are self-employed and paid a variable rate per delivery, so they measure falling pay in their own specific ways: they have become reliant on cheap frozen meals, they no longer have the cash spare to cover emergency repairs, they are working more hours per day to make the same amount. Things have got particularly bad since December, but it is unclear why exactly – the whole system gives riders almost no information about how the decisions that shape their working lives are made. Analysis by Rodeo (an app that measures the earnings and costs of delivery riders) published in the Financial Times suggests that the rate per delivery fell by 9% for Just Eat and 2% for UberEats in 2023. In 2017, Deliveroo riders in cities like Brighton made a flat £4 per drop; today, after a significant bout of inflation, the minimum delivery fee is £2.90.

Because it costs around £3 an hour in operational costs to work on a moped, a rider needs to make £14 an hour just to scrape minimum wage (not accounting for the additional income required to cover a pension, holidays, and sick pay). Assuming that drivers can make an average of three deliveries an hour, this means that they need to make £4.66 per delivery. The sad reality is that they rarely do. Workers are under constant pressure, always aware of their own exploitation, which is driving them deeper into poverty with each day. So starting in January, riders added each other to WhatsApp groups, and spread the word. Their demand was simple: a guaranteed £5 minimum per delivery. 

On the night of the first strike, the picket has slowed the pace of work inside the dark kitchens to a crawl. With no riders turning up to collect food, the orders pile up and the pass overflows with brown paper bags. Occasionally the manager instructs the kitchen staff to junk orders that have been waiting for more than half an hour, after giving up hope of them ever making it to the customer. They are unceremoniously dumped in the bins out front. After three hours of strike action, during which only one or two deliveries successfully left the premises, the manager makes an announcement. It has been decided: the facility will close for the night. 

Rodeo estimates that this one evening of striking cost Uber Eats and Deliveroo £1 million each – probably an underestimate, given the refunds that the platforms have had to dish out and reputational costs associated with the negative press caused by the strike. Since the first strike was announced on 25 January, Deliveroo's share price has fallen by more than 10%. The striking riders are facing the might of massive platforms (Uber alone has a market capitalisation of $161 billion). It is an uneven fight, but their tactics have proven effective. The hardcore of organised riders aren't daunted by the power of the platforms. After all, the whole point of a strike as a tactic is that it can tip the established balance of power upside down. 

The Reality of the Job 

Mateus (not his real name) is one of the key riders behind the strike. He was catapulted into a leadership role after his social media content promoting the first strike struck a nerve and won widespread support – initially from other riders, and then from workers further afield. After four years as a rider, he understands the situations facing his fellow workers. He knows what it’s like to keep riding when you are soaking wet and exhausted because you need to make enough to pay rent, what it's like to have a close call with a bus and say a silent prayer of thanks that you didn't go under the wheels, what it’s like to fall asleep after a day on the road, the noise of your moped still buzzing in your ears.  

When COVID hit in 2020, Mateus lost both of his jobs in hospitality. Like many other Brazilians in London, he decided to start working for the food delivery platforms. His experience is characteristic: he does long hours for increasingly bad pay, he is exhausted at the end of every day, he holds on for the time he gets to spend with his mates. He doesn't miss the customer-facing side of being a waiter, but sometimes he’s shocked at how he's treated by the people he delivers to. ‘Most people just open the door, say the code number, and close the door straight away,’ he says. ‘There’s no “Hello”, “Hi”, “How are you?”, “Drive safely” – there’s nothing. Sometimes there’s not even eye contact – they just grab the food and close the door. It makes me feel like we are at the bottom of the ladder, we are just disposable.’

Mateus tells me the story of a friend who had his moped written off in a bad crash. (The pay structure of the apps means that riders are always under pressure to complete deliveries faster to boost their earnings, meaning that they can end up taking risks on the road.) His friend was injured, but he still called the customer to let them know. ‘He said the food would be late, he was in an accident, and the guy didn’t care, he just said, “But my food is coming, right?”’ Mateus laughs, ‘Yeah, your food is coming, with a bit of blood.’ 

Working as a migrant courier in London inevitably means having a combative relationship with the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office. Riders without papers are constantly under threat from raids at McDonald’s and on high streets. During the latest strike on February 23rd, scabs have been using the threat of deportation as a weapon against striking workers. ‘They phone up the Home Office and give them people’s addresses, saying they know that illegal immigrants are living in that house,’ Mateus says. For the past few weeks since the strikes began, the raids seem to have got worse. Sometimes pickets have turned up at dark kitchens only to find them guarded by vanloads of police. Mateus puts it bluntly: ‘They're using the police to stop people from starting a movement.’

Second Picket Line, 6pm, Valentine’s Day 2024, Bermondsey  

If you head north up the Old Kent Road from its origin in New Cross, you will be surrounded by food. Small restaurants selling Caribbean, Vietnamese, and Venezuelan dishes sit alongside Millwall pubs like The Windsor and The Five Bells, which claims to have regularly hosted Charles Dickens at some point in the 1860s. Keep on going and you end up crossing under the railway bridge that carries the Overground into Peckham. Turn right there, just before the big Lidl, and cut through some social housing, and you’ll find yourself in another light industrial estate, home to yet another set of dark kitchens. 

This evening, two security guards are positioned out front. Their official role is to protect the safety of riders who want to cross the picket line to make deliveries. Their unofficial role seems to be to remind strikers that the company is watching. As a result of their self-employed status, riders have no legal protection against unfair dismissal, and so threats of arbitrary terminations are very real. Because it’s Valentine’s Day, the picketers are mostly single men, sitting in distinct groups based on their primary languages: Portuguese, Turkish, and Polish. Every few minutes, a group of mobile pickets arrive. They check that the strike is holding solid in that location, before driving off to continue their rounds.

Less than a mile away, in the shadow of Millwall’s ground – The Den – another dark kitchen has been shut completely. There isn’t even a picket there, just two security guards standing around by a closed door. There were so few riders out working that there was no point staying open. Despite the massive disparities between the contending parties, the riders seem to have the upper hand – for tonight, at least. 

Wages and Migration 

One of the most nefarious aspects of capitalism is how it generates consent for its exploitation and alienation of people as workers by simultaneously empowering people as consumers. We are exploited, but in return we have the freedom to buy an increasing volume of whatever we are supposed to want. But this mechanism is breaking down. Since the financial crisis of 2008, it has been working intermittently, or not at all. The portion of the population excluded from the deal has grown, and even the once-protected middle classes have been exposed to falling living standards, while an ever-increasing proportion of the working class has become trapped in low-wage, low-productivity service work.

For labour-intensive industries that cannot relocate production to different countries to take advantage of cheap workers (particularly service providers like hotels, restaurants and, more recently, food delivery platforms), migrant labour offers a way to get the benefits of cheap labour while remaining accessible to their customer base. This means the wage dynamics of the gig economy can't be explained solely by understanding the economy. An understanding of migration policy, and how it has shaped the conditions facing the low-paid workers who are the backbone of the UK hospitality industry, is also essential. 

In 1996, the French Maoist Emmanuel Terray witnessed a hunger strike at the Saint-Bernard church in Paris, where 300 sans papier (undocumented) migrants had come to organise to demand residency papers for all. In the subsequent years, Terray used the spark of this struggle against the French state and its racist border regime to develop a new concept of the role of migrant workers in the French economy, which he called ‘délocalisation sur place’ (outsourcing in situ). He began by examining what it is that borders really do. Rather than preventing undocumented migrants from entering the country, borders instead create the conditions of insecurity that change migrant behaviour, particularly of those without the correct papers. Those workers have the threat of state violence, detention, and deportation hanging over their heads, and so they are forced outside the protection of official labour market regulation. They accept jobs at lower wages because they are unable to appeal to the state to enforce the minimum wage.

In the UK, The Hostile Environment policy, first introduced by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, is a perfect example of the dynamic Terray identified. It uses the border regime to make the life of undocumented migrants in the UK as difficult as possible. The Immigration Act 2016 created the offence of ‘illegal working’, which is committed when someone knows or has reasonable cause to know that they are disqualified from working but does so anyway. If workers go to the police to report abuses in the workplace, they become just as likely to be arrested as their bosses. Delivery platforms benefit from this dynamic through a contractual clause called ‘substitution’, which means that riders can ‘rent’ their accounts out to other people (this mechanism has also been relied upon in court to support Deliveroo’s claim that they do not employ their riders). While the apps check the account holder, the responsibility to conduct a right-to-work check on the account renter is devolved from the platform. As a result, food delivery platforms can say with all honesty that they do not have any contractors without the right to work in the UK. And yet, predictably, many of the people who end up renting accounts are undocumented and make much less than the minimum legal wage. It's these riders who often end up accepting the worst deliveries for the lowest payments. Their vulnerability makes profits possible. 

Third Picket Line, 6pm, 23 February 2024, London 

In January this year, the three biggest European delivery companies – Just Eat, Deliveroo, and Germany’s Delivery Hero – were projected to have positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation. This is big news, since for almost the first decade of their operation, delivery apps were not profitable. Platforms like Uber and Deliveroo ploughed cash into the hope of becoming profitable monopolies, regardless of if they were making money in the short term. But after ten years of hoovering up market share, things seemed to have turned a corner. London is one of Europe’s most mature markets, where there are big margins to be made from food delivery. In order to realise these margins and justify their exorbitant market valuations, platform bosses need to push down costs – and the single largest cost they face is labour. This is the context for the ongoing real-wage cuts facing riders. The viability of supposedly futuristic platform business models rests, in the end, on the age-old tactics of managerial domination: sweating labour in much the same way as the industrialists of satanic cotton mills did before them, and garment sweatshops still do. 

Although the initial momentum that launched this strike action a month ago has spread, in London it is starting to falter. A strike has been called for this evening, but fatigue is setting in. In some places, pickets are half-hearted or non-existent. This pattern isn't a surprise. The nimbleness of an organisational approach based primarily on WhatsApp has its own weaknesses – the communication between strikers can expand very quickly, but the resulting connections are fragile. From the outside, courier work looks like a lonely job, but in practice most riders know the other workers in their area well. They bump into each other at the McDonald’s delivery counter at 7am, or waiting around in parking bays during the post-lunch lull, or outside dark kitchens during the evening rush. These are the connections that built the strike. But without the strong bonds formed in face-to-face interactions, and through a union, the cooperation between workers in different zones is always at risk of disruption. February’s initial mobilisation must be followed by the creation of a more durable organisation that can lead a prolonged campaign. It's a big ask, but it seems that nothing else will do.

The riders haven't got their pay rise just yet. But that's not a surprise to Mateus: ‘I don’t see us winning any time soon. It’s going to be a long, long battle – but we’re ready.’ 

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To learn more about the strikes, directly from the workers, please read Notes From Below.

Credits

Callum Cant is an author, researcher and labour rights advocate who specialises in the gig economy. He is the author of the book Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy and is one of the editors of the online journal Notes From Below.

Ada Jusic specialises in illustrations with a political or social context. You can find more of her illustrations at https://adajusic.com/

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn. Additional edits by Odhran O’Donoghue.

For our fifteenth newsletter in this season, we asked writers, farmers, politicians and activists for ideas for viable policies that would improve the food situation in the UK. In this compilation, Zarah Sultana, Alex Heffron, Amber Husain, Lyds Leather, Abby Rose, Pen Vogler, Dee Woods, Col Gordon. Pamela Brunton, Dr Courtney Scott, Bee Wilson and Katie Revell think about the achievable ways that our food systems could improve if the desire to change policy is there. 

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How would you improve food in the UK?

We asked writers, farmers activists and politicians for practicable policy ideas.

Minimum Wage Tied to Cost of Food

It feels pretty basic to suggest that the cost of food ought to be accounted for in minimum wage and benefit calculations, but this is one of the five as-yet-unmet demands of the UK Right to Food campaign. The word ‘luxury’ might still evoke saffron or salmon for some, but with the price bloat and wage stagnation of recent years, for many it has come to describe the idea of simply eating enough. Still, even if the cost of staples (where price hikes are felt most keenly) were to be factored in to our country’s smallest incomes, would that constitute the satisfaction of a ‘right to food’?

The spirit of this right derives from the dream of a society in which every person is able to feed themselves with dignity – reasonable for one of the richest countries in the world. For me, this would mean not just eating enough, but eating with freedom and delight – allowing for the exercise of cultural, political and ethical choice, but also the indulgence of whim. A fleshier version of the basic demand, then, would be to insist that those wage and benefit calculations account for the kind of culinary expenditure you’d allocate to someone you loved. Or perhaps what those who make policy would expect to spend on themselves. Amber Husain

Reform Universal Credit

The way that we eat, and our ability to engage with food as a culture, is undeniably connected to our financial income. Reforming the Universal Credit system is a means to ending the philanthropic model of food aid that currently exists in the UK. UC doesn’t currently cover an individual or family’s basic needs for an adequate standard of living – including rent, bills, and food – and threatens sanctions if people don’t accept zero-hours contracts. This perpetuates a cycle of inconsistent income, increasing household food insecurity and reliance on food aid. By excluding those seeking asylum, or who have no recourse to public funds (NRPF), from claiming UC, the hostile environment is systemically starving people.

UC needs to be increased to allow people an adequate standard of living and enable them to reject the zero-hours contracts that are forcing us into a failing gig economy. It needs to be extended to people with NRPF, and the five-week wait on UC – which purposefully exposes people to food insecurity – must be scrapped. Changing how people eat and connect to food will demand an intersection between politics, economy and culture. It’s not enough to talk about ending the need for food banks; we must also put a welfare policy in place, protecting the worker and migrant rights that allow people and communities to actively choose and participate in how they want to feed themselves. Lyds Leather

Agroecology Development Officers

In 2022, Scotland passed the Good Food Nation Act, for which all local authorities, health boards, and Scottish Ministers must now produce plans. Amongst other things, these plans must take into account environment, health, and social and economic well-being. If created thoughtfully, these plans have the potential to help kickstart transitions to agroecological food systems.

My policy change would be to create teams of Agroecology Development Officers in each region, building on the methodologies of ‘Farmer Clusters’ (where groups of farmers are facilitated to work collaboratively in order to accomplish goals they couldn’t achieve on their own) as well as the emerging frameworks of ‘Regional Land Use Partnerships’, which facilitate collaboration between local and national government, communities, landowners, land managers and wider stakeholders in order to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis. These teams would be tasked with working with different members of the food production cycle to tackle food and land policy together, helping to facilitate the organisational and cooperative capacity on the ground. They would also help develop the appropriate infrastructure that would be required to deliver meaningful Good Food Nation plans in an agroecological way. Col Gordon

Death on the Curriculum

That death is a fundamental part of life is something many farmers inherently understand (often much better than most other people). On farms, animals die all the time. They are eaten by other animals, they fall ill or get injured, and they are killed so that we can eat them. Yet one of the thoughts prompted by our latest Farmerama series Less and Better? – a deep-dive into what it even means to eat less and better meat – was just how allergic most of us have become to the subject.

In order to truly honour all that we eat, and the ecological systems and cycles of which we are a part, we need to reconnect with death. As a starting point, learning about death in the classroom should be made mandatory. This can’t just be formed of a single visit to an abattoir – something that could be traumatic and would be all too easy to forget or suppress as the child grows up. Instead, we need a curriculum of death, which unearths dying as part of the experience of living fully; which helps young people understand what it means to kill animals in order to eat them; and to understand their – our – own place in the cycles of life. Abby Rose

A focussed ‘Blue Economy’ for Scotland

Wild salmon is a holy fish. In Gaelic legend, the fish signified wisdom; historically important as food, but equally as a badge of Scots culture. But in recent decades, wild salmon populations in Scottish rivers have been declining, and in December 2023, wild Scottish salmon was officially classified ‘endangered’. Scottish farmed salmon, meanwhile, is the UK’s biggest food export. These fish are kept in densely stocked ‘feedlot’ cages flushed with pesticides and antibiotics, emitting waste equivalent to half the population of Scotland. Industrial salmon farms destroy the marine ecosystem on which wild fish depend.

In the Scottish Highlands, where these farms are located, the Gaelic-speaking world traditionally thought very differently about living creatures. Take ‘dùthchas’, an ancient belief that land rights should be shared by all of a place’s inhabitants, not by a private individual. Today, ecosystem-based aquaculture policy guided by dùthchas would mean asking the seas what they needed us to farm, rather than focusing on the single species that makes the most profit. (For instance, this might mean increasing our farming of mussels, oysters and scallops, which require zero inputs and filter nitrogen, cleaning the seawater as they grow.) Scotland’s ‘blue economy’ policy (2022) claims an ‘ecosystems-based approach’ – but salmon farming is incompatible with this aim. Instead, the government should consider Norway’s hefty redistributive tax on salmon farms. Proceeds could fund regenerative aquaculture projects, like the community-owned Aird Fada Seaweed farm on the Isle of Mull. Thus we create meaningful jobs, respect indigenous Gaelic values, put nature back at the centre of human ecology, and help clean up the mess in Scotland’s blue commons, which are currently being siphoned off for private gain abroad. Pamela Brunton

Big Food Windfall Tax

For meaningful transformation in our food system right now, we need policies that control the power concentration of the big, global food corporations. A windfall tax set at a minimum of 50% on excess profits from such companies is one possible policy change. This could help build equity into the food system by disrupting the way it current works, whereby those who work the hardest benefit the least. It could encourage the redistribution of wealth in the form of real living wages, paid directly to the people who produce, package, cook and serve our food. It could also help fund the extension of social protection programmes like free school meals; support British farmers by ensuring fair prices; and fund a just transition towards a localised, climate-friendly, sustainable, agroecological farming system. Or it could reform the social welfare system, so those most impacted by household food insecurity – racialised, minoritised and marginalised groups – would have actual living incomes, plus access to affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate food.

Windfall taxes on food companies are currently in place in Portugal (at 33%), and have recently been called for in the EU parliament by the Greens. Many think tanks and charities, including TMG, Tax Foundation, Oxfam and ActionAid, have made the case for them. The UK has a windfall tax on energy companies which is currently set at 75 %, so to extend this to food companies and supermarkets – at 50% or more – is feasible. This windfall tax cannot be a short-term response, but must pave the way to longer-term robust regulatory policies in order to hold big food companies accountable, and to ensure that they no longer extract from our planet or exploit the millions around the world who feed us. Dee Woods

Policies Changing Land Ownership

Good, healthy food depends upon the best ingredients. Local food producers are an important part of this, but concentrated ownership and poor access to land is a massive barrier to scaling up agroecologically-grown fruit and vegetables in the UK. Today, good land can cost as much as £25,000 per hectare, and secure rental opportunities are few and far between. Research in Wales found that just 2% of Welsh agricultural land is needed to supply enough fruit and veg for the entire population to have their five a day. And so, land reform is necessary.

One approach could be for governments to implement a Right to Grow, and there are several ways this could be achieved. Campaigners have asked for local authorities to make unused public land available for growing – this could be extended further by mandating local authorities to provide more land for horticulture from their council farm estates (Carmarthenshire County Council have already started to do this). Another route could leverage the new farm subsidy schemes to financially incentivise landowners to provide secure tenancies for market gardens (just as payments are made for environmental actions). Those market gardens could then be publicly funded for infrastructural development such as irrigation and polytunnels, helping people grow affordably priced fruit and vegetables to be sold locally. Alex Heffron

Free School Meals for All

Children pretending to eat from empty lunchboxes, or stealing from shops on the way to class just to get some food. As a Member of Parliament, parents and teachers are telling me stories like this more and more often. We live in one of the richest countries in the world, but more than four million children are growing up in poverty. So every day when the lunch bell rings, there are children who don’t just worry about getting their favourite meal. They’re worrying about getting any meal. This is why I introduced the Free School Meals for All Bill, a proposal to guarantee every primary school pupil in the country gets a hot, healthy meal each day. This policy is already being rolled out in Wales, Scotland and London (at least until next year), but not the rest of England.

Study after study shows the benefits of the policy: helping pupils with concentration, attainment and behaviour, and supporting pupils from the poorest families the most. What’s stopping this policy from happening isn’t affordability – it could be paid for almost twice-over by ending the private schools’ charitable status tax break – but rather a lack of will from political leaders in Westminster. So in Parliament, I have been asking this question: What’s more important – safeguarding a tax break for wealthy parents, or ensuring every child gets a hot, healthy meal each day? Zarah Sultana

Food Literacy in Schools

Data from the Food Foundation shows that sales of vegetables in the UK dropped to their lowest level in fifty years in 2021–2022. Without a taste for them, though, children cannot benefit from the salad or vegetables in their free school lunch, which is a universal entitlement in England for children aged 4–7. ‘Taste Education’ – which can be taught using nothing but a bag of apples or a few herbs from the school garden – should be made a basic part of education for ages 3–11 (and ideally beyond). ‘Eat at least 5 portions of a variety of fruit and veg each day’, says gov.uk. But does anyone check whether UK schools are helping children to develop a taste for vegetables and fruit? Sometimes referred to as ‘Sensory Food Education’, Taste Education is the simplest way of all to learn about food. In essence, it is putting fresh food in children’s hands and asking them what they see, smell, hear, touch and taste. Research from Finland and other countries suggests that even a reasonably short course of this kind of Taste Education can increase a child’s willingness to try vegetables, regardless of what they eat at home.

The resources to implement this policy are already there. TastEd – a charity I co-founded in 2019 with a primary head teacher and a former sixth-form teacher– has created more than a hundred free lesson plans and PowerPoints tailored to existing curriculums, as well as teacher training videos. The aim is to give children the chance to discover the joy of vegetables, rather than them seeing this food as something that they ‘should’ eat. Already, more than a thousand schools and nurseries have signed up, and teacher feedback suggests that the effect on children’s eating habits, as well as their relationship with eating, can be profound. A teacher in York reported that a child with autism and sensory needs – whose diet is mostly ‘basic’ and devoid of vegetables – learned to enjoy lettuce during a TastEd lesson, and now chooses a dish of lettuce with every school meal. Food literacy – like actual literacy – should be a universal right, and policy should reflect this. Bee Wilson

Mao-Lite Rural Reeducation for Politicians

A friend has a story about when, on a trip to a countryside farm with a group of inner-city Bristol kids, one child pointed to some attractively woolly sheep and said, ‘Look! Cloud dogs!’ Some might use this story to argue that urban families eat badly because they don’t know where their food comes from, and that, if only they could learn to cook, they would be healthier. It’s easy to blame the people with the least agency; however, it is the powerful, not the powerless, who need to step up to the plate. Power and responsibility go together, as Spider-Man reminds us. The real problem is that the powerful people in Westminster and in boardrooms live in a whole world of cloud dogs. They don’t understand that good food and farming must be baked into a society, and that both require long-term planning. Spend time growing or cooking and you will know what good food is (and it isn’t produced by extrusion and additives). To fix our broken food system, I’d begin with some Mao-lite reeducation at the top. Anyone with a say in the nation’s food should spend some time working on a farm, and in a kitchen, learning how to cook. Pen Vogler

Polluter Pays

At the FFCC, we run something called The Food Conversation, where we ask people a simple question: What do you want from food? It turned out, unsurprisingly, that people want a fairer food system that holds businesses to account. Across political divides and demographics, people wanted bold, transformative food policies that protect their health and the environment. When it came to policy interventions, they expressed strong interest in the ‘polluter pays’ principle – the idea that polluters should bear the environmental and social cost of their actions. They were unhappy that the cost of diet-related ill health was falling to society (and the NHS), while big food companies’ profits rise. They explored, and were drawn to, the idea that food companies could be taxed, or fined, for producing and marketing foods that are contributing significantly to the health crisis, such as heavily processed, addictive foods that are laden with salt, fat and sugar. They were also interested in the idea that food production which pollutes the environment could incur fines, pointing to large private companies investing heavily in industrialised chicken production in parts of the UK, for example.

Crucially, people felt policies must be designed and implemented fairly, so that people on low incomes do not bear the brunt financially. They saw opportunities to use money (raised from taxation and fines) to offset the cost of healthy, sustainable food so that it becomes an easy, affordable choice. Just as one example, we could use the money raised through polluter pays to help hospitals and schools buy healthy food from small-scale food producers. Dr Courtney Scott

Publicly Subsidised Diners in Every Neighbourhood

A new network of public diners – affordable, appealing, accessible – could be part of a move away from charitable crisis responses and towards a recognition that we all have a right to food. Nourish Scotland, a charity focusing on food policy and practice, recently launched a project called ‘Public Diners: Infrastructure for a Good Food Nation’. As they point out:

Scotland has extensive social infrastructure to support our wellbeing. From public libraries, parks and leisure centres, to housing and the NHS, the state invests in and maintains institutions and systems for our collective benefit. Yet, very little is in place in relation to food.

