All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. 

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles, including all upcoming episodes of The Full English podcast.

A Vittles subscription costs £4/month or £40/year, and this will soon increase ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

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Back in the midst of time (March 2020) when I started Vittles, I had some kind of manifesto about platforming marginalised voices within food writing who we rarely get to hear from. When you first read this, you may have had your own idea of what this meant, and I hope over the last two years that Vittles has done it, exceeded it and continues to do so. But what you might not have expected when you read it, is that I wanted to platform the perspective of people who went to Eton and the sub-class of people who rule, de-facto or otherwise, this country.

And yet, is it not the case too that these voices are somewhat unheard from? Of course, they want it to be this way, which is why this eating takes place in cloistered settings: tuck shops, school dining halls, private men’s clubs, the House of Lords canteen. But I find all this stuff fascinating — besides, as Justin Gayner mentions today, does an incarnadine grouse eaten by an Old Etonian in a St James’s club not fulfil something like the function of a meal at a diaspora restaurant in an outer borough of London? I am only slightly joking.

For today’s newsletter, which is the last of this season, you need to cast your mind back two years ago when the new Covid rules were being set and there was a lot of stuff about grouse in the papers, which seemed rather inexplicable. What did grouse have to do with anything? And yet, as Justin shows, grouse doesn’t just say something about class: who owns grouse moors, who produces grouse, who eats grouse IS the very mechanics of class in this absurd country. “we gotta exempt grouse shooting or the mps will go crackers” Boris Johnson allegedly texted his big brained, bald head-honcho Dominic Cummings, according to Cummings earlier this month — that is only a half-truth. We might not know exactly who asked Johnson to exempt grouse shooting, but find out, and you will know precisely where the real power in this country is concentrated, and perhaps, where they like to eat.

To Eat a Grouse, by Justin Gayner

BLACKADDER: ‘Basically, it’s a right old mess. Toffs at the top, plebs at the bottom, and me in the middle making a fat pile of cash out of both of them.’

MRS MIGGINS: ‘Oh, you’d better watch out, Mr. Blackadder; things are bound to change.’

~ Blackadder the Third (Curtis and Elton)

September 2020: Covid infection rates are rising and the testing system is collapsing. In Downing Street, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is signing off a new law, the ‘rule of six’, while thumbing a fuck-off wallpaper catalogue. His mobile rings. Aware of the new rule’s ramifications, a familiar voice pleads with the Old Etonian (OE) to make an exemption, reminding him of favours owed. Days later, a broken nation is informed that it will become illegal to gather with seven or more people. Except, that is, for the friends and owners of grouse moors.

It’s likely we will never know the name of the mysterious caller, even though only 150 people in Britain own a grouse moor. Satirical magazine The Fence handily compiled a list of suspects, notably (Lord) Harry Dalmeny (OE), who hosted a trigger-happy Prime Minister at a pheasant shoot in 1999. Nevertheless, this list remains educated guesswork, as many grouse moor owners now hide their identities with trusts and offshore companies, although a 2016 investigation by ‘Who owns England?’ found that an astonishing 550,000 acres of land, an area the size of Greater London, is covered by grouse moor: for context, that is roughly 4 per cent of the landmass of England.

Game, land and power have always been intertwined. The story starts around 1500 BC, when members of the Egyptian royal family began rearing antelopes, gazelle and elephants to kill for pleasure rather than protein. It was the Greeks, however, who first got the taste for cultivated gamebirds including black grouse, pleasingly named L.tetrix. The Romans also got in on the act, building house-sized aviaries or ‘ornithones’ to breed and eat birds whilst listening to them tweet. Simultaneously, the first laws were being codified to ensure that the landowning upper classes got their grouse. Roman law dictated that ‘only that which is within my power may be mine’, while the toffs in Germania similarly dictated that only ‘he who is authorised to bear arms may freely capture animals’.

But, as with all good ideas about keeping the great unwashed out of your backyard, dissent from the lower classes was only a few centuries away. In the late 1780s, peasants in Germany overturned laws about game hunting, enabling them to grab a weapon and go and bag what they liked. (The result was carnage; nearly all game stocks in these areas were decimated.) In Britain, the Game Act of 1831 technically allowed anyone with a game licence to shoot within the boundaries of a ‘season’, designed to protect the species in question, but the cost of the licence was so expensive that it inculcated grouse hunting as the preserve of British landowners and the upper classes. Shooting grouse became a ‘sport’ rather than an essential means of preserving life through food. If anything, technology was created to make grouse hunting even more difficult; earlier guns were lit by taking a match to a slow-smouldering piece of string, like one of those comedy bombs in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon – hopeless for a bird that flies up to 70 miles an hour.

It was around the eve of the twentieth century that the modern version of grouse shooting found its footing with the creation of ‘driven grouse’, where dogs and lowly paid ‘beaters’ would startle grouse towards a line of eight shooters, concealed in ‘butts’ – stone dugouts traditionally made of stone and trimmed by heather and moss. This innovation, fuelled by cheap human labour, enabled vast amounts of birds to be shot. During this pre-war period, the big shoots would have been owned almost entirely by royals and the peerage – and when I say big, I mean big. In 1888 Lord Walsingham (OE) personally killed 1,070 grouse in a single day on Blubberhouses Moor in Yorkshire – a rate of one every 13 seconds. On 12 August 1915, eight guns brought down the biggest bag in history, shooting a truly unfathomable 2,929 birds on the Earl of Sefton’s (OE) Abbeystead estate in Lancashire. 

But to truly understand grouse’s link with power, you have to go to White’s, in St James’s. Founded in 1693, White’s is the oldest club of its kind in London. (You have probably never been, and likely never will.) From the 1780s the club became the unofficial headquarters of the Tory party, while also becoming one of the most fashionable spots to place a bet – one of the most infamous wagers recorded was Lord Alvanley’s 1816 flutter of £3,000, or £299,000 in today’s money, betting that a particular raindrop would beat another down the club’s bow window. Since then, White’s has retained its tradition as a home from home for gentlemen, with members such as Prince Charles and Prince William (OE), as well as Tory grandees like Sir Nicholas Soames (OE). David Cameron (OE), whose late father Ian (OE) was Chairman of White’s, famously resigned his membership as he didn’t feel the club represented a modern Conservative Party.

Most of the grouse shot in England has historically gone to clubs like White’s and the other St James’s clubs. Their names are Wodehousian – Boodle’s, Brooks’s, Buck’s Club, the Carlton Club, the East India Club, Pratt’s, the Reform Club (where the fictitious Phileas Fogg started his journey around the world in 80 days) and the Turf Club, to name a few – each of them with an associated interest (the Turf’s, for example, is horseracing) and an infantile rivalry that mimics the inter-house competitions of their former private schools. The one thing all of them have typically had in common is that women were not allowed, unless to clean or cook, a quality they share with the most famous public (i.e. private) school for boys in the country: Eton College.

Eton, clubland and grouse moors form an unbreakable triangle. An Eton education provides an infinite range of foundational courses essential to accessing both the British upper-middle class (BUM) and also private members’ clubs like White’s. (There is an important distinction to be made here: unlike aristocrats who are born with a title and land, entrance to the BUM can simply be achieved via a top private education and an extremely well-paid job.) At Eton, teenagers can golf, polo, beagle (hunt with dogs) and shoot, either with rifles (think snipers) or shotguns (think grouse shooting and bank jobs). Nothing’s off limits. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (OE) famously bludgeoned a duck to death with a brick before roasting it in an orange sauce while studying there. It really should be of no wonder that Conservative prime ministers, 20 out of 55 went to Eton, govern this country without the slightest consideration of restraint – or that so-called, self-proclaimed ‘gentlemen’ could design spaces that prevented their own mothers from eating lunch with them. ‘Clubland’ was – and is – an extension of childhood: a place where women perform domestic tasks and men are free to behave as they wish without being ‘nagged’ by ‘she who must be obeyed’. 

In this respect, the food on offer is similar to restaurants that fulfil the ‘taste of home’ aspect for a diaspora: here, clubs are reminiscent of both private/boarding school and home/nursery (when my father went to Eton, he could bring back a pheasant and they would cook it for him in the tuck shop). For the uninitiated, upon first eating grouse, your primal brain might reject the taste and suggest that it might be a reasonable idea to projectile vomit. Yet I have the same connection to grouse that Grace Dent has to Angel Delight or Tom Parker Bowles (OE) has to the Duchess of Cornwall’s roasts. Decades on from my first taste, I still have an irrational longing for that heady blend of faecal and renal, its very fibres hewn from the kind of things Jay Rayner long ago trademarked as ‘the good stuff’: heather, bilberry and air so clean you want to lick it.

But the taste of grouse, like club rules, is something that divides people – those in the know versus those who are not. In an article for Eater London, food writer George Reynolds (OE) calls grouse a symbol of ‘conservatism, asymmetry and exclusion… suggestive of the things the self-appointed guardians of England’s so-called national identity hold dear: the consolidation of land and wealth into the hands of the very few.’ It seems in both production and consumption, grouse will never stop dividing palates and social strata alike.     

On 27 October 1986, the BUM exploded. Prior to this date, the major financial institutions in the UK had to be majority-owned by British shareholders. These shareholders all happened to be ‘PLU’, aka ‘People Like Us’. Margaret Thatcher, however, didn’t like this one bit, as she believed in free markets and meritocracy. So she and the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, instigated what is known as ‘Big Bang’, which broke up the fat-cat public schoolboy cabal and introduced electronic trading, new regulators and foreign ownership.

Before the Big Bang, clubland was the bastion of well-connected gentlemen who made significant amounts of money running the Empire but also the banks, insurance companies, the church and major educational institutions. Grouse hunting served critical functions for the BUM as well as the aristocracy. ‘Firstly, it allows you to show off how good your own shooting season has been, which is basically a way of showing off your wealth’, one clubland member tells me. ‘Secondly, it shows how many other clubs you’ve been invited to, if you can compare the grouse at White’s to that of rival club Boodles. This is a way of showing off your popularity.’ For the aristocracy, inviting the BUM to both rent and shoot grouse on their land and bring it back to their London clubs was necessary for their estates to survive.

Yet the ‘ghastly Americans’ – who bought up all the legacy finance houses – had a very different idea of what working life meant. Long liquid lunches with grouse, claret and port at Rules were eschewed in favour of the Pret sandwich at your desk. Gone were cigars and brandy; in came cocaine, snorted hastily in cubicles. But the Americans didn’t care, as productivity rose, and so did their profits. The knock-on effect for the BUM was profound. For generations they’d had both power and money – but, while there was an initially thrilling payday for the partners forced to sell off their stakes, this capital has been significantly eroded.

The nub of this problem is that, without the BUM funding grouse moors (and the gentlemen’s clubs that buy the grouse to sell in their dining rooms), the future of the sport is under threat. It’s not just that the modern management of grouse is steeped in risk (last year, a particularly frosty spring meant that entire broods of grouse were lost) or that environmental concerns (both for the moorland and the grouse’s natural predators) mean that there ever-growing range of vocal alliances and charities whose sole purpose is to see an end to grouse hunting. It’s also that if you want to shoot a grouse, the cost ranges from £2,000 up to £15,000 for the very best days. If you want to buy a grouse moor, you’re looking at a cost of roughly £4,000 per brace (pair) of grouse, multiplied by the average amount of brace, averaged over a ten-year period. In plain English, an average of 1,600 birds (800 brace per year) is going to set you back £3.2 million. In reality, the good shoots are bought for considerably more than that. In addition, a basic estate will need a couple of gamekeepers a year (£30,000 each) as well as houses for them to live in, Land Rovers to drive and staff to run the main estate’s lodge (circa £100,000 a year). On the shoot day itself you will need thirty beaters (£25 a day each), loaders (£90 per day) and cooks to make breakfast, elevenses (bullshot and sausage rolls), lunch, tea and dinner (another £100,000 a year).

This is why despite having controlled grouse shooting for more than a century, the peerage – Dukes, Earls and Lords – now own only half of the UK’s ten biggest moors. The new reality is that the biggest names in grouse production are not landed gentry but those whose fortunes were made possible by the Big Bang. Aside from Harry Dalmeny, two other possible candidates for the mysterious Boris Johnson phone call are Jeremy Herrmann, whose hedge fund is named after a cannibalistic trout (and who also attempted to offset his grouse moor loss as a tax deductable item), and Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross, who gifted a Caribbean holiday to the Prime Minister. Both are fresh faces in the sport, having made their own fortunes rather than inheriting them (though Ross is not exactly new money - his grandfather was a wealthy fish industrialist.) Neither went to the major public schools of their generation (Eton, Harrow or Winchester) but, most significantly, both are prominent Conservative party donors, as eager to influence Whitehall as they are to bag a brace. In this context, it would seem highly likely that Boris Johnson’s grouse moor exemption had an ulterior motive behind it regardless of what exact class strata the mystery caller belonged to.

My own attempts last year to buy a grouse confirmed the risks and environmental concerns facing the industry; before the season ended in mid-December, I went to my local butcher, The Ginger Pig in West London, where the manager, Tomasz, said he hadn’t stocked a single bird since the season began on 12 August (aka the ‘Glorious Twelfth’). The retail price of available grouse had skyrocketed to £24 per bird and most of them had gone to gentlemen’s clubs like White’s in addition to muscular restaurants that cater to aspirational food-dudes (e.g. St John and Gymkhana).

Taking advantage of a rare invite, I decided to channel my inner Bertie Wooster (OE) (and Patrick Bateman) and changed into a Huntsman midnight wool, single-breasted twill suit before hailing a black cab to White’s. I imagine that a night in the grand high-ceilinged clubrooms was once exhilarating; that the ghastly paintings of dogs and horses hung in the central clubroom were once fashionable. Yet going to White’s now is like going to an English Heritage museum, with out-of-work actors listlessly attempting to recreate the great days of clubland. The ‘experience’ has become an ordeal, every beat of the ‘customer journey’ designed to discipline you: you must wear a suit and tie, only get a drink if a chinless member orders, nor say anything to the waiter unless you are invited to. This is hospitality as punishment, echoing childhoods when parents sent their eight-year-old children to be abused by strangers.

This evening, there are only a handful of members at White’s: it appears it might not be just grouse shooting that’s in danger of dying, but the very class of people that shot them in the first place. Yet, as I sit in one of the club’s opulent dining rooms, it is as if nothing has changed, or ever will. I begin to relax, reluctantly seduced by the comforting sight of bow-tied waiters, the sound of clinking claret-filled glasses and earnest chatter. A cheery waitress comes to take our order. 

‘We’ve got lots of good things today,’ she says earnestly. ‘Lovely partridge, a whole grilled Dover sole and the venison tartare looks delicious. But I’m afraid to say, we’re plain out of grouse.’

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Credits

Justin Gayner (OE) is a media entrepreneur, former QI elf and recovering journalist based in Shepherd’s Bush. The fee for this article has been donated by the author to Age Unlimited, a charity which he is a trustee of that helps vulnerable young and old people. The charity’s first cookbook, Recipes From Le Rouzet, is available to buy here. (100% of the cover price will go to the charity.) 

The illustration is by Alex Christian, a designer and illustrator based in London. You can find more of his work at https://www.alexschristian.com

Selected bibliography:

Scott, John, The Upper Classes, Property and Privilege in Britain

Hudson, David, Grouse Shooting

Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne, trans Bell, Anthea, History of Food    

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. 

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles, including the latest newsletter on the flourishing food culture of Preston.

A Vittles subscription costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below.

Subscribe now

In late 2020, ten Indigenous leaders and organisations in the US wrote an open letter interrogating the idea that Western-led regenerative agriculture holds all the solutions to the climate crisis. The letter primarily talks about difference in language, and how perhaps even the English language itself cannot offer the answer within its structure and definitions. “Regen Ag & Permaculture often talk about what's happening 'in nature'” the letter says. “Nature is viewed as separate, outside, ideal, perfect. Human beings must practice “biomimicry” (the mimicking of life) because we exist outside of the life of Nature.”