We believe we need a new piece of social infrastructure – a public diner – to make it easier for all of us to eat well.

There is precedent for this model: during the Second World War, state-supported ‘British Restaurants’ served price-capped, nourishing, three-course meals to anyone who needed them. In 1943, there were 2,160 of these restaurants, serving 600,000 meals a day. (Churchill, in perhaps one of his more enlightened moments, proposed the name ‘British Restaurant’ as an alternative to ‘Communal Feeding Centre’.) Of course, that was during a war; a national emergency. But aren’t we in an emergency right now – a cost-of-living (or cost-of-profit) public well-being emergency? Katie Revell

Do you have an idea for a policy that would improve how we eat in the UK?

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Credits

Amber Husain is a writer based in South London, UK. She is the author of Replace Me (Peninsula Press, 2021), Meat Love (Mack, 2023), and Tell Me How You Eat, forthcoming from Hutchinson Heinemann (UK) and Atria Books (USA).

Lyds Leather is a food activist working on community-led food access and provision in Sheffield. They currently research the depoliticisation of hunger, the right to food and how it is claimed, and what that looks like in a Sheffield context.

Abby Rose is a farmer and soil health advocate and the co-founder of Vidacycle, which makes apps that support farmers to take a more regenerative approach to farming. She is also the co-creator of Farmerama Radio, an award-winning podcast sharing the voices behind regenerative farming.

Pen Vogler is a food historian and author of Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain.

Dee Woods is the co-founder at Granville Community Kitchen and Director/Food Justice Policy Coordinator at Landworkers’ Alliance. Dee currently represents La Via Campesina as the Western Europe Focal Point of the Coordinating Committee at the CSIPM (Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism) for relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security. They are a coordinator of the Equity Working Group for the current work stream on Reducing Inequalities for Food Security and Nutrition.

Col Gordon is a researcher who’s based on his family’s farm in the Scottish Highlands, where he grows heritage grains and helps his father raise livestock. He’s a director of The Shieling Project, a trustee of Highland Good Food Partnership, and on the co-ordinating group for Landworkers’ Alliance.

Pamela Brunton is chef and co-owner of award-winning Inver Restaurant in Argyll, Scotland, and author of a forthcoming book, Between Two Waters: How a place inspired a kitchen (to be published by Canongate in September 2024). Between Two Waters looks at Scottish food culture through a very broad lens.

Alex Heffron is a farmer in south-west Wales and a PhD researcher at Lancaster University, looking at land use, agricultural transitions and ecological crisis.

Zarah Sultana is the Labour MP for Coventry South.

Dr Courtney Scott is the Director of Policy & Research at the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC).

Bee Wilson is a food writer and journalist. Her latest book is The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen.

Katie Revell is a Glasgow-based audio producer with a particular interest in food, farming and relationships to land. You can find her on Instagram or at katierevell.com

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking and life. If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

In yesterday’s piece on the sugar tax The Demon in the Can Professor Karen Throsby argues that the sugar tax is a policy that over-promised the benefits it could deliver, shifting the blame for complex health and social problems onto individual consumers. Today, Jonathan Nunn, Amelia Horgan, Ophira Gottlieb, Owen Hatherley and Rebecca May Johnson look at another aspect of the sugar tax: how the reformulation of their favourite soft drinks to circumvent the tax, and the additions of artificial sweeteners, have made them inaccessible and undrinkable.

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Crossing the Rubicon

by Jonathan Nunn

The post-sugar-tax reformulation of fruit soft drinks is a relatively minor legacy of a Conservative government that made it its mission to run the standard of living in this country into the ground, but it’s one worth examining in further detail. Here are the facts: up until 2018 Rubicon Passion Fruit and Blood Orange Sanpellegrino were two of our finest drinks – one the Sauternes of the kebab shop, the ideal accompaniment to takeaway food, and the other a drink capable of making you feel like you were drinking an aperitivo on the Piazza Navona even when you were knocking one back on a Sainsbury’s forecourt.

When I think of Rubicon in particular, I come over with a severe case of binmenism. Do you remember real Rubicon? Remember when your mum would buy you a kebab roll and a cold can of Rubicon as a post-shopping treat? They’ve stolen that from you. Six years on, the impact of the reformulation (in Rubicon’s case, reducing the amount of sugar to 4.5g and replacing the rest with sucralose) has not helped improve health outcomes, or reduced the power of the companies that own Rubicon and Sanpellegrino (AG Barr and Nestlé respectively), but it has reduced the standard of my life and the standard of every life in this country. Both drinks are now imposters, vile simulations of what they used to be. While Coca Cola can create a sugarless replacement that uses its own artificiality as a virtue (Diet Coke), fruit soft drinks have suffered most from the sugar tax, as reducing or removing the sugar fundamentally alters the taste of the fruit, replacing it with an uncanny valley version of itself.

Sanpellegrino knows this, too. In reaction to the sugar tax, it also introduced a ‘Classic Italian Taste’ with more sugar – which, because Sanpellegrino are cowards, is only available through Ocado (and still has 10 % less sugar than the pre sugar-tax version). On the Sanpellegrino website, one FAQ is, ‘Are you introducing the Classic Italian Taste because you have had lots of negative feedback on your new recipe?’ ‘No we are not’, they reply, turning the Sanpellegrino FAQ section into a house of lies. If our food industry is going to be dominated by powerful conglomerates – and it is, unless real policy intervenes – then the least they can do is give us a small moment of pleasure. Until then, you will find me in France – where they tax artificial sweeteners too – stocking up on the taste of my childhood.

End of an Italian Fantasy

by Amelia Horgan

I wasn’t allowed sweets until I was quite old – maybe three or four. This, I imagine, was supposed to instill in me an aspirational abstinence. Naturally, it did not work. Instead, it made me greedy and sneaky, and all my best childhood memories are of getting sugary sweet things and eating them: the two hulls of a Kinder Egg; the Ben’s Cookies shop that opened next to my primary school. I once had a dream where school dinners were replaced with a lurid dessert bar. Instead of plates, there were massive meringues.

Because all of this was secret, it was also shameful. I was worried about my teeth falling out, particularly after seeing the posters in the dentist’s office proclaiming how many grams of sugar there were in my favourite drinks and snacks. This is to say that sugar has been, for me, the source and site of embarrassing fantasy for a long time. Because I was terrified that sugar would one day instantaneously dissolve my teeth, I limited soft drinks to the gloopy, gooey, metallic flavour of artificial sweeteners, with two exceptions: Sanpellegrino’s Limonade and Limone e Menta.

Because these drinks were ostensibly Italian (in fact, Sanpellegrino has been owned by Nestlé since 1997), I managed to convince myself, against all anxiety, that they must be near enough healthy. They started as a rare treat, cutting through the grease of takeaway pizza. But things snowballed, and I found myself ordering boxes and boxes.

On European holidays, because you can’t get Diet Coke, normally I’ll have a Coke Zero. But Sanpellegrino’s two lemonade variations (the sugary kind) figured as a holiday special, too – I’m in Italy! It wasn’t long, though, before greedy sips of delicious lemon, sometimes cut with semi-sophisticated mint, brought back my paranoia about having a sugar film on the teeth – and the feeling I’d been hoodwinked by a fantasy version of Italy. However, the drinks were simply too tasty to stop.

In 2018, Nestlé changed the recipe for their Sanpellegrino line. They replaced 40% of the sugar with stevia to get around the sugar tax – reducing the sugar content to less than 5g per 100ml. I tried one lousy post-tax can: I was no longer in Italy. The hybrid sweetness recipe – apparently the product of years of research and development – was somehow, for me, both too sweet and not sweet enough. And all the talk of excess (even if now-reduced) sugar took me fearfully back to the dentist’s office; it was over.

Punished by Mitsuya Cider

by Owen Hatherley

Crohn’s disease is capricious and unpredictable, but for me there is one absolutely fail-safe trigger for a flare-up: sweeteners. The Crohn’s or colitis sufferer might notice it for the first time, as I did, upon eating a box of Tic-Tacs. Not long after enjoying these cleanly sugar-free delights, there were painful cramps, followed by a night copiously expelling anything that might ever have been in my digestive system. This experience was repeated for me on many occasions upon the passing of the Sugar Tax – oh, a harmless can of Sprite! A can of Ginger Beer! Irn-Bru has never done me any harm! Only after a few experiences of losing an entire night to diarrhoea and cramps did I realise the pattern.

Personally, I would choose the slower damage caused by the gradual rotting away of my teeth than the guaranteed, if temporary, liquidation of my internal organs. And yet somehow, this apparently very common reaction was never factored into the equation when the sugar tax was proposed – anything related to toilets or bowel disorders or the like being regarded here as a bit of a joke – it might give you the trots eh, giggle giggle etc. And so, if I go to the average fast food emporium near where I live in south-east London and decide I might like to include a drink in my Meal Deal, I have the choice between Classic Coke, and water.

In a café, you generally have to rely on guesswork – tea, no matter how sugary, will be Aspartame- and ‘Ace-K-’ free unless you request otherwise; but bottled and canned iced tea, outside of Chinese and Japanese cafes, absolutely will not. In a corner shop, you can at least read the backs of the cans. Abroad, you generally are less likely to be confronted with the problem unless the drink in question is explicitly described as, say, Bez Cukru (‘without sugar’ – one of the first Polish phrases I learned). On a recent trip to Japan, as a long-time non-smartphone user, I would ask my partner to train Google Translate’s picture app on cans of delicious things – to my great delight, Suntory Highballs, Calpis and Pocari Sweat were all drinkable. This led to an overconfidence that was punished by ‘Mitsuya Cider’ (not cider, but a lemonade brand created in misinformed Anglophilia a century ago); mercifully, urban Japan has more public toilets on an average street than Britain has in an average city.

In her crusade against the Nanny State, moronic Greenwich resident Liz Truss had but one good idea – dropping this idiotic policy. Accordingly, I considered for a time reactivating my Twitter account, having formulated in my head my own personal best moralising-trolling take: ‘I don’t know who needs to know this but opposing the policies of Liz Truss is in fact ableism’ - but then, before I had the chance, she was gone, and the sugar tax was still here.

To a Bru

by Ophira Gottlieb

Growing up in Glasgow, our mums would collect gingies and store them in the kitchen by the bins. Gingies are empty glass bottles that once contained Irn-Bru. Back then you could buy a bottle for 70p, bring the gingie to the corner shop, and get yourself a 30p return. That meant you could walk into a shop with an armful of gingies and walk out with a Mars bar, a Brain Licker, and another bottle of Bru. If you tanned the bottle on the spot, you could give it back and get a Freddo.

First they took our glass bottles, and then they took our flavour. The sugar tax hit Scotland like nowhere else in the UK, and not since the discontinuation of the Greggs macaroni pie have the palates of Glasweigans been so offended. The ‘Hands Off Our IRN-BRU’ petition was signed by tens of thousands. Protesters and rioters took to the streets.

And all this for a drink that, famously, has no actual discernible flavour. Throughout the ages, Irn-Bru has invariably marketed itself on the fact that nobody can agree on what it tastes like. A survey found that Scots generally believed the drink to taste of either bubblegum, ginger, or the colour orange – none of which are true – and 56% of Scots agreed with Irn-Bru’s creator A.G. Barr that the drink simply tastes of ‘girders’.

The only thing 100% of Scots can agree on is that Irn-Bru tasted great, and now it tastes less great (the sugar content was halved to 4.7g and the rest replaced with aspartame and acesulfame k). As far as I’m concerned, Irn-Bru tasted of artificial flavouring and sugar, and now it tastes of artificial flavouring and aspartame, tipping the balance from what was once a charming hint of iron girder to an all-out metallic tang. Six years after the introduction of the sugar tax, in response to the widespread outrage that simply never ceased, Irn-Bru brought back the original recipe from 1901, which had even more sugar (11g) than the pre-tax Bru. They even brought it back in the original glass bottle. The only thing we still need back is our gingies.

Energy Crash

by Rebecca May Johnson

Regular small meals and snacks are what people are advised to eat when pregnant – to manage nausea and the fact that you can’t eat a huge amount at once as things become crowded around your digestive system. I’ve become intensely aware of when my blood sugar is crashing and that when I need energy, I need it like, right now. This was the situation, recently, when I was out walking in the Essex town where I live. I had taken a stroll round the seafront, looked in at my favourite charity shop, bought the newspaper and suddenly felt oh my god I need some sugar.

Weak and a little nauseous, I looked to the refrigerator cabinet of the newsagent and picked up a can of Old Jamaica Ginger Beer. I opened it, drank, and then after a moment felt the dreaded mouthfeel and aftertaste of artificial sweeteners. I panicked at not being able to get what I needed – sugar – and was pissed off by the waste. I threw the ginger beer away, undrunk, then went home fast as I could manage and made some toast. I’m not sure why I had faith that it would be OK. Perhaps on a previous occasion I’d found a rare example of Old Jamaica’s ‘original recipe’ cans, which contain pre-tax quantities of sugar – 15g – as opposed to the 4.9g per 100ml of the reformulated drink.

I have always been hyper-attuned to the presence of artificial sweeteners in soft drinks and am a long-time hater of Diet Coke (which – another pregnancy discovery – contains twice as much caffeine as regular coke). I was gutted when a visit to a treasured Italian sandwich bar in London was tainted by the instant ick of post-sugar-tax orange Sanpellegrino. While pregnant, soft drinks have had a heightened importance, too, because alcohol is off the menu in pubs. During a previous pregnancy in 2022, I noticed that Fentimans had held out against the tax – I told people, ‘Fentimans is still safe’. Then, just before Christmas 2023, we went to the pub, and I confidently ordered one of their ginger beers, hoping for a corrective to my Old Jamaica experience. I tasted it, and my heart sank. It was adulterated with artificial sweetener, and I abandoned the glass after one sip and got some tap water.

How has the sugar tax affected you?

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Credits

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Jonathan Nunn is a writer and founding editor of Vittles. He is editor of London Feeds Itself.

Amelia Horgan is a writer and editor from London. She is the author of Lost in Work.

Ophira Gottlieb is a writer and bookseller from Glasgow, currently living in West Yorkshire. She has published poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction, and is currently working towards her first collection of short stories.

Owen Hatherley is a writer. His most recent books are Artificial Islands , which won ‘best book’ and ‘best monograph’ at the 2023 Architectural Book Awards, and Transitional Objects.

Rebecca May Johnson is a writer and co-editor of Vittles. Her first book is Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our fourteenth focus for this season is the 2018 sugar tax introduced in the UK. In our first article, Professor Karen Throsby writes about the sugar tax as a policy that over-promised the benefits it could deliver, shifting the blame for complex health and social problems onto individual consumers. In part 2, Jonathan Nunn, Amelia Horgan, Ophira Gottlieb, Owen Hatherley and Rebecca May Johnson look at another aspect of the sugar tax: how the reformulation of their favourite soft drinks to circumvent the tax, and the additions of artificial sweeteners, have made them inaccessible and undrinkable.

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The Demon in the Can

The sugar tax six years on. Did it work? Text by Professor Karen Throsby. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

If you went into a shop in early 2018 and bought a can each of Irn-Bru and Coca-Cola, you would have encountered two different strategic responses to a change in food policy. Both soft drinks would still have had their familiar branding and colour, but they would have no longer been quite the same. If you looked at the ingredients on the bottle, you would have discovered that the Irn-Bru had been reformulated to replace the sugar with the sweetener aspartame. In spite of market research showing that most consumers can’t tell the difference, outraged fans stockpiled the original recipe bottles, signed an angry ‘Hands off our Irn-Bru’ petition, and branded celebrity chef and anti-sugar campaigner Jamie Oliver a ‘lettuce shagger’. Meanwhile, with the 1985 marketing disaster of ‘new Coke’ still fresh in their minds, Coca-Cola chose a different path. It stuck with the classic recipe, but made the bottle smaller and sold it at a higher price to absorb the costs of the tax.

In his budget speech on 16 March 2016, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced plans to introduce a Soft Drinks Industry Levy – more commonly known as the ‘sugar tax’ – which would come into place in 2018. The tax would add an additional duty of 24 pence per litre for drinks with more than 8g of sugar per 100ml, and 18 pence per litre for those with 5–8g per 100ml. This marked a key turning point sugar’s recent rise to dietary infamy in the UK – it had already supplanted fat as the food enemy du jour – but this new levy revived the flagging ‘war on obesity’ which had as yet failed to achieve its goals. During all this, anti-sugar and anti-obesity campaigners were jubilant. Jamie Oliver was reported in the Sunday Times as having ‘parked his Vespa on Parliament Square and strolled towards a scrum of television cameras’, before removing his helmet and dancing ‘a jig of joy’ for the watching press. Meanwhile Osborne was in parliament, faced with the unpopular task of introducing a new tax, while also positioning himself as a brave leader fuelled by moral obligation to future generations. He declared: ‘I am not prepared to look back at my time here … and say to my children’s generation … we knew there was a problem with sugary drinks … and we did nothing.’ And the UK was not alone in its decision: by 2021, over 45 countries, regions and cities had introduced some form of taxation on sugar-sweetened beverages.      

The announcement of the sugar tax was hot news in the UK. For some opponents, it was the epitome of ‘nanny state’ interference. Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg denounced the tax as ‘absurd, nannying, puritanical cobblers’^[1]. Others embraced the accusation, and in December 2018 England’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, recommended extending the tax to other high-sugar products, describing herself as the ‘chief nanny’. But even while voices of dissent made for good copy, the tone of the reporting was largely positive, with the tax framed as striking a brave blow for child health in the face of industry opposition. As the World Health Organisation argued in 2017, the promised benefits included obesity prevention and reduction, reduced healthcare costs, increased revenues for the promotion of public health, and the distribution of the greatest benefits to those with the lowest incomes (since they were most likely to suffer from the chronic diseases commonly associated with sugar consumption and obesity). In short, the sugar tax was presented as a win for everyone, with the Conservative government gaining additional political capital from the appearance of standing up to an increasingly unpopular food industry in the interests of public health.

But what gets lost in the collective pursuit of a single-nutrient solution to complex health and social problems? What other agendas might the consensus around the sugar tax be enabling? This is not to argue that there is a great conspiracy at work, and nor is it to stand in defence of the sugar industry, whose commitment to profit trumps all. Instead, it is to suggest that sugar reduction through taxation has provided a convenient lowest-common-denominator platform around which multiple agendas can coalesce. Fatphobia, classism, and the imperative to ‘do something’ have pushed the lived realities of those most disadvantaged quietly into the background.

Food and drink choices are never only about nutritional content; they are also about taste, preference, habit, identity, and pleasure in ways that can never be contained by the logics of taxation and reformulation. There is no space in such policies for the mother who, living in grinding poverty, buys her child a sugary treat that she can’t really afford in order to make straitened times more bearable, or for the exhausted worker enjoying the comfort of a favourite chocolate bar or soft drink at the end of a long day. With the sugar tax, food and drink are stripped of their social value – as acts of love, care, comfort, or celebration – and are reduced to their nutrients. The social context that frames and motivates food choice has to be disregarded for this platform to be maintained.

The case against the sugar tax

The case for the sugar tax rests on the assumption that it will reduce population-level rates of obesity and the disease’s associated health problems. However, even five years after the tax’s introduction, there is no substantial evidence of measurable health improvements or weight loss in the UK: there were only modest weight changes for some groups (and no clear causative relationship between this and the tax). In the absence of promised health benefits in the present, three other measures serve as proxies for success, bridging the gap between the predicted health outcomes and reality, and smoothing over uncertainty to maintain support for the tax.

Did the sugar tax increase heath outcomes?

The first proxy for success is reduced sugar consumption, either through product reformulation to bring sugar content below the levy threshold, or the deterrent effect that higher prices on unreformulated products have on consumers. For example, in 2020, Public Health England reported that, between 2015 and 2019, there was a 35.4% decrease in total sugar sales from soft drinks, with consumers increasing their intake of low-sugar versions, which was then assumed to translate into health benefits. Before the policy had come in, newspapers and public health journals were awash with extravagant estimates of the impacts of reduced consumption. For example, as early as 2013, the British Medical Journal argued that a 20% tax would reduce obesity prevalence by approximately 180,000 people, while in 2016, Cancer Research UK predicted it would prevent 3.7 million cases of obesity by 2025. The overflowing optimism of these predictions meant that when the tax was launched in 2018, a Treasury press release was able to pronounce the scheme a success before it had even started: 50% of manufacturers had already reformulated products to avoid the levy, removing an estimated 45 million kg of sugar from the food supply every year. In 2020, Public Health England was similarly triumphant, noting a 43.7% reduction in the total sugar content of drinks subject to the tax and a 35.2% fall in the calorie intake likely to be consumed on a single occasion. Such celebratory announcements by government bodies were buoyant with the certainty that although these benefits hadn’t manifested yet, it was only a matter of time before they would. 

A key factor sustaining the optimistic speculation that reduced sugar will equate to wide-reaching health benefits is the confident claim that, when future health impacts are finally realised, the most disadvantaged will be their first beneficiaries. In 2016, the Guardian cited Simon Capewell of the UK’s Faculty of Public Health, who offered this back-of-an-envelope calculation:

If you apply a sugary drinks tax across the board and everybody consumes 10% less, that produces a 1% reduction in disease overall. But in poorer areas that would be a three-times-bigger reduction compared with more affluent areas, because poorer people are two to three times more likely to get heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer or to have a stroke […] Poorer people would benefit more from a sugary-drinks tax, so it would be progressive in health terms and not regressive in financial terms to any significant degree.’

It is important to recall that the sugar tax was being debated and implemented while the UK was living with the impact of austerity policies. These imposed significant cuts to public services and the welfare system, impacting directly on the most disadvantaged in society, who were targeted as ‘scroungers’ overconsuming scarce public resources. Capewell’s calculation reproduces austerity’s sleight of hand, positioning ‘poorer people’ as both the perpetrators of damaging overconsumption (of public resources, of sugar-laden foods) and the bearers of the responsibility for solving those problems (by changing their behaviours). This narrative of requiring ‘poorer people’ to live differently promises to cushion the effects of their poverty, but does not address its causes. Capewell’s statement also begs the question: If poorer people are more likely to have bad health, why not address their poverty rather than their sugar consumption? The sugar tax leaves no space for such questions, holding those social inequalities in place.

Did the sugar tax raise money for healthcare?

The second proxy for the policy’s success is its anticipated financial benefits, including both promised savings in healthcare costs and the generation of revenue which can be ring-fenced for health-related interventions. For example, in November 2018, a Treasury press release announced that the tax had generated an additional £153.8 million since its introduction in April that year, which Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, Robert Jenrick, described as ‘helping our next generation to have a healthy and active childhood’. The promise of future health-related investment was key to securing public support for the sugar tax, and in his 2016 budget speech, George Osborne promised to use the additional revenue to double the funding dedicated to primary school sport and to support healthy school breakfast clubs (since then, the funds have been theoretically ‘spent’ many times over in public announcements and news reporting). Osborne’s claim insulates the sugar tax against its own failures by promising health gains by other means, and in turn these speculative benefits provide political cover for the purposeful and sustained underfunding of services.

In reality, there have been no guarantees that the revenues will reach their declared destinations, and in 2021, food campaigning organisation Sustain protested angrily that £700 million of the funds raised by the sugar tax since 2018 has been unaccounted for. This disappearing cash demonstrates the ways in which the sugar tax’s surplus funds are not always used in the interests of the promised beneficiaries. Instead, they have provided political cover, allowing the government to get away with decimating the public services that the sugar tax revenue was allegedly destined to support.

Did the sugar tax change the food system?