The two newsletters today, by Sebastian Delamothe and Aimee Hartley, are about different aspects of farming — collaborative, financial, mental — but at their very heart, they are about the separation between Humans and Nature, and how trying to set up a system that looks after one but does not look after the other is inherently unsustainable. It’s a long read, so please take your time to sit with these ones.

As Season 5 comes to a close next week, this will be the last newsletter on farming on Vittles for a while. I hope that this season has got you thinking more about growing and production — if you wish to know more and follow more publications dedicated to agriculture, please find the Season 5 reading list here.

It doesn’t have to be like this, by Sebastian Delamothe

My journey to a windy, wet, hilltop farm in West Wales to make raw milk cheddar started back in March 2020, when ten years of working in kitchens and superyacht galleys had left me with nothing but gout in my big right toe. During this time, I indulged my inner epicurean. I cooked, experimented and ate a gluttonous range of high-quality ingredients, but I never really understood why prefixes like ‘grass-fed’ on grass-fed beef or ‘raw milk’ on raw milk cheese denoted quality, other than that they tended to taste better and it was something to do with how they were produced. 

Wanting to explore rural living, farming and how these ingredients were made, I moved to Germany. Over the course of the following year I worked on many iterations of low input farms, the type that supplied great produce to the restaurants I worked at – rearing mangalitsa pigs for charcuterie, pressing grapes for natural wine, harvesting white asparagus and ladling curds for lactic goat’s cheese. In the idyllic valley of Ibental in the Black Forest, I worked on a ‘mixed’ farm, meaning it didn’t specialise in one crop or animal; rather, they had pigs, chickens, potatoes and plenty of grassland. Their jewel in the crown were twenty Allgäu Brown cows: a hardy, multipurpose and, importantly, native breed that thrives outside, even in the freezing Black Forest winters. When the farm’s grass stopped growing, the cows would eat the meadow hay harvested in summer. After more than ten years of being a dairy cow they would be retired and turned into unbelievably tasty salami.

The Allgäu Brown breed fits the farm’s constraints: imported feed and antibiotics aren’t needed to maintain a high level of output – the cows transform the highly biodiverse grassland into nutrient-dense protein through the act of grazing. This experience taught me what the term ‘low input’ actually means: each farm decision is influenced by the desire to minimise external inputs and optimise resources already on the farm. It was my first farming experience but immediately I could see it made sense. Something clicked in me. 

I then wound up on a peri-urban farm, with 60 goats. This was a one-woman show; she made consistently delicious, citrussy, gooey goat’s cheese, while simultaneously doing the paperwork, milking the goats twice a day and selling the cheese at the local city market three times a week. The milk was never refrigerated or heated and it was inoculated with a whey starter (analogous to using a sourdough starter in bread baking). To make consistently good cheese like this you need to be an expert technician with vast experience and deep knowledge of the constituent levels of fat and protein, how well the milk will acidify and how the natural microflora of your animal’s milk and teats will change the flavour. It was equally impressive as overwhelming to watch, let alone be a part of for a month. 

As the year progressed, I learnt a lot and was having a great time. But something that started off as a niggle became inescapable. Yes, these small family farms were having a positive impact on their local communities and weren’t debasing their environment. Maybe their yield was less than ‘conventional’ farms, but what they lost in yield was made up for in flavour and quality. However, there was something else that united them: every single one of these farms was not financially viable.

It turned out that the small-scale family farming I had set out to learn about tends to be lonely, exhausting and economically unsustainable. These farms were ‘low input’ in every metric – except labour; had they accounted for all the hours they worked then their hourly pay would have been well below the minimum wage. Most were tenant farmers, so their work wasn’t even paying off a shadow investment. In one case, the farmers were being evicted after 20 years because their landlord wanted to convert the farmhouse into rented accommodation for inhabitants of an expanding nearby city. Without exception, each farmer had a spouse who was earning a salary off-farm. Some depended on considerable unpaid help from family members and others from cheap imported labour from the Eastern Bloc.

The grim financial reality of small family farming in Germany is replicated around the world. A farmer who sells vegetables to British supermarkets can receive as little as 9p per £1 of the retail price. Predictably, this poor return drives farmers to increase production. Ultimately, this ends up as agriculture on an industrial scale, characterised by carbon-intensive, high-input monocultures which put increased stress on the natural environment. As farmgate prices – the price of the produce paid at the farm – have decreased, smaller family farms haven’t been able to compete with larger farms’ economies of scale. Many small farms are going bust while UK farming land becomes consolidated into fewer hands. The increasing costs of electricity are not just affecting our homes; farms which typically need a lot of electricity are looking on in shock, while the red diesel and fertiliser have gone through the roof. These difficulties have been compounded by the loss of EU subsidies without any clear idea of what will replace them.  

My first error, when I set out on my quest to find out how our food is produced, was to simply equate small family farms with ‘good’ farms. As Sarah Mock explains in her article on family farms in the US, “the small family farm is less a viable business plan than a social pacifier”. Taken alongside Col Gordon’s Farmerama miniseries Landed, there is an emerging idea that the small family farm is a modern fallacy and a colonial concept. My experience in Germany and what The Prince’s Countryside Fund report explains is that the relationship between farm size and type, attitude, behaviour, environmental value and land ownership is far more complex. 

When I returned from Germany, I found myself trying to understand how a low input small family farm squares sustainable finances with its responsibilities to the environment. To seek the answer, I found a job at Bwlchwernen Fawr in West Wales. Here I am learning to make Hafod Cheddar while learning their nature-friendly farming system. We make Hafod from a herd of 80 Ayrshire cows – this is a comparatively small herd (the UK average is 150). The Ayrshires are hardy cows and excellent converters of forage to milk. Their milk has small fat particles and exactly the right balance of butter, fat and protein for cheese-making. The craft and technical knowledge of my colleagues turns this high-quality milk into a delicious raw milk cheddar. 

Bwlchwernen Fawr is the longest running organic dairy herd in Wales. Its survival story is defined by adaptability, which drove them to start making Hafod cheddar in 2007. Over the last 40 years British farmhouse cheese – by which I mean cheese made with milk from the farm it is produced on – has returned from only a handful of producers to become a growing sector. The proliferation of new farmhouse cheese producers popping up around the UK and Ireland represents an improvement in quality, quantity and flavour. Britain now produces approximately 750 distinct cheeses made by individual producers. 

The flow of cheesemakers and cheese industry people at Hafod highlights what seems to me to be an industry wide openness towards sharing information. “There is an understanding of trust based in the broader cheesemaking community which encourages respect for the shared information and the spirit in which it is shared,” says my colleague, Jenn Kast of MilkJam London. This builds a sense of solidarity, which can also be seen via acts of support between various cheesemakers. We benefited last month when another cheesemaker (who, in another industry, might be called a competitor) posted a different strain of starter culture by first-class mail for our use the following day. But where did this collegial atmosphere originate?

Historically, English cheesemaking was considered domestic work and therefore the province of women. The nineteenth century saw the consolidation of standards with regional agricultural societies funding research and itinerant dairy schools, allowing the likes of cheddar expert Edith Cannon to instruct others. Up until the late twentieth century, cheesemakers learned their craft from other women, usually a mother instructing her daughters. The Second World War and rationing rang the death knell for farmhouse cheese production and was replaced with factory-produced industrial block cheddar, defined by low prices and poor quality. 

In 1989, the farmhouse cheese community under the leadership of Randolph Hodgson, one of the founders of Neal’s Yard Dairy (NYD), the cheese shop most associated with the British farmhouse cheese revival, established the Specialist Cheesemakers Association (SCA). Its first action was to provide positive arguments for raw milk cheese in the hostile debates that were happening at the time. Its coveted ‘cheesemakers’ best cheese award carries the name of James Aldridge, whose modus operandi, like Hodgson, was to share knowledge openly and widely. 

Over the last few decades, the SCA has become a repository of technical information and advice. It provides assistance to cheesemakers dealing with overzealous Environmental Health Officers and organises an annual farm visit that affords the farmhouse cheese community a convivial weekend. Sam Horton of Longchurn Dairy explains that the association has “so much documentation and grants and funds [...] and are always at the end of the phone if you need something”. In addition, technical knowledge is shared through organisations such as the Science of Artisan Cheese (supported by the SCA and NYD) whose biannual conferences feature multi-disciplinary presentations that afterwards are shared freely online.

David Lockwood, a director of NYD, believes the modern culture of collaboration comes from necessity; for NYD to remain viable they have to deliver quality British cheese and are as dependent upon their suppliers as the cheesemakers were on them. If quality dropped, NYD wouldn’t have been able to find another maker of the same style, because there weren’t any. Instead, they had to work together to improve quality through sharing technical knowledge, rekindling the spirit of the pre-war cheese industry.

This interdependent collaboration between shop and farm can be seen in the recent case of The Courtyard Dairy and Sam and Rachael Horton’s Longchurn Dairy in Settle, North Yorkshire. Longchurn rents the land and cheesemaking room from Courtyard, providing ‘the basis for what our business needed,’ according to Horton. In addition, Horton acknowledges support from the industry as a whole: ‘Everyone is so collaborative, the vast majority of the cheesemakers […] help someone set up. It doesn’t feel like we are competitors.’ 

Retail hubs like this have been key in developing the discussion around flavour and quality, and providing a more transparent way for the public to support farmers and producers. NYD’s decision to include the cheesemakers’ name with the cheese – Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire, Montgomery’s Cheddar – marked an important step to establishing provenance in the UK food scene by linking the consumer to the farms (before this it was practice not to name producers in shops lest competitors find out what was being sold). Another element of this interdependence within the cheese community is financial. NYD has been known to tell cheese producers to increase their prices to make sure the farms remain viable. It can also be seen by NYD offering loans to cheesemakers and cheesemakers offering financial support to NYD in the event of cash flow problems during the pandemic. 

Is this collaborative nature among farmhouse cheese producers uniquely British? On the continent, French cheeses are regulated by a heavyweight classification system of Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC). Because these guidelines stifle creativity and innovation, any small competitive advantages remain well-guarded trade secrets. One of our visitors at Hafod was Trevor Warmedahl. He documents indigenous cheese making practices at Milk Trekker and has made cheese on both coasts of the United States for the last 12 years. Warmedahl attributes the lack of community in the US farmhouse cheese industry to the American value of independence and the idea of “the small farmer standing alone”. Interestingly, this rugged individualism isn’t replicated in the state of Vermont, which is a hotbed of artisan cheese production. According to Warmedahl, the diversity of great cheeses in Vermont resembles that in Britain. 

As there isn’t a clear demarcation between life and the farm, here at Bwlchwernen Fawr, things are not that different from the small family farms I visited in Germany, so it would be disingenuous to paint the British farmhouse cheese industry as the silver bullet for the struggling family farm. Until farmgate prices increase and the polluter pays principle is enforced, small family farming will remain extremely difficult. However, what NYD’s cheese buyer Bronwen Percival calls “the tender green shots of recovery” represents the beginnings of a revival of British farmhouse cheese and highlights a potential route to financial viability. I know the German dairies I worked on could produce even tastier cheese if they had access to hubs similar to NYD or Courtyard Dairy. The financial support and innovation driven by these hubs have been critical in the farmhouse cheese renaissance. Although the German farmers were connected loosely with their neighbours, they didn’t have the time to think about collaboration beyond the occasional social event. If they were to organise themselves with similar farms into food hubs where equipment, land and finance were shared, they would gain more financial independence.

As Matthew Syed writes in Rebel Ideas, a book on cognitive diversity and collective intelligence, “innovation is not just about creativity, it is about connections”. What is unique about British farmhouse cheese producers is that we understand this. We don’t exist within a bubble. 

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The Nature of Resilience, by Aimee Hartley

In the UK’s food calendar, September is a month of abundance. Summer crops of tomatoes, courgettes and runner beans are still plentiful, while the spoils of autumn are almost ready for harvesting. Yet for market gardeners, this time of year can be brutal. It was Sussex-based grower Sinead Fenton’s self-proclaimed “tired ramblings” on Instagram last year that named ‘grower burnout’ – a time each September when depression and fatigue take hold like clockwork. The quiet moment after navigating an unpredictable growing season and long days of physical work, when the “body is in shreds and the brain is exhausted”.

Fenton, alongside her partner Adam Smith, came into the world of farming five years ago after moving from London. They are part of a new generation of regeneratively minded growers in the UK who are casting aside a faceless, industrial food system in favour of a healthier, human-centric one. So hearing about this disconnect – between nurturing life in their market garden while heavily depleting their own resources – feels all the more alarming. “A lot of us (growers) are preaching the talk around regeneration, regenerative farming, healing the land etc, but we often forget about ourselves within this,” continues Fenton. “We were drawn to this work, outdoor work, because of a system that has been pushing us too much, extracting from us, yet we are falling into the same patterns.”

Recent surveys on poor mental health in the farming sector are shedding more light on just how acute the problem is. According to a recent report from the Farm Safety Foundation, 92 per cent of farmers under 40 ranked poor mental health as the biggest problem they face today. This year, R.A.B.I – a national charity supporting farmers in England and Wales – launched a free counselling and psychotherapy service on the back of an extensive survey they published last year. One of the most profound findings was that over a third of farmers in the UK declared that they are ‘likely’ suffering from depression, due to a combination of isolation, environmental stressors and financial insecurity, not to mention the impact of the pandemic, where farmers worked harder than ever to keep the rest of the population fed.

“One of the realities of modern-day farming is people working in remote locations,” says Abby Rose, co-founder of Farmerama, a podcast about regenerative agriculture. “Many people in the city lust after isolation, but experiencing this day in and day out is really challenging.” Having fled city life in Bristol for the rolling hills of Somerset, herdswoman Hannah Steenbergen is no stranger to the challenges of rural living and solo farming. Hannah manages 38 rare breed cows – the majority of which are bred for beef. “One of the biggest challenges of working alone is problem-solving,” says Steenbergen. “A few months ago, one of the cows got his head stuck in the feed barrier. My dad (an organic farmer in Lincolnshire) taught me to imitate the sound of a horse fly so the cow could get himself out. I thought, ‘who else can I bother at 9pm with these kinds of questions?’.” 

Steenbergen’s predicament is endemic to many farmers today. As little as 80 years ago – before WWII and the advent of industrialisation – there were more people on farms, a sense of teamwork and camaraderie, and a physical place to ask questions and share knowledge. For Steenbergen, online forums such as Regenerative Women on the Land and WhatsApp groups like Somerset and Dorset Regenerative Farmers have helped to plug this gap and find the support she needs both practically and emotionally: “While the WhatsApp groups are good for problem solving, forums such as Regenerative Women on the Land are less about what you’re doing day to day on the farm, but how you’re connecting to it.” 

Alongside social media, these types of virtual communities have become a lifeline for farmers working independently and living remotely, providing both social connection and a space to share practical advice. But Rose is cautious about placing too much weight on them as the solution: “We need to be part of a community to thrive. To share in the hardships as well as celebrate the good times. This shared experience – the physicality of it all – plays a key role in farmers’ mental health. The idea that social media could fill that need entirely simply isn't true.”

For Peter Greig, a second-generation farmer and the founder of Piper’s Farm, it is rebuilding the resilience of rural communities and family farms that is not just integral to our farmers’ mental health, but to the future of Britain’s farming landscape. For more than 30 years Greig has worked passionately and tirelessly with local, small-scale farms – supporting younger generations of farmers who had either left, or were struggling to find viable ways to keep the family business afloat. 

The model that he has created for Piper’s – which involves a collective of 40 family farms selling sustainably-produced meat, dairy and pantry provisions straight to customers – has empowered farmers to find an alternative route to market that places human health (their own, and consumers) at the forefront. “It is based on the principle that a functional market is dependent on multiple individuals having access to multiple small scale units of production,” enthuses Greig. “Industrialising the food chain has not only brought terrifying challenges to human health – but placed a huge amount of power in the hands of giant corporations. Food has become a faceless commodity, with most producers not even knowing where their food is going.”

The disconnect between farmers and the food they’re producing is easily mirrored in our own relationship to the food we eat. Just as farmers are largely unaware as to whose plate their food ends up on, we too, as consumers, have no idea who’s making it. Conversely, in a regenerative system, where human input and nutritious food is both a necessary and valued part of the equation, there is room for both farmer and consumer to flourish. The Pipers’ model offers an intricate understanding of how closely the two are linked, of how fundamentally connected our farmers’ mental, emotional and physical wellbeing is to our own. Greig believes this shared sense of responsibility is a platform in which to invite newcomers into rural spaces to help regenerate them: “By inviting those with diverse skills to set up enterprises around artisanal production outside of cities, we can bolster the health of local landscapes and encourage those who live there to be a part of it, too. Then there is a shared vision in which we are all connected.” 

This kind of rural revival – based on the resilience of local ecosystems and linked-up communities – is cropping up in various guises across the UK. Tim May is a fourth-generation farmer at Kingsclere Estate in Hampshire who innately understands the nuanced relationship between ecological, financial and human health. He has been exploring the future of farming through a regenerative lens and a progressive ‘circular community’. In 2021, he invited bright young minds to pitch for space on the estate to develop their environmentally-friendly enterprises. From start-up farmers, chefs and drinks producers to textile producers, craftspeople and wildlife experts, all ideas and backgrounds were welcome. “We know that in order to sustainably grow our business, we need to diversify,” says May. “By creating access to land and funds, we can give people the time, support and guidance they need to develop their own ideas, as well as inviting them to be part of the bigger picture.”

The same idea has taken root at Wave Hill Farm in South Devon, where Emilie Savary and John Crisp started out farming with a flock of pasture-fed sheep. In the last few years they’ve been moving towards a mixed, ‘closed-loop’ farming system, where a collective of like-minded businesses make the most of each other’s raw materials or by-products within the same plot of land. From a market garden to a micro dairy, brewery and bakery, Savary and Crisp wanted to invite people to be a part of the farm who would struggle to access land otherwise. “This mixed farm system looks a lot like what you’d imagine a traditional farm to be,” says Savary. “It involves more people, a community. We take it in turns to cook for each other and cover each other’s jobs when we need time off.” 

For Savary, Wave Hill has been both the “best and the worst” for her mental health. Five years ago, amidst caring for two children, writing a dissertation, working a full-time job and helping out on the farm, her body keeled over from chronic fatigue: “It’s been a hell of a struggle. I’ve had to completely rethink how I allocate my time and energy – from how the farm is run to how I care for myself and my family. Really, we’ve created a needs-based system, built around our physical and mental wellbeing. The regenerative, environmental side of this is in some ways just a by-product of this.” 

This approach, which places the mental health of farming people first and foremost, seems both intuitive and radical. And perhaps an easier one to digest for regeneratively-minded farmers rather than those who’ve been working on conventional farms for decades. “Within a conventional farming model, which relies on a chemical-based, high-input system, many people have huge debts accumulating interest that need servicing all of the time,” says Rose. While regenerative farming becomes less financially precarious over time and the cost of production is much lower, the mounting pressure on conventional farmers to take on more risk and dramatically change their business model is a difficult conversation to navigate. 

Crucially, there needs to be a more open dialogue between those employing regenerative practices and those who aren’t – a space to discuss ideas and listen without judgement. Before becoming a farmer herself, Savary spent 15 years helping others manage their composting schemes and learning as much as she could about the challenges that conventional farms face: “I am really interested in transitions. In talking to farmers working with conventional practices and seeing where they’re coming from. By learning to truly listen and speak their language, over simply condemning their practices, we can start to imagine what the transition to a more agroecological model might look like – and feel like – for them. We can create more space for the right type of conversations and help remove the stigma of asking for help.”

The nature of regenerative farming is in its essence about creating life. Restoring, replenishing, reviving – it is about bringing our soils, and perhaps ourselves, back to life in some way. For those in cities, the rise of urban and peri-urban community growing projects is associated with improving mental health and creating valuable opportunities for healing and connection – particularly in the face of the pandemic. But for those who are driving this paradigm shift in the countryside, waging a peaceful war against the global, industrialised nature of our food system, the price is high, both for farm owners and those who work alongside them. “It’s easy to focus on the environmental benefits of regenerative farming, but if you are killing yourself in the process, it’s just not sustainable. To be truly regenerative, you need a system that is as healing for the land as it is for people working it,” says Savary. 

Her words feel like a rallying cry – not simply to redesign our flawed agricultural system, but to redefine our roles within it. This message feels as relevant for farmers, whether working regeneratively or with conventional practices, as it does for those who consume their food. It is an open, inclusive invitation to start asking questions about the nuanced, inter-linked relationship between our own health and planetary health – a platform that regenerative farming has given us. Perhaps within these more compassionate, exploratory parameters, the definition of resilience in an industry – and increasingly a world – so well versed in survival can truly begin to change. 

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Credits

Sebastian Delamothe is a cheesemaker and apprentice farmer. For the last two years he’s been working on small family farms. For the best part of a decade before that he was a professional cook with an 18 month stint as a cheesemonger.

Aimee Hartley is an editor and journalist based in Somerset. In 2015 she founded Above Sea Level, an independent print magazine offering a new perspective on wine. Aimee is also the co-founder of Twelve Noon, a creative studio for food, drink and hospitality with editorial at its heart.

All photos in ‘It doesn’t have to be like this’ credited to Sebastian Delamothe.

Many thanks to Liz Tray for proofing.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. 

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles, including the latest newsletter, which is on Calder Valley’s tradition of dock pudding and an account of this year’s world championship dock pudding competition.

A Vittles subscription costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

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Two things on the noticeboard today. First of all, Vittles will be holding a panel talk at the British Library in London this Saturday on the subject of ‘What is British Food Writing?’ where we’ll be discussing the tone and function of British food writing throughout history (from Mrs Beeton to Red Hot Entertainment) and looking at where it might go. Am v thrilled to say that the panel will be Angela Hui, Yvonne Maxwell, Lucy Dearlove and Pen Vogler (and there may be a very rare appearance by me as host). If you would like to attend then please sign up here.

Secondly, one of the contributors to this newsletter, Ben Benton, is working on launching a small independent cookbook press, Saturday Boy Books saturdayboy.com to publish new and underrepresented voices in food. One of the key tenets of the press will be its commitment to encouraging the careers of new and emerging food writers and cooks. It is their core belief that there is extraordinary talent out there, but that many of those voices may not yet be known or are not yet deemed ‘commercially viable’ to the mainstream publishers. If you wish to submit anything or learn more, please do so via the website here.

What is the most important drink in the world? Well, water, technically. But it is masala chai that holds the distinction of being the only drink, or food, that contains the three most consequential ingredients in modern history, all bound together in a small disposable pottery cup: tea, sugar and spice. Trace back the ingredients in masala chai and you get a history lesson: from tea, you will learn about 2000 years of Chinese culture, the spread of Daoism, the Opium Wars, the ascent of Britain as a world power, the Industrial Revolution, the independence of America, the creation of the minimalist Japanese aesthetic you can find everywhere from Scandinavia to your local coffee shop; from spice, you will learn about the formation of modern Europe, colonial trade routes, and the creation and evolution of all major cuisines; from sugar, the Middle Passage, the formation and abolition of the slave trade, the creation of the modern Caribbean and the creation of modern America. The lengths undertaken, the evil wrought to bring you a drink you throw on the floor once you’re finished, is almost too much to think about.

And yet, while these ingredients take you through the grand sweep of history, they have personal histories too, intimate histories that tell us about family and identity, each one unique. Today’s newsletter by Ben Benton and Kareem Arthur tell two of those histories through two family recipes that use sugar or spice, their production outside of Britain, and how each one has provoked a personal reckoning with the past. The recipes, I’m thrilled to say, are reproduced exactly as they were written: for the recipe too is not just the history of the dish, but the story of who wrote it and who they wrote it for.

Spice, by Ben Benton

My grandparents were not gourmands by any stretch. Their formative years were post-war and they were working-class; their diet: meat and two veg. Family celebrations were known to happen at The Gatwick Hilton, regardless of there being no flight to catch, while culinary luxury was found in ‘grand’ coastal hotels: The Hythe Imperial in Kent, The Grand at Eastbourne, The Toorak in Torquay. They would take cookery classes if they spent any length of time at these hotels; a chef in a high-starched toque would take them through beef wellington or crepe suzette or duck a l’orange. Once, at The Hythe Imperial, they were shown this way with kedgeree. 

Kedgeree is a succinct example of the influence of spices, their colonial passage and adoption in British cooking, but also shows how vernacular British food was actually transformed and enlivened by spice. These were not things brought in by middle-class gourmands but were very much in everyday use. My grandparents, for instance, had a very well-stocked spice cupboard; my grandmother would boil her carrots in a little orange juice, butter and caraway, my grandfather would stud his onions with cloves for a sauce. Their little corner cupboard that spun around when you pulled it out would always have two types of mustard seeds, black, white and green peppercorns (peppercorn sauce was in the ascendancy in the Surrey of my childhood), always mace and nutmeg, cassia and cinnamon, cayenne and paprika. 

I learnt about these spices from my grandfather, a product of the world wars. He leant towards history and global economics as the vehicles with which to try and enlighten me about the world, a method not always met with enthusiasm, but when he spoke of food and where it came from – how trade routes, globalisation and colonialism had influenced what we cooked and ate here at home – he had me hooked. With a Dorling Kindersley World Atlas and his laminated kedgeree recipe, I vividly recall him showing me Zanzibar and Sri Lanka, Kerala and Madagascar, pointing to distant places where each of these gnarled, perfumed things came from.

Today, I am a chef, cookbook author and editor with a similarly well-stocked spice cupboard. I recently edited a manuscript for a cookbook where the author had specified Espelette pepper for a particular dish, Tellicherry black pepper for another, instructions I liked for their specificity and authenticity, but which I also suggested he remove. The home cook should not be sent into a tailspin, I argued, by the search for such specific seasoning. The author’s response was pragmatic and the specificity was removed, but the simple edits left me feeling sad. I was left wondering: should it be the job of chefs and cookbook writers to influence buying patterns and the sourcing of spices? Should the cook on the ground be expected to consider their spices in the same way they have started to consider their meat, vegetables and washing-up detergent? And, if the home cook were to want to scrutinise their spices, how easy might that be, what might they discover? How has our consumption of spices changed over the past three decades since I sat and traced the route of cinnamon from Sri Lanka back to Surrey?

If I go back to that kedgeree recipe, the routes we traced are no longer the same. The ginger, turmeric and black pepper of that recipe came from Kerala (Alleppey, Cochin and Tellicherry most likely), the cloves from the Maluku (or Spice) Islands, an archipelago in Indonesia, the cinnamon stick was from Sri Lanka. It was a sweeping arc, liveried in the Atlas in the red of colonial Britain, from the map’s south-eastern corner back to the UK. Vasco de Gama was mentioned, I’m sure, although I mainly recall the clatter of metal spoon on porcelain platter which told me that scented rice was being mixed with yellow fish, and that ochre-yolked eggs, cut into rounds, were being placed on top. With the benefit of hindsight, though, and a good few decades of education, the elephant in the room after those early chats over the atlas is that the all of the routes traced were colonial, likely opened up and operated by the East India Company, and thus a multitude of sins and issues are inherent within. 

A Market Insider report on global spice production would suggest that, today, my black pepper is as likely to have been produced in Brazil as in India, my ginger is most likely Nigerian or Chinese, the cloves likely come from the hills of Sri Lanka, or from Madagascar or Zanzibar, as does the cinnamon stick. The turmeric might still be from Kerala, or it might be from Vietnam or Iran. The reasons are a medley of opportunism, trade deals, government contracts, the comparative advantage of the new players versus the incumbent and global capitalism, which is always looking for a new foothold, new frontier for investment, for yield, to generate returns. That I ever thought otherwise, that I had a misplaced romanticism of spices coming from specific places only because of tradition, is down to a British education that does not approach our troublesome colonial past with any sense of historiography.

No matter the where of production, the sheer scale of modern spice production does raise questions of quality. A visit to a Keralan spice factory a few years ago revealed a surprisingly manual process; the stems were removed by hand from chillies destined for powder and most stages in the process from fumigation to drying to processing to packing had considerable manual elements. But when any product is produced at mass and for yield, shortcuts are inevitably taken; according to one particularly bombastic report I read recently by the Seasoning and Spice Association, “at the cheaper end of the market, adulteration is often practised by spice manufacturers to gain additional profit. Certain stages of the process can be eradicated.” By this they mean the careful natural fumigation and drying, “with chemicals added into the process as a shortcut”. This would be anathema to the professional chef and the home cook alike if we were considering our dairy or our dried goods. The same report goes on to suggest that some large manufacturers will “employ the use of fillers, ranging from cheap spice extracts to flours, with some places adding toxic and carcinogenic dyes to spices, to enhance their colour and appeal.”

All of this should be common knowledge when buying spices or, indeed, anything with spices in. My local coffee shop tells me in painstaking detail of the high-welfare criteria of its beans and milk, but would they know, or care, where the cardamom in their buns comes from? If a spice farm is operating under Fair Trade, a paltry 15% premium on the cost of producing the crop is paid to the farmer; if not, then the margin for profit will be negligible and the farmer will return to their farm to eke out yet another unprofitable harvest, while the traders and importers process their keenly priced raw ingredients for profit. By the time exporters, spice companies and supermarkets have had their hand in moving the spices around the world, the whole process might have taken years; two at best, up to six or seven at worst. Any farm that manages to produce a consistent supply throughout the year will need to be using vast quantities of sprays and water and heat to create consistent conditions, or if not that, then someone along the line will have to be pimping and adorning the poor-quality crop that they can produce, and none of that can be good; not for us or the environment, nor for the flavour of the crop itself.

As with all these things, there is already an enlightened niche, be they the communities themselves in spice-growing regions, or the more engaged shopper the world over, who are already taking considerable care and attention to find out where their spices come from, who produces them and how they are ending up in their chicken methi or samosa chaat. But we need the mass market to demand better if we are to move the needle. The cumulative influence of localised consumer demand and buying patterns, extrapolated globally, can move the juggernaut of global supply, eventually, even if we are still reliant on Bart or Schwartz and at the whims of the global marketplace. As cooks, we are at the thin edge of the wedge in terms of spice consumption. The proliferation of ready meals, an increased interest in global cuisines among keen home cooks, health fads such as turmeric lattes and ginger, fennel and liquorice teas, etc, have driven the huge growth in spice consumption in Europe and the US in recent times. But perhaps we can do our little bit by considering our spices when we do buy them, and not wait for chefs and cookbook authors to lead us there. 

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Places to buy spices

Diaspora & Co – https://www.diasporaco.com/collections/all#spices (American) – Expensive, and as such I actually can’t make a case for them at home, but in recipe development the brightness and clarity of their spices makes them an absolute joy to cook with. 

Rooted – https://rootedspices.com/ – for some reason I buy into the narrative and they seem to be cleverly placed (price-wise). Whilst their spices are perhaps not quite as alive as someone like Diaspora, this London-based company blow away the dusty nonsense available readily on the high street. 

The Spicery – https://www.thespicery.com/spicestore-shop – based in Bristol, I worked with these guys a little bit back in the day when I helped Stevie Parle on his book with Emma Grazette, Spice Trip. They were a very impressive outfit then and I have used them over the years since. 