The final, and most nebulous, proxy for success is the very fact of the sugar tax. For a Conservative government frequently accused of cowardly inaction in the face of the powerful soft drinks lobby, the sugar tax was an opportunity to gain political capital by making a very public shot across the bows of the soft drinks and junk food industries. Jamie Oliver explained this in his 2018 Guardian piece, noting that ‘The best bit is that it’s the first time government has put someone on the naughty step and said: “There’s a few more of you out there and if you don’t reformulate your products yourself, we’re watching”’. But aside from political posturing, there is a darker side to the way that policies such as the sugar tax operate. They shift the blame for the impact of decisions made by those in power onto vulnerable individuals. For example, even as newspaper commentator Alex Renton acknowledged in the Observer that the sugar tax as a tokenistic gesture is likely to have little impact on rates of type 2 diabetes, he also said he’d support it because its messaging would nudge shoppers: ‘every mention of it is another warning to a parent buying a Britvic Drench for a thirsty toddler.’

The consumer-led approach blames declining public health on individual food choices, instead of on the choices by politicians that have constrained what and how people can feed themselves and their families. It provides shelter for this act of political forgetting, since once the ‘warning’ has been issued, its work is done – and the weight of failure falls firmly on those who are seen as failing to comply. The poorest serve as the abjected ‘Other’ against which the restraint and self-mastery of those proudly eating a ‘healthy’ diet can be measured.  

When the sugar tax was introduced, it was with a triumphant fanfare, offering up a ‘big stick’ to beat industry where voluntarism had failed, and bringing with it endlessly optimistic promises of dietary and health transformations. There are many earnest and honourable voices in support of the sugar tax, but however well-intended, the tax begins with the wrong question, and so can never provide the answers that we need. Instead of asking, ‘How can we get people to eat less sugar?’, we should be asking, ‘How can we achieve social and food justice?’. This second question keeps our focus on political choices rather than food choices, and on inequalities as failures of social justice and not simply as barriers to be circumvented to get people to eat the ‘right’ things.

The infinite elasticity of what constitutes success for the sugar tax signals its socially damaging failure rather than its triumph. In this way, the sugar tax has become a lightning rod for ongoing debates about the distribution of responsibility for food and lifestyle choices, particularly in the wider context of austerity – and more recently, the cost-of-living crisis – where access to social support is increasingly tied to compliance with prescribed behaviours. Instead, we need to start by understanding why people make their food choices (if they have choices at all), and to take those choices seriously – not as displays of ignorance or greed that need to be corrected, but as choices that are meaningful: as acts of comfort, pleasure, convenience, necessity, or simple self-care.

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^[1] Gault, A, ‘Tax the biscuit,’ The Sun, 18 March, 2016 (Print edition).

Read part 2 by Jonathan Nunn, Amelia Horgan, Ophira Gottlieb, Owen Hatherley and Rebecca May Johnson here

Credits

Karen Throsby is Professor of Gender Studies and Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. She has been researching the intersections of gender, technology, bodies and health for over 20 years, including research on the new reproductive technologies, surgical weight management, extreme  endurance sport and most recently, the social life of sugar. She is the author of Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness (Manchester University Press, 2023), Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity (Manchester University Press, 2016) and When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (Palgrave, 2004).

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

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The Life and Death of the Hawker Centre

A history of hawker centres and the evolution of hawker food in Singapore. Text by TW Lim. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

In 2022, Urban Hawker – a version of a Singaporean hawker centre – opened right next to Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. Eleven-thousand square feet of some of the world’s most expensive real estate were transformed to house seventeen stalls selling the greatest hawker hits like Hainanese chicken rice, laksa, and Hokkien mee: the food homesick Singaporeans like myself dream of. The place is full of designer furniture, and features a bar that belongs in a swanky hotel’s lobby; there is so much neon plastered around the stalls that the lights overhead are hardly needed.

My first stop at Urban Hawker is usually Kopifellas, a stall serving Straits-style kopi (coffee that is dark-roasted, brewed, and poured over sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and sugar) and kaya toast slathered with coconut jam and butter in slowly melting slabs. The first time I visit, I hope that, half a planet away from home, the person taking my order will understand me when I ask for ‘kopi-C, siew dai’. The coffee is fine, aside from being served in a branded paper cup, but what stands out most is that my kopi-C, after tax and tip, comes to US$7 – about ten times what I’d pay in Singapore.  

My favourite kopi-kia (coffee maker) in Singapore is the guy at the Kim Hwa Coffee Stall in Bedok Block 216, three stops away from Changi Airport on the Metro. Block 216 is a typical hawker centre, slab-faced and unadorned – there’s little more than a roof and a bunch of utilities bundling the stalls together. The cooked-food stalls are wrapped around a wet market, which is filled with vegetable sellers, fish-ball makers and butchers; people do their groceries as others eat. Every surface is hard and washable – tile, plastic, concrete, or stainless steel – and stalls in Block 216 sell braised pork offal, clear fish soups, and crisp-edged batons of radish cake, to be eaten on tables bolted to the floor.

There’s an honesty about the utilitarianism of Block 216: the tiny stalls (perhaps a third of the size of Urban Hawkers’), the uncomfortable stools, and the grumpy efficiency of the hawkers. Urban Hawker, on the other hand, feels too nice, too stagey, like an exhibit at a World Fair booth: Hawker Centre of the Future. However, this form, and business model of swisher, reinvented hawker centres is so successful and so replicable that you’ll find food halls like Urban Hawker in most major Western cities – and, increasingly, in Singapore itself.

But hawker culture wasn’t built on standardisation and economies of scale. It was built on individual craft and infinite diversity. It was also built on the public-funded capital injection for tens of thousands of micro-businesses owned by working-class families in the two decades after 1965, when Singapore was established as a sovereign city-state. In Singapore, hawker food is utility as well as pleasure, and hawker centres are infrastructure. Contained within this infrastructure is six decades’ worth of changing policies and developments that continue to determine how Singaporeans live and eat.

Block 216 was first constructed in the east of Singapore in 1979 and alongside the other 100+ hawker centres which now exist, it feeds millions of Singaporeans every day. Several of its stalls have ‘Chai Chee’ (菜节) in their name – Chai Chee Kway Chap (菜节粿汁), Chai Chee Cai Tao Guo (菜节菜头糕 – radish cake), Chai Chee Minced Meat Noodle (菜市肉脞面) – a reference to the farming village that used to sit less than a kilometre from where Block 216 now stands. When it gained independence from the British in 1963, the island-state of Singapore – a mere 45km wide – was mostly farmland and jungle. Large swathes of the population were farmers who lived in kampungs or villages like Chai Chee, in wooden houses with palm frond roofs.

The median monthly wage in 1965 was SG$87 (the equivalent of about £260in 2023), and the unemployment rate was 9%. Hawkers walked through kampungs carrying portable stoves, stopping when someone hailed them. Others set themselves up by the village crossroads, offering an assortment of cooked and raw food. Many of the dishes they sold – like min jiang kueh (yeasted pancakes topped with peanuts and sugar) or ham chim peng (flat fritters with a whisper of salted bean paste swirled through) – are still found in hawker centres today; excellent specimens of both are available in Block 216.

After independence, Singapore’s first government, led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, launched a concerted programme of urbanisation and industrialisation. With no hinterland to speak of and no natural resources to exploit, his government had no choice, as Lee famously said, but ‘to develop Singapore’s only natural resource, its people’. In this period, a governmental body called the Housing & Development Board (HDB) transformed the kampungs of Singapore into public housing estates of high-rise flats with indoor plumbing, gas stoves, and electricity – the kind in which 80% of Singapore’s population now lives. The government built factories nearby, too: Singaporeans, it was thought, would earn more money making Rollei cameras or Varta batteries than they ever had as chicken farmers. Crucially, each housing estate included a wet market and a hawker centre, where hawkers, like those from Chai Chee were resettled.

These development policies prioritised citizens’ ability to live well (to keep them happy) and cheaply (to entice multinational corporations to invest in worker-filled Singapore). Ensuring hawker food was still easily available helped achieve these goals, as it meant that more of the population could move to dense urban cores and spend less time cooking, eating, and engaging in domestic labour. However, like the British colonial government before it, the government under Lee considered hawkers a nuisance, incompatible with their visions of the urban, orderly city-state. Hawkers littered and obstructed traffic, and occasionally caused more serious problems, like outbreaks of cholera. But they were also integral to everyday life and could not be discarded altogether. And so, hawker centres were both a solution to “the hawker problem,” and a way of transforming and modernising something indispensable to Singaporean society. 

When these resettlements were proposed, hawkers were sceptical – not least because they’d have to start paying rent on their stalls. But the government was determined: it subsidised stall rentals and declared that hawkers who didn’t move to a hawker centre had to find other employment (today, it’s hard to say whether the carrot or the stick did most of the work). In those first two decades of independence, the government built some 135 hawker centres, at an initial cost of SG$5 million, with fifty-four centres springing up between 1974 and 1979 alone. In 1985 the last of Singapore’s street hawker was resettled in a brand-new hawker centre, while the building still smelled of concrete dust. 

While the government’s construction of hawker centres may seem to demonstrate their support, they still considered hawking a backward profession: something people resorted to when they couldn’t find better-paying employment. They had envisioned that the hawker trade would die a natural death when ‘a viable basis for industrial expansion [was] established … and [their] problems of unemployment [became] solvable’, and by the 1990s, unemployment in Singapore hovered around 2%. During this time, the government (still headed by Lee) created policies to discourage Singaporeans from becoming hawkers. Empty hawker stalls were only re-let to Singaporeans who qualified for a ‘hardship case’ scheme – they had to be over forty, with families to support, and no other means of making a living.  Because of this, only a handful of new hawker licences were issued between 1973 and 1990. With so many ‘easier’ jobs to choose from, like assembling electronics or clerking in a bank – things with shorter hours and steady salaries – who would need to become a hawker again?

The 1980s and 90s also saw the dawn of neoliberalism across the world, including Singapore. The free market didn’t change the way hawkers cooked, but it radically altered their economic prospects. First, the government began to let rental prices in government hawker centres float with the market, rather than setting them as they had done to that point. Secondly, it began to outsource the work of providing hawker stalls to private landlords, to whom hawkers had to pay rent.

By the early 1990s, the buildings that had risen from the kampungs twenty years prior were being redeveloped. Hawker centres were among the casualties, and the hawkers they housed were compelled to leave and seek new places of work. These developments created effective diasporas of hawkers and their stalls, such as the one that spiralled out of the Hill Street Food Centre when it was repossessed in 2000. Like the hawkers of Chai Chee village, those of Hill Street are memorialised elsewhere: Hill Street Fried Kway Teow – widely considered to be the best char kway teow stall in Singapore – is miles away in Bedok.

Today, my favourite bak chor mee place is in Bukit Batok, the HDB estate in western Singapore where my mother buys her groceries. Here, a heap of noodles is dressed in rendered lard, light soy sauce, and black vinegar; some broth goes in a separate bowl. If you ask for it spicy, as I do, the hawker adds sambal, which turns the sauce rust-red. The canonical toppings include ground pork, slices of pork liver, shiitake mushrooms braised in soy, a few slices of fish cake, sometimes a fish-ball or two, then a scrap of torn lettuce and fragments of ti poh (dried sole) to finish. The whole thing is put together in under three minutes, with a total absence of ceremony: archetypical hawker food.

But I don’t eat this dish in a hawker centre; instead, I get it in a kopitiam (Hokkien for ‘coffee shop’) – a collection of cooked food stalls that share bathrooms and a seating area. Kopitiams resemble small hawker centres, but they are privatised spaces, neither built nor run by the government. With Singapore’s exploding population (from 2.4 million in 1980 to 3.5 million in 1995) to accommodate, the HDB built several new towns, Bukit Batok being one of them. Since there were no hawkers to resettle, these new towns didn’t have hawker centres. But hawker food was still in high demand, so, as a compromise, the HDB provided spaces for kopitiams in the new estates.

Although the government was no longer building hawker centres, the number of hawkers and hawker stalls continued to rise throughout the 1980s and 90s; many Singaporeans consider this period a golden age for the trade. There were more and more Singaporeans to feed, and hawkers had become as necessary to the Singaporean diet as rice. Newspapers still write about Tan Kue Kim, who would fry hokkien mee with a gold Rolex on his wrist, wearing a long-sleeved shirt at the wok to remind his white-collar customers that they were his equals. Or consider the Chen Fu Ji sisters, who were a subject of debate in Parliament because they charged SG$25 (around £26 today) for a plate of crab fried rice at a time it was virtually unheard of to charge more than SG$10. Legend has it that they unloaded their supplies from a Mercedes.

Despite an increase in the number of hawkers, the new, neoliberal policies set a rent spiral in motion, squeezing hawker incomes even as wages for virtually every other occupation rose. Costs of eating at hawker centres rose, and hawkers were left to deal with rising costs. In 2006, seventy-five-year-old Ho Ng Mui, who ran Yuen Kee Cantonese Braised Duck in the Smith Street Food Centre, said, ‘I leave my house in Kampong Bahru every morning at four o’clock … I’m open for business from 8am to 4pm. I do this every day of the week except Wednesday, when I rest … On average, I earn a net profit of about 1,000 SGD [approximately £590 in 2023]  a month.’ (In the same year, the average household income in Singapore was SG$5,730 or £3370.) Yuen Kee, which was started in 1940 by Madam Ho’s father, has since closed down. As the government anticipated all those years ago, Singapore had begun to lose its hawkers – and with them, a taste of its heritage.

Affordable, available hawker food has always been seen as part of the social safety net for Singaporean citizens. Today, faced with the prospect of Singapore’s hawkers going extinct, the government has launched a raft of initiatives aimed at preserving the trade. There’s the Incubation Stall Programme, which offers reduced rent on stalls and additional equipment subsidies for first-time hawkers, and the Workgroup on Sustaining the Hawker Trade. Members of parliament occasionally mention the need ‘to ensure... that our hawkers can earn a decent living,’ but when the Workgroup published its report on the hawker trade in 2020, it contained few concrete suggestions on how to increase hawker incomes. It’s as though the goal is to sustain the hawker trade, but without sustaining the hawkers and their lives. 

Given this, the free market would probably consider Kopifellas a success story. What started out as a food court stall in an industrial area of Singapore in 2017 now operates fourteen stalls in kopitiams across Singapore, in addition to the outlet at Urban Hawker where I’m a regular. Their menu is exactly what you’d expect from the kopi hawker in a kopitiam, and there’s no question that the company has helped fill more hawker stalls. And if a hawker is someone who sells hawker food in something that resembles a hawker stall, there are more hawkers because of Kopifellas too.

But while the kopi-kia at Kopifellas (both in Singapore and Manhattan) might be making hawker food, she isn’t a hawker at all – she’s an employee with no meaningful equity in the business, working with standardised ingredients and processes. This is at odds with the hawkers of the first hawker centres, who cooked with some autonomy and worked for themselves. The same is true at dozens of other hawker franchises in Singapore: Selera Rasa Nasi Lemak; the kopi chains Ya Kun and Killiney; Koo Kee Yong Tow Foo; Katong Laksa. While many of these companies did grow out of hawker stalls, today it’s just as easy to buy your ‘hawker food’ from a company that didn’t. 

Though newer companies capitalise on hawker culture, true hawker centres cannot be replicated and franchised as easily. The culture of eating and cooking that they embody live on in the way you can walk into a hawker centre in Singapore and get three different plates of chicken rice from three different stalls, in the way every plate of char kway teow has a different balance of wok hei, sauce, and texture. This is true of Block 216, but also of the ecosystem of hawker centres, which are not a thing but a system. And their cultures could could not exist without the burst of activity that brought hawker centres into being.

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Credits

TW Lim is a writer and a cook. Originally from Singapore, he has worked in the US food system since 2010. He writes for the Art of Eating and Scope of Work, and at let them eat cake on Substack.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how policy intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our twelfth newsletter for this season is by Rachel Hendry. In her essay, Rachel writes about the ubiquitous presence of blue roll in restaurants and food businesses and investigates the food hygiene policies behind its rise to prominence.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

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Totally Devoted to Blue Roll

An investigation into hospitality’s obsession with blue tissue paper. Text by Rachel Hendry. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

My working day is punctuated by a soft, powder blue. It feels at its lightest and brightest on the front-of-house station where I spend most of my time – leaning my booking sheet against its column-like form, hiding my phone and my painkillers in its shadow. In the kitchen of the coffee shop I work at, it keeps herbs hydrated and snakes across the metal counter to hold the heavy plastic of the chopping boards in place. As it soaks up oil on metal counters, it turns darker – a deep, steely shade of the same blue.

The tactile nature of my work, and the muscle memory upon which I rely, depends heavily on the presence of this blue tissue paper, more commonly known as ‘blue roll’. From kneading a fresh roll against the counter to help coax the inner tube out, to twirling the paper between my hands so it can cascade to the floor and help me clean a spillage, blue roll is always by my side. I like to have it in a specific place during service, and when I eat in other venues I notice their preferred blue roll locations, too. I bristle when I see a customer trespassing into my station and helping themselves to my supply. It’s not for you, I find myself thinking, it’s for me to use for you.    

Everyone in hospitality has a blue roll story. Paris Barghchi, who recently turned to winemaking after years of working in London hospitality, described its manifold functions. ‘I have used blue roll in its most obvious role of master mopper-upper, but I have also used blue roll to write down email addresses, phone numbers and recipes’, she told me. ‘I have plugged holes, propped tables and – I can assure you – on MANY occasions it has made a trusty plaster for myself and many, many chefs throughout the world’. Another (anonymous) hospitality worker was dating a colleague who lived above the restaurant when blue roll helped them deal with an unfortunate incident involving leaking ancient pipework in the toilet: ‘We couldn’t have used the linen! Thank goodness for blue roll!’ they said.

Personally, I remember the onus put on hospitality workers throughout the pandemic, ferociously cleaning and sterilising our kitchens and restaurants, and think about how quick customers are to sit at tables I haven’t yet cleared, their anticipation for something pristine and Instagram-worthy, despite the hectic pace at which kitchens work. How could I provide this level of service to so many, so quickly and so efficiently, without the help of blue roll?

Yet because blue roll just always seems to be there when you need it, we very rarely think about why it’s there. There was a time before blue roll, before it became ubiquitous. When did it enter British kitchens? What created the conditions for blue roll’s popularity? Why does everyone have a blue roll story? Why is it even blue? I set out to investigate.     

In the early restaurants that unfurled on the streets of Paris in the 1760s, there was no ‘rouleau bleu’ waiting to mop up spilled champagne and smears of espagnole. In fact, after talking to chefs and restaurant workers, it seems that blue roll didn’t exist before 1990. Simon Matthew, founder of a culinary business in Cardiff who started working in kitchens in 1984 remembers the exact moment things changed: ‘In the mid-1990s a friend of mine who had worked in proper professional kitchens [came to work at my café] and he said, “We have to get blue roll”. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, right, do we not just use a tea towel?!’ Another chef who worked in kitchens throughout the 1980s and 90s told me there was no blue roll for him, either. He would be assigned two tea towels at the start of his shift and that was all he had to keep his section, and his dishes, clean. I shudder at the thought of what my tea towels would look like at the end of a shift, given the sheer amount of hot sauce, maple syrup and filter coffee that I clean up on an hourly basis.

In every conversation about blue roll that I had with my fellow restaurant workers, the same letters cropped up over and over again: ‘EHO’. For those unfamiliar, EHO stands for Environmental Health Officer – an inspector whose role it is to ensure and enforce good hygiene and food preparation practices in commercial kitchens throughout the UK. They have been the catalyst for a new era of food safety – and, arguably, for the shift to the conformist (and sometimes exclusionary) kitchen culture of today, where each venue – no matter the difference in style or cuisine – must diligently work to the same hygiene protocols. The EHOs’ unexpected and interrogative visits, which take place during the hustle and bustle of service, involve heavy questioning on hand-washing and surface hygiene, and often, being seen using blue roll means making it through unscathed. 

In the UK, modern hygiene policy has its lineage in the Public Health Act of 1848. Created to control outbreaks of cholera, it brought about government-defined frameworks to improve public health. In the 1990s, outbreaks of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and its human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), deaths from Salmonella, and the introduction of genetically modified foods, led to growing concerns about the safety of food in Britain, and prompted an era of enhanced food hygiene regulation and oversight. In the wake of BSE, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) was formed in 2000 (under Tony Blair’s Labour government) to enforce food safety and oversee food policies across restaurants and food businesses. It is the duty of EHOs, mostly employed by local authorities, to carry out the food hygiene inspections which are required by the FSA. While EHOs existed prior to, and work independently of, the FSA, they liaise with the agency on issues relating to food hygiene, food safety complaints, and concerns raised by the general public.

In 2005, the FSA produced the ‘Safer Food, Better Business’ (SFBB) pack, a food safety management system template for use by catering businesses – the heaviest binder in any professional kitchen. Health officers were trained to ensure that the written procedures outlined in the SFBB were being adhered to in the running of the food businesses they inspected. The pack contained a dedicated chapter on effective cleaning and hand-washing: for instance, surfaces must be washed with hot, soapy water, then rinsed with clean water and either left to dry naturally or with the help of a clean, disposable cloth or paper towel. While blue roll is not specifically mentioned, the SFBB’s strict specification of easily visible, accessible disposable paper must have been a driving force behind its growing popularity in restaurants at the time.

In 2009, an inquiry into the E. coli outbreaks in South Wales – which led to the death of a child in 2005 – brought about another round of regulations. A series of recommendations were made to help prevent the spread of harmful bacteria in premises that produce and distribute food. The FSA solidified this with E. coli cross-contamination guidance, which suggests the use of paper towels to turn off taps after hand washing as taps can be a source of contamination and goes on to state that ‘disposable single-use cloths are recommended when cleaning’. So, reusable cloths were out, paper towels were in. To enforce things further, in 2010 the FSA instigated a new enforcement tactic by nationalising food hygiene ratings. Under the scheme, numbered ratings from 0–5 for food businesses are published online and are often plundered by local newspapers as scandalous stories – ratings can make or break a restaurant business. Just as the Catholic Church used hell to create a semblance of order, so too does EHO use the food hygiene rating scheme.    

The vast and growing market for blue roll exists because of its single-use disposability – making it is an inherently wasteful product. While there are no specific requirements for blue roll within the policies of the FSA, Fiona West, Environmental Health Specialist at NCASS (The Nationwide Caterers’ Association), explains how the product replaces multi-use towels: ‘The fact is, science has shown us that reusable cleaning cloths and hand towels can quickly harbour bacteria causing cross-contamination … Blue roll crept in and became increasingly used because it allows a food business to easily facilitate the controls for cross-contamination.’ But why blue-coloured tissue in particular? Since blue food is rarely a part of diets, it is a useful colour for the disposable Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to be, as prescribed in the ‘Personal Hygiene’ section of the SFBB binder, and is used throughout food preparation – plasters, gloves, hairnets, and blue roll – as a result.     

At the coffee shop, I receive deliveries of blue roll bound together in packs of six, which are then carefully stowed away in cupboards, ready for use. But who do I have to thank for their physical existence in the first place? There are over a dozen manufacturers of blue roll based in the UK, from Surrey to Midlothian, that distribute to hospitality venues. I spoke to one of them – Fourstones Paper Mill – to find out how blue roll is made.

When Fourstones was founded in 1763, they produced paper for books. But now their primary finished product is blue centrefeed, aka blue roll, which they have produced since 2003. Echoing the experience of chefs, Fourstones head of marketing Kevin Duxbury, informed me that blue paper tissue first appeared on the paper market around 1990, coinciding with the food safety outbreaks that kickstarted the formation of the FSA. Since then, sales have grown exponentially: within Western Europe, the tissue paper sector – where blue roll production sits – has remained the only paper grade experiencing growth rather than decline over the last decade. In 2022, the global tissue paper sector was valued at $80.99 billion and set to each $133.75 billion by 2030. That’s a lot of blue roll being made and sold – only to be disposed of.

To get started making blue roll, Fourstones effectively ‘cook’ recycled paper. The paper is sorted and checked for contaminants, which are removed, and then is placed in a giant blender along with hot water, breaking the fibres down into a pulp. After de-inking, and the removal of stray paperclips, the fibre is treated and a blue dye added. Then comes the fun part – the fibre is passed through a paper machine, transforming it into the soft, absorbent stuff I cleave to during my shifts. The dyed fibres are pressed to remove excess water before the paper is transferred to a large steel cylinder and dried. This dry paper is then scraped off with a blade and fed into a winding unit, where large, industrial-size rolls of blue paper will be formed. After drying, the paper is wound into smaller logs with the circumference of the blue rolls used in hospitality, passed through perforation blades so sheets can be separated from one another until, eventually, the paper is cut into individual blue rolls, ready to be packaged for sale.