Spice Mountain – https://www.spicemountain.co.uk/product-category/spices/ They have a mad range of spices and other nice stuff and I’ve always found the quality to be pretty good. Order online or visit the Borough Market stall. 

The Spice Shop – https://thespiceshop.co.uk/herbs-and-spices – The OG for me. I lived in Ladbroke Grove when I first moved to London and these guys were my local dealer. I don’t actually know how they stand up in terms of sourcing etc, but I would say I’ve always found their spices to be great. 

Sous Chef – https://www.souschef.co.uk/collections/herbs-spices – Tbh I do quite often buy some of the more esoteric bits and pieces I need for recipe development etc from Sous Chef. I find that the more generic spices etc are perhaps not of the most compelling nature, but for niche bits and pieces they are a great resource. 

Sugar, by Kareem Arthur

Grandma Joyce always used to make coconut bread. During half-term, my mum and I would take the trip up to Banbury in Oxfordshire where she lived and there it would be, sitting on the wooden dresser next to the fridge waiting for our arrival, wrapped tightly in tin foil. It was dense, not quite a bread but not a cake either. She would always make extra: one would accompany her on the return leg too when she’d drive down to us in London with a loaf in her bag, along with M&S sausage rolls she’d picked up at the petrol station on the way. 

A handwritten recipe for coconut bread, or sweetbread as it is also called in Barbados, lives and travels with me from home to home. It fell out of a book I borrowed from my mum that she’s had since she was in her twenties called Cooking in Barbados (written by Charlotte Hingston with illustrations by Jill Walker). It’s one of my favourite books. Most copies don’t actually contain a recipe for sweetbread, something that has always been surprising to me. I always expect to see it nestled between the banana cake and the pineapple pie. But mine does. It was written by my mother when she was 19; she scribbled down a recipe before she went to university, I guess, as a way for her to take with her a piece of home. My mum’s handwriting is the kind I dreamed of having when I grew up. It swirls and swooshes across the page elegantly like the dancer she is herself, every letter perfectly joined. At the top there’s a personalised sentence which says “A note from Karen” then below that ‘COCONUT BREAD’ in capital letters – a recipe enough for exactly two loaves. The fourth ingredient down, along with the red glacé cherries and raisins, is key to making this treat delectable – 6oz of caster sugar. 

The UK’s sugar industry is worth £740 million. Its origins lie in the Caribbean, on island sugar plantations which flourished during the 19th century. These islands included Martinique, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Croix, the Leeward Islands, Saint Domingue, Cuba and Barbados itself. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe and are where the origin stories of famous sugar companies in the UK, such as Tate & Lyle, began. It would be this sugar, both its profits and the fuel it provided for workers in industrial Britain, that would help shape the modern world. 

Andrea Stuart’s book Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire tells the story of the sugar plantations, intertwined with the journey of her ancestors, of their migration from the UK to Barbados in 1625 to their life on the island during the 19th century. I found the book in a bid to learn more about Barbados and its histories; reading it, I realised that sugar production was a particular type of hell. Producing sugar was a labour-intensive process and slaves were required to do all of the work, starting with harvesting the crop in the fields with the heat from the rays of the glowing sun directly permeating onto their bare skin. The work began from early dawn until nightfall, the days were long, the climate was hot and the job was a daily risk. In order to create those coveted jewels, the juice must be derived from the sugarcane crop and refined. Slaves not only cut the sugarcane, but every plantation had its own sugar mill, boiling house and curing house. 

Among the fear, anger and sorrow I also found some sense of empowerment, like in the story of Bussa, a saltwater slave who in 1816 led one of the biggest rebellions in history on the island. Bussa’s statue was created 1985 by Bajan sculptor Karl Broodhagen, 169 years after the rebellion, and symbolises the breaking of chains. Another person who fought for the abolition of slavery was who Stuart describes as a forgotten heroine, a Quaker from Leicester called Elizabeth Heyrick. In her pamphlet An Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of Women, which was distributed widely around Britain in 1828, she made judgments on those who were contributing to the suffering of slaves, particularly those in the West Indies. She made direct links between the suffering of slaves and the consumption of sugar, declaring that “by buying sugar we participate in crime”, a riposte to those who claim that changing values meant that the British didn’t know the production of the crop was immoral. 

For a long time, before the island relied on its thousands of visitors each year, the trade of sugar was what Barbados leant on to support its economy. Until the beginning of the 1990s, Barbados not producing sugar wasn’t something that many could envisage. Since the decline of the industry and trade to Europe, Barbados has since had to rethink how it can support the island’s economy and where this leaves the sugar trade for them. Today the biggest suppliers and producers of sugar worldwide are India and Brazil. Caribbean countries now produce less than 0.3% of the world’s sugar. With Trinidad closing its last sugar factory in 2007, only five Caribbean countries still produce sugar: Belize, Jamaica, Guyana, Cuba and Barbados. Barbados no longer participates in the European trade (production is mainly used as local supply and to trade with neighbours) and at present there are only two factories left still producing sugar: the Portvale Sugar Factory and Andrews Sugar Factory, both in the parish of St. Joseph. 

Yet it is still very much part of the local culture. Crop Over, an annual and much-awaited celebration that takes place in July-August, is a carnival that celebrates the end of the season and is part of Bajan culture. The tradition was first celebrated in 1625 at the end of the harvest season. The king and queen growers are crowned and parties go on long through the night until dawn. There is one company that sells locally and supplies some of the best restaurants and pastry chefs in Barbados: Plantation Reserve, a mill that supplies sugarcane for a revitalised local industry on the island.

Sugar has also become a big part of a Bajan’s palette: conkies are made with a mix of cornmeal, brown sugar, raisins and nutmeg, which are then steamed in a banana leaf and traditionally enjoyed on Independence Day which takes place on November 30th; Bajan bakes are a shallow, fried, flat dumpling eaten for breakfast and made with a dough containing brown sugar and sweet spices – the perfect accompaniment to fried eggs and avocado; cassava pone is a sweet dessert made from grated cassava and coconut, currants, cherries, all brought together into an aromatic mix filled with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and, of course, brown sugar. New companies such as Plantation Reserve are looking to reframe Barbados’ sugar in a new light and use it as a chance to support small local producers. 

What struck me the most when reading Stuart’s memoir was how little I knew of the history of sugar, this fruitful crop. The fields of cane will no longer look the same to me next time I visit Barbados, and the island will feel somewhat different. In turn, the England that I was born in, and my connection to it, feels more distant. If sugar is part of the fabric of Barbados history, even beyond slavery, it is also the same in the UK. This economy wouldn’t be half of what it is today without the effects of the sugar industry and the plethora of wealth that it’s brought to this country. 

For me and many other Caribbean folk, sugar is seamlessly woven throughout our culture and cuisine: delicious foods and baked goods made by elders to make life a little sweeter and childhood even more memorable. But the history of sugar and the bleak path it took to be able to use it in abundance isn’t something to take lightly. Although the production and process has evolved since its origins, its beginnings should be respected and the people who suffered should be honoured. It’s important that everyone is aware of the people who made its popularity possible.

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Credits

Ben Benton is a writer and cook with an interest in how we eat in England. He has have a particular soft spot for the everyday food of the suburbs, both nostalgic and current. He unpacks this, alongside thoughts on his own personal greed, each week through his newsletter, No Cartouche, and can be found on Instagram. 

Kareem Arthur is a writer from South East London. Her work focuses on food justice, the origin of ingredients, different cooking cultures and food systems around the globe. Centred around women she also tells stories about their relationships with the kitchen, the emotional connections that we have with food and how the act of cooking positively contributes to our mental wellbeing. You can find Kareem through her website www.kareemarthur.com 

The handwritten family recipes in the photos are reproduced with the permission of the authors.

Many thanks to Liz Tray for additional edits and proofing.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. 

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles, including the latest newsletter, which is a two-part master guide for newcomers and tourists on where to eat in London.

A Vittles subscription costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

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Like all British people I was born with a biscuit in my mouth. My mum did not lovingly feed me wet rice with her hands, nor okro stew, but the tea soaked mush of Rich Tea biscuits. My father was a Jammy Dodger. We, the British, don’t have a fully coherent cuisine, but we do have Hobnobs, Digestives, and Jaffa Cakes. ‘The way in which the British eat is as formally structured as a Bach sonata,’ the social anthropologist Mary Douglas once wrote ‘but there is one coda: the biscuit’

I came across the quote in an excellent essay on the industrialisation of the biscuit by Catherine Flood, in the book ‘London’s Kitchen: Industry, Culture and Space in Park Royal’. Flood posits that there were three things that made the biscuit so central to the construction of British identity: sugar from the West Indies that made them cheap and available to the working class; their unexpectedly perfect pairing with milky tea, that together formed the tea break; and the ease at which they were industrialised, which allowed for people across the country, no matter what social class, to experience the same sensation (a hundred years before Warhol made the same observation about Coca Cola). ‘The biscuit has a unique relationship with the factory,’ Flood writes ‘not only as an industrially manufactured product, but as a food intimately bound up with the routines of work (and leisure) that the factory system produced.’

Biscuits are a food group that connotes a certain authenticity and democracy, as food writers from Nigella Lawson to Ruby Tandoh have observed. Only yesterday, I went to Anna Higham’s launch of her wonderful book The Last Bite, at which her take on Hobnobs were served to the disappointment of absolutely no-one. In its politician interviews, the forum Mumsnet always asks the question ‘what is your favourite biscuit?’ not for the answer, but to see how they answer it (notoriously Gordon Brown dithered on the question twelve times, prompting the user FlamingoBingo to declare ‘He's lost my vote for good. I'm absolutely livid!’)

Yet the democratic nature of biscuits, as Sharanya Deepak says in today’s newsletter, doesn’t mean they ‘[erase] the sweeping distinctions in the ways that…different classes live and eat’. Nor is the biscuit a neutral, passive observer. India has an even more complex relationship with the biscuit than the British, forced upon a country and then gleefully adopted, overtaking even the British obsession with them. And just as the British biscuit facilitated the move of workers into a factory rhythm, the Indian biscuit has been formed by and then reinforced the new nation state. To consume a Parle-G or a Milk Biki is to participate in story that the nation state tells itself over and over again to birth itself. Reader beware: think about it for too long while dunking and it might just fall off in your chai.

The Story of the Nation State in Five Biscuits, by Sharanya Deepak

As a teenager growing up in East Delhi, biscuits were my chosen snack. They were sweet, portable, and easy to slip into a bag to eat on neighbourhood street corners, where I spent most of my time watching boys fight over beautiful girls and parking spots. In the early 2000s, the Indian snack market was ablaze with new, flashy brands of beverages, biscuits and chips that came in bright packets with slapstick slogans and zany American-sounding names. I was impressed by the different textures of the biscuits – by craters, and crunch, and new fillings like pink strawberry jam and coffee-flavoured biscuit cream. I remember thinking that eating this way would make us more internationally savvy. I have memories of being dizzied by the nifty packaging and plastic colours that accompanied this flush of Western capitalism. These new snacks frightened my mother, but drove both my father and me to hide at the shops, where we sifted through the selection of compact packaged goods.

Today, biscuits are one of the fastest-growing manufactured food industries in India, but not so long ago, before economic liberalisation in the 1990s, the biscuit industry was formed of small manufacturers that emerged from local, regionalised exchange. Before that, it was defined by the British regime in India, where the biscuit market consisted predominantly of tinned boxes of Huntley & Palmers, which remained unaffordable to both the Indian and British working classes. The presence of these biscuits in an elevated, inaccessible market premised an early aspiration to them; even until fifty years ago, the mass-produced biscuit was a luxury, an experiment that industries – first home-grown, then multinational – undertook on the country’s massive consumer base. 

Biscuits are, as everything is in India, defined by who eats them, and where. Through looking at shifts in production that defined the biscuit industry post-1947 (after Indian independence), you can track India’s agricultural and industrial production, consumer identities, the aesthetics of consumption, and evolving preferences of taste. These biscuits can tell us about trends, shifts and the influence of global cultures on Indian food – all driven by the engine of the new Indian nation-state.      

1947–51

Parle-G (Post-independence production; refined wheat)

Parle-G is the most consumed biscuit in the world. It is the backbone of many stories of childhood, and is associated with the oft-uttered, much exaggerated phenomenon of being a ‘bridge between rich and poor’, as if occasionally eating a common product erases the sweeping distinctions in the ways that Indians of different classes live and eat. But it also tells of India’s most eaten and most notorious food group: mass-produced, highly refined wheat. 

Historically, Indians did not consume mass-produced refined wheat. Even until the twentieth century, the diets of agrarian communities consisted predominantly of native varieties of rice and distinct types of millets. But by the 1920s, wheat was a well-cultivated crop under British rule, with the canal colonies of Punjab, the areas of Berar, and the Central Provinces converted into wheat-growing tracts for exporting grain to British industry. A large amount of this wheat was not used for family-scale domestic consumption; instead, it was used to manufacture foodstuffs such as bread and biscuits – which are, as historian Lizzie Collingham notes, the most ‘durable way to preserve wheat’.

Before Parle, the wheat flour biscuit was a luxury afforded only to colonial officers, memsahibs and elite Indians in the subcontinent. When the Swadeshi movement, which demanded that Indians boycott British goods, began in 1905, Indian businessmen saw an opportunity to start making home-grown versions of popular foods. Among these men was Mohanlal Chauhan, who foresaw the popularity of the manufactured British-style confectionary and opened a factory under the name ‘Parle’ – named after the village ‘Parla’ in Mumbai – in 1929. Chauhan acquired machinery from Europe to make treats like candied toffees and sweets, as well as a glucose biscuit which provided a quick swipe of energy in a compact, flat-shaped biscuit made up of  sugar, edible oil, and refined wheat flour. The Parle glucose biscuit was also sent in large quantities to British-Indian soldiers fighting in World War II, and it was through this exporting that Chauhan sustained his business in a time when almost all production in India was geared towards the war.   

Meanwhile, India was inching towards freedom from British rule, emerging as a partitioned free country in August 1947 – albeit one swarming with displacement and wide, ravaging hunger. The Parle glucose biscuit stitched itself into this time, promising to provide ‘shakti’, or energy, and becoming a symbolic stand-in for nutrition and sustenance, both of which India lacked. However, independent India was short on food grain. Because wheat was the most abundant and cheaply produced food grain in the nations of the Global North, it was also the main measure of scarcity and relief. 

In 1951, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, undertook the ‘wheat loan’ from American President Harry Truman after he was unable to respond to this challenging spell of hunger. Three years later, 10 million tonnes of wheat under Public Law 480 (PL480) was sent by the Eisenhower administration to India as aid. The base Indian diet then had to modify itself to synchronise with this global aid; the PL480 wheat was a non-native hybrid not entirely favourable to Indians, but in desperate times it pervaded kitchens, markets and palates, normalising mass-produced wheat which was then used to make rotis and bread. Even though the United States temporarily stopped its exports of PL480 wheat to India in the 1960s, when the government criticised US bombings in Vietnam, Indian consumers had become accustomed to the taste of wheat, and even developed a desire for it. In the late 1960s – when the Green Revolution took over the agricultural output of the country – refined wheat, once scarce, was now produced everywhere, and available for consumption and processing into wheat flour to make biscuits. 

1970s

The Karachi Bakery Fruit Biscuit (Local bakeries; fruit flavourings)

Karachi Bakery was one of several food establishments set up by new migrants and refugees after 1947,  into both sides of the freshly made border. While companies like Parle set their sights on cultivating pan-national identity, institutions like Karachi Bakery became emblematic of the cities they arrived in and the ones they were from. Today, Karachi Bakery’s most popular product is the ‘fruit biscuit’, a square butter-biscuit that is inlaid with small pieces of bright, multi-coloured candied fruit called tutti-frutti, a name which originates from the Italian phrase for ‘all the fruits’. It is this sweet to which the biscuit owes its fame. Years before it became a phrase used to describe food flavouring, tutti-frutti was the name for a jewellery style devised by the European aristocracy, where gemstones were carved in the Mughal courts in India to form natural motifs that resembled berries, flowers and fruits.  

Tutti-frutti was first made in India by a brand named Nilon’s – a small factory started by brothers Suresh and Prafful Sanghavi in Jalgaon, Maharashtra in 1962. Before they set up and licensed their brand, the family behind Nilon’s produced lime cordial and syrups to be shipped to the British army during World War II. Like Parle’s biscuits, exporting regular and tinned fruit was also a lucrative business because these products were manufactured for the war; preserving and pickling were otherwise household activities, not meant for business. 

In the 1970s, Nilon’s decided to branch out from making fruit preservatives and emulate tutti-frutti, then popular in the United States. But unlike what its name suggests, the tutti-frutti produced by Nilon’s contained only papaya, which is native to Maharashtra and easy to grow. The fruit was harvested, cut, dried, coloured and then preserved in a sugar syrup before it was packaged in small glass bottles and sent to vendors across the country. The small, chewy bits of sugar didn’t taste like much but they lent theatricality, curiosity, colour and whim to the dishes to which they were added. 

In many urban South Asian cuisines, there is an impulse to customise and modify foreign influences. It is what historian Utsa Ray usefully calls ‘indigenising hybridity’ when she speaks about how stews with ghee and spicy mutton cutlets entered the diets of middle-class Bengalis in colonial Bengal. The idea of eating something that mimics foreign fancies is popular in South Asian manufactured foods and, in many ways, tutti-frutti was an original model of this impulse: it took European frills and made an approachable, accessible indulgence for people on the other side of the world. 

In 2020, my friend Sadaf Hussain brought my attention back to tutti-frutti when he mentioned a childhood favourite, ‘shake’, that he drank outside university in Ranchi, Jharkhand. Shake is a cold, liquid custard resembling a milkshake, garnished with cashews and tutti-frutti. I asked him what the point of tutti-frutti was in this concoction – ‘It tastes of nothing’, I said. Sadaf ignored my predictable scorn of the condiment. ‘Bas chamatkaar, mazaydaar banana tha kisi cheez ko’, he replied.

‘What do you mean what was the point? It was to make something feel like spectacular, meaningless fun, that’s all.’

1980s

Milk Bikis (Industrialisation of milk, and producing milk powder)

With smooth imports of edible oil, the stabilisation of wheat flour biscuits soon became routine, recreational goods. In 1978, Britannia, one of India’s primary biscuit brands, launched ‘Milk Bikis’, which came in small packets and were also, like Parle-G, affordable to most. The biscuit was familiar – flat, sweet and stamped with the basic company logo – but it also introduced the new flavour of milk. Its aroma was claimed to be ‘sweet vanilla’ which, in India, was – and still is – a flavour associated with plain milk, rather than the vanilla bean. But the ingredient that lent Milk Bikis their flavour and texture was not fresh milk. It was milk powder.

Milk powder’s entry into the biscuit industry was sparked by the centralisation and industrialisation of milk in India. In March 1970, a scientist named Verghese Kurien started a programme called Operation Flood, which created a series of dairy cooperatives by weaving together a national milk grid across the country. Before that, dairy was a household industry, operating in localised networks based on region and caste across the subcontinent. Kurien’s model, which started in Gujarat, was called the Anand Milk Union Limited, which would become Amul, the largest milk cooperative in the world. Through Amul, Kurien linked milk producers throughout India with consumers in more than 700 towns and cities. Over the next two decades, Amul set up processing units, creating and supervising hygiene standards and ensuring that excess milk was procured and manufactured into other products like condensed milk, cheese and butter.

Milk powder was another one of these excess products. As the technologies for distilling liquid milk into powder became accessible and less expensive, smaller factories set up units, purchasing large quantities of milk from Amul’s processing plants. Unlike butter, milk powder wasn’t used much in domestic consumption, but it was suitable for industrial methods of food manufacturing and, by the 1980s, it was used to make biscuits, adding compact consistency and a heightened golden colour when used. 

The industrialisation of milk changed the course of biscuit-making in India in other ways, too. Amul’s butter is a popular ingredient in many biscuits, the most famous of which is the Shrewsbury biscuit, made by the Parsi-run Kayani Bakery in Pune. The family that runs Kayani is resolute – without Amul butter, their wildly popular biscuit simply would not exist. 

1990s–2000s

Hide & Seek and Little Hearts: The Premium Biscuits (Producing an aesthetic and creating the consumer)

In 1996, Parle launched a biscuit called Hide & Seek, a flat, square biscuit featuring sliced craters set with chocolate chips. Hide & Seek was the size of a functional Indian biscuit like the Parle-G or Milk Bikis, but the flavour and royal purple plastic packaging was more luxurious than the biscuits that came before. Hide & Seek was a ‘premium biscuit’, in a category that also included Britannia’s Pure Magic, a round, dark chocolate bittersweet cream biscuit that came in similarly glitzy packaging and exhibited pools of liquid chocolate. (Today, Pure Magic is even more ornate; its tag line is ‘pure biscuit artistry’.) When I was a teenager, Hide & Seek and Pure Magic were prized items which we would eat during after-school study sessions. When I learned to drive at the age of seventeen, I would keep a packet of Hide & Seek in the dashboard. Every time I drove to McDonalds – then a new feature in our lives – the biscuit would be dessert.  

Premium biscuits were introduced to the market during India’s economic liberalisation, which deregulated industries, enabled international trade and allowed for an influx of Western brands and corporations in one sudden sweep. Throughout the next decade, India would swarm with American fast-food outlets and see an increase in popularity of the packaged foods industry: domestic food manufacturers had to step up to this sudden competition. The beginning of the free market created an audience infatuated with mass-produced foods, which kept corporations on their toes. In this period, biscuits became more than just basic products for sustenance; with the availability of new machinery, colouring agents and emulsifiers, they were laden with richer, more memorable textures. As the economy loosened up, biscuits also expanded in their map of aspiration – from being imitations of British confections to borrowing from other Western food cultures. In 1990 Britannia launched Petit Beurre, which was based on a French biscuit from Nantes; by the 2000s, American-style cookies, like Parle-G’s Milano and the Subway chocolate cookie, made headway.

Aiding the rise of these brands was a surge in big-budget televised advertising. Biscuit brands devised story-led ads and brought in celebrities to endorse their products; in 2000, Britannia launched its best-known advert, which featured cricketers Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar as patrons of the Marie biscuit, claiming nonchalantly: ‘Britannia Khao. Cricketer ban jao.’ or ‘Eat Britannia. Become a cricketer.’ In this era of advert-aided consumption, aspiration was no longer tentative and limp; instead, it became bold and self-assured. Brands created identities based on products and the Indian consumer changed – from being grateful for things that came their way, to wanting to be spoken to directly. 

One of Britannia’s most successful ad campaigns and biscuits alike was launched in 1993. Little Hearts were small sugared French palmiers, and came onto the scene with romance-themed campaigns, like teenage first dates, that symbolised the independence of Indian youth. This was the first known usage of what would become a popular corporate tactic – to summon the young Indian consumer as emancipated, separate from the structure of the family. This was also the beginning of the corporate-driven manufacturing of identity and nostalgia in India, in which women and young people were targeted as a separate consumer base of their own. The appeal was that, unlike most traditional luxuries – like sweets made from ghee and sugar, which were gatekept by dominant-caste communities – these capitalist goods did not discriminate on traditional grounds; they could exist and be purchased by people across caste, class and gender. Little Hearts promised an aspirational culture, but they also promised liberation – eating a packet of them made for free-footed emancipation from any parental and societal rules, even if fleeting. 

Even today, the wheat and biscuit industry run in symbiosis. When, in 2020, Parle cut 10,000 jobs due to high costs during the pandemic, wheat mills worried about their business. And during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Indian producers looked to sell to European markets for higher prices, Parle decided to launch its own wheat brand, advancing ownership on its most crucial ingredient. Adverts remain central, too: Britannia, for example, relaunched a popular campaign from the 2000s for their brand Good Day; this featured Deepika Padukone, one of Bollywood’s highest-paid actors. Similarly crucial are the entrance of new ingredients with changing legislations: the government’s recent call for people to eat millets and native grains has led biscuit brands to introduce these ingredients into their products. 

It is always possible to glimpse the changing spectrums of production through India’s biscuit brands: the industry is a pantomime of need, desire and profit, into which new materials and inclinations are introduced at a terrifying pace. At the border of Bangladesh two years ago, I discovered a new biscuit – a slim, salted potato biscuit somewhat hastily named ‘Potata’ that was to gain a solid following over the next year, achieving cult-level popularity among the Indian biscuit consumer base. Potata is made by the Bangladeshi brand Pran and, while the biscuit points to a constantly changing appetite for new kinds of biscuits, to me it also indicates the permanence of hybrid varieties of potatoes – first introduced as a pervasive cash crop by the British, today they are consumed and grown widely in both Bangladesh and West Bengal. Fast-moving goods remain defined by the production of goods that are historically pervasive, but also viable and profitable to industrial ownership. Even as regional diversity remains, in mass-produced goods like biscuits it is possible to see what a nation’s farmers are driven to produce on large scales. 

At the shops nowadays, I habitually gawk at the selection of biscuits available, and as I buy separate brands for different people – cookies for my friends, millet digestive biscuits for my parents – I reorient myself with the luxurious way we now purchase. It remains surprising to me that Indian food is often spoken about in its home-bound forms, when in reality it is beyond the patterns of domestic spaces that the shifts in food consumption occur – and when it is in nifty packages of industrially produced foods that the citizens of this never-ending country seem to eventually define themselves. 

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Credits

Sharanya Deepak is a writer from New Delhi. You can read more of her work on her website: https://www.sharanyadeepak.com/

The illustrations are by Reena Makwana https://reenamakwana.com/ . You can find more of her work on Instagram

Many thanks to Meher Varma for additional edits, and to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits and proofing.

Note: this article has been amended to make clear the wheat loan was initiated under Truman but PL480 was under Eisenhower, and the PL480 wheat does not refer to a variety.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. 

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles, including the latest newsletter, which is a master guide for newcomers and tourists on where to eat in London. You can also find more London restaurant guides here:

The Worst Value Restaurants In London

99 Places to Eat Lunch Near Oxford Circus

60 South Asian Dishes Every Londoner Should Know Parts 1, 2 and 3

London’s Best Dishes (and what to eat instead)

Food Scams

Best Sandwiches AND Wraps

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First of all, Happy Bank Holiday to all those celebrating! I should really take A Day Off, but I’ve got into the habit of sending out on Monday mornings for so long now that I would probably fret away the holiday if I didn’t get it out of the way. In the spirit of yesterday’s May Day, please feel free to enjoy your government allotted break, don’t check your inbox, and come back to this on Tuesday.

Secondly, with the sighting of the crescent moon, it means that today is Eid al-Fitr (or, Little Eid). This is the first of two unplanned coincidences in this newsletter, which is about Eid al-Adha (or, Big Eid), a completely different Eid. Since Season 1, I have generally tried not to publish articles cashing in on religious holidays ─ they’re often a sign of laziness, of newspapers who will do a single ‘Ramadan recipe’ and publish nothing else for eleven months. Publishing an article on the wrong Eid unintentionally would be very much in this spirit, but I quite like the coincidence of these two things aligning (I may start posting Christmas recipes at Easter).

The other coincidence is that this is the third article in a row in a Vittles trilogy on meat production, starting with Rosanna Hildyard’s newsletter on the language of farming animals for meat two weeks ago, moving on Kate Ryan’s investigation into the history of black pudding production in Ireland and its creation by uncredited women last week, and finally today, with Jess Fagin’s reported story on how halal mutton is sustaining the British sheep industry, and also re-localising slaughter from a centuries long trend of being pushed to the margins. Again, this was unplanned, but they gain some power from being in conversation with each other and I recommend you read them side by side.

My concession to it being a holiday is a brief introduction. Whether you’re eating mutton or not, have a peaceful bank holiday and Eid Mubarak!

How halal mutton is re-localising sheep slaughter, by Jess Fagin

On the hottest day of our second Covid summer, dawn sun belts down on an unshaded yard in a field in the middle of England. This looks out towards green-and-brown grids of pasture, and those icons of British rurality: grazing sheep. A trickle of cars wobble down the lane towards the lairage, St George’s Cross flags still flapping from windows after the disappointment of the Euros, soundtracked by bleating, metal scraping from an industrial unit, and the muffled break of Phil Collins belting ‘Easy Lover’ from a radio. Parents, children, and groups of friends arrive until there is a gathering of fifty people taking shade by the barn. Children are lifted to perch on the railings to see the sheep in their pens, and giggle at a lone rowdy goat poking its head above the wool. A brother and sister run down into the yard towards a truck, as a swollen alien-like blob tumbles off its load and splats on the unpaved ground. ‘Urgh! Gross! That’s the stomach! Dad! It just burst!’

I can’t tell you exactly where this field is, because my presence here was based on the agreement that I wouldn’t disclose its location, or identify the farmers, vets, workers, owners, or delivery drivers who come to this small sheep slaughterhouse as part of their everyday working lives. To some, their labours are unethical and violent. Many of these workers recalled leaving a long shift to look under their cars for bombs, or seeing barns which had been razed by flames. Requests to take pictures made them uneasy, as they feared reprisals from animal rights activists or Food Standards Agency inspectors. Slaughter is a process where bodies and their boundaries are in flux, where a frozen moment: a cut of a throat, or a bloated sheep’s rumen falling off a lorry, is not outside the realms of the ordinary. There is no way of slaughtering an animal that can be disguised as anything other than the bloody conversion of a live animal into flesh and organs. 

Today, the boundaries between public and private have mellowed. It’s the first day of Eid al-Adha, the annual Islamic festival of sacrifice which celebrates Prophet Ibrahim’s submission to Allah through his willingness to sacrifice his son, Ismail, who was miraculously replaced with a ram at the last minute. Visitors today are repeating the story with Qurbani, the practice of sacrificing a sheep, which is a demonstration of their devotion and closeness to God. The meat from the sheep is then shared between the person practicing, family and friends, and those in need. 

In Muslim-majority South Asian and Middle Eastern cities, families may themselves purchase, live with, and slaughter sheep, camels, goats or cattle (in a 2015 article for Roads & Kingdoms, Saba Imtiaz evokes the sensory overload of public slaughter on Karachi streets). But in Europe, where home kills are heavily legislated and livestock is confined to rural areas, religious practice has been shaped in dialogue with local laws, farming systems and identities. Anthropologist Pnina Werbner, researching Pakistani communities in Manchester in the 1970s, saw the reluctance of newly arrived immigrants to identify themselves as in need of charity; instead, they would share meat simply between family and friends. Today, Qurbani is sometimes arranged with family abroad or through high street butchers, while explicit reformists suggest alternative lifestyle-based sacrifices altogether, questioning whether the intense temporality of slaughter is ethical in the context of the global meat complex.