One person’s blue roll is not another’s. I am particular, and notice the different textures across brands – some are too rough and don’t absorb moisture very well, while others are too flimsy and make blue flakes stick to my knuckles. I’m relieved to find I am not alone in noticing these differences in quality. The critical role that blue roll plays in upholding hygiene standards is reflected in – you guessed it – another regulatory body. The Cleaning and Hygiene Suppliers Association (CHSA) accredits manufacturers of cleaning products, including blue roll, to ensure quality and consistency. The first of their manufacturing standards accreditation schemes for soft tissue was established in 1997, when many rolls arrived shorter and narrower than buyers expected. During our conversation, Kevin told me about the dangers of ‘shrinkflation’; some manufacturers trim a couple of millimetres off each blue roll, or wind the tissue less tightly in order to save money. ‘Weigh your blue roll’, he warned me.

I’ve wondered if the sales of blue roll reflect the state of hospitality. According to this theory, surely sales of blue roll dropped during Covid, with the closures and inconsistencies that came with eating and drinking out during a pandemic? Kevin assured me that was not the case; in fact, he told me, the opposite is true: ‘there was a noticeable dip when obviously the whole economy kind of locked down. When it reopened, hospitality was very limited, but you started to see centrefeed everywhere – in supermarkets and I even saw medical couch rolls in bed stores for people to lie on. So we were quite buoyant.’ My colleague Otto tells me this spread of blue roll across spaces provided an opportunity for him to bond with his parents when he last visited them: ‘I saw a blue roll in the house – my dad’s been taking it home from work. He’s a builder and they use it on jobsites. My mum also uses it in the care homes she works with,’ Otto explains. ‘I’d say blue roll truly is the multidisciplinary roll.’

Whether kitchen porter or general manager, fast food chain or fine dining establishment, the same hygiene standards are asked of all hospitality workers – we must sing from the same ‘Safe Food, Better Business’ hymn sheet. And from its supposedly unnatural colour, to its absorbent, disposable nature, blue roll has helped hospitality survive the waves of hygiene enforcement that have spread across the land. But while blue roll is accessible, having a cooking and FoH set-up that can uphold everything the FSA binder decrees, is not. There is little tolerance for different culinary practices in the system, or for nuance when interpreting the rules. FSA policy favours companies with the resources to put everything into practice. The growing sales of blue tissue paper are perhaps a symptom of a lack of time to train or to envision a way of working that doesn’t involve the imposition of conformity in kitchens and such a huge scale of waste.

When I am there, on my hands and knees, trying to breathe through what it is to clean up after other people for a living, it is blue roll that is a constant. And maybe that’s why hospitality workers feel such a fierce, symbolic bond with this blue tissue paper. It binds us, distinguishing worker from customer. Perhaps there is an alternative to the rolls of powder-blue paper as far as the eye can see (and I like to imagine a world in which there isn’t such a reliance on it), and what it would take to get there. But for now, someone has just kicked the dog bowl in the corner over, and I worry about what will happen if I don’t see to it right away.

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Credits

Rachel Hendry is a writer and a waitress based in Cardiff.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how policy intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our eleventh newsletter for this season is by Max Fletcher. In his essay, Max writes about how the elusive tax of VAT has evolved over the decades, and how it affects the ability for restaurants to operate smoothly and the way British diners eat.

We also wanted to share news about Less and Better, a podcast produced and hosted by the team at Farmerama. In this series, co-hosts Katie Revell and Olivia Oldham attempt to unearth the question: what do we do about meat? On an expansive, sometimes personal journey, they ask who benefits from different systems of meat production? What priorities do seemingly simple solutions obscure? And, perhaps most importantly, they discuss the possibility of shared principles and values, on which to build a better meat future for all. You can listen to the series here.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

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VAT: The Fiscal Theme Park

The story of how VAT affects restaurants and eating habits in Britain. Words by Max Fletcher. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

On 1 April 2023, as it was busy wreaking havoc on UK restaurants, VAT celebrated its fiftieth birthday. Despite having been part of British life for over half a century, most of us have only the vaguest idea of what VAT (or ‘Value-Added Tax’) actually is, let alone how it affects the way we eat.

VAT is an indirect tax, which means that, unlike Income Tax or National Insurance, it isn’t charged directly to the individual. Instead, it’s seamlessly incorporated into the price of most goods and services we buy - VAT is generally not declared on restaurant menus, but it adds (at its current rate) the same 20% to the cost of a meal out.

As the name suggests, this tax is only charged on the value that’s been added to a commodity. For instance, as steel moves through the supply chain from its raw state, it is formed into different products, like cooking pans, and becomes incrementally more ‘valuable’. While restaurants, like all other businesses, can claim back the VAT they pay, for customers there’s no way of avoiding the 20% added on to the price of a hot meal.

The only way for consumers to avoid paying VAT is if they buy products which are exempt. The British state considers most basic ingredients like vegetables, bread and meat to be ‘essential’, as well as cold food eaten on the go (which is why I always eat my Pret egg sandwich walking down the Euston road). When it comes to food, only ‘luxuries’ are taxed under VAT, which includes eating a sit down meal or anything hot that’s taken away.

Additionally, the VAT system in the UK is full of anomalies. ‘Beyond the everyday world,’ wrote Lord Justice Sedley in 2001, ‘lies the world of VAT: a kind of fiscal theme park in which factual and legal realities are suspended or inverted.’ Fruit juice, for instance, is VAT-able, but caviar is not; the state technically regards it as more luxurious to drink Tropicana with your breakfast than to bump Almas Beluga at £40,000 per kilo. These baroque rules waste time and money: recently, for instance, Walkers took HMRC to court, arguing that their poppadoms shouldn’t be taxed because they weren’t a ‘potato-based snack’, despite being 40% potato. That so much expense is squandered on tenuous legal cases points to the pressure VAT puts on margins. Whether it’s a fried egg at a caff or eggs royale at The Ritz, that 20% – one of the highest rates in Europe – can be a deterrent for customers dining in, and for the restaurant, it can be the difference between profit and loss.

At VAT’s current level, restaurants are becoming increasingly unsustainable: in the year to June 2023, more than 5736 licensed premises shut down in the UK – a staggering average of ten per day. The rate of closure has been so steep that it’s already wiped out some of the legacy of the modern British food renaissance: there are just under 100,000 licensed premises in the UK, which is the lowest that figure has been for over twenty years. The restaurants that remain are slashing their payrolls. Josh Eggleton, who runs the West Country restaurant group The Pony Family, told me that ‘most businesses are operating at 50% staff capacity’, which forces fewer people to cover more roles and work harder, thus creating an unsustainable working environment. ‘If we want to pay people a correct wage and value them’, Eggleton continued, ‘something’s got to give, and that’s got to be VAT.’ 

VAT was first devised by French tax official Maurice Lauré in 1952. At the time, Britain had the Purchase Tax, levied in 1940, which was brought in to help pay for the war effort, imposing taxes of up to 100 per cent on luxuries like perfume and furs. Under this tax, all food – including restaurant meals – was exempted to keep the price of everyday goods down. This was integral in the progressive world of post-war politics – even when, in the mid-1960s, Harold Wilson’s Labour government needed money to shore up Britain’s ailing heavy industries, they did this by taxing employment rather than goods. 

Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath introduced VAT in 1973 because it was a compulsory condition of Britain entering the European Economic Community: it ensured that goods and services within the bloc could be taxed in the same form, albeit at different levels. The public response to this change was overwhelmingly negative. A 1973 article in the Sunday Times reported that ‘many complaints’ about the new regime ‘are concerned with [...] restaurants whose bills have soared’. To mitigate this expense, Wilson – when he took power again in 1974 – cut VAT to a standard 8% (paid for by the introduction of a higher 25% rate which was applied to select luxury goods). But it wouldn’t be long until Conservative politicians took advantage of VAT to advance a new kind of economics. After the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher cut the top rate of income tax from 83% to 60% and eliminated the higher VAT rate on luxuries, funding this by almost doubling the standard rate of VAT from 8% to 15%. In 1988, she further slashed the top rate of income tax to 40%, and, in 1992, and raised VAT from 15% to 17.5%. As the rich got richer, the price of everyday goods rose. 

Simultaneously, these decades spurred the British food renaissance in fine dining, which did actually trickle down from London to the country as a whole. In her book The Cultivation of Taste, Christel Lane points out that, until the 1980s, dining out was considered the preserve of the elite: not only was it expensive, but restaurants also created barriers to entry by maintaining formal service, enforcing dress codes, and writing menus in French. Yet as the 1980s whirred into the 90s, a generation of restaurants that were more relaxed in style (if not always in price) sprung up to cater for the newly moneyed middle-classes. Chefs from these restaurants, like Jamie Oliver of The River Café, made television shows, encouraging people to emulate the ‘modern British’ cuisine that now prevailed.

VAT played a small role in this: during the period, the UK’s rates were lower than in many other European countries. In France, restaurants were taxed at 19.5% to our 17.5%, which made Britain – and especially London – a more profitable place to set up shop. However, in the late 2000s, things started to change. The financial crash in 2008 compelled France to cut its restaurant taxes to 10% in order to stimulate its ailing industry, and most European countries have since followed suit. In Britain, however, Tory chancellor George Osborne not only ignored calls from the hospitality sector to do the same, he actually increased the base rate to 20% in 2011 which is where it currently stands. 

When I asked the Tory MP Tobias Ellwood – who told me that hospitality VAT should be cut to 15% – why his government kept taxes so high during the financial crisis, he replied that they simply ‘got away with it’. Other conditions allowed restaurants to thrive after the crash even with a high VAT rate: interest rates were kept low, making it easier to finance restaurants, while freedom of movement in the EU meant that there was a ready supply of cheap labour from the continent. Between the years 2009 and 2019 – despite the crash – hospitality was the second-fastest-growing industry in the UK economy. 

When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, the importance of the industry compelled Boris Johnson’s government to help it survive. Of all the measures that were subsequently put into place – which included relief from business rates and the Eat Out to Help Out scheme – the VAT cut, from 20% to 5%, was perhaps the most significant. A survey taken in 2021 found that, without this reduction, three-quarters of hospitality businesses may have gone bust. 

In October 2021, however, VAT was raised from 5% to 12.5%. By this time, Brexit was choking the supply of labour, interest rates were rising, and Russia’s war on Ukraine had sent fuel and food prices rocketing: the conditions which had spurred the industry’s pre-pandemic growth were long gone. Any relief the industry may have experienced was short-lived: on 1 April 2022, VAT was reverted back to 20%. 

Aside from the sustenance and comfort they provide, hospitality businesses have become essential to the country because of the jobs they create: last year they were the third-biggest employer in the UK. Yet today, it’s become more expensive than ever to run a restaurant in the UK.

Between 2021 and 2022, gas prices rose 124% and electricity 63%, and between 2022 and 2023, food prices rose by 26%, along with an increase in labour costs. Restaurants could maintain the same margins if they raised their prices to match inflation, but their menus would become unaffordable. A graphic by Viewpoint Partners, which does accounts for restaurants like Jolene, shows that if a plate of beef shin pappardelle had risen from £12 in 2021 to £17 in 2023, the profit would still have almost halved, from £1.60 to £0.85. If VAT was reduced from 20% to 12.5%, however, the restaurant could save £1.06 from their tax bill, taking their total profit back up to £1.91 (assuming they didn’t pass on some of the saving to the customer).

Rachel Harty, the leader of HospoDemo (who are currently campaigning for VAT rates to be halved to 10%) echoed Eggleton when she told me that a VAT cut is ‘the one thing the government could do right now that will make a difference to the survival of hospitality’. In October and December 2020, Harty, who is also a freelance marketing and PR consultant, led hundreds of restaurant workers, including Fergus Henderson and Jason Atherton, on two marches to Parliament Square, where they protested against the closure of restaurants during the pandemic’s second wave. Harty has since turned her sights to VAT, staging another Parliament Square protest on the issue in November 2022. But despite pressure, the government has so far refused to act, arguing that it’s providing enough help by subsidising business rates and fuel (even though fuel subsidies have been scaled back and business rates are due to rise again in April this year). ‘Our industry is such a vital one for the British economy, and that’s why they give us these concessionary scraps’, Harty told me. ‘But it’s just not enough’. 

When it comes to the VAT cut, a possible problem could be that it would benefit the biggest restaurants the most. In fact, a cut wouldn’t even touch the smallest vendors. Ewart Drysdale of Ewarts Jerk, a West Indian food stall off London’s Kingsland Road, isn’t even registered for VAT; if you have a turnover of less than £85,000, you don’t have to be. When I spoke to Drysdale, he told me that he was suffering from price rises, but cutting hospitality VAT would save him nothing. Meanwhile, to JKS – the restaurant group that owns Gymkhana and Trishna – the pandemic-era VAT cut was worth £3.7 million.

One solution would be a progressive and layered policy. While HMRC claims that it would be ‘impossible to distinguish fairly between what might be regarded as essential and what might be regarded as luxury meals’, many of the chefs I talked to disagree. Chantelle Nicholson, chef–proprietor of Apricity in Mayfair, suggested that it could ‘work according to a rebate system, so places that could prove they’re doing something for their community or the industry could pay less’. Natalia Ribbe of Sète in Margate pointed out that support could be regional, to help restaurants like hers which are dependent on seasonal tourist trade. ‘The money that we take in summer is three or four times what we take in winter, and having some kind of scaling VAT system would be helpful’, Sète said.

Such reforms would require a nuanced public debate about the way different types of restaurants contribute to our society, and how food businesses need to be supported in distinct ways; currently, British politics is simply not open to this. To start with, there isn’t even a minister to represent food businesses: ‘hospitality’ is part of Kevin Hollinrake’s ministerial portfolio, but his remit also covers tourism, accommodation, and entertainment. Food and drink businesses are among the most labour-intensive of these, and therefore particularly deserving of help, but this is hard to articulate when they’re gathered into the same fiscal theme park as campsites, circuses, zoos and planetariums. Also, MPs who come out in support of a VAT cut tend to do so not because they value restaurants or eating as such, but because it would help tourism in their constituencies (Tobias Ellwood, for example, represents Bournemouth East, a resort town on the South Coast). In January, closures gained national headlines, but this was only because they affected recognised names: MasterChef finalist Tony Rodd, who owned Blackheath restaurant Copper & Ink, and Sunday Brunch’s Simon Rimmer, who was forced to shut Greens in Didsbury. A petition by restaurateur Andy Lennox is gaining pace online, but until this issue becomes more established in the national conversation, and across different kinds of restaurants, any real change is unlikely.

The pressures of VAT are changing what restaurants can serve, and how they operate: Harty has noticed that smaller restaurants have survived by offering less – ‘Cold food only, so charcuterie and that kind of stuff that doesn’t require any cooking at all or any kitchen staff either’ – so they can economise on produce, wages, and energy. This kind of offering doesn’t have to feel meagre, however. Consider the menu of Cadet in Stoke Newington, which centres around the bountiful charcuterie of George Jephson. Other chefs are also responding resourcefully to the crisis: at Apricity, Nicholson has reacted against high taxes and inefficient business models by cooking a low-waste, sustainable menu. She has also incorporated the service charge into the final bill so that her staff aren’t dependent on tips. However, we can’t expect all restaurants to transform their approach this rapidly. If only the fittest are allowed to survive in the short-term, the industry will crumble.

Perhaps the way to encourage politicians to act, particularly in an election year, isn’t to advocate a targeted approach, but rather to make the appeal more universal: reduce VAT across a number of industries – not only hospitality, but construction and energy, for example – to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis as a whole. Still, Rishi Sunak will never act in this or any other way, since VAT is a central plank of the economy that the Tories created in the 1980s, where low taxes on wealth are paid for by high taxes on everyday goods and services. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is advocating stealth taxes by raising VAT on school fees, but he’s not made significant promises on hospitality, despite its importance to life all over the UK. For this reason, the VAT rate probably won’t move. As costs rise, fewer and fewer of us will be able to afford restaurants, whether we appreciate the work they do or not. And for those who rely on hot takeaways for nourishment, high taxes like VAT remain an obstacle to comfortably accessing food every day.

The remarkable thing about the British food renaissance was that it gave chefs confidence to try new things, wherever they were in the country. And for diners, the last thirty years expanded what was on offer and broadened access to varied and new experiences of eating. Restaurants became an essential part of not just our lives, but our economy, too. However, now that the economic conditions that gave rise to this shift have ended, the frontiers of British dining may retreat to the traditional strongholds of big cities. If the fractures caused by VAT continue, the spaces in which we eat will diminish, and with them so will our pleasure. The culture of restaurants British diners once accessed with relative ease will once again become a luxury.

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Credits

Max Fletcher is a writer based in London. 

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how policy intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our tenth newsletter for this season is by Veronica Deutsch. In her essay, Veronica writes about the ‘family worker exemption’ policy under which live-in nannies, au pairs and domestic workers are excluded from UK employment rights. The piece focusses on the use of food as a tool of control by employers, with testimonials from those affected.

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Food is a Battleground

The use of food as a tool of control by employers of live-in nannies and domestic workers. By Veronica Deutsch, with testimonials from those affected.

UK households employ tens of thousands of in-home workers – nannies, au pairs, and migrant domestic workers – with the workforce concentrated in the most affluent boroughs of London. Relationships between in-home childcare workers and their employers blur the line between professional and personal, as workers often form close relationships with the children in their care and are privy to intimate moments in their employer’s family life. And while live-out nannies and domestic workers tend to be on the receiving end of better pay and treatment, those who ‘live in’ face some of the poorest conditions across both the gig and childcare sectors.

The policy underpinning these exploitative live-in situations is the ‘family worker exemption’, which, since its introduction under New Labour in 1999, has excluded all childcare workers who live in the homes of their employers from UK employment rights, like the right to annual leave, maximum working hours, statutory break times, and the minimum wage. Originally intended to facilitate cultural exchange between European au pairs and British families, in practice it enables the exploitation of young, usually migrant women from across the world. Under the exemption policy there is no lower limit to what families can pay their workers. The government guidance on ‘pocket money’ for au pairs suggests £90 for a working week of ‘around 30 hours’, but in practice workers are often asked to work 50-plus-hour weeks for as little as £1 per hour.

In this professionally ambiguous workplace, food is a key battleground, often closely regulated by employers. Despite their employment sites also being their homes, many of these workers face stringent rules around what, when, and where they eat. Workers’ ability to cook for themselves tightly controlled, and they are often left without access to regular meals or money to buy food.

When I started nannying in 2013 after dropping out of school, I looked after two girls under the age of five, and food defined my working life. The parents worked long hours but persisted in buying vast quantities of food, leaving it all week, then clearing the fridge out at weekends and dumping the rancid dairy and meat in the bin for me to take out come Monday morning. I remember in particular a display of fruit in the middle of their kitchen island: a cornucopia of fat, ripe peaches and kiwiberries; endless apples and Queensland mangoes, which they’d buy by the trayful and which I’d squirrel away for dinner, putting plums and pears into my backpack and eating them on the train. All day, I rattled around their enormous house doing long shifts, often 14 hours, and this theft – though I wasn’t proud of it – was a small resistance.

In 2020, I helped to establish the Nanny Solidarity Network (NSN), a grassroots mutual aid organisation for migrant nannies and au pairs in London. The group went on to establish the first trade union branch for nannies and au pairs with the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB).’In 2021, the Low Pay Commission launched an inquiry into whether or not the ‘family worker exemption’ was fit for purpose, and in October of that year, ruled that it was unlawful (although it is in place until April 2024). When the inquiry started, almost all the stories that the NSN submitted as evidence from workers in the group mentioned food and eating in one way or another. We heard first-hand how migrant workers in domestic premises were cut off from their cultural heritages and the foods they most wanted to eat, as their employers limited what, where, and when they could cook.

I contacted five of the group’s members for this article and asked them to talk about how food related to their work. What unites these testimonies is the context which makes these forms of oppression possible – the policy that means workers fall through the cracks, left living in houses that they can’t treat as homes.

During Maya’s time au pairing in the UK, she often found herself without regular meals. Though initially her employers would offer to buy her things as part of their weekly shop, it quickly became evident that she was expected to carry out the shops herself – and was often questioned or criticised for the things she chose.

The first host family I worked for used to say that I could add anything I wanted to the supermarket list if I went to the supermarket to do the grocery shopping with them, but it was obviously just extra work that they were giving to me. If I didn’t go to the supermarket to do the food run, I wouldn’t get fed. Many times I couldn’t get what I wanted anyway because they would say, ‘Why do you need yoghurts?’ or, ‘Why do you need these types of fruits?’, since I’d pick things that were different from what they used to buy for themselves, and for me [that] was very hard in the beginning because it was very different from my homeland’s food – especially from what I knew, having recently arrived. I was just trying to make sense of the things I wanted to eat. Towards the end of my stay with them, they wouldn’t buy food anymore, not even for themselves, because they would say they had already eaten during the day. Since the kid I was taking care of was a toddler, he was eating just snacks and noodles for his whole day of food. Unfortunately, that was one of the reasons why I left them. Maya, 24, Brazil

Esme found herself working for a family who put locks on the fridge, and forced her to eat in time with a metronome to slow the pace of her eating.

When I first started as an au pair, one of the families I worked for had a classic ‘clean eating’ approach to food: no meat, no salt, no sugar, all organic, freshly prepared ingredients. It wasn’t my personal preference, but I was happy to accommodate their wishes. The child had a kidney condition that meant she was constantly hungry, and this became a bit of an issue – the child would often be found raiding the fridge for food when my back was turned. In the end, locks were put on the fridge, but it established a very heightened atmosphere around food, which came to a head when the mother felt that the child had picked up a habit of eating too fast – a habit she decided was picked up from me. One day, she came home with a metronome for me to eat in time with in an effort to solve the problem. That was when I decided it was best for me to move on. Esme, 36, UK

If food is a shared language, then nannies and au pairs are often stripped of their voices. In the domestic space and with limited money of their own, workers are forced to become adept at eating like they haven’t been there. This shame and isolation – bred from the secretive way workers are forced to eat – is corrosive, and has knock-on effects on how confident workers feel in challenging other forms of exploitation they may be facing.

Zaira’s au pair family would not allow her to join for mealtimes, and she was often forced to eat the children’s leftovers instead of cooking for herself.

My first year in the UK, I lived with a family as an au pair. I was doing my training at the time and helping my boss, a single mum with three children, for around 20 hours – plus multiple babysitting nights – per week. Dinnertime was quite shocking for me because the mum would leave the dinner on the kitchen table before the children came back from school instead of us eating all together. There wasn’t any portion separation, so whatever was on the table, the children would eat it when they came back from school, and I could eat the rest after I finished my work, whatever was left. I felt so undervalued and poorly treated. I did try a couple of times to cook some food for myself in the evening instead. However, the mum wasn’t happy that there was a cooking smell in the home late [in the] evening, so I had to stop. I felt that I was not welcome to cook my food as she was cooking, but the problem was she wasn’t checking that there was enough left over for me to eat after the kids had finished. At the same time, I don’t want to stop children from what they are having if they are hungry, and I was too naïve to tell her that most days there was no food left for me. On Fridays, the mum would cook food like chicken and beef, which I love. However, on Friday evenings, I was off while they were having their Shabbat dinner. I was never welcomed for a Shabbat dinner, and I was warned that this was their family time. I would patiently wait for their dinner to finish and then sneak into the kitchen to have my dinner, eating it cold from the fridge if there was anything left. While food had previously been a highly appreciated, plentiful, and overly shared thing, it has quickly turned into something I feel almost guilt and shame for needing: a lonely, joyless part of my life. Zaira, 26, Egypt

Beyza worked for a vegetarian family during the Covid lockdowns and was banned from bringing fish into the house.

I agreed to take a live-in position for a vegetarian family, but I wasn’t aware beforehand that I was not allowed to consume any meat. I am not a big red-meat eater; however, I love fish as I am from the Mediterranean, and during the interview the family mentioned that I [could] consume whatever I wish[ed], despite their diet. I thought this wouldn’t be a problem. The role was to oversee two girls, 14 months and 28 months. We had an OK-ish start; it was quite hectic since both children were very active, and we were not allowed to go outside because of Covid. I was doing 13-hour shifts, 7am–8pm, with an hour of break in between, and almost all of my meals were with the kids. It was a very long day at home. Usually, I was too tired to do anything afterwards, so I would mostly just sleep. The family had an open-style kitchen, so it was their living room as well, and this meant that even after I’d finished my shift the parents would be occupying the kitchen, and I felt too uncomfortable to go and cook for myself. Even on my off days, I would try to wake up before others woke up so I could have a ten-minute breakfast in peace.

On one of my off days I wanted to cook fish for myself, so I went shopping and got my fish – it was a ready meal which I only wanted to place in the oven and would eat in my room. I watched and waited for a quiet time to use the kitchen – not lunchtime or dinnertime, obviously; sometime in between – and when I finished my cooking, the family bumped into me in the kitchen. The girls started asking me, ‘What are you eating? Can I have it?’ etc, and I quickly but kindly answered that it was my lunch and I was having it in my room, and sorry but I couldn’t share. Later, I was warned by the family that they didn’t want their children to see me consuming meat, and not to do it again. Since it was Covid, eating outside wasn’t an option, and they also didn’t want me to have takeaway because they believed takeaway would bring Covid. I was only able to cope for around five months in that house, and then I quit. It was a shame because I actually loved the children. Beyza, 28, Turkey

When the jobs are good, as they sometimes are, food can act as a common language. One of my favourite nannying jobs was for a family who owned a deli, and the dad, who was usually incredibly quiet, would come home on days where he’d received new stock practically bursting at the seams with excitement: he’d eagerly hand me finger limes; doughnut samples; slices of fresh truffle, desperate to talk to me about them. One day, he brought home some Arabica tahini, and we sat side by side, eating spoonfuls from the jar. It may seem small, but there is something powerful in what food does in this context – it allows us to bring ourselves to work, to let ourselves see one another, and to let the kids we look after see us. There are good childcare jobs out there, where food can be a positive part of work – but whether you get one is down to luck, and being treated fairly in one’s workplace shouldn’t come down to a roll of the dice.

Becky has had a varied experience of food in her workplace. Some families have enjoyed sharing meals with her and teaching her new ways of cooking.

I had a boss who, when I started, had in their contract that I was only able to eat with them once a day from their food. I hated how she’d take account of what I was eating, when I was eating. And I’ve always shared my food with the children [I look after], so if I’m eating something that I know [the] kids haven’t tried before, I’ll often give them some of mine to share. But I didn’t do that with this family because, you know, it goes two ways. They also requested that I bring in tea and coffee, which I’ve never had in another job. It was quite an interesting role [laughs], and quite a short role, thank goodness!

But I love sharing with families, you know, I want to be able to bring them things that I’ve made. And you know, I always used to make a Christmas cake with my last family: we used to share a lot. They’d make me Chinese food – they were a Chinese family – and we did a lot of sharing like that. It was a community rather than a job. They wanted to learn about English foods, so I used to make them shepherd’s pies, and in turn they would teach me how to do some of the traditional foods that they did, which was lovely, and I still use those recipes now and really, really enjoy them. And I think that’s something that I’ve learned in every single job: I’ve learned new recipes, I’ve learned new ways of cooking, and my cooking has definitely evolved from where it was a few years ago – [when it] was very English and quite plain – to kind of having a repertoire of many different cultures, many different cuisines, and I love that. I was given an Indian cookbook years ago, and it’s one of my favourite things to cook from still. I think it’s really amazing. That’s what I love about my job … learning through different cultures and different ways of cooking and, you know, different food methods and things. I’ve spent a lot of time bulk-cooking for my families, and a few weekends ago I had a Friday off [from] my family. And because I had a lot of time off, I said, ‘I will do some cooking for you over the weekend.’ And so I made a moussaka, I made a cowboy casserole, I made shepherd’s pie and a few other things as well, which went down a treat, you know, and that’s because I really like and respect them. It goes two ways. Becky, 36, UK

After years of campaigning, the family worker exemption policy is due to be scrapped in April 2024. But while the removal of the policy is a landmark win for the workforce, its abolition alone cannot disrupt the broader issue of domestic work, and those who carry it out, being taken for granted. While childcare will be a key issue in the next general election, the conversation focuses on formal childcare (such as nurseries and childminders) to facilitate the careers of ‘working women’, conveniently ignoring that many workers are juggling unpaid childcare responsibilities themselves. Growing anti-migrant sentiment, likewise, is making it difficult to get the stories of these workers on MPs’ agendas, where change could be effected.

So, how to move forward? Well, where state and regulatory bodies have let workers down, workers are coming together to protect one another. Cooking and sharing food has been a way of building community among workers who are often isolated. Voice of Domestic Workers, a domestic worker-led campaign organisation, runs classes for their members every Sunday; here, workers can share a meal, socialise, and learn more about how they can actively participate in the group. Nanny Solidarity Network, likewise, runs regular picnics for its members – an opportunity to meet other nannies and learn more about what the group is. From these networks, women are bandying together to make sure that their fellow workers know their rights. Workers are often unable to cook foods they recognise for themselves, share parts of their heritage with the children in their care, or participate in the ritual of family mealtimes – but they are also, increasingly, feeding one another. Punitive policy disenfranchises us, but it can do the opposite, too. When childcare workers gather in collective spaces, we can eat, cook, feed, and share with impunity – and when we do that, we can build the power to transform our workplaces.             

Names have been changed to protect the anonymity of those giving testimonials.

To donate to Nanny Solidarity Network, more information here.
To donate to Voice of Domestic Workers, more information here.

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Credits

Veronica Deutsch is a researcher focusing on childcare based in South London. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Bristol exploring how informal childcare workers’ identities are shaped by migration status, ethnicity, and class, and how this influences their ability to build collective power. She previously worked as a nanny for nine years.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson andJonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how a single or set of policies intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our ninth newsletter for this season is by Dan Hong. In his essay, Dan writes about ‘gastrodiplomacy’, the phenomenon in which governments use cuisine to leverage influence, and how global appetites and the restaurants you eat at are formed by these informal policies.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.

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The game of gastrodiplomacy

A story of how governments around the world market influence through food, by Dan Hong

In the summer of 2021, I stumbled across the Japanese cafe ‘Soya’, slightly off the main tourist drag in central Athens. From the street, I could see that its shelves were lined with furikake seasoning, fermented pastes, and dried fungi, products I had never seen before in Greece. In the two years I’d lived in the city I had seen many sushi restaurants but, unlike Soya, their menus were usually heavy on ‘pan-Asian fusion’: a mix of sushi rolls and bao, bulked out with mayonnaise. Intrigued, I sat at the only table available and ordered a homemade bento box from a small blackboard menu. I was instantly soothed by the first mouthfuls of rice: they were fragrant and savoury, and accompanied by freshly cooked vegetables, pickles, and rolled omelette.

As I ate, I spoke to the owner, acknowledging the difficulties of the pandemic for restaurants and small businesses. She was quick to respond: ‘But the cafe gets support from the Japanese Embassy. They want to show Japanese food to Greek people’. This caught me by surprise. At the time, I was working as a diplomat in Athens and had never heard of such a project. ‘Japanese diplomats come here quite a lot,’ she added after a pause. ‘Sometimes the ambassador, too.’ On my walk home, I wondered what drew the Japanese Embassy to this small cafe. Was the Japanese government using Soya to counterbalance the more commercially successful but ‘inauthentic’ restaurants? In which case, what else were they doing outside of Athens? And were other countries doing the same?

For centuries, food has been present in the theatre of diplomacy. In his Politics, Aristotle discussed the social eating that took place between ambassadors of Greek city states in the fourth-century BC, highlighting how this was used as a means of fostering amity before getting to the hard talk. In On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes, François de Callières, the seventeenth-century French envoy of Louis XIV, wrote, ‘A good table is the best and easiest way of keeping [the ambassador] well informed’, and that ‘when people are a trifle warmed by wine they often disclose secrets of importance’. But with Soya, the Japanese government was doing something different – and far more intriguing. They were pursuing ‘gastrodiplomacy’, a state-led policy of promoting national cuisine to foreign audiences; a way of marketing national identity through culinary culture. Public diplomacy specialist Paul Rockower describes it simply as ‘winning hearts and minds through stomachs’.  

The term ‘gastrodiplomacy’ was coined by the Economist in 2002 in reference to the ‘Global Thai’ programme, which is considered the first official example of gastrodiplomacy. Although not the first time a government had sought to promote national food, the Economist argued that what made Thailand’s approach pioneering was their strategic objective to ‘not only … persuade more people to visit Thailand, but to subtly help deepen relations with other countries’. The programme included $3 million of cheap government credit made available to Thai people setting up restaurants abroad, along with business support and market research from officials in Thai embassies. The Thai foreign ministry even negotiated a new three-year visa for Thai chefs moving to work in New Zealand. This was followed by a communications campaign in which Thailand tried to shift its reputation from sex tourism to food tourism through a series of government-funded documentaries and foreign newspaper op-eds. In 2018, Vice reported that ‘At the time of the Global Thai program’s launch, there were about 5,500 Thai restaurants beyond Thailand’s borders; [by 2018] there [were] over 15,000. The number in the US increased from around 2,000 to over 5,000.’

Since this initiative, many other countries have followed suit in a variety of ways. In 2009, South Korea committed $10 million of funding for South Korean chefs to travel abroad and attend culinary school. In 2011, the Peruvian government launched an internet campaign in which celebrities including Al Gore, Eva Mendez, and Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa were filmed endorsing Peruvian cuisine. Gastrodiplomacy has become a particularly popular tool with East and Southeast Asian governments, as rapid economic growth has led to an increased desire for countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and South Korea to establish themselves on the international stage. Because they do not yet command the same geopolitical influence as the more traditional heavyweights of diplomacy (countries on the United Nations Security Council or the G7, for instance), they have sought to establish themselves by other means, gastrodiplomacy being one of them.

This is why gastrodiplomacy tends to be aimed at Western audiences: countries want to increase their influence where global power has long been concentrated. However, with Western political and economic hegemony receding, there are increasing cases of gastrodiplomacy targeting new centres of gravity in Asia; for instance, Malaysian gastrodiplomacy targets the UK, the US and New Zealand, but also China. Taiwanese gastrodiplomacy is similar, but with an added emphasis on Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The diplomatic tool often becomes a way to command recognition and status abroad; utilising cuisine to leverage what influence already exists.

In the 1960s, my father’s family moved from Malaysia to London after my grandfather landed a job at the BBC. They lived near Bayswater, alongside much of the diaspora. Back then, Malaysian cuisine was in scant supply, with only a couple of restaurants dotted around Bayswater and Chinatown, so my grandmother would improvise, cooking dishes at home with the Thai ingredients stocked in local Chinese supermarkets. Today, however, Malaysian cuisine in the UK is on the ascent. Over the last ten years, laksa pastes have popped up in every high street supermarket (lower-quality versions, albeit), while quality Malaysian restaurants have sprung up across all boroughs of London. Unusually for diaspora restaurants, many of these occupy prime, central real estate (although the hokkien mee at Papayaya, near where I grew up in south-east London, is proof to the doubters that good food does exist in Bromley).

This rising popularity can be traced to the fact that Malaysia has been actively pursuing gastrodiplomacy in the UK for over a decade, through its ‘Malaysian Kitchen for the World’ programme. As part of this initiative, the Malaysian High Commission have run a food festival at Nottingham University (the top UK destination for Malaysian students); a collaboration with Tesco; and public shows with MasterChef and BBC Good Food. Malaysian chefs drove around the UK in a food truck, performing cooking tutorials and giving out free samples on high streets. In 2010 alone, Rick Stein spoke to The Guardian (‘It’s perplexing to me that Malaysian food is not more widely known in Britain as it’s quite as exciting as Thai or Vietnamese’) The Times (‘I love Thailand but there can be a sameness to the food — here [Malaysia] the wonderful diversity of Indian, Chinese and Malay cooking blows your mind’), The Independent (‘I'm captivated by Malaysia; the food is particularly interesting’) and The Telegraph (‘I'm very keen on Malaysian cuisine’) mostly without mentioning he was ambassador for Malaysian Kitchen for the World.

Curious to know what else was behind the boom in Malaysian cuisine, I asked several Malaysian restaurant owners for their opinion. They pointed to the growing population of Malaysian students (now the eighth-largest overseas group in UK universities) and the prominence of Malaysian-born UK-based celebrity chefs, like 2014 MasterChef winner Ping Coombes and 2022 Bake Off winner Syabira Yusoff. Restaurateurs, who are on the front line of championing Malaysian food, are naturally reluctant to ascribe too much of their success to the government, but the fact is many chefs at the best Malaysian restaurants in London over the years (Zainuddin Yahaya of Tukdin, ‘Kak’ Ani of Makan Cafe, Pak Awie of Melur) started out working at the Malaysia Hall Canteen in Bayswater – a restaurant subsidised by the Malaysian High Commission to the extent that a nasi lemak costs a mere £4, but only to those who can show a Malaysian passport at the door (and their friends).

Normah abd Hamid, my favourite Malaysian chef in London and owner of the eponymous Malaysian restaurant in Queensway Market, told me that to influence the market, you need to teach them about the culture of Malaysian food. ‘How do you eat nasi lemak? You gather each item onto your spoon and put it all in your mouth. We like to teach our customers this,’ she said. When Normah first moved to the UK, she hosted dinner parties open to all her neighbours in Notting Hill – including a young David Cameron, who lived nearby at the time. At these dinners she learned about the British palate and how to win over British taste buds, creating a relationship between cook and customer. It is this atmosphere of intimacy that she fosters at her tiny restaurant in Queensway Market, deliberately reminiscent of a kopitiam (a kind of Malaysian greasy spoon) with its dense seating and slow fans overhead. One of my favourite dishes is ‘Normah’s Nasi Lemak Crispy Chicken’, a diplomatic take on the British obsession with fried chicken designed to meet her customers halfway.

Not all attempts at gastrodiplomacy have been so successful. A common but ill-fated strategy has been the attempt by various governments to control the quality and authenticity of food overseas. In 2006, for example, Japan commissioned a taskforce of so-called ‘Sushi Police’ to assess the divergent quality of Japanese food abroad. ‘What we are seeing now are restaurants that pretend to offer Japanese cooking but are really Korean, Chinese, or Filipino,’ stated Toshikatsu Matsuoka, Japan’s Agricultural Minister at the time. ‘We must protect our food culture.’ Secret inspectors were sent to Paris to observe eighty Japanese restaurants, of which one third were denounced for ‘crimes against authenticity’ and did not receive official accreditation from the Japanese state. And Japan is not the only country operating in this way. Last year, Italian Minister Lollobrigida announced that only Italian restaurants that used ‘the majority of ingredients coming from Italy’ would be officially certified as authentic. Clearly, being a global hegemon of food culture can make one neurotic.

To me, these attempts to control the foreign reproduction of cuisine do not seem credible. Very few customers are aware that ‘authenticity certificates’ exist, and I suspect even fewer care that they do. Who takes restaurant recommendations from the government, anyway? When I asked Japanese restaurants in London if they had witnessed the Sushi Police, most had never heard of them, even though the city is densely populated with Japanese restaurants.

These initiatives also show how gastrodiplomacy can descend into what sociologist Michaela DeSoucey has called ‘gastronationalism’: a response to globalisation through ‘a form of claims-making and a project of collective identity’. A good example of this is the concept of the ‘Mediterranean diet’, which has a long history of being exclusionary. The never-ending stream of articles touting its health benefits have created a huge industry, and gastronationalist policies in Europe have seized upon this. In 2013, the Mediterranean diet officially joined the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, as proposed by Italy, Greece, Spain, Morocco, Cyprus, Croatia, and Portugal, while ignoring most of the Middle East and North Africa, despite their integral role in the development of Mediterranean cuisine.

Is gastrodiplomacy’s slide into gastronationalism inevitable? The way food is associated with identity, combined with diplomacy’s pursuit of the national interest, means gastrodiplomacy will always have at least a tinge of nationalism. I saw an example of this last summer, at an exhibition in Marseille which concerned the Mediterranean diet. The exhibition indulged in common tropes of French traditional farming practices, communal eating, and bounty, but it remained Eurocentric, failing to describe the historic role of colonialism and the migration of Muslims, Arabs, and Jews in the Mediterranean diet’s formation. As I walked through the exhibition, I felt its message: ‘Return to the earth! Return to the hearth!’ But it was to Western tourists that this call was made, not to Mediterranean brethren across the sea.

Amid this, Taiwan’s Global Food Initiative is an instructive counter-example, demonstrating how gastrodiplomacy can be used as a form of resistance against other nationalist powers. Taiwan has been governed independently of China since 1949, but Beijing views the island as part of its territory. It has vowed to ‘unify’ Taiwan with the mainland, and not ruled out the use of military force. Taiwan’s Global Food Initative which was launched in 2022, is a response to this. It covers thirteen countries across North America, Asia, and Europe (including the UK), and deploys standard gastrodiplomatic fare: food festivals, newspaper op-eds, and support for Taiwanese businesses abroad. With these initiatives, the Taiwanese government’s stated aim is to diversify into new overseas markets – a response to Beijing tightening the screw on Taiwan’s economy.

However, Martin Mandl, an expert in Taiwanese gastrodiplomacy at the University of Vienna, thinks there is more to it. Speaking to me over Zoom a few months ago, Martin explained how Taiwan was using food to carefully promote a sense of Taiwanese cultural identity distinct from the mainland. ‘The Global Food Initiative relates to a broader political change brought in by President Tsai Ing-Wen,’ Martin said. ‘In response to a China in the ascendency, [Ing-Wen] has shifted the focus away from Taiwan’s shared Chinese heritage to a distinct national image around modernity, open society and democratic values.’

When it comes to food, this ‘shift of focus’ has manifested through an emphasis on the multicultural origins of Taiwanese food. Martin mentioned a documentary produced by Taiwan’s Tourism Ministry, which describes its food as created by ‘people from a host of backgrounds… [including] America, Japan, China, and Australia’, a claim that stresses a particular blend of multiculturalism in which Taiwanese food is shown not only as different from Chinese food but also sufficiently inclusive of it, delicately avoiding competing claims over ‘national’ dishes. At a recent international food fair in Sydney, a friend told me he witnessed Taiwanese products being sold, with their slight difference from their Chinese counterparts emphasised — like the fact that Taiwanese soy sauce is made from fermented black soybeans, rather than China’s yellow soybeans.

A Taiwanese diplomat told me that their method of gastrodiplomacy was simply to support Taiwanese food businesses in what they were already doing. Consider the bubble tea shop, with its sleek interiors and customised, colourful product: it already embodies the modern, open Taiwan that ex-President Tsai wanted to convey, the one that is a booming global market. Are all customers aware that bubble tea is Taiwanese? No. Are all these shops Taiwanese-owned? Again, no (indeed, many are Chinese). But the diplomat maintained that if they were making Taiwanese food more popular, it was still a success in their eyes. Since Taiwan cannot risk going toe-to-toe with China militarily, being overtly nationalistic or creating a ‘Bubble Tea Police’ (as Japan did with sushi) could be dangerous. So, Taiwan has taken a cautious approach, rallying the international community around its cause through the subtle medium of its cuisine.

Since the Global Thai Programme in 2002, the number of countries introducing their own gastrodiplomacy campaigns has been increasing. Globalisation has brought foreign cultures to our doorstep, to the extent that food is now one of the most common means of encountering other countries, and governments utilise that for their gain. I appreciate Malaysia and Thailand’s efforts to support their diaspora restaurants and chefs, but the rise in populist and nationalist politics around the world makes me worried that the future of gastrodiplomacy could mirror the gastronationalism that imposes doctrines and agendas on cuisine. Taiwan’s embrace of the multicultural origins of its cuisine is an antidote, though, and there are some hopeful signs that the UK might start to follow suit. Until recently, Britain’s cultural identity had mostly been promoted through music, sport, and film (consider the Harrys: Styles, Kane, and Potter), but in 2021 the British government appointed Indian-born chef Vineet Bhatia as its new ‘culinary ambassador’.

As demonstrated by Normah and her desire to teach people about Malaysian food, it is chefs who really know how to bridge the gaps between people and distinct cultures. This must be what the Japanese Embassy in Athens recognised when they chose to support the woman running Soya, and it is encouraging that Japanese gastrodiplomacy – once behind the Sushi Police – is willing to put money into developing small, independent eateries. Gastrodiplomacy is at its best when giving a platform to the real experts on the ground, and avoiding obsessions over national identity or attempts to control how people cook. Ultimately it is the restaurant workers and chefs, not the officials, who are the true diplomats.

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Credits

Dan Hong has worked in diplomacy and is an occasional writer, based in Lisbon and previously Athens. 

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £800 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles, which you can read on the Vittles back catalogue.

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Welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how a single or set of policies intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our eighth piece for this season and first for the new year is by Jacinta Mulders. Today’s essay is about the show Border Security: Australian Border Force and how the surveillance of food at Australian airports is televised to foster racial biases and divisive politics. Read on for a story about how food becomes a victim of nationalistic, narrow-minded politics at policed borders, and how policies of control neglect the layered actions and sentiments of carrying food away from home.

The casual cruelty of Border Security TV

Surveilling food at Australia's airports on 'Border Security: Australia's Front Line'. Words by Jacinta Mulders. Illustration by Lee Lai.

Nine minutes into a 2018 episode of Border Security: Australia’s Front Line, I watch a platinum-blonde airport biosecurity officer designated ‘Officer Robyn’ knife a zòngzi apart with a box cutter. Eaten in Chinese communities across the world, zòngzi are glutinous rice parcels stuffed with a variety of fillings, wrapped in bamboo leaves and steamed; this zòngzi is one of several that a young student from China is attempting to bring into the country. She has been stopped at Sydney Airport and looks on darkly as Officer Robyn starts picking up pieces of her edible cargo and slicing them open on a steel bench, where the contents of other passengers’ suitcases are scattered around like guts. The lighting in the airport is cold and fluorescent. Around Officer Robyn, disoriented passengers trundle by, pushing trolleys, while in the background blurred figures stagger haltingly in airport queues. Cumulatively, this evokes the feel of a factory – one where people, rather than objects, are being quality-controlled.

Zòngzi are often shaped like pyramids, but the ones that the student has packed in her suitcase are rectangular and evidently home-made. I watch as Officer Robyn takes one and slits through its carefully wrapped leaf to reveal the sticky rice inside. Another cut and she is able to pry it apart, pulling out the steamed chestnut that sits, surrounded by thin shreds of pork, in the centre. The action feels violent, as though a sacred thing has been desecrated.

‘We’re dealing with something that’s wrapped in a fresh leaf here,’ Officer Robyn says to the filming camera. ‘Can you describe what’s in this?’ she asks the student. ‘Some pork,’ the student says. ‘Pork is not allowed,’ Officer Robyn replies. The camera zooms in on the ruined zòngzi, as Officer Robyn’s fingers continue to hover over its wrecked parts.

At this point, a voiceover swoops in to interpret what is taking place. ‘Pork has the potential to be a major threat to Australian livestock, and can carry an extreme risk such as foot-and-mouth disease’, the voice, male and authoritative, states. No context is given about the food being surveilled or where it comes from. The zòngzi are not referred to by their name but instead called ‘pork rolls’ – an invented and inaccurate misnomer, particularly because the zòngzi contain barely any pork. The focus in the episode is on characterising the student’s actions – and her food – as malicious and dangerous, rather than understanding her intentions. Her seven kilograms of zòngzi are thrown out without apology, while a voiceover patronisingly concludes: ‘Now that [the passenger] has offloaded her restricted food, her first stop might be the supermarket, to grab some Aussie produce.’

I have eaten zòngzi at home, whenever my mother-in-law has made them. I have had them at restaurants, and bought strings of them out in the suburbs: sweet ones stuffed with red dates and peanuts, savoury ones filled with chicken or mushrooms and pork. I love everything about zòngzi – their attractive geometry, the leafy smell of their cooking leaves, the warm, caramelly taste of the chewy rice in my mouth – which is why it’s a shock when I watch Officer Robyn handle the zòngzi as though they are something alien. When I see her pry the chestnut out, I am reminded of all the times it has, to me, felt like a warm surprise inside the hand-packed rice.