Some Muslims, however, visit a halal slaughterhouse like the one I visited, which offers a Qurbani service. For three days, the closed-shop is open. People arrive from cities around the country to choose a sheep, have it slaughtered in their name by a licensed halal slaughterman, then take the fresh meat home for celebratory meals. No longer restrained by the politics of sight, arms are stretched out for selfies, and chatter about recipes and evening plans mingles into the soundscape. This rural patch, a node in a network of moving sheep, meat and people, becomes a destination where people can be physically present: it allows them to know the animal being slaughtered and who is doing the slaughtering, and to be close to others after eighteen months of isolation. It is a place to connect to individual pasts, to memories of communal slaughter in public squares in Bangladesh; for a recently bereaved son to remember his father, who brought him here as a teenager; a place to remember feeling close to nature in a rural family home in Gujarat, of cooking meat on an open fire in Tunisia, of being taught by family members how to slaughter in Ghana; and a place where people can shift out of the binary formation of being neatly categorised as either a rural producer or an urban consumer. It’s a remaking of traditions, where stories are reinscribed and imaginative lines connect a field in the middle of England to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Ghana as well as London, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and Leicester.

In the past decade, Eid al-Adha has become one of the busiest weeks for sheep sales and slaughter in the UK. One farmer (somewhat exaggerating) tells me that ‘If you look out over the fields of England, you won’t see any sheep over that Qurbani week.’ A retired halal slaughterman recalls ad hoc arrangements between the local mosque and slaughterhouse forty years ago; since the 2000s however, the halal meat sector has grown alongside the population of British Muslims, and been regulated by the emergence of halal certification agencies which have enabled and tracked its ascension. Under their rubrics, slaughterhouses can specialise as halal and prepare for religious festivals, supported by agricultural boards which advocate to farmers how to capture the market with British-reared sheep, rather than lose trade to Qurbani practiced abroad. 

Like the owner of this slaughterhouse, many working within the halal sector are not Muslim, but have folded the festival – and religious slaughter – into their trade. They have weathered crises for decades, from foot-and-mouth to the uncertainties of Brexit and the drop in demand for lamb. Yet, outside of livestock and agriculture market reports and forecasts, and against the slurry of Islamophobic reports in the Daily Mail about halal meat ‘invading’ Pizza Express, the significance of halal markets to British rural livelihoods is rarely celebrated, even though 70% of domestic and exported sheep meat combined, is slaughtered through various halal methods. 

For a sheep to be eligible for Qurbani, it needs to be sexually mature – which, depending on breed, can be anywhere from six months to one year old. Last year, Eid fell late in July, when few spring-born lambs had reached maturity. These seasonal breeding cycles impact Easter sales even more: most of the lamb on supermarket shelves is sourced from New Zealand. In preparation for the Eid surge, some farmers held on to their older sheep through winter, while in the weeks before, buyers nodded ferociously to auctioneers at markets as prices rocketed.

This year it will be tougher. Based on the lunar calendar, Eid al-Adha moves back around ten days each year. Halal certifiers shifted their stipulations to accommodate the availability of eligible sheep – from one year to older than six months if they looked mature. But last year the HMC, a leading halal certifier, advised Muslims to avoid lamb altogether and only purchase hogget or mutton – sheep older than a year – to be confident they were not being duped by slaughterhouses. (This year Eid is predicted to fall on 9 July, when even the earliest-born lambs will be skimming six months old.) While the owner of the slaughterhouse I visited is frustrated by the shifting guidance, complaining that accreditation agencies erratically ‘change the rules’, when, for him, religion should ‘do things by the book’, an unchanging technicality, the Qurbani market remains one he will adapt towards in a sector always characterised by uncertainty. 

What counts as valuable sheep meat in Britain has always been fluid. While lamb is increasing in popularity both for Qurbani and in halal butcher shops, it was the demand for mutton which first spurned the rise of British halal sheep meat in the 1960s, when British citizens from India, Pakistan, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica and Trinidad were invited to help rebuild the country after the war. In those countries, lean, muscular, unaged fresh goat meat and mutton from older animals is common, and cast ewe meat (from female sheep which have come to the end of their breeding lives) was the most texturally similar available. More recently, there have been various campaigns for a mutton renaissance, to introduce ‘British’ consumers to the taste of a ‘lost’ traditional meat and support farmers selling older heritage breeds, slaughtered at small, local slaughterhouses, as a corrective to the fast-paced production of lamb. Largely directed at restaurants and chefs, the virtues of this mutton are described as properly finished on grass, aged for weeks, and with fat so thick it lines your insides. 

To elevate renaissance mutton as local, flavoursome, and superior, comparisons are always drawn to halal mutton, which is variously described as ‘poor quality’, ‘unaged’, ‘tough’, found in ‘ethnic’ butchers or otherwise ‘suited to pies or pet food’. These are misrepresentations of the values of halal mutton. Cast ewe meat is instead a re-localised meat, feeding place-bound tastes which have travelled and been remade in Britain by multiple diasporas. The owner I visited continues to adapt and refine his production as migrations change, supplying paya, shaki, mutton and lamb, sourcing the various carcass sizes requested by Somali, Afghan, Syrian and Turkish butchers. 

By midday, it’s roasting outside, and anyone who arrived at the slaughterhouse early is still waiting. The owners have devised a ticketing system to track sheep on the slaughter line to people’s names, but the lairage manager is trying and failing to remember who arrived first. He scribbles names on a ticket to pass to the slaughterman, who then picks it up, bloodied fingers smudging the sharpie. Inside the slaughterhouse, the crew of slaughter workers who skin and eviscerate carcasses on the moving line are adapting to a new rhythm, as sheep come through in staggered fits and bursts, then stall as the slaughterman goes outside to meet people. Apart from the slaughterman himself, none of the line workers are Muslim, but this week is the most profitable and dependable time to labour. Retired workers have been called back to help, returning to catch up with old colleagues, fill themselves up on a dose of banter, and visit the pub to reminisce about their years in the trade. 

A few hours later, the line comes to a halt. Workers blame people for taking too long to choose, people outside don’t understand how it can take six hours to slaughter a sheep, and the owner blames everyone. Taking advantage of the short circuit, a worker, disinhibited by the heat and exhaustion, stands outside in his pants by the ventilators, not seeming to care that they are blowing hot air, sucking an Aldi ice lolly. A shared tube of Pringles and an emergency trip to KFC later, the line resumes. 

All this to say that the British sheep sector and the slaughter line shift logics, and that everyone participating – the farmers, visitors, owners and workers – orient themselves towards one another. It’s a cosmopolitanism rooted in recalibrating systems of production around economics and human connection. Sometimes confusing and inefficient, it is radically human, socialised and storied.

The modern European slaughterhouse, and the moving slaughter line, were never designed for such human connection. Emerging in the late nineteenth century in the imperial centres of Paris and London, slaughterhouses were designed to distance the growing urban masses from the proximity of animals and death in open meat markets. Meat consumption was on the rise in Victorian cities, but meat-making was holding modernity back. Killing was moved from a mishmash of private slaughterhouses owned by butchers in city centres to new out-of-town utilitarian architectural forms. Historian Paula Young Lee describes these ‘public abattoirs’, renamed to rid them of their violent semantics, as umbilically connected to the urban metropolis, hidden from the everyday lives of urban consumers but intimately connected.  

The same logic that shifted meat production out of British cities shifted farming out to its empire, constructing a system of multiple dislocations and power grabs: colonised from coloniser, human from animal, city from rural area, producer from consumer, and a collective activity to a private one. Every scandal in the British meat industry has intersected with these dislocated geographies, from horse meat in ready meals to BSE and foot-and-mouth. Victorian moralism and industrialisation mutated into neoliberal capitalism, as supermarkets and agri-business conglomerates dominated the meat chain. Slaughterhouses scaled-up and centralised. Now dependent on underpaid EU immigrant workers, their emergence has run in parallel with wage drops and the deskilling of slaughter labour. Tastes for meat changed too, as people in British cities shifted from eating mutton to quickly reared New Zealand lamb.

In 2018, the Sustainable Food Trust released a report warning that independent rural slaughterhouses were near collapse, pummelled by the costs of legislation after the BSE crisis and unable to compete with the false economies of supermarket procurement. In 2018 there were 249 red meat slaughterhouses, down from 320 in 2003 and 1,890 in 1971. Today, there are only 159 red meat slaughterhouses, and the largest sites dominate the sector. Just 32 process 88% of all sheep slaughtered in the UK.. 

This absence of smaller rural slaughterhouses was obstructing a ‘nascent renaissance of local food cultures’ corrective to anonymous, industrialised food production. In the report, small, local halal slaughterhouses were erased as a productive force in this renaissance, because the method of sometimes-used non-stun religious slaughter might be off-putting for farmers. 

When the owner I visited bought his slaughterhouse twenty years ago, entering the trade was a bleak endeavour. As a former sheep breeder, he wanted to serve local farmers. He’d spotted a profitable microcosm in the market: the demand for unaged, fresh mutton for halal butchers in Peckham, Hackney, Leicester, Birmingham and Nottingham. When he started, cast ewes were cheap outcasts: ‘When I had my sheep many years ago, I might cull ewes for sort of 12–15 pound, but now you can be getting 70 pounds.’ Their value has risen with demand: halal mutton is now more expensive than supermarket-sourced New Zealand lamb. This independent site has provided a workplace for skilled slaughtermen, where they can negotiate their wages. They’ve resisted working on larger lines, where they feel anonymous – ‘like robots’ – and are poorly paid. They are explicit: ‘If it wasn’t for the Muslims, we’d be out of a job.’

Policymakers tell us that ‘Britain needs to feed itself’ by re-localising the national food system – away from its colonial roots, the deleterious impacts of just-in-time supermarket supply chains and the precarity of food imports. Yet for decades, the old sheep, the small rural slaughterhouse, the high street butchers, and skilled workers – all on the margins of the mainstream production of lamb – have been sustaining each other and feeding Britain’s people. There are threats, of course: butchers priced out of gentrifying high streets; the changing tastes of a younger generation. But the production of British halal sheep meat has already re-localised slaughter, intersecting in radical, earthy ways with the farming system; connecting diverse cities to rural fields, people to their faith, and Britain to its colonial past. In this anonymous field in the middle of England, a knot of histories is threaded into rural and city lives in ways that cannot be untangled. 

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Credits

Jess Fagin is an anthropologist and Londoner. She is currently doing her PhD at the University of Exeter, which explores practices of sheep slaughter in England in so called “conventional” and halal slaughterhouses as we shift through the legislative transitions of Brexit, asking what diverse slaughter practices can reveal about how nationhood and national borders are imagined. She is on Instagram: @jessfagin

The illustration is by Heedayah Lockman, a Glasgow-based freelance illustrator and graphic designer, with an architectural background. Inspired by still life and food, she enjoys exploring colour and different techniques by using grids and patterns that contrast the shapes of everyday objects. You can find more of her work on Instagram: @heedayahlockman.

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for proofing and additional edits.

All photos taken from Wikimedia Creative Commons.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the latest newsletter on African food in Yorkshire. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

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If I was going to proffer an excuse for why it’s taken Vittles so long to cover Ireland properly (outside of the chippy guide and Max Jones’s salmon trip), I’m going to have to lay the blame at the feet of The Blindboy Podcast. As far as poor excuses go, this is up there with your average British person explaining, defensively, that they really should go to Ireland, they would love to (and it’s so close!) but then doing nothing about it. But let me continue. When I started Vittles, my aim was to fill some of the gaps I saw that other publications weren’t covering, like a particularly virulent slime. You may have clocked that this newsletter never covers American issues ─ that is very much on purpose and I think we’d all like to keep it that way. It’s not because I don’t love American food writing and writers, in fact it’s the opposite; it’s that I read it all the time. Why try to compete?

Similarly, how does Vittles compete with the extended long-form spoken word food writing that is coming out of Blindboy’s mind every now and then? In the last year we’ve had ‘How the Subway sandwich is linked to 19th century Irish Republicanism’; ‘Why the Chicken Fillet Roll is emblematic of post-recession Ireland’; ‘The cultural significance of Irish summer salads and Taytos’; and ‘How the original KFC recipe is being preserved in Limerick’ (this one ended up with a pack of seasoned flour in a plastic container being divvied up at a restaurant, like an open air coke deal). He even did a Salt Bae hot take a week before my own.

For better or worse, the hot take is now what I associate Irish food writing with. You can see it as ‘storytelling’ or ‘bullshitting’ (which are synonyms for the same thing) but it is essentially when a narrative takes you for an unexpected ride, when it doesn’t take the shortest route between two points but revels in diversions, picking up surprising guests along the way. I’m fan of this type of writing, but today’s newsletter by Kate Ryan manages to combine the hot take with something more rigourous and nuanced. A hot take might have told us that one man and his black pudding was responsible for today’s Irish food culture. But via Borges, the Aleph, a mysterious recipe, meitheal, two producers ─ one celebrated and one we know nothing about ─ Ryan spins a narrative on the value of the recipe and who takes credit for it, while also telling the story of modern Irish food. I hope you enjoy the ride.

The Aleph: A Story of Irish Food in One Pudding

In 1945, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges wrote ‘The Aleph’, a fictional story of a limitless singularity in which the universe and everything in it can be seen, or ‘one of the points in space that contains all other points.’

The Aleph is everything, all at once.

Irish food writer John McKenna often appropriates Borges’s notion: ‘Food is an Aleph,’ he says, a lens through which we can see and make sense of the world around us. The concept of an all-seeing singularity translates well in food, particularly food culture. Everything we are – everywhere we are – can be seen, experienced, and comprehended through the spectacle of food, the complexity of all merging into sharpened focus.

But if a universal idea of food is hard to capture in all its massiveness, a recipe is a bite-sized aleph. Recipes do not exist on their own; they come from somewhere, rooted in history and culture. They carry with them stories; a bewildering mix of science, instinct, tradition and folklore; a smattering of good fortune, happy accident, and timing. 

Writing recipes down is a relatively modern invention – they were previously spoken between generations to keep them alive. A recipe can be as unique as a fingerprint; it is a piece of us, of inestimable worth. And it can also connect a dispersed nation of people as far away from their place of birth as it’s physically possible to be.

In Ireland, black pudding is food, is culture, is a recipe: it is an Aleph.

In 1880, on the eve of her retirement, an elderly Johanna O’Brien wrote down her recipe for black pudding and sold it to Philip Harrington, the proprietor of a butchers shop at 16 Pearse Street, Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland. A widowed farmer’s wife, O’Brien had long supplied Harrington with rings of her homemade black pudding. It had earned her a modest income over the years; when she retired, she parted with the only thing of value she had left to trade – her recipe. In a way, it remained her recipe; local people would only buy pudding from Harrington’s because they knew it was Johanna’s, and therefore the best.

In 1880, Ireland was in a period of seismic social change. The country had emerged from the wreckage of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845–1852 with at least a million dead and another million emigrated. Memories of hard times persisted, and the land remained an essential part of the Irish way of life, providing the ability to both feed the family and earn a living. Food was precious and precarious, and a fantastical corpus of folklore, myth, magic, and legend surrounded its everyday production. 

Black pudding was produced in the home – and always by women, whose fine fingers were considered more dextrous for the delicate work of cleaning lengths of intestines than the rough-hewn hands of men. But this was no easy work: heavy buckets of blood had to be seasoned with salt, stirred to prevent thickening, and mixed with oats, spices, and fat, then piped, tied, and plunged into boiling water before being drained, dried, and fried in lard, when it was finally ready for eating. 

Meitheal is the Irish word to describe a neighbourhood coming together to do work that benefits those in the community – harvesting crops, for example, or other tasks associated with preserving food, cultural traditions, and knowledge. There was a meitheal for black pudding season, too, after pigs had fattened on autumn mast, as women from the neighbourhood gathered in homes of others to help make it; a recipe belonging to the woman of the house would prevail, and the meitheal respected that. The method, mostly identical from one home to the other, needed no instruction. At the end of the day’s labour, food was shared, the meitheal disbanded, and each person bestowed with a piece of black pudding for their efforts.

For many Irish women, this was the only way of earning an income, known as pin or egg money. Each woman’s recipe for black pudding was known only to them, rarely written down, and passed from generation to generation. The process of selling black pudding had cultural as well as fiscal value. Success or failure determined not only survival, but also reputation. In parting with her recipe, O’Brien was relinquishing a means of survival, but in doing so there was a respectful acknowledgement of her reputation as a skilful maker of black pudding.