At one point during the customs process, the student tries to justify her actions, saying, ‘They tell me to bring here to eat because there’s nothing to eat—’, but she isn’t permitted to finish. ‘Nothing to eat in Australia?!’, Officer Robyn replies, her voice incredulous. Eventually it is the officer who gets the final word, fining the student $420 and explaining the punishment’s necessity in a closing shot. It feels as though the zòngzi are the casualties of a litigious battle in which the Australian state is the necessary victor. And in this made-up drama, zòngzi are not a foodstuff eaten and enjoyed by a large part of the world – they are a foreign contaminant, a threat.

Border Security is a reality TV show that has been showing on Australia’s free-to-air Channel 7 since 2004. Originating as it did in the early noughties, a precursor to British shows such as Nothing To Declare UK and UK Border Force it can be seen as both a product and an enabler of the anti-foreigner hysteria that developed in popular Western culture in the wake of 9/11. In the years that followed, widespread panic was instrumentalised by the government to foster biases that were attached particularly to Muslims, but also to anything or anyone that Australia and its Western allies imagined to be a racial, cultural ‘other’. The Australian Government at the time succeeded in linking these biases to refugees; this culminated in an infamous incident in 2001, when the conservative Prime Minister John Howard (who also refused the entry of a carrier of predominantly Afghan refugees into the country in the 2001 ‘Tampa affair’) was re-elected after the ‘Children Overboard Affair’, in which he claimed that asylum seekers off the Australian coast had thrown their children overboard in order to be rescued. Border Security’s key drama, which hinges on themes of security, safety and protection, bolsters these political attitudes, which centre around keeping people out. The show emphasises a sanctimonious, inviolable border from which foreign bodies and products must be rejected.

The images you still see on Border Security may seem reminiscent of the country’s past, but they are consistent with how the borders of many nation states are policed in the Global North. Significantly, Australia’s model of penalising asylum seekers is touted as the gold standard for far-right leaders around the world, and has recently become the template for the new Illegal Migration Act (2023) in the UK. The act has key features in common with Australian laws; for example, barring refugees arriving in the country without a visa applying for protection, and enhancing the government’s powers to detain. Also, the slogan used by Rishi Sunak – ‘Stop the boats’ – is identical to the one rolled out by conservative Australian governments through the 2010s for the same purpose. It is these new realities of hard-line exclusion that Border Security reflects.

There are three types of segment on Border Security. In the first, incoming passengers under suspicion are filmed being taken aside and questioned about their motives for coming to Australia. In the second, incoming mail and cargo is checked and tested for drugs, smuggled produce and other illicit goods. And in the third, food and other contents of incoming passengers’ luggage is scrutinised and assessed for products that may threaten Australia’s biosecurity as dictated by the Biosecurity Act 2015. The government maintains a Biosecurity Import Conditions database, which regulates imports and any conditions placed upon them. The Australian Border Force’s website translates these rules into categories of food and other tourist and animal products, which are up for interpretation by incoming travellers. For example, fresh fruit is not allowed, honey must be declared, and ‘shelf stable’ biscuits can be brought in. The rules contain tricky nuances: meat floss is allowed, while pork biltong is not.

As an English speaker and Australian citizen who has travelled overseas and returned to Australia several times, these rules are not that difficult for me to navigate: I am accustomed to what I can and can’t bring in. The same may not be true for a person entering Australia for the first time, if English is not their first language and they have not predicted that their baggage will be subject to food-related restrictions. Australia’s prohibitions are tougher than those of any other country I have visited. Uncooked rice cannot be brought in. Noodles that are not commercially manufactured cannot be brought in. Nuts ­­– even packaged ones – must be declared for inspection on arrival. The list is comprehensive and the enforcement is rigid. In the messy, irregular and highly personal acts of travel and migration, it’s easy to imagine omissions occurring while a person is packing their suitcase with foodstuffs that remind them of home.

The hawkish tenor of Border Security’s broadcasts does not owe itself to biosecurity laws but to the strategic political agendas of policing playing out on a national scale; its segments are emboldened by graphics, dramatic music and text reminiscent of a crime show to reflect this. The programme’s imagery develops a sense of spectacle by using montages spliced together from unappetising and unattractive cargoes and enhances a sense of urgency by using maps of Australia, shields, and the word ‘Alarm’ in close-up. Passengers are reduced to their nationalities, becoming ‘this Chinese student’ or ‘this Korean couple.’ In most cases, the biosecurity officers questioning the passengers raise their voices and speak in a blunt, scornful manner, as if the passengers lack not English but intelligence.

It also seems as though the majority of those targeted for filming at biosecurity are from East or Southeast Asia; from countries which represent and have represented a high proportion of Australia’s immigrant intake for the last few decades. (This surveillance also reflects a set of policies known as White Australia Policy, which curbed the immigration of non-white people into the country, until it was formally abolished in 1973.) During the filmed interrogations, the ordinariness of the food the passengers carry is often ignored by the officers in question. In an episode from the show’s sixteenth season, a man returning from China is caught out with vacuum-packed beef snacks; in another, a woman designated ‘Officer Nicole’ is shown examining multipacks of ramyeon and cylinders of tinned tuna belonging to a couple from Korea. The passengers look on, bamboozled and embarrassed. It is clear they do not know they have done something wrong.

Although it’s extremely uncomfortable to watch uniformed staff belittle and barrage arrivals at immigration, the segments of Border Security in which passengers are interrogated about their food always stand out to me for their cruelty. Watching home-made meals from afar be prodded and probed makes me think about the opposite: the softness of the familial and social contexts in which the bag has been packed and the foodstuffs prepared. Where is the food from, and whose mouth is it intended for? Who wrapped and tied seven kilograms of zòngzi for transportation to a faraway place? Even as packing takes place in private rooms, at the border, intimate details become suddenly public. Via Border Security, personal actions and preferences become sources of interrogation and shame.

The need for biosecurity in Australia is clear. The country’s history is littered with examples of foreign species being brought in and ravaging catastrophes on native ecosystems. While I do not contest this, what I object to is the spectacle that is made of rejection in Border Security and the way that, via the show, foreign food items are tethered to notions of othering and disgust. Instead of being interested in the diversity of global foods, the show cultivates an aesthetic of putrefaction and revulsion in which otherwise ordinary food is made to look as bizarre as possible. In most episodes, the association between incoming food and disease, pests, and vermin is also deliberately cultivated through the language of the voiceover and biosecurity officers, and the ‘bad smell’ of foods is emphasised. As soon as some tinned pork is found in the suitcase of the Korean couple from season sixteen, Officer Nicole is quick to mention the risk of foot-and-mouth disease and ‘African swine fever’ –painting the food as contaminated, even if it isn’t. In these ways, unfamiliarity and disgust is created and then peddled by the show.

The only place I watch Border Security these days is at my in-laws’ house. On occasion, the family pauses while eating dumplings or a mung bean jelly salad to watch the show on the TV to the side of their dinner table that they keep turned on. My mother-in-law chuckles uncomfortably as she remembers the time she tried to bring vacuum-sealed beef jerky from China and was forced to throw it out. And I recount all the times I’ve filled my suitcases with food: Tim Tams for friends in the UK, fish spice mix and Sarawak pepper for my Mum from our year in Brunei. I think about the sackfuls of Rossana candies my grandmother always brought back from Italy to remind her of the country she left behind as a teenager. The fact that Border Security is still running twenty years after its commencement, demonstrates that, at least for some, there remains a kind of lazy, if watchable, magnetism in the cruelty of seeing a person be punished at the Australian border because of their difference. Are people made to feel that their safety is dependent on this demonstration of blunt force at the border? Or is it because we wouldn’t wish the same on ourselves?

Borders can be a site of fertility. They are places where fruitful interactions can take place and new ideas can emerge from an environment of cross-pollination and exchange. The sharing of foods is thrilling, as is the possibility of a nation that thrives on eating habits that are transcultural, inclusive, and abundant with new influences. As such, each of the small interactions that occur on Border Security is a failed opportunity – to explain things properly, to acknowledge distance travelled, to convey a sense of welcome and to create new cultures. This, I think, is where the real embarrassment of the show lies: in its insistence on one type of Australia, it tethers itself to the worst elements of the country’s past and projects it into a future that is closed, reactionary, and unapologetically racist.

In the past week alone, I have eaten deep-fried coconut and banana fritters from a Vietnamese food stand in Cabramatta, bought lechon from a Filipino catering business down the road, and baked a chicken using the recipe of a Chinese-Australian chef. In the inner city on Friday nights, tables consume platters of thinly sliced bresaola and bowls of buffalo stracciatella. Like in many cities, one of the thrills of Sydney (where I live) is the ability to participate in a spectrum of food cultures just by travelling across suburbs. Instead of being alive to this variegated reality, Border Security peddles a worldview of ‘Australian food’ and ‘Australian produce’ as things which are assimilated into the country’s anglicised culinary history. But this is a vague concept in itself. What is quintessentially Australian? A cos lettuce salad? A meat pie? A pavlova? Everyone knows that the dessert originated in New Zealand.

The truth is that what is considered ‘Australian food’ is in a state of constant and necessary flux. Indeed, in a recent Guardian article about what Nigella Lawson eats when she’s in Sydney, the writer Ann Ding claimed that ‘“modern Australian dining” … mostly just means “Italian”’. But when my grandparents were newly arrived Italian immigrants in the 1960s, the idea that their food could ever have been quintessentially Australian would have made them laugh in disbelief. According to Border Security, Australian food cannot be zòngzi, despite the fact that it is consumed in communities across Australia and by many Australians born abroad, including my mother-in-law. The show is not capacious enough to allow that vision.

Although Border Control reflects a pessimistic and sheltered reality, there is, happily, a great dissonance between the enforcement of biosecurity strictures in Australian airports and the nuance and pleasure that exists in the intersectional culinary realities of people’s lives. Zòngzi continue to be made and eaten in households around Australia. Ramyeon floods supermarket aisles. Pork floss is eaten with tofu in restaurants all over the country. And all these foods and more will continue to be eaten in Australian towns and cities, long into the future, despite Border Security’s narrow-minded histrionics. I am confident that their presence in Australia and its culinary cultures will outlive the show.

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Credits

Jacinta Mulders was shortlisted for the 2022 Stinging Fly / FBA Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Believer, Australian Book Review, and numerous other publications. She is working on a collection of short stories. 

Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist living in Tio’tia:ke (known as Montreal, Quebec). She has made comics for the New Yorker, McSweeneys and the New York Times. Her graphic novel Stone Fruit was released in 2021 with Fantagraphics, Sarbacane, Coconino and other publishers.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

This week’s newsletter is a special package made up of four essays and conversations interrogating how policy affects what children eat at schools, and the role of various governments in shaping children’s food education, nutrition and pleasure. The articles can be found below and on our website, and can be read in your own time.

School Lunches: the Last 120 Years
A Chat With a Dinner Lady
Why is Food Education so Unappetising
The Tuck Shop Diary

All of Season 7 is free to read, but you can subscribe for £5/month or £45/year, which gives you access to our whole back catalogue and ensures all writers are paid fairly. Thank you so much for your support!

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Tuck in, it's Schools Week!

The food we eat at school is formative, shaping appetites and aversions that endure through adulthood into old age, as well as providing essential nourishment when bodies and brains are growing fastest. I still remember how our canteen gave us chocolate milk for pudding only twice during the seven years I was at primary school. I spent every other lunchtime there waiting for chocolate milk to appear again, which led to a life-long obsession with chocolate milkshake. Anyone who has grown up in Britain during the last few decades will have their own memories of industrial school dinners. Personally, I was less keen on the balls of unseasoned mashed potato (rumoured to be powdered), meat pies (at a time when the BSE crisis was at its peak) and spam. Nonetheless, we had to do our best to convince the dinner ladies on patrol that we had eaten enough before we could leave the table.

As a society, we should care profoundly about the food we serve children at school – especially at a moment when food poverty is at critical levels. According to The Food Foundation, in January 2023, 21.6% of households with children reported that their children had directly experienced food insecurity in the past month, affecting an estimated 3.7 million children – up from 11.6% in January 2022. And as the pieces in this week’s series show, you can draw a portrait of every political epoch that the United Kingdom has been through over the past century through its attitudes to and investment in feeding children at school and educating them about how to cook — from the creation of the welfare state, through to Thatcher’s dismantling of it, and the sticking plasters of New Labour.

For schools week, Lexi Earl looks at how school dinners have changed in Britain over the last 120 years, from the late 19th century era of porridge, dripping and bone broth, through to Roast Dinner Wednesdays and Turkey Twizzlers. Katie Randall interviews one of the people on the front line of feeding children, a dinner lady (or as they’re now known, midday assistants) to talk about how the job has changed and what policies schools have to adhere to when feeding their pupils. Laura Thomas interrogates how packed lunches are shrinking due to a misguided policy on 100 calorie snacks. Thea Everett looks back at the history of the subject known as ‘Food Technology’ and formerly called ‘Home Economics’, and why teaching children about food has always been such a low priority for both governments and schools. And finally Will Yates lets the people who are most affected by school dinner policy — actual school children — tell us their relationship with food and the canteen in their own words. RMJ

School Lunches: the Last 120 Years

From nourishing soldiers of empire, to the founding of the welfare state and its subsequent decline: a century in school dinners. Words by Lexi Earl.

‘In 2020, deep in the Covid pandemic, footballer Marcus Rashford called for the English government to extend free school meal provisions by serving meals for hungry children during the summer holidays. But why might the state be involved in providing nutrition for children? The answer lies in the very origins of school meals in the UK, which suggest their purpose extended beyond mere fuel. From the nineteenth century onwards, food became a way for the state to shape children into particular kinds of citizens, with the school dining table as a source of ‘civilisation’, say. Since the beginning, school meals have provided an avenue for the state to get involved in the making of the child’s body.’

A Chat with a Dinner Lady

A conversation with a midday assistant by Katie Randall, and a guide to school dinner policy by Katie Randall and Laura Thomas.

‘Being a dinner lady in the modern world is no easy task; with the cost of living crisis taking its toll on families across the country, dinner ladies, just like teachers, are often the first to notice when a child – or parents – may be struggling. Dinner ladies, for better or worse, also have to enforce policies dictated from the top down.

I had a chat with a dinner lady who works at the local school (which I attended as a child). We chatted about how things have changed over the years, how both school and government policy affects children and their families, and how, ultimately, dinner ladies care for the young people they look after.’

Why Is Food Education So Unappetizing?

Subject to endless rebrands, why has food education has struggled to gain real legitimacy in British schools? Words by Thea Everett.

‘When I think of ‘Food Technology’ lessons at secondary school in the mid-2000s, the chief feeling I recall is being overwhelmed by mayonnaise.​​ I remember the coleslaw we’d made in class leaking from its Tupperware into my O’Neill backpack; a pasta salad with chunky shards of onion congealing in its box, with so much mayo it had become one mass. Even though food ultimately became my personal passion and my career, ‘Food Tech’ did not instil a love of cooking in me – and I gave it up before GCSE. I decided to investigate its history and its present; has food education always been so unappetising?’

The Tuck Shop Diary

School dinners in children’s words. Scenes from morning break, written and compiled by Will Yates.

I ran down the stairs running through a huge angry crowd praying the lunch line wasn’t long. My prayers were answered as it unbelievably took 30 seconds for me to be let in. As I went in and explored my options, I couldn’t make up my mind on what to get. I was wondering should I have my usual Halal chicken burger or try something new, the cous cous and chicken wrap. I knew I had to make up my mind quick before one of the ladies would shout the usual ‘hurry up’. I asked a fellow friend and he said why don’t you try something new, so I chose the cous cous rap. I wasn’t happy with the amount of chicken I was given, it was a little amount, although the wrap was delightful and succulent for £1.80. I would give this wrap a solid 7.5 out of 10, could’ve been a 9 if I had more chicken. Ismail, Year 10

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Credits

Lexi Earl is a writer and science communicator, currently managing the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food. She is the author of Schools and Food Education in the 21^st Century (Routledge, 2018) and, with Pat Thomson, Why Garden in Schools? (Routledge, 2021). Lexi is interested in the way we feed children, the different actors involved, and how our feeding practices are shaped by policies, the media, social media, families, tradition and knowledge. She writes a newsletter on Substack: nature//nuture. 

Laura Thomas is a Registered Nutritionist who writes the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter where she helps people feel less afraid of feeding themselves and their families.

Katie Randall is a writer from London interested in how class, food and culture intersect. You can find more of her food writing on Paste Magazine and Hawkker.

Thea Everett runs a recipe Substack called What’s That You’re Cooking, Thea?, and is a deputy editor at delicious. magazine.

Will Yates is a former secondary school English teacher now working in public affairs. You can find his writing on his website or on Twitter and bad photos of his food on Instagram.

Thank you to our anonymous dinner lady and school children for their contributions.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how a single or set of policies intersects with eating, cooking and life. For our fourth week, we have contributions by Lexi Earl, Thea Everett, Will Yates, Katie Randall and Laura Thomas on how policy has, and continues to affect eating and food education in British schools. You can find the whole series here:

School Lunches: the Last 120 Years
A Chat With a Dinner Lady
Why is Food Education so Unappetising
The Tuck Shop Diary

In this essay, Thea Everett takes look at food education over the past century produces a portrait of the political ideologies of successive governments, from Victorian paternalism to the Thatcherite fixation on business, and finally the under-resourcing that characterises state education post-2010.

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Why Is Food Education So Unappetising?

Subject to endless rebrands, food education has struggled to gain real legitimacy in British schools. Words by Thea Everett.

When I think of ‘Food Technology’ lessons at secondary school in the mid-2000s, the chief feeling I recall is being overwhelmed by mayonnaise.​​ I remember the coleslaw we’d made in class leaking from its Tupperware into my O’Neill backpack; a pasta salad with chunky shards of onion congealing in its box, with so much mayo it had become one mass. Even though food ultimately became my personal passion and my career, ‘Food Tech’ did not instil a love of cooking in me – and I gave it up before GCSE. I decided to investigate its history and its present; has food education always been so unappetising?

Food education in Britain was originally introduced as ‘Domestic Economy’ to state schools in the mid 1800s to ‘help improve basic living standards’ among the working classes, and included needlework and laundry-making alongside cooking. The Victorian origins of the subject have a My Fair Lady-esque feel; women were educated primarily for domesticity, whether as wives or in domestic service roles, depending on their class. Domestic economy was available as a subject only for female students until 1975, when the Sex Discrimination Act made it unlawful to limit access to a subject based on gender (though in reality boys didn’t start to study cooking until much later). Domestic science, as it became known, was centred around teaching core cookery skills: Yorkshire puddings, Victoria sponge, and pineapple upside-down cake all featured (as well as things like how to iron a man’s collar…). The 1970s also saw the introduction of Home Economics BSc degrees and BA courses, which signalled the subject being taken more seriously, despite the gendered nature of food education during the period.

When I was at school, between 1997 and 2010, food education was part of the ‘Design and Technology’ block of subjects – a legacy of the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1989, which reclassified the subject and transformed it for the twenty-five years that followed. The rebrand from ‘Home Economics’ to ‘Food Technology’ in the final year of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government shifted the focus from cookery for consumption at home to food production in an industrial and factory context. According to a 2011 episode of BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme on the topic, this rebrand was an attempt by Thatcher to give the subject the gravitas of science. She ‘decided that what we needed was not cooks but technologists – people skilled at designing theoretical frozen pizzas, not people who could make a pizza.’ This emphasis on food innovation meant that, in the years that followed, the subjects of cooking and eating were taught with a focus on engineering and capitalist enterprise, instead of pleasure or nourishment.

The New Labour years saw a patchy approach to food education, with no notable policies brought in and a sycophantic Blair leaving celebrity chefs to dictate discourse around food in schools. Blair mainly ran with the Thatcher-era emphasis on industry, adding an entrepreneurial gloss in his 2007 curriculum update, when GCSE students were tasked with considering packaging and labelling as well as target market and evidence of testing ‘a food product which was suitable for mass marketing’. Eat your heart out, Alan Sugar! The exam consisted of two written papers, but no cookery. For pre-GCSE secondary education there was an emphasis on food safety – how to handle knives or a hot pan of water – and science such as how full of protein or carbohydrates certain foods are.

But there was almost nothing about how food tasted or made you feel. Personally, I only remember three food-related lessons at my own primary school during that period. One: watching mould develop on a slice of white bread over the course of a week. Two: making tiramisu with the Italian teacher Chiara, because in some Blairite Europhile haze our controversial headteacher wangled fortnightly Italian lessons for our state primary. And three: visiting Pizza Express to learn how to make dough balls. While novel and somewhat entertaining, these things did not teach me much cookery – a shame, given the joy and confidence that sustained, hands-on learning can give primary-age children.       

The Tory–Lib Dem coalition government (from 2010–2015) ushered in a genuinely new era of food education, with a policy in 2014 that made food education compulsory for all children aged 5–14 and an all-new ‘cooking and nutrition’ curriculum that appeared to give the subject unprecedented importance in primary and secondary schools. The policy was introduced on the recommendation of the 2013 School Food Plan, commissioned by Michael Gove and written by food entrepreneur and philanthropist Henry Dimbleby. However, while the mandatory teaching of food seemed to indicate a strong commitment to food education, meaningful implementation has been less convincing.

The new curriculum said that by age fourteen all pupils should be able to ‘understand the source, seasonality and characteristics of a broad range of ingredients’ and ‘cook a repertoire of predominantly savoury dishes’. It aimed to instil ‘a love of cooking in pupils’ – a valiant goal. At first glance, all this seemed progressive, with the word ‘love’ replacing the more robotic design-tech language that preceded it. However, nice-sounding ideas have not been backed up by resources. In 2014, when it became compulsory for all primary-age children to carry out practical cooking lessons, 75% of primary schools faced the problem of having no kitchen for pupils to cook in. According to a 2017 study, pupils in more than half of all primary schools receive less than 10 hours of food teaching a year. Often, there is no one teacher responsible for food education in a primary school, and instead nutrition forms part of the science curriculum. Despite the ‘compulsory’ tag, many primary schools leave food education to overworked teachers, who must squeeze it into timetables wherever they can. One Bermondsey-based teacher reported that food education ‘is not something we do much of … we tend to focus on balanced diets … now and then we’ll make something that ties in with a history or religious education topic’.

In secondary schools, food education still sits among the ‘Design and Technology’ subjects and is studied quarterly, on a rota. However, the emphasis of the curriculum has changed since I took the subject in 2004, moving away from the industry and fact-focused elements that previously dominated. The GCSE has lost its ‘Tech’ tag; after an initial, short-lived rebrand in 2014 as ‘Cooking and Nutrition’, it has now been renamed ‘Food Preparation and Nutrition’. The current  GCSE places an emphasis on the demonstration of ‘effective and safe cooking skills’, as well as learning about diet, nutrition and a range of cuisines to support pupils with skills for home cooking or jobs in catering. However, D&T education expert Dr HildaRuth Beaumont points out, one of the main intentions of the renewed focus on cooking skills ‘is to equip pupils to choose and cook food that is healthy with regard to combating the obesity crisis’ – a somewhat less romantic idea than the attempt at ‘instilling love’. There is also the problem that students usually have to source their own ingredients for practical assessments, meaning the playing field is not level. A teacher I spoke to recalled a Food Tech class in 2018 at a Deptford school where the exam brief was ‘British food’, so students made fish and chips. One boy brought a whole frozen mackerel, which staff had to help him defrost, skin and fillet before he could even get cooking – he had a time disadvantage in his exam from the get-go.

The cancellation of food as an A-level in 2015 has caused more problems: it has created a dead-end for the subject, evidenced by a decline in the number of students choosing to study the GCSE. When the A-level was removed, one Hackney academy chose to offer a Hospitality and Catering ‘Pathway’ (like a BTEC) instead of a GCSE, as this provided a route into work in restaurants for students who did not want to do a degree. Always oversubscribed, the popularity of the Pathway demonstrates the huge demand for practical food education when there is the promise of a job for students who might want to avoid a debt-ridden university route.

Cooking is one of the most vital life skills, so it is troubling that many children get such a poor grounding in a subject which will profoundly affect their lives.     Personally, I didn’t start paying attention to food until I left school to study at university. Far away from family and friends, I found that being in the kitchen, trying to recreate familiar recipes, made me feel calm when big life changes were afoot. It brought me a feeling of fulfilment I hadn’t really experienced before. Shortly after this, I was fortunate to move to Australia, where the national obsession with food and cooking inspired me to consider food as a respected job – something that my food education at school had never done.

I would love to see food classes in British schools being taught with the same access to resources as science or art. I’d love to see the course broken up into modules, with practical lessons combined with theory classes on how food interacts with culture and community, and how food trade and our import and export system works. I’d like food classes to offer a critical look at how we might change our food system to make a healthy diet accessible for all, and not just an individual responsibility. When the food and drink industry, including agriculture (or 'farm to fork food chain') industry employs 4.2 million people in the UK, and agriculture employs a third of people globally, I think we owe it to our children to introduce them to the importance of the subject, and the many opportunities on offer. More than just instilling love, better teaching of food in our schools could see the next generation of British adults equipped to deal with the political challenges facing the food system in years to come. Who knows where that might take us.

Further reading on food education in the UK –

https://www.platetalks.co.uk/talks/the-importance-of-food-education

Design And Technology Education: An International Journal

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Credits

Thea Everett runs a recipe Substack called What’s That You’re Cooking, Thea?, and is a deputy editor at delicious. magazine.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li .

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how a single or set of policies intersects with eating, cooking and life. For our fourth week, we have contributions by Lexi Earl, Thea Everett, Will Yates, Katie Randall and Laura Thomas on how policy has, and continues to affect eating and food education in British schools. You can find the whole series here:

School Lunches: the Last 120 Years
A Chat With a Dinner Lady
Why is Food Education so Unappetising
The Tuck Shop Diary

In this piece, former secondary school teacher Will Yates shares his project ‘the tuck shop diary’, in which students write their own reflections on the school canteen.

The Tuck Shop Diary

Scenes from morning break, written and compiled by Will Yates.

In the large comprehensive secondary school where I taught until last summer, the canteen was a lifeline in the most literal sense of the word. My school was in one of the country’s poorest postcodes, with 45% of our pupils eligible for free school meals. In the weeks following our return from the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, the lunch bell brought with it expressions of palpable relief on kids’ faces; more than once, a child tearing down the corridors mid-lesson was pacified by the offer of a panini, after it emerged they’d not had any breakfast.

But food was only half the canteen’s value: for the students at our school (a fraction of the 800,000 children the Food Foundation estimates live in poverty but do not receive free school meals), the canteen was a safe space to eat £2 strip burgers and fries from one of the chicken shops across the road, confident in the knowledge that the duty teachers and canteen staff had bigger concerns than ensuring that only proprietary food was consumed on the premises.

Last year, those bigger concerns were mine to deal with. Trying to squeeze well over 150 students through the turnstile and food counters in a fifteen-minute break-time requires the physical presence of a Berghain bouncer, the grace of a seasoned diplomat and the multifocal attention of an orchestral conductor – none of which I possess. Instead, I took the shouted instructions of our head chef as gospel and tried to make sure nobody caused a melee at the patty counter.

In my final term, wanting to make the most of my interactions with the kids, I decided that the people who are the most affected by school dinner policy – and the least heard – should have a chance to air their own thoughts. I started a project that I called ‘The Tuck Shop Diary’. The idea was simple: for a few weeks, I would give students in the canteen a booklet of food writing (Nigel Slater, Ruby Tandoh, Michael Winner) in the hope that they’d also write about what they, or others, were eating that day. Beyond that, and a vague plea not to cuss out their mates, I didn’t really apply any restrictions at all.

The hardest part of the project was finding pupils willing to take part. ‘But what do I say, Sir?’, they asked. It surprised me – after all, teenagers aren’t short of strong opinions. But over the next few weeks, I watched them begin to scribble, and write they eventually did.           

Snippets from tuck shop diaries

One of the more striking tendencies was an overwhelming willingness to defend the canteen as an institution, regardless of students’ thoughts on the post-Jamie’s School Dinners menu restrictions. Some, such as Sundus, even appreciated it, offering a brisk, businesslike endorsement of the food options:    

The canteen offers a great variety of snacks that appeal to everyones preferences. For example, the canteen alternates between different cultural cuisines. We have seen foods from all across the world such as Indian, Greek and Lebanese. I especially like the curry and stir fried rice, as it is quite flavourful. Many people have had positive comments on the cultural foods. Sundus, Year 8

For some of the older pupils, the comments were more forthright. Jainit’s account opened with a bombastic assessment of the canteen and the bagel he ate there, before lapsing into more circumspect tones on both topics.

Beyond the toxicity of the lunchline, more specifically towards queue-skipping prefects, there lies a silver lining. For lunch today I had a scrumptious cheese and tomato bagel. This bagel is quite special for not only me but pretty much the whole of the school. Its cheesy and gooey filling almost is delightful, but then you remember it’s the canteen food, which might be a necessity but could be upgraded majorly. Soft bagel buns are light and fluffy like they should be and was a good change from a sit down focused hot meal. Overall I enjoyed this delight and was a solid 7 out of 10. Jainit, Year 10

One of the grim realities of tight school budgets is that catering staff have very little discretion to look the other way if pupils can’t pay. What this means in practice is that going to the canteen with friends is more than just a social occasion – it’s an insurance policy. Paying for others’ food, often without any expectation of reciprocity down the line, is commonplace. Still, as Ismail alluded to, there’s a level of deference involved in a group trip to the canteen:    

I ran down the stairs running through a huge angry crowd praying the lunch line wasn’t long. My prayers were answered as it unbelievably took 30 seconds for me to be let in. As I went in and explored my options, I couldn’t make up my mind on what to get. I was wondering should I have my usual Halal chicken burger or try something new, the cous cous and chicken wrap. I knew I had to make up my mind quick before one of the ladies would shout the usual ‘hurry up’. I asked a fellow friend and he said why don’t you try something new, so I chose the cous cous rap. I wasn’t happy with the amount of chicken I was given, it was a little amount, although the wrap was delightful and succulent for £1.80. I would give this wrap a solid 7.5 out of 10, could’ve been a 9 if I had more chicken. Ismail, Year 10

In schools with a majority of Muslim kids, halal chicken burgers are major canteen currency. Joel’s account of his disappointment at a last-minute menu change was a tour de force, capturing how a canteen trip can make or break your day:    

I was betrayed in the canteen, like a friend who promises you something beyond delightful but either delivers it like a UPS deliveryman or delivers nothing at all.

After my arduous two hours of English in a classroom more vacant than a literal ghost town, my friend and I blitzed down the stairs, probably insulting Newton by moving beyond lightspeed past the various lower years in our path. And then we arrived at the canteen, where time seemed to firmly stand for an eternity until the place opened.

Sausage rolls, hot dogs, baguettes, bagels, fruits, sandwiches, chips, waffles. All gracefully adorned the place.

However, something was missing. Thursday’s blessing was absent from the mortal realm.

Chicken burgers.

While they are a clear 6/10 and quite simple, they still exceed every other insignificant item. Whenever I’d eat them my faith in the canteen would be restored a bit. But, the people in the canteen have made an irrevocable mistake. I was betrayed. I was betrayed in the canteen.

Anyways, grapes are very delicious, well I’d say every fruit is beyond the quota of delicious. This may be me compensating for my betrayal (it is), but I don’t care. Joel, Year 10

Like any piece of school work, the diary suffered from a lack of time and focus, but across the few weeks of its lifespan I saw more and more kids keen to get involved. In recent years, teenagers have been subjected to a gamut of school-based frustrations and miseries – you could forgive them for being angry about how they can’t even get a Diet Coke at lunchtime. But, as Kayden’s account shows, there are some joys that not even Michael Gove can take away.

every day I go To The canteen The canteen Lady check if I am not in Truble.

Today she ascd my From Tutor mr mowle To check iF I had a good week.

he said yes!

as a Reward She gave me a Icecream.

and the Icecream was nice. Kayden, Year 7

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Credits

Will Yates is a former secondary school English teacher now working in public affairs. You can find his writing on his website or on Twitter and bad photos of his food on Instagram.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how a single or set of policies intersects with eating, cooking and life. For our fourth week, we have contributions by Lexi Earl, Thea Everett, Will Yates, Katie Randall and Laura Thomas on how policy has, and continues to affect eating and food education in British schools. You can find the whole series here:

School Lunches: the Last 120 Years
A Chat With a Dinner Lady
Why is Food Education so Unappetising
The Tuck Shop Diary

In this conversation, Katie Randall has a chat with a dinner lady (or ‘midday assistant’ as they are officially known) about her role looking after the nutritional welfare of children on the frontline of school dinners. Afterwards, Katie Randall and Laura Thomas outline the actual policies that schools have to follow when feeding children.

A Chat with a Dinner Lady 

A conversation about the role of dinner ladies, and a guide to school food policy. Words by Katie Randall.

On the rare occasions that dinner ladies (nowadays often known as ‘midday assistants’) are featured in pop culture, they are not usually portrayed favourably: in Horrid Henry and the Demon Dinner Lady, an adaptation of Francesca Simon’s popular book series, a red-faced dinner lady patrols the school canteen, stealing snacks out of children’s lunch boxes to eat for herself. They can also play on misogynist tropes; David Walliams’ ‘Mrs Trafe’, from his novel Billionaire Boy, is described in promos for the TV adaptation as ‘dirty and old and … dreadful at cooking’. She is also played by Walliams himself in the show, which will shock nobody.

Although negative portrayals are aiming for laughs, they fail to acknowledge the important role dinner ladies often play in children’s day-to-day lives. Being a dinner lady in the modern world is no easy task; with the cost of living crisis taking its toll on families across the country, dinner ladies, just like teachers, are often the first to notice when a child – or parents – may be struggling. Dinner ladies, for better or worse, also have to enforce policies dictated from the top down – which perhaps feeds into some of the negative stereotypes that children might relate to in Simon and Walliams’ work.

I had a chat with a dinner lady who works at the local school (which I attended as a child). We chatted about how things have changed over the years, how both school and government policy affects children and their families, and how, ultimately, dinner ladies care for the young people they look after.

KR: So you’ve been a dinner lady for how long?

DL: Approximately fourteen years. We started off as ‘dinner ladies’ and now they call us ‘midday assistants’.

KR: Have you seen many changes over the years? I’ve got horrendous memories of that dining room… 

DL: It was pretty grim [back then] to be honest. The food that was served was brought in from a different school, so it wasn’t cooked on the premises. The food varied depending on which cook you got, and once it’s been transported from one school to the other, it's also not as fresh. 

Around 2013, we got a ginormous hall and a state-of-the-art industrial kitchen. Now, we have the most fantastic cook ever – or chef, though I don’t think she minds being called cook. She cooks fresh portions for each lot of children coming in.      

KR: What kind of food is available to the children who have school dinners now?

DL: I would say, on the whole, it’s all made fresh. We have home-made bread. They’re also doing ‘vegetarian day’, to do with saving the world and eating less meat. So cook will make sponge chocolate brownies with beetroot, or make jackfruit wraps with different vegetables. We’re very spoilt. There’s a salad bar with home-made coleslaw. I think all the food brought into school – as in the catering side of things – is organic and responsibly sourced.

KR: Can you also talk a bit about what packed lunches might have been like when you first started as a dinner lady versus what you see now? 

DL: You’re always gonna get different types of packed lunches. You have healthier ones, with lots of fruit. But then you’ll get ones packed with four types of different treats. 

Because of the different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of children in our school, it has varied over time. Some children might have cold fish fingers in a roll. Some will bring in two chocolate croissants and yoghurt. They can have smoothies, but they’re not allowed fizzy drinks. But I don’t think any of these rules are written down. They’re allowed to bring in biscuits, or chocolate-covered biscuits. But they couldn’t have a Dairy Milk. 

KR: What happens if a child does bring a Dairy Milk in?

DL: We always make sure the children are old enough to be able to chat about it. Don’t get stern with them. You just say, ‘Can you remind whoever does your packed lunch that you can have a Taxi or a Club bar, but not chocolate.’ It’s not written down – well, maybe it is, but not when I looked it up the other day. There must be something, but I couldn't find it.

KR: I don’t think they make Taxi bars anymore … Would you take the chocolate bar off the child?

DL: No. But if it had nuts in it, then yes, as we’re a nut-free school. I think the nut-free school policy was introduced not long after you joined the school, which would have been about twenty-four years ago. Nut allergies, and allergies as a whole, were getting more awareness, so the school made a decision that it would be nut-free. Because even the school dinners are nut-free. They’re not [free] from other allergens unfortunately, but definitely nut-free.

We had a case where a child had nuts. So I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I’m gonna have to take them away.’ Most times the welfare officer will come and talk to the child and explain why they can’t have them. 

KR: I think that’s a bit different though. It’s slightly less difficult to tell a child they can’t eat something because their friend could die, rather than just because it’s not allowed. 

DL: Yes, I suppose. If it’s the younger years and you notice someone has three bags of crisps, four chocolate bars and a sandwich, you’d have to advise them not to eat it all. You might say, ‘Mummy or Daddy has given you four chocolate bars, but you only can have one of them today.’

KR: Are sweet things available for children who have school dinners? 

DL: Cook doesn’t decide, it’s decided by the council. She’s given a menu and a recipe, but she might change it slightly. 

KR: What sort of thing is she allowed to change? 

DL: Her flavouring might be slightly different. But if the recipe says one teaspoon of sugar and then you put six tablespoons of sugar [in], that’s not allowed, because there’re certain regulations she has to abide by.

KR: Conversations about food are hard to have with children of any age. Have you ever had to have conversations with parents?  

DL: That’s the welfare officer’s job. 

We’re not scrutinising all the packed lunches, you check in case there’s something untoward. I might notice someone’s packed lunch is a bit sparse. Then we’d give the welfare officer a nudge and the next day we would consciously look at that child’s lunch – but not comment to the child. If the pattern continued, then the welfare officer would call the parents. 

It’s not necessarily telling the parent off – it might be, ‘Can we help you? What’s going on?’ And the parent might say, ‘I’m on my own, I’m struggling.’ You just don’t know other people’s circumstances, do you?

KR: Do you find it uncomfortable when you have to talk to the children about issues with their lunch? 

DL: I don’t feel uncomfortable. I feel sad for them. Some of them don’t have a lot of choice, especially in Key Stage Two – so ages 7–11. There’re a lot of people who apply for free school meals because they can’t afford to give [their children] packed lunches. I should say, at present, the government only allows all pupils at Key Stage One, so ages 4–7, to have a free school meal. 

KR: Do the majority of children eligible take that up? 

DL: Unless they’re an adventurous eater, it can be daunting. We have to sit down and encourage them to eat, as they might be a bit homesick. We often speak to parents if a child’s not settling and not trying any of the food. Suggest they have a packed lunch for a few weeks to get into a routine and then see if they’re happy to try school dinners. 

KR: It’s changing now, isn’t it? Sadiq Khan is giving free school meals for all primary-aged children in London for a year. 

DL: So now for Key Stage Two, ages 7–11, they’ll get the offer of free schools meals as well as those aged 4–7. But say in a normal scenario elsewhere in the country, or when that ruling wasn’t in place, if a student in Key Stage Two has had a rubbish packed lunch three days on the trot, the school might give them a few free school dinners. 

KR: Would the parent, in theory, then have to reimburse the cost of those meals?

DL: Yes. We had a child who didn’t understand. He had his packed lunch at break time and then got himself a school dinner. 

KR: But it feels quite harsh to charge a family for something like that? 

DL: It’s hard, but that’s not my decision – it’s down to the school. I think in that particular case, the mum had applied for free school meals, but she’d only just arrived in the country and she was waiting for the paperwork to confirm her eligibility. 

KR: Do you think there is enough information about free school meals for parents? 

DL: I don’t know, it all goes via the council. But the office or the welfare office would help. We know about new families joining the school who are in need. You advise them, as having to deal with the council when English is your first language is hard enough! 

Lots of the paperwork is translated, and on the school website there’s a section on how to apply for free school meals. But if someone is new to the system or the country, I feel the school should be helping out more. 

KR: Everyone is struggling with the cost of living crisis, and food is so much more expensive now. I don’t think the eligibility threshold has changed for free school meals. Have you noticed a middle demographic who are struggling? 

DL: I suppose if there were parents who had managed beforehand and the child had had quite a good packed lunch, but now if it’s not so good – we’d report that. We’re the first part of the jigsaw. If we feel the situation hasn’t changed, we’ll mention it again. Sometimes that child falls outside the net of support available. We’re not looking into every single lunch box, but we need to know if a child’s eating properly. 

KR: Do you think the ‘policy’ of not allowing children to eat the unhealthy items in their lunch can be harmful if it leaves them without enough food? Do the parents replace the unhealthy options with healthier options? 

DL: Yes, because sometimes you think, ‘Last time he had lots of crisps, but now he’s only got a sandwich’. You have a duty of care to make sure the child eats. If a child’s packed lunch has hardly anything in it you have to get permission to let them have a school dinner. You speak to the welfare officer and they confirm it’s OK. 

KR: You say the rules aren’t written down, but they’ve come from somewhere. Who made those decisions? 

DL: I’m not sure. I think the rules came into place not long after I joined as a midday [assistant]. We’re also a ‘healthy school’. We’ve been given a rating – I’m not sure if it goes from bronze to gold, but we’ve got the rating to maintain. 

KR: Do you think the policies come from a well-intentioned place? 

DL: Yeah. It’s always looking after the children, isn’t it? It’s always their well-being, to protect and look after them.

KR: And you think the policies that are in place to support vulnerable young people are strong enough to do what they need to do? 

DL: I do. If there is a new midday and there’s an issue, we always say to them, ‘Don’t be afraid to come and talk to a more experienced midday.’ Because none of us wanna see a child go hungry. 

KR: How far do you think schools can intervene, and do you think they should intervene at all? Could you argue that’s up to the parents? 

DL: No, personally, I disagree with that. We have a healthy school status. So, in the same way we need to manage the rules around allergies, we need to do the same with healthy food. 

KR: If you had to change any policies or put anything different in place from now, what would that be? 

DL: I think it would be nice if every child could have a free school meal, not just for the year. There are some children who aren’t eligible under the current system, particularly in Key Stage Two, and you can see they’d really benefit from that.     
 

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A guide to school dinner policy, by Katie Randall and Laura Thomas

Free school meal eligibility

Free school meal eligibility varies across the UK; however, in England, children between Reception and Year 2 in state-funded schools are eligible for free school meals automatically. In London, Sadiq Khan has now introduced a free school meal policy to cover children in all year groups throughout the 2023–2024 academic year, in order to help families struggling with the cost of living crisis.

Applying for free school meals varies between councils, and it’s possible to search eligibility criteria by entering your postcode on the government website, which then links you to your local council website. Some of the criteria that could mean a child is eligible for free school meals includes a parent claiming:

• Income Support

• Income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance

• Income-related Employment and Support Allowance

• Support under Part VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999

• The guaranteed element of Pension Credit

• Child Tax Credit (if you’re not also entitled to Working Tax Credit and have an annual gross income of less than £16,190)

• Working Tax Credit run-on – paid for 4 weeks after you stop qualifying for Working Tax Credit

• Universal Credit – if you have an annual (net) earned income of less than £7,400 (as assessed by earnings from up to three of your most recent assessment periods)

Pupil premium

Pupil premium is a policy where the government allocates extra funding to a school if a child is, amongst other criteria, eligible for free school meals. Funding allocated to schools in the 2023–2024 academic year is as much as £1,455 per primary-school-aged child who can claim free school meals, with the funding paid directly to the school in most cases. KR

Healthy schools rating scheme

The healthy schools rating scheme is voluntary, and schools can participate by completing self-assessments; they will receive a rating based on their answers. This can then be used to demonstrate their commitment to healthy eating and physical well-being. KR

School food standards practical guide

Food prepared by schools must follow strict regulations, which are detailed here. The page includes checklists for headteachers, requirements for sustainably procuring food and nutritional guidance.

The website for the school where the dinner lady I interviewed works provides information about the food they serve, which is pretty much in line with what she said. ‘[The catering service] ensure[s] there is an excellent, wide variety of tasty school lunches every day of the week, including Caribbean, Asian, Mediterranean, Vegetarian and traditional dishes, so there is something for everyone’s taste. The lunches consist of a main course and desserts made fresh on the premises each day, freshly baked bread … Enjoy unlimited vegetables and salad items as part of the main meal, helping children to get their 5-a-day!’ KR

Nut-free school policy

Now common in many schools, a quick Google search shows you many school websites that promote their status as nut-free. These policies are in place to protect children with often severe allergies. Schools are also required, as outlined as part of the guidance for schools in England, to provide allergen information for their school dinners. KR

Informal bans on foods

In my conversation it emerged there are lots of informal rules about what children can and can’t have in their packed lunches. Whilst the dinner lady I spoke to couldn’t find a place where these policies were explicitly recorded at her school, it seemed to her that this was common knowledge between all of the dinner ladies and was linked to maintaining the school’s ‘healthy school rating’ (detailed above). Some of the bans on food include:

•  ‘Pure’ chocolate bars (e.g. chocolate without a biscuit filling, which is allowed)

• Sweets

• Fizzy drinks

• Nuts, or products containing nuts

• Multiple items of certain foods eg 2 bags of crisps, which a child would be encouraged not to eat all of if this was included in their packed lunch. KR

Change4Life (C4L)

Change4Life (C4L) was a social marketing campaign devised by Public Health England, with the aim of influencing the eating habits of children in the UK. This was part of a broader suite of policies under the banner ‘Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives’, which was published in 2008. The intention was to reduce calorie consumption across the population, but especially in kids – despite evidence from the government’s own research that the average Brit consumes fewer calories today than they did in the 1950s.

In 2018, C4L launched a campaign targeting parents which had the tagline ‘Look for 100-calorie snacks, two-a-day max’. The stated aim of the campaign was to improve the healthfulness of children’s snacks. What has transpired is a novel market for manufacturers. Existing products have been miniaturised and rebranded as ‘lunchbox friendly’, or ‘school compliant’, even though they undoubtedly do not comply with the (admittedly austere) School Food Standards. 

This has led to absurdities such as the new ‘Big Kid’ Organix bar having 94kcal – almost 25% smaller than the original, made for younger children, which has 123kcal. Curly Wurlys are now 17% smaller than they used to be. One mum counted only six Monster Munch in her kids’ multipack bag (these packets are 50% smaller than the grab bag counterpart). Soreen bars, Frazzles, Freddos, Dairylea Dunkers, Coco Pops cereal bars and Jammie Dodgers Minis all brag on the front of their packaging that they’re under 100 calories.

Despite the fact that C4L’s campaign ran for only eight weeks, it’s now virtually impossible to find packaged children’s snacks that are over 100 calories; whole aisles in the supermarket are dedicated to the shrunken versions. Anyone who has ever picked a child up from the school gates will know that 100 calories are patently not enough to soothe their hunger. 

When we frame children’s appetites as the problem, we are not only avoiding talking about the social and structural inequity that drives poor health, we are actively embedding it further into the fabric of society. LT

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Credits

Katie Randall is a writer from London interested in how class, food and culture intersect. You can find more of her food writing on Paste Magazine and Hawkker.

Laura Thomas is a Registered Nutritionist who writes the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter where she helps people feel less afraid of feeding themselves and their families.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how a single or set of policies intersects with eating, cooking and life.

For our fourth week, we have contributions by Lexi Earl, Thea Everett, Will Yates, Katie Randall and Laura Thomas on how policy has, and continues to affect eating and food education in British schools. You can find the whole series here:

School Lunches: the Last 120 Years
A Chat With a Dinner Lady
Why is Food Education so Unappetising
The Tuck Shop Diary

In this essay, Lexi Earl tells the story of school lunches over the last 120 years, from Victorians nourishing soldiers of empire, to the founding of the welfare state – and its subsequent decline with the rise of neoliberalism.

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School Lunches: the Last 120 Years

From nourishing soldiers of empire, to the founding of the welfare state and its recent decline – a century in school dinners. Words by Lexi Earl.