Over 100 years after the handover of O’Brien’s black pudding, the esteemed Irish chef Gerry Galvin presented it as Celtic ‘boudin noir’ on the menu of the inaugural 1989 Eurotoques dinner at Trinity College Dublin. ‘He pair[ed] … the quotidian black pudding with the princely oyster,’ wrote McKenna, and in that moment utterly transformed the perception of Irish food, from a means of survival to a celebration of tradition with a proud and stoic heritage. Presented as a surviving taste of culinary history, it reignited the food culture of a nation once at risk of disappearing.

In 1976, Edward Twomey acquired the butchers shop at 16 Pearse Street. The shop came with deeds, keys, and Johanna O’Brien’s recipe for black pudding. The recipe required fresh cows’ blood, pinhead oatmeal, onions, fat, and a mix of spices. The use of cows’ blood immediately made this recipe stand out – with a few exceptions, most black pudding made in Ireland uses pigs’ blood. The blend of spices in O’Brien’s recipe was held in such secrecy that only one person at a time was allowed to know its precise mixture – a recipe within a recipe that lent black pudding its almost mythical status among locals. 

It is perhaps that everyone seemed to have one, a recipe handed down through generations of the same family, that meant the importance of this black pudding was initially unrealised by Twomey. He decided to abandon the whole bothersome process, ending an unbroken 96-year-old tradition of pudding-making in the town. Besides, wasn’t it too old fashioned?

Handmade, homespun foods and dishes that formed the backbone of the traditional diet were under threat in Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s. Neatly packaged foods made in a factory sold a vision of convenience to Irish women, releasing them from drudgery at the stove. Packet soups, industrialised blocks of reformed cheese, microwave meals, convenience foods – these were all the rage: fashionable, exciting, steadily encroaching on the everyday lives of ordinary people. Ireland was hooked on convenience, says McKenna:

When Eddie took over the shop in 1976 there was really nothing happening in what we might call creative Irish cooking, either in terms of artisanship or in terms of restaurant cooking. The economy was completely flat, emigration was still very, very considerable […]  nobody made oxtail soup anymore, but everybody ate oxtail soup because Knorr made a packet which made 1.5 pints.

Foods experienced a shift away from their domestic setting to the industrialised, centralised, commercial world of men. The lure of modernity and international export markets, galvanised by Ireland joining the EU in 1973, translated into an increase in exports of milk, butter and meat. Serious profit was to be made for those who could produce specifically for export on a mass scale. Food production was no longer about honouring recipes, traditions, and producing enough food to feed a family; instead, it was about mass manufacture and consumption.

Few things erode the cultural identity of a nation more than a loss of respect for its embedded foodways, and it took just a few women to remind Twomey of this fact: loyal customers, almost always women, travelled near and far to his butchers shop for the black pudding, only then considering what else they might purchase. It quickly became clear that if there was no black pudding for sale, there were no customers. So, after a brief hiatus, production recommenced. A realisation descended upon Twomey, that he had in his possession a recipe of extraordinary value – black pudding is ubiquitous, its method universal, but the recipe for his black pudding had the ability to draw people, to make people loyal. By 1980, Twomey was digging into the history of his butchers shop, trying to work out why this recipe for black pudding was so indelibly connected with his shop and the town, and embedded in the taste memory of his customers.           

Twomey came to understand that his black pudding represented a connection to a taste of a time that was disappearing from the collective memory of the Irish people. He took to the road with his wife, Colette, a van full of his Clonakilty Blackpudding, and a desire to spread his gospel. McKenna witnessed Twomey in action:

There were things [Twomey] did which were extremely unusual. Eddie identified himself with his food – he was the product; he was the story because he was the maker. But he also said this black pudding was a historical artefact in Ireland’s food culture – it has a story, it has an importance, and he was the continuum of this tradition. […] He didn’t represent himself as the person who created this, he presented himself as the person who represented the food. [T]hat gave him extra kudos; he wasn’t saying he made this out of nothing.

The historical artefact was of course the recipe; the ring of Clonakilty Blackpudding Twomey proudly held aloft, declaring it a world-class food, a manifestation of that artefact. When tasted, it transported Irish people to a time when black pudding was made at home, when the meitheal gathered and the recipe was carefully followed: culture in practice. When such things are ripped from the fabric of life, when the ability to practice has been unpicked from memory, all that is left is to observe. Twomey’s championing of his black pudding enabled observation by taste and a recognition that old ways can coexist with new; a prompt for remembering who we are and where we come from. We can pair ‘the quotidian black pudding with the princely oyster’ and recognise both as equals.

Twomey was doing all these things at the time of a new, emerging artisan food movement in Ireland. From the late sixties, an influx of British, Dutch, German and returning Irish arrived in search of a different way of life. Land was cheap and plentiful, and remote isolation was easy to achieve for those looking to ditch modern living – a direct contrast to what the Irish themselves were striving for.

The first expression of Irish terroir in food came from pioneering farmhouse cheesemakers which, carrying on the ancient Irish-Gaelic female tradition of dairying, made butter and cheese. Milleens, Durrus, Coolea and Gubbeen all made cheeses synonymous with West Cork – a quintessential taste of place – enduring to become second-generation enterprises laden with awards and accolades. But it wasn’t just cheese: butter, beef and bread were all being created too, as well as a new generation of visionary chefs who merged classic French cookery with championing Irish traditional food. Myrtle Allen, founder of Ballymaloe House and Eurotoques, was famous for it, and well regarded as the matriarch of the Irish farm-to-fork ethos. She recognised Irish food was as good as anything else anywhere else – if not better.

They say timing is everything. Twomey saw and understood what this black pudding recipe was, what it represented and what it meant to people. He saw what a small collection of people – producers and chefs – were tapping into and asserted Clonakilty Blackpudding’s place in it. Twomey approached people who held significant sway in how Irish food was considered and presented – Myrtle Allen, Declan Ryan, Gerry Galvin and Michael Clifford – chefs at the pinnacle of their careers. His black pudding was included in John McKenna’s first Irish Food Guide (1989); McKenna recalls how, in the years between 1989–1991, there was a tangible change in Irish food, as it was reconsidered and revalued – Twomey’s black pudding was key to this. In many ways, Twomey’s awareness – his willingness to put his humble pudding forward as an exemplar, and his unwavering championing of it – smoothed the path for others.

By the time Edward Twomey passed away suddenly in 2005, at the age of just fifty-four, he had transformed Clonakilty Blackpudding into a hugely successful food company, producing black pudding by the thousands of tonnes, exporting throughout the UK and Europe and even starting a factory in Australia, where it provides a taste of home to the huge Irish diaspora. Twomey’s wife Colette is now Managing Director; once more there is a formidable woman at the helm, custodian of the recipe and the only person to know the secret blend of spices that goes into every ring. Like Johanna, Colette understands the importance of community: embracing the spirit of meitheal, she generously supports local sports, education, heritage, and other small businesses in Clonakilty. She even became the town’s first directly elected mayor in 2014. 

Unfortunately, many of the pudding’s virtues extolled during Twomey’s crusade have been sacrificed – such is the cruel paradox of success – fresh beef blood exchanged for dried beef blood, and not always from Ireland; black pudding no longer handmade but prepared by machines. But however unrecognisable the modern process of making black pudding would now be to Johanna O’Brien, we are assured the recipe remains the same.

Meanwhile, in the tiny village of Sneem in County Kerry (population 288), Peter O’Sullivan and Kieran Burns are owners of two butchers shops on opposite sides of the street from one another, second and fourth generations respectively. In 2020, they obtained European Protected Geographic Indication (PGI) status for their Sneem Black Pudding. Both work with fresh beef blood, slaughter at their in-house abattoir and hand-mix the blood to their own family black pudding recipes. Each recipe is slightly different, and the PGI concerns primarily the use of fresh blood in black pudding in Sneem, continuing the tradition of respect for family recipes in their village. 

The PGI status embeds the importance and centrality of the recipe as a signifier of place and maker into an ark of taste, the recipe recognised for its cultural, not commercial, value. Without Twomey’s impassioned work, a prestigious and rare PGI for black pudding may never have been considered worth the effort by O’Sullivan and Burns.

In the Aleph that is a recipe for black pudding, there are ingredients and a method, but there is also legacy, history, culture, tradition and indigenous knowledge. There are women whose work ensured food was plentiful, who valued the importance of sharing what they had for the benefit of many. It has a story and, at its best, an immutable sense of place. Without Johanna O’Brien at its heart, Clonakilty Blackpudding wouldn’t be what it is today at all; with her, it is all these things. 

There is a photograph of O’Brien said to have been taken on the day she handed over her recipe to Philip Harrington. In it, she is dressed in finery particular to the region of the time: a black dress, a black bonnet, and a black shawl. She sits in an ornately detailed chair, a pair of glasses in one hand and a piece of paper in the other, which is said to be the recipe itself. The fact that a photograph of this day exists at all shows it was a momentous occasion for her, but we cannot know for sure how she felt about the valediction. We may never know how much money Philip Harrington parted with for Johanna O’Brien’s recipe, but because of Edward Twomey, we know the value of her recipe is more than the sum of its parts.

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Credits

Kate Ryan is a food writer and founder of Flavour.ie, a platform dedicated to Irish food and food culture. She is the current Secretary of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild, a judge for Blas na hEireann and the Irish Quality Food Awards, and is a recent graduate of the Postgraduate Diploma in Irish Food Culture, UCC. Her food writing has been featured in The Echo and The Irish Examiner, as well as TheJournal.ie, TheTaste.ie, Headstuff.org, The Southern Star, The Opinion Magazine, and Irish Foodie Magazine. In 2017, she authored an Artisan Food Guide of West Cork. Kate is originally from Bristol and moved to Ireland in 2005 settling into the beating heart of Irish craft food and drink near the ocean in West Cork with her husband. In 2021, she became an Irish citizen.

The collage is by Alia Wilhelm, a Turkish & German collage artist and director's assistant based in London. You can find more of her work on her website and Instagram.

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits and proofreading.

Note on John McKenna quotations — In 2021, Kate completed a research thesis on blood puddings of Ireland which included a case study on Clonakilty Blackpudding. As part of her research, Ishe interviewed John McKenna, an established, well-respected food writer in Ireland and co-founder of McKenna’s Guides, formerly Bridgestone Guides. The quotes used in this essay are directly drawn from the written record of those interviews.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the latest newsletter on snacks. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

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I was recently reading a Instagram post by Farmer Tom Jones (who must always be referred to as Farmer Tom Jones to distinguish him from the famously randy singer of the same name) with a photo of four newly born piglets, all fine down and cute snouts, making their first tentative steps into the world. With another farmer, or maybe if this was some advertising copy for an ‘ethical’ meat company, these ‘piggies’ would be accompanied by some platitudes about the circle of life, about the proud mother, about how this was the start of some happy existence. But the words contradict the idyll of the picture ─ the piglets have since all died. “Eyes, tails, legs, squeaks, but not quite with the manufacturers stamp of approval” Jones says. The piglets had come too early, the gilt couldn’t produce milk, the crows and ravens had started gathering on the fence, smelling death. Ten piglets dead. Someone, clearly not reading the words, comments underneath: “Look at them! Brilliant”.

Perhaps we don’t know how to react to words this truthful about farming. The tenor of Jones’s post isn’t mourning, but annoyance: looking at it without emotionless, the gilt is an investment that isn’t paying off. All those days of care and attention for nothing. Jones jokes, mirthlessly, that he could start again or turn her into sausages. But there is emotion too: “You start again, give her another chance. It’s what you do and love.” There is no time for sentimentalising over dead animals that represent a livelihood, but there is a duty of care, a bond that goes beyond labour and money, a recognition of one’s self in the animal.

Today’s newsletter by Rosanna Hildyard is about the untruthful ways we often talk about animal farming, and how little they resemble the experience of rearing and caring for animals. Yet there is a long tradition of sensitive farming writing; in fact, the way Farmer Tom Jones talks about animals reminds me of one of the first pieces of ‘food writing’ 2000 years ago, which is the way the Roman poet Virgil talks about animal death in the Georgics. (If you’ve never read it, I recommend watching this video of Werner Herzog reading his own translation of an astonishing passage describing the madness of a horse). There is an honesty and sense of keen observation there that today, you might only easily find on a few farmers Instagram posts, or a James Rebanks book. This type of writing is precious; more of it in the mainstream may not just improve animal lives, but, like all truthful writing, it might enrich our understanding of ourselves too.

We need better language to talk about farming animals, by Rosanna Hildyard

My grandmother’s refrain echoes through the house. 

‘Poor cows … Those poor cows!’ 

She is standing at the back door, looking out as the garden is battered by a North Yorkshire winter. ‘What about the cows?’ she asks, and repeats herself, over and over again, before answering herself: ‘You must get those cows inside!’ 

At length, a frustrated exclamation floats through from the kitchen. ‘The cows are in, Mum.’

‘In?’ she says, baffled, as though the idea of the cows being in the barn in January is lunacy. ‘They can’t be in.’

Those in the kitchen ignore her again. She turns back to mouth at the glass. 

‘…Those poor cows.’

My grandmother has been a small-scale farmer for most of her life. After marrying my grandfather aged twenty, she moved from her childhood home in Sussex to rural North Yorkshire. The war had disrupted her schooling; afterwards – perhaps to make up for this – she was allowed to lodge in London for a few months, to study at art college. The story goes that, when she and my grandfather became engaged, she asked whether they would be able to delay their wedding, so that she could stay in London and finish her art course. He said, of course she could – but in that case he’d find some other girl to marry, because he had determined to get married that year.

So she went to Yorkshire, became a farmer’s wife, and ‘got on’. She continued painting, had a baby every two years (on average), and learned that ‘starved’ in Yorkshire meant not ‘hungry’ but ‘cold’. In the early 1970s, once the five children were reasonably grown, she took a step further into farming. She made a proposal: to expand the farm business into rare breeds. It was a forward-looking idea: produce less, but better, meat. She took it seriously. Her herd grew, gradually, winning prizes at Crufts-type cattle shows. My brother can remember hanging a sheet out on a hedge, painted with the word ‘CHAMP’, for her triumphant return from one of these in the 1980s. Her cattle were, however, the wrong choice: they were too small-boned and delicate to make much money as beef. But as I think about the abrupt ending of her artistic education, it seems to me that cattle breeding had replaced painting as something she found meaningful. 

Now, aged ninety, she is unable to remember which college she studied at, and confuses her own childhood with that of her children. Sitting in the kitchen when she comes to visit us, her sentences trail shyly away. But in the barn, she can immediately spot which of my father’s cows is pregnant (it is almost imperceptibly fatter); which is getting old. She stands in the dim-lit foldyard, disagreeing mildly with my father over the fertility of bulls. She potters up and down, muttering proudly at the cattle. She reaches unhesitatingly through a shit-encrusted gate to pat their coarse fur. 

I am interested in the ways we talk about meat farming. My grandparents, uncle and father are, or have been, farmers – beef cattle and arable – and I mostly grew up in the countryside. I know farming is a practice that involves intimacy with animals. It is both affection and exasperation – my father has a particular dislike for the cow that shits in the water trough, meaning he has to clear it – but the close relationship is there. These days, I am physically removed from animals. I live in London and eat mostly falafel, not because of strict vegetarianism but because – why eat bad mince when you can get an excellent wrap from Falafel & Shawarma for the same price? Despite London’s constant presence of foxes, rats and birds, I feel physically removed from animals – livestock, unlike slippery wild things, take up space and leave their trace behind. There are no cowpats in Burgess Park, or tufts of greasy wool stuck on stiles.