In 2020, deep in the Covid pandemic, footballer Marcus Rashford called for the English government to extend free school meal provisions by serving meals for hungry children during the summer holidays. But why might the state be involved in providing nutrition for children? The answer lies in the very origins of school meals in the UK, which suggest their purpose extended beyond mere fuel. From the nineteenth century onwards, food became a way for the state to shape children into particular kinds of citizens, with the school dining table as a source of ‘civilisation’, say. Since the beginning, school meals have provided an avenue for the state to get involved in the making of the child’s body.

1870–1900: nourishing future soldiers

Sample menu: porridge, broth, fruit

One of the reasons for the early focus of state involvement in children’s diets was to ensure a steady stream of well-nourished and strong soldier recruits for Britain’s military expansion and colonial conflicts (the Boer wars, the Second Anglo-Afghan war and the Third Anglo-Burmese war, among others). Hungry and malnourished children were more easily identified after the Liberal government’s Education Act of 1880, which made schooling compulsory for all children between the ages of five and ten.  Having hungry children in classrooms who were unable to learn undermined the efforts of the universal education to mould children as citizens of the British empire. Charities stepped in to fill the gap too, and in Manchester, Bradford and London, some school boards starting serving meals in the 1880s. Meals largely featured oat porridge, broths and fruit, and were targeted at the neediest children.

1900–1930s: bread and dripping

Sample menu: meat stew, bone broth, treacle tart

In the 1900s, school meals became a more formal part of school life, with the Education (Provision of Meals) Act (1906) introduced by the Liberal government under Henry Campbell Bannerman. This authorised Local Education Authorities (LEAs) to provide meals for children, but did not make them do so (an attempt to appease those members of government who worried the state was becoming too paternalistic). Tablecloths, flowers, and older monitors to serve food made the school meal an educational event situated within the school day and provided those children of the so-called ‘deserving poor’ with an example of what might happen in a family home. Foods served were typically Victorian in outlook (think simple and bland) and included porridge (with milk or treacle), bread with dripping or margarine, and soup made from bones.

By 1909, 113 school canteens were serving around 116, 000 children a year (4% of children in schools). Those who did not eat at school generally went home for a lunch provided by their mothers or a neighbour. The Great Depression of 1929–1932 saw a sharp increase in meal uptake to over 600,000 meals per day (approximately 12% of children in schools, largely for free). The meals served in the late 1920s included warm cocoa or soup, both with bread, and by the early 1930s began to resemble those for which the meals service is famous: stews, hot pots, and treacle tart. Free milk was provided nationwide from 1934 onwards, an initiative of the Milk Marketing Board, made official by the Milk Act (1934).  

1940s–1950s: A war effort and the welfare state

Sample menu: corned beef, meat and two veg, chocolate semolina pudding

In 1940, in an bid to get more women into the war effort, the government decided LEAs should provide meals to all families that desired them. Attempts to implement this were hampered by bombing and a lack of equipment, but increased funding in 1941 stimulated local authorities into intensifying efforts to provide meals. Children either received meals for free or paid the cost of the meal. Another government circular at this time established some nutrition standards: a lunchtime school meal should provide 1000 calories, 20–25g first-class protein and 30g fat.

In 1944, a coalition government under Winston Churchill introduced the National School Meals Policy, and LEAs had to provide meals for all children. The era of ‘meat and two veg’ (and pudding) – a symbol of the more paternalistic welfare state – was ushered into being. The government also published proper nutrition guidelines, although these were never implemented. As food was still being rationed, school cooks had to make use of canned fish and meats, potatoes, and tinned desserts when designing their menus. Rationing continued until 1954, after which dishes like fish and chips, corned beef, blancmange, and chocolate semolina pudding started to appear on the menus were distributed by local councils – such as those in the School Meals Service Recipe Book distributed in Surrey in 1956.

Today, the school meals in this era are now looked back upon with nostalgia. The time is considered aspirational (by some) because of its simplicity – in home life and work life, and, for children, its provision of nutritionally beneficial meals. These meals continue to exist to this day through Roast Dinner Wednesdays, a weekly occurrence in most primary schools which provides the equivalent of a British Sunday roast dinner (with veggie options too), including stuffing and roast potatoes.

1970s–1990s: Individualism and ‘freedom of choice’

Sample menu: tomato and cheese pizza, chips, sprinkle cake and custard

The service of school meals might have continued this way, had it not been for the economic upheavals of the 1970s and the rolling back of the welfare state. The Conservative government (1979–1997) sought to cut expenditure across a range of public services, one of which was school meals. Free milk was abolished in the early 1970s, when ‘Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher’ became a regular taunt from the press (Margaret Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education and Science from 1970–1974). Although the meals service was providing 5.5 million meals a day in 1970, over the next ten years take up decreased dramatically from 70% in 1973 to around 40% in the mid 1980s. The decline in take up of school meals mirrors the increase in their price due to inflation and then government removal of national pricing limits for school meals in 1980. Many families switched to packed lunches to save money. Rather than being the responsibility of the government, children’s lunchtime nutrition was now deemed the responsibility of their family, with children being regarded as consumer-citizens, capable of freedom of choice. State interest in moulding children’s diets waned.

The Education Act (1980) no longer required local authorities to provide meals to children except those receiving them for free. Nutrition standards were abolished. The Local Government Act (1988) introduced Compulsory Competitive Tendering. This obliged LEAs to put their meals services out to tender and required them to accept the lowest price. This ushered in the era of pizza, chips, turkey twizzlers and hamburgers. Vegetables largely disappeared, and any notion that a school meal might be part of a child’s wider educational experience was eliminated. Highly skilled school cooks became box-openers and food-reheaters.

2001–2013: The early noughties

Sample menu: pasta bake, chicken curry, apple crumble

The advent of the modern school dinner is sometimes traced back to the airing of Jamie’s School Dinners in 2005, although provision had already been made by the New Labour government for the reintroduction of food-based standards in 2001. Concerns about children’s health – and more specifically, their fatness – had been growing throughout the 1990s. A Food in Schools programme was launched to help develop whole-school approaches to eating and drinking. But of course, like all bureaucratic entities, the meals service was, in practice slow to change. Skilled cooks had been replaced by unskilled staff; kitchens had been abolished or were without necessary equipment. With the exception of a handful of schools (particularly primaries, who were quick to change their approach), this continued to be a challenge for most schools, due to budget constraints and the expectation of multiple choices of lunchtime meals.

In May 2012, a young girl in Scotland started a food blog called Never Seconds. In it, she documented the lunches at her local primary school. Her pictures provide a snapshot of primary school meals in the early 2010s and feature macaroni and cheese; sausages and potatoes; chicken fajitas; soups plus sides of vegetables; and fruits, yoghurts or cupcakes. By this time, the meals service had moved beyond offering only traditional British foods and started to include more variety – curries, tacos, pizza, pastas – alongside roast dinners, fish on Fridays, or sausages and mash. However, while often implemented in the spirit of celebrating diversity and embracing immigrant communities, these meals tended to be the ‘British version’ of a particular dish, and therefore not recognisable to the children that menu planners and cooks were trying to include. 

In 2013, the School Food Plan was published by the Department for Education, and with it a new era of school food began. While the School Food Plan was only a review, with no actual funding for change, it changed thinking about lunchtime, transforming it from mere fuel into an integrated part of the school day. The kinds of lunches advocated by the School Food Plan were those cooked in-house by skilled cooks, featuring a balanced plate with vegetables and fruit as well as proteins and carbohydrates. Processed, fried, and convenience ‘beige’ foods were out. As set out in Earl, Schools and food education in the 21^st century cooking from scratch, gardening, and so-called ‘foodieness’ were in (although, in practical terms, very little changed except in schools where teachers, head teachers or cooks spearhead initiatives).

2020s: footballers and free school meals

Sample menu: chicken tagine, lentil and sweet potato curry, fruit and yoghurt

As we approach nearly 120 years of the school meals service, what has changed? Shockingly, the number of children coming to school hungry is still remarkably high – 23.8% of children in England were eligible for free school meals in 2023, up from 22.5% in 2022 and 17.3% in 2020. Diseases of malnutrition, including scurvy and rickets, have reappeared. If this makes you rage, so it should. That a wealthy country like the UK has so many children living in poverty, in states of malnourishment, is a scandal.

Corporate control of the school meals service remains an issue. Meal parcels delivered by these companies during Covid lockdowns caused a stir on social media when parents posted images of what they had been provided: white bread, baked beans, sliced cheese, yoghurts, some fruit, some potatoes, some pasta. The cost paid to the provider was reported to be between £10.50 and £30, while the food provided could have been bought for around £5.

One issue is that the framing of how to change school dinners is still based around children’s body weight; any policies – and plenty of charities, NGOs, and others – frame children’s body weight as a problem. The logic is thus: eat more healthily – less beige foods and more fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, lean proteins – and you will be thin. Better still, teach children how to eat healthily (through cooking and gardening), and they will eat better, teach their parents to eat better, and none will be a burden on the health service (because they will be thin). This rhetoric hides the very real structural reasons children might be fatter (food and fuel cost, access to varied foods, time to cook, lack of outdoor space etc), and moves the responsibility of health to the individual family – often exclusively to mothers – and the child. It is also often couched in perceptions of social class and (mis)understandings of poverty, disguising the severe underfunding that has plagued the health service for over ten years, the damage that a fat-phobic society does to those in bigger bodies, and narrows our understanding of health as equating to thinness.

But there are signs of hope. Charities like Chefs in Schools are bringing skilled chefs into school kitchens. Universal Infant Free School Meals, a compromise of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2014, provides free meals to all children in Reception and Years 1 and 2, and according to a 2022 study by Angus Holford and Birgitta Rabe, is showing evidence of helping address malnourishment in children across income brackets. Provision for school meals is part of the English Food Strategy, connecting meals to food education more generally, and harking back to the original idea that meals be part of a wider food education curriculum in schools. From September 2023, all primary school children in London are eligible for free school meals. However, commitments to universal provision remain contentious – although the Labour Party committed to universal free school meals in primary schools in their 2019 manifesto, they have refrained from such a commitment in 2023. Universal free school meals would make a difference to all children, particularly those who don’t meet the current threshold for free school meals but still reside in poverty. All children deserve to be well nourished so that they may take advantage of their education, and live their lives with dignity.

A note: school meals were devolved across the four UK nations in 1998 and 1999. This essay refers to those in England.^. Education was devolved in Scotland in 1998, in Wales in 1999, and in Northern Ireland in 1999 (with brief periods of direct rule until 2007).

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Credits

Lexi Earl is a writer and science communicator, currently managing the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food. She is the author of Schools and Food Education in the 21^st Century (Routledge, 2018) and, with Pat Thomson, Why Garden in Schools? (Routledge, 2021). Lexi is interested in the way we feed children, the different actors involved, and how our feeding practices are shaped by policies, the media, social media, families, tradition and knowledge. She writes a newsletter on Substack: nature//nuture. 

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £800 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles, which you can read on the Vittles back catalogue.

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Welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season will investigate how a single or set of policies intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our third writers for the season are Dolly Kikon and Joel Rodrigues. In this newsletter, Dolly and Joel write about how foraging in Nagaland is threatened by new land-laws, and militarisation. Read on for a journey through Northeast India’s forests, and a story of how national encroachment snatches sustenance, custodianship and joy from indigenous people in South-Asia, and across the world.

Foraging through impending loss: land-rights and militarisation in Nagaland

Words by Dolly Kikon and Joel Rodrigues. Photographs by Rendo Shitiri. Illustration by Neivikhotso Chaya.

On a hot day in May this year, on the outskirts of Nagaland’s Khumtsü forest, the master forager Zareno digs her fingers into the wet soil to make steps on the forest’s slope, ascending to the field of mhalivo where she picks the dark-green oval leaves. Around us, we can hear birds, crickets, and beetles. The forest is a prism of green, of moss, fern and tree canopy; it rained this morning and the ground smells fresh. Mhalivo – or the gnetum gnemon plant, as it’s sometimes called – is often used in Naga dishes. When it is cooked and eaten with rice, it tastes woody with hints of mint, and often flavours yam stews, dry fish chutneys, and meat and fish curries like machihaan, mani rüchak, oso and ongo ohan. The plant can also be cooked on its own, and the leftover water from boiling it down consumed as a broth.

Khumtsü is one of many forests in the Wokha district, which is located in the west of Nagaland, India’s hill-clad North-Eastern state. Wokha is also the homeland of Lotha Nagas – like Zareno, who lives in the nearby town and earns a living by collecting and selling edible wild vegetables from the forest. The Lotha community is one of several indigenous Naga groups, who live predominantly in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh in India, but also across other regions in South and South-East Asia. Like many of the communities across the Eastern Himalayas, the Lothas practise jhum cultivation, or slash-and-burn agriculture. This is done by clearing and burning a patch of forest land, after which a former jhum field is allowed to regenerate into forest. The relationship between forager and forest is intimate; Zareno even has a small bamboo hut in the forest, where she sometimes sleeps if she has spent the night foraging for plants.

Across Naga communities, jhum – and foraging– have co-existed for centuries: edible plants from the wilderness make their way to the fields, and vegetables like gourds, pumpkins and yam cross over from the cultivated patches to the region’s tropforests, where they can be picked. Foraged foods like hantsan (fiddlehead fern), furothezu (pennywort), mani (taro) and bamboo shoot are an integral part of Naga people’s diets. Bamboo shoots are fermented and preserved as pulp or juice, while hantsan is used for steaming fish and meat in bamboo hollows, plus a variety of dishes containing potato and yam. Every season an array of exciting edible plants turns up at the kitchen table in Naga homes, as a reminder of the mood and flavour of the forest. Foraged foods are the essence of both Naga life and its cuisines.

But foraging, like many ways of indigenous life connected to the forest, is slowly declining in Nagaland. Upheavals in land laws, and the decades of militarisation imposed on the area, have steadily affected the environmental sanctuaries of the region, and the food-systems of the Naga people who depend on it. In the past few decades, the forest in Nagaland has dwindled as a pillar of life and nourishment, as national authorities seek to govern and utilise it for economic gain.

Nagaland is one of India’s eight North-Eastern states, located in the Indo-Burmese biodiversity hotspot that is home to many of India’s ethnic-minority indigenous tribes. When the state of Nagaland was formed in 1963 to be part of the post-colonial Indian nation-state, the constitutional amendment of Article 371(A) enabled Nagas to govern their land resources and practise jhum cultivation, recognising the Naga people as custodians of their forests and land. This also guaranteed the Naga land-management system, in which farms and forests are maintained as per the customary laws of each tribe. Like select others, the state of Nagaland was given special provisions under the new Indian nation-state, free from the interference and ultimate authority of the central government in New Delhi. This was not merely charitable, but rather a culmination of Naga articulations of self-determination and sovereignty which can be traced back to 1929.

Even though centralised impositions and pressures on Naga autonomy have always existed, in the past two decades, things have been drastically changing in the region. Crucially, the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act (FCA), was passed in August 2023 by the Narendra Modi-led Indian parliament in New Delhi. To be implemented in December 2023, the FCA overruled the constitutional guarantees of community ownership, and safety-nets for self-governance provided to Naga people at the formation of the Indian nation-state. It took ownership of land ‘that has previously been declared or notified as a forest’, and stated that the central government could now usurp and utlise community-owned land anywhere within 100 kilometres of India’s border for ‘strategic linear project of national importance and (those) concerning national security’. Since Nagaland shares an international border with Myanmar, this means that forest land through the region can be marked for infrastructural changes at the government’s whim. Apart from this, the FCA makes way for dams, and military projects under the umbrella term of ‘national interest’.

Simultaneously, governments at both the state and national level have introduced proposals for new plantations of tea, coffee, rubber, oil palm and cardamom in community-owned forests through Nagaland. These encourage an economic aspiration among people, motivating them to make commercial (even if destructive and unsustainable) use of their lands. Legislations like the FCA, like the previously enacted Nagaland Forests Act (1968) bring the forest under extractive development models and monetary calculations. But even more crucially, policies and laws like these deny the forests as rights of Naga people. They disregard indigenous methods of food and survival, disrupting Naga people’s agency to roam, cultivate and forage in the forests for their own nutrition, at their own will.

These developments directly endanger the livelihood of foragers like Zareno. To her, the forest gives sustenance, and Zareno, by foraging in it, keeps it robust and alive. When she forages, Zareno is careful not to pluck the seeds of plants. ‘Mhalivo seeds can be roasted and eaten, but regeneration of plants is integral’, she told us. She further explained that the plants are like clans – groups defined by their gene types and their relationship to one another in the forest. These abundant plants feed people, but they also have agency of their own, ‘when they do not want to be found and wish to stay away from sight, no forager can find them,’ Zareno said. To her, foraging is an act of balance, a knowledge that is carried by winds, humans, birds, animals, and streams. And the forest is a communal space – it houses the river, mountains, plants, and human beings like herself.

The week we met Zareno, we also visited Wokha town, only 10 kilometres from  Khumtsü forest (and Dolly’s ancestral home). With a population of approximately 35,000 people, Wokha is the administrative, economic, and educational centre for the district, first established as a British headquarters of the Naga Hills in 1876. Even though it is a small town, several food entrepreneurs and vendors work in Wokha. One of them is Fuchumbeni, a 27-year-old baker and cook who owns a restaurant called Hotel Siroy Lily in the town. In her restaurant, which overlooks the street, she sells Indo-Chinese dishes like chowmein, plus other Indian snacks like rotis with pickles. Her stock of flour, butter and sugar comes from Dimapur, the largest city in Nagaland. ‘Around 60 people – from the Rengma, Sumi, and Lotha villages – come to eat here every day,’ Fuchumbeni said, but she told us that nothing is sourced from Wokha and its adjoining forests. This decline of indigenous food systems and foraging can be traced back to almost three decades of militarisation and counter-insurgency operations which have been imposed on the area.

Like the rest of the Naga homeland, Wokha witnessed counter-insurgency operations after India’s independence in 1947; these were a consequence of the Naga people’s demand for the right to self-determination. In 1958, the extra-constitutional Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) was imposed throughout Naga lands; this empowered the Indian armed forces to detain and even kill a person on mere suspicion. Throughout this long-drawn conflict, human rights groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, and even more detained, tortured, and arrested. Similar to what has happened in militarised regions such as the Kashmir valley and Manipur, the AFSPA was (and remains today) the most curtailing and violent imposition on the life and mobility of Naga people since the 1950s.

Food-production and foraging have been affected by this surveillance. Between 1956 and 1963, when granaries were burnt down and there was widespread starvation, villagers were prohibited from cultivating their fields during curfews. Also, from the 1950s to the 1970s – at the height of the Naga movement for self-determination – the Indian state displaced villages and regrouped them into larger residential areas for surveillance. These were far from the forests that those communities knew and frequented; as they could no longer farm and forage effectively, people became dependent on state aid for food grains. During this time, Indian security forces also perceived the forest and adjoining fields as places of ‘danger’ where insurgents sought shelter and refuge. And so, foragers who entered the forests were suspected to be armed rebels, or sympathisers of the Naga freedom movement, detained on the suspicion of ‘unrest’.

In the decades following militarisation, Nagaland, which had been self-sufficient, became a food-deficit state with significant imports, as its people were distanced from the forests and indigenous methods that sustained them, unable to feed themselves. Among young Nagas, the histories of state surveillance have led to concern and uncertainty about about the future of their lands. Today in Wokha, security barracks encroach lands, taking over forests and village commons, preventing community activities like foraging from taking place in these spaces. The creation of legible and ‘legitimate’ urban centres has resulted in ‘urban aesthetic’ like that in Wokha, encouraging Naga people to live, work and eat outside the forest. The cultures of militarisation has diminished the forest’s existence as a site of sustenance and work.  Fuchumbeni observed how these shifts in landscape have led to a change in the palate. ‘They [the people of Wokha’s communities] do not have time to forage and cook’, she said. 

Fuchumbeni’s observation speaks to the fact that for many people like her customers food is now tied to industrialised produce; it points to the emergence of a diet that comes from the mitigation of traditional Naga food systems. But even though her restaurant is devoid of foraged ingredients from the forests, Fuchumbeni sometimes cooks traditional Lotha food with mhalivo: occasionally, when she gets home from work, she seasons smoked pork and fish with sun-dried perilla seed paste; she cooks her yam stew with fermented bamboo shoots. Similarly, across Naga households, processed food like instant noodles and canned fish are improvised with foraged herbs like pennywort and fish mint roots. New foods have become common and integral across Naga diets, but it is impossible to erase the traces of foraged foods: ‘They [foraged foods] will never go away’, Fuchumbeni said.

In India today, indigenous communities are regularly disenfranchised of their land and food rights. For instance, in 2019, the Supreme Court of India directed twenty-one state governments across India to evict almost one million indigenous people from their lands, meaning they were also dispossessed of shelter and food. Owing to the constitutional provisions provided by Article 371(A), Nagaland was not impacted by this eviction order, but the rapid unplanned urbanisation and infrastructure development in the state is leading to loss of forest land and biodiversity almost every day. Consider that under the NMEO-OP (or ‘National Mission for Edible Oils-Oil Palm’), launched under the BJP government in 2021, state and central governments provide potential oil palm farmers with financial assistance to buy everything from seedlings to machinery, along with support in the gestation period. And that in 2015, Nagaland had less than 150 hectares for oil palm, but this has now, in 2023, increased to over 5000 hectares.

Even though Nagaland is witnessing apparent economic ‘progress’, the future looks concrete and surrounded by plantations. As bulldozers flatten the mountains and forests to build roads and extract resources, tastebuds, tongues, and tummies feel the weight of impending loss.

Around the world, conversations about foraging practices by indigenous people remain irrelevant to governments, merchants, and consumers – until they become a global trend, adopted by so-called ‘sustainable’ lifestyles. But this knowledge of the nutritional benefits of edible plants, and the essential nature of the forest from which it stems, is rarely protected or spoken about. When we think of policies for forest-filled regions in South and South-East Asia, how can indigenous knowledge, care, and foraging enter the lexicon of the law and marketplace? Is there a way for foragers like Zareno to be part of the world that assigns value to plants and understands care rather than economic calculations? Is there a way for Fuchumbeni to cook her native food for customers? Can she run a restaurant with produce sourced from closer to where she lives?

As we left the forest with Zareno, a farmer offered us jakronthi fruits boiled with sugar and dried on top of a fireplace. The fruits grow across the Wokha district and are green and oval-shaped with a big seed. When they are fresh, they taste sweet and sour. When they are boiled with salt and dried, they are smoky and chewy. Jakronthi is used as post-meal digestive, and as a medicine to cure stomach ailments. Today, in Naga villages, jakronthi is gifted to family and friends more often than it is sold in markets. To snack on this fruit, you need to be in the forest, and with someone who knows and understands it. We relished the sweet, sour and smoked flavour as we stood below its tree, imagining hornbills above us eating the same fruit. We thought of the birds dispersing the seeds after they ate. This – the moment in which the tree, the birds, and forest-dwellers were bathed in common sunlight – was the impending loss. This thought was impossible to swallow, unlike the delicious fruit.

However, Zareno, with her machete in hand and a cloth bag across her shoulder, remains a caretaker of Khumtsü and knows all its residents. She continues to roam the forest, calling each flower, creeper and plant by name. One day, the jakronthi, like the pennywort and fiddlehead ferns, may become strangers to these forests, lost as distant memories. But until then, because of foragers like Zareno, they will continue to perch on Naga tastebuds and find their way to the Naga plate.

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Credits

Dr. Dolly Kikon is an anthropologist. Her work focuses on the political economy of extractive resources, militarization, migration, development initiatives, gender relations, food cultures, and human rights in India. Her current writing projects include an ongoing book manuscript on fermenting cultures, and a report on the impact of the 2020 Baghjan oil spill in Assam. She also directed and produced an ethnographic film titled, "Seasons of Life: Foraging and Fermenting Bambooshoot during Ceasefire". More information about work is on her website.

Joel Rodrigues was born in Mumbai and has lived in Northeast India for almost a decade. He is the co-author of the open-access book, Seeds and Food Sovereignty: Eastern Himalayan Experiences published by North Eastern Social Research Centre. He has co-edited the book, Food Journeys: Stories from the Heart with Dolly Kikon, published by Zubaan. He is currently a doctoral student in social anthropology at Stockholm University.

Neivikhotso Chaya is a geologist, and doctoral student in the Department of Geological Sciences at Guwahati University.

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.