When I read about meat farming, animal life still feels at an emotional remove. On Monday, newspapers paint farms as struggling businesses key to the post-Brexit economy; on Friday, they are the setting for reality TV shows led by comically bumbling figures; in the weekend supplements there is always someone reporting excitedly about how ‘the new farming’ is changing everything. Yet I do not see a meaningful relationship between the discourse around farming and the practice of it. The way the media, culture and even farmers themselves talk about the labour of rearing animals is imprecise, often sentimentalised, and can be easily twisted to suit unethical ends; animals are, as it were, a blank canvas on which to project various self-serving, human-centric ideas. But when I watch my grandmother, I am struck by the fact that this is a dualistic job that involves daily, close care for animals before the act of killing. Emotion is involved, as well as the moral difficulties of rearing an animal to kill. Yet these aspects of rearing animals for meat are often left out of accounts in the media; the writing I see about meat production today seems troubled by this dualism, and prefers to ignore it.

If you pick up a copy of Farmers Weekly or any other mass-market farming magazine, you will find headlines about such gripping topics as ‘environmental management plans’, ‘price rises for Arla suppliers’ and ‘new statutory codes of practice for farmgate milk contracts’. It is language that is almost strategically tedious – it might relate to a factory full of spare parts rather than living, feeling creatures.

Such clinical language seems to anticipate the continued spread of American-style, profit-oriented ‘mega farms’ in the UK. A 2017 investigation by the Guardian estimated that around 800 mega farms were in operation here, a 26% increase from 2011. It is most likely an even larger number now; although the UK population may have started moving towards plant-based diets, around 86% of us still eat meat. Such farms keep thousands of animals indoors and ‘seriously constrain internally motivated behaviours, particularly comfort movements such as stretching, grooming [and] nesting’, according to Christine Nicol, professor of veterinary science at the University of Bristol. This is not even counting their impact on the wider environment.

We need more accurate, nuanced, and consistent language to allow us to distinguish between different forms and scales of farming animals. Apart from the obfuscating tedium of professional agricultural language (which is usually only read and heard by those working in the sector), representations in the popular media about farming animals are broadly divided into two distinct styles: violent, macho language on one hand, over-sentimentalised on the other.

First, the misogynistic language exemplified by ‘Britain’s most famous farmer’ (so dubbed by The Times), Jeremy Clarkson. Once of cars, now of farms, Clarkson is probably the epitome of a certain kind of competitive ‘man vs land’ mindset. His description of the sheep he husbands on his Netflix-sponsored farm is typically brutish: 

‘I […] bought two rams, which are basically woolly ball sacks, and in short order, all but three of my new flock were pregnant. The failures? I ate them, and they punished me for that by giving me heartburn.’ 

Like Farmers Weekly, Clarkson’s account of keeping livestock does not give a detailed account of rearing livestock; instead, he conceals the reality of living with animals with crass jokes. Over thirty years have passed since academic Carol J. Adams published her seminal work, The Sexual Politics of Meat, which argues that both women and animals become ‘absent referents’ in conversations about food: objectified, they are no longer seen as things that are alive, and suffer. However, as Clarkson demonstrates, the difficult and intimate work of raising animals is still displaced in popular culture by violent and sexualised language.

The banality of Farmers Weekly, and the violence of Clarkson’s language, allow us to blinker ourselves. In his essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ John Berger argues that one of the many functions animals have historically served for humans is that they force us to reckon with ourselves: ‘when [man] is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him’. It may sound obvious, but animals are the only part of the natural world that can look back at humans; when we engage with them, we see our own relationship to them. To erase our relationship with animals in farming is, therefore, to forget our own complicity in their lives and deaths.

What may seem like the opposite kind of language to Clarkson’s can sometimes have exactly the same effect. A farmer who breeds the same cows as my grandmother has the following on her website:

Our breeding cows are individuals, each with her own character . . . We name each of our cows after a white flower. Tulip, our herd’s matriarch, has daughters, grand daughters and great grand daughters happily grazing with her.

Naming a cow ‘Tulip’ is just as unfair as Clarkson’s ‘woolly ball sacks’; it too conceals the reality of raising animals for meat. Respecting and naming animals isn’t a bad thing in itself – as Berger points out, humans of all cultures and eras have venerated animals as creatures that enrich, enable and define our societies. But this is sentimentalising animals on a customer-facing website as part of a marketing strategy – it’s just as disingenuous as talking about cows as though they are car parts. 

Who does this sentimental language benefit? Farmers big and small are increasingly aware of self-marketing, and mindful that in order to attract custom, they must seem progressive. The bigger farms greenwash – ethics-wash? – their practice by using vague, sentimental language that conceals the artificial situation of an animal raised in the intensive conditions of a mega farm. When I walk through my local Tesco Express, I notice more and more ‘happy eggs’, ‘high welfare’ and ‘friendly farm’ labelling. But at present, even chickens raised intensively, with no access to natural light or adequate room to nest, can be categorised as ‘high health and welfare’. It’s difficult to tell, from these labels, which farms actually are higher welfare. This isn’t just exploiting animals: this kind of language exploits the human consumer, too.

Recently, I have taken to watching videos of a farmer called Minette Batters. There are plenty online: Batters speaking at COP26, Batters on Channel 4 News, Batters recording herself testing her cattle for TB. The current tensions in modern UK farming are best exemplified by Batters, possibly the most powerful person in UK agriculture. As President of the National Farmers’ Union, a union of around 50,000 skewed towards owners and businesses, she represents the ‘old guard’ of farming. But she straddles this duty with that of making farming palatable to the wider, non-farming public. In one video, Batters states that she gets ‘really attached to my cows. Some of them even have names.’ I find this interesting, and watch the video again. Batters smiles intently at the camera as she says ‘really attached’ – look, she’s a human! She loves her cows! But, unlike Tulip’s owner, Batters tempers this with multiple qualifiers: ‘some of’, ‘even’. The video continues. Batters insists that her cows ‘are part of the family’, then backpedals: ‘Certainly some of them, anyway’. 

Here, Batters is struggling with the dualism inherent in meat production: you live with an animal, worship it, even, and then you eat it. Berger observes that ‘the vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and depend upon, animals’. ‘Remain’ is a key word: in the UK, the Enlightenment – which brought in theories about the separation of the human from the soulless animal – coincided with enclosure of the countryside, and both contributed to the spreading conception of animals as something distant from us. Berger was writing pre-1980; Batters is speaking in a UK that is altogether more globalised, yet also where urban living has increased, and most people are at a greater distance from primary production than ever before.

Here emotional disconnect about meat production can function as self-protection for not only the consumer, but for the farmer, too – even Clarkson burst into tears when he personally had to drive some sheep to the abattoir. It is important to remember that most of those working on the frontline in meat farming can’t afford to be sentimental about their livelihoods: farming is a job with tiny margins and unpredictable setbacks, and farm labourers, of course, are among the most silenced voices in the labour force, often on short-term, cash-in-hand jobs, and with their only UK union disbanded in 1982. As the number of mega farms in the UK increases, we are in a dangerous position. No matter how much farmers feel they care, these farms focused on profit margins do not, ultimately, prioritise animal welfare. Now that we’ve left the EU, the UK must regulate farms and food, and mandate space, fresh air, and prices for animals, which makes precise language when we package, discuss and report on meat production all the more important.  

Often, it’s easier for an individual to pretend an animal is a machine, or to tidy it away with a joke. Yet treating a living thing as a product is a slippery slope under capitalism. When we admit that our language assumes an animal is, for example, a machine, it forces us to look not just at animal welfare and different ways of farming, but also at what Berger calls ‘the universal use of animal-signs for charting the experience of the world’. When we recognise that our ideas of what farm animals are, are only ideas, we realise just how much we are grappling with. Like my grandmother, for whom time slips away, the concept of what animals are, exactly, has slipped away from us – if we ever had hold of it at all. Perhaps the people who live closer to animals have a more precise grasp of their mysteries – perhaps not.

My grandmother does not talk much about cattle anymore. At Christmas, we try to remind her of the prizewinning ‘CHAMP’, a heifer whose name was Pearl. But Pearl has been and gone in my grandmother’s mind. Nevertheless, her fierce attention to the cows brings home to me the genuine relationship that farmers can have with animals – if the conditions are right. The fact that some UK farmers pride themselves on animal welfare is, I think, a hopeful sign. If we can dig into the source of this pride, things can be made better for animals. Chickens should live on more space than one A4 sheet of paper. Care must be something that is practised, not just felt. 

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Credits

Rosanna Hildyard is an editor and writer from North Yorkshire. She is a Barbican Young Poet and an alumnus of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Her poetry and fiction has been published in PERVERSE, Banshee and Modern Poetry in Translation, been shortlisted for the Benedict Kiely Award and come second in the Brick Lane Short Story Prize. Her short story collection, Slaughter, was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2021 and is available from Broken Sleep Books.

The illustration is by Lucy Haslam, an illustrator based in Bristol who specialises in editorial illustration and narrative comics. She likes to sit back and let the textures do all the heavy lifting in her work. You can find her work at lucyhaslam.com and get in touch at info@lucyhaslam.com.

This newsletter was edited by Rebecca May Johnson. Many thank to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits and proofing.

Additional Reading

Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (Bloomsbury, 1990)

John Berger, ‘Looking at Animals’ from About Looking (Bloomsbury, 2009)

Barry Cockroft, ‘The Dale That Died’ (Yorkshire Television documentary, 1975 [available for free on BFI Player]

John Clare, Poems, ed. Paul Farley (Faber, 2016)

James Herriot, Every Living Thing

Forrest Gander and John Kinsella, Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (University of Iowa Press, 2012)

Amanda Owen, The Yorkshire Shepherdess (Pan Macmillan, 2015)

Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (Orion, 2020)

James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life (Penguin, 2015) and English Pastoral (Penguin, 2020)

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 5: Food Producers and Production.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

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If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from editing this newsletter, especially fielding comments and complaints, it’s that the narratives we like to tell and want to be true are never quite as easy as they seem to be. You want that co-op’s model to be the solution to the food system’s woes, but it turns out they’re paying poverty wages; you want that vegetable supplier you love to expand their business and make their produce available to all, but it turns out the owner treats his workers like shit; you want that cutesy bakery serving heritage wheat croissants to…well, you get my point. You also want to be sure that the villains really are the villains, but sometimes they turn out to be quite alright (or at least they pay a lot better.)

Today’s newsletter by Mina Miller, and co-produced with the lovely people from The Fence, juggles several different narratives: food co-ops, Brexit, smoked salmon wars, right-wing failsons, the gentrification of Hackney Wick, and Michael Gove. The initial idea came out of an email Mina sent me a while back in response to another newsletter Vittles had published, which made me question some of the narratives I wanted to be true, and my easy acceptance of anything that confirmed them. Really though, it shouldn’t be surprising that the food producers that run solely on good intentions would be the ones that are least satisfying to work for, and that self-governance is always much harder than the revolution. It’s not that the answer is to give up your values, but we should acknowledge that the devil’s party is often a lot more fun.

Forman, Grilled, by Mina Miller

The first thing you noticed walking through the front door of H. Forman & Son was the smell: the pervasive, unmistakable aroma of smoked fish, poorly disguised by the brash floral notes of an industrial-grade air freshener. Along with the sombre tiling, and beatifically uplit sides of salmon in a viewing window, it gave the foyer an almost funereal vibe, like you’d walked into an undertakers, rather than an active factory in London’s industrial heartland. Not that I could smell the fish anymore: on some days, I’d come home and my boyfriend would look up and say, ‘you’ve been in the factory today’. Within a few weeks of working there I was totally nose-blind.

Just before I started at Forman’s in 2016, my interest in sustainable farming and small-scale food production had led me to coordinate the fruit and veg box delivery for an organic community farm and co-operative – a job which, despite its progressive credentials, paid me a meagre wage and left me physically exhausted, clinging to my sanity. While staffed exclusively with well-meaning people, the co-op was full of unspoken expectations. I shouldn’t buy my lunch at Tesco. I should spend my break talking to volunteers. I shouldn’t show too much enthusiasm for making the box scheme profitable – in fact, I shouldn’t use the word ‘profit’.

When I raised the fact that unpaid work wasn’t in the job description, I was told quite tartly that my willingness to go to the pub after work but not work (unpaid) open days had been noted. My job was terminated. Shortly after, I found out Forman’s home delivery subdivision, Forman & Field, was looking for a sales manager at its premises, a large, fish-shaped new build the colour of salmon, located, aptly, on Fish Island in Hackney Wick. I knew Forman’s well – the well-worn lore is that it’s been operational since 1905 and is the oldest smokehouse in London – so I applied, excited at continuing to work in the artisan food space and the ability to reliably pay rent. I met the owner, Lance Forman, who hired me at once.

Most people know Lance one of two ways: either for his political activity (he’s a prominent Brexiteer, former Brexit Party MEP and extremely active on Twitter) or because they’re interested in salmon. A short, charming man with an easy sense of humour, Lance gave the impression of being permanently amused, often at himself. Despite wearing braces in a salmon scale pattern and salmon-coloured ties, he exuded an air of eminent reasonableness and was unfailingly polite. If you asked him what his favourite food was, he’d laugh and say ‘salmon, of course!’

Lance did actually love salmon, and his enthusiasm (‘smoke is a process, not a flavour!’) changed my conception of what it should taste like. Most salmon is cured chemically, using a strongly flavoured liquid smoke that is either heated into a gas or brushed directly on the fish (a process Lance compared to spray tanning). Forman’s salmon is salted within 48 hours of being pulled from water, then hot- or cold-smoked in large smokers with oak chips, the salt hardening into a crust, the pellicle, which is sliced off, revealing tender fish with a hint of smoke flavour. Pellicle used to be a waste product until Lance thought to sell it as ‘salmon jerky’ (I used to nibble it at my desk until I realised it made me murderously thirsty).

Though my responsibilities at F&F were ostensibly that of a manager, I soon learned there was little to do but show up. Because the majority of orders went out in the three weeks before Christmas, we were only really needed to keep things ticking along for the rest of the year. Just two of us took orders, managed customer service, organised product photoshoots, made sales calls, printed the delivery manifests and ensured the parcels made it onto the courier’s van at the end of the day. In the long hours of spring and summer downtime, I taught myself coding and digital marketing and made a great number of eBay purchases.

Then, at peak time, the work became relentless, with the phone ringing non-stop. Courier troubles let us down repeatedly, with harried drivers jettisoning hundreds of pounds of food over random fences and boxes of caviar being held in eternal limbo at sorting centres. We prided ourselves on our customer service, so I remember the painful time I had to call up a woman on Christmas Eve and explain to her that, despite our repeated efforts, none of her family’s festive dinner would make it and to go to the shops before they closed. When the factory got overwhelmed, we’d head down to help pack box after box, readying them for dispatch, stuffing them with shredded paper and carefully wrapped packets of food in freezing temperatures.

As for the customer calls, they were like dispatches from another time. A large portion of the customer base was elderly and upper-class, seemingly confined to their estates in far-flung reaches of England, befuddled by the changes happening around them. They would unfailingly answer the phone by stating the final digits of their phone numbers with shaky voices in received pronunciation. One odd thing happened quite frequently: rather than adhering to standard phonetic code (N for November, etc.), callers would instead creakily spell out their addresses saying ‘it’s N… like for nobody!’ Some were confused about the orders they had placed. One customer with suspected dementia put in so many lavish orders in quick succession that we intervened to check if the food was really needed (it was not). They were quick to complain and expected freebies and refunds for the tiniest mishaps, such as the food arriving cool (and fine to eat) but not ice cold. Couriers enraged them, particularly ones they suspected to be foreign. Shortly after Sadiq Khan’s mayoral victory, I received a number of calls that started off with an angry aside about London not being London anymore because a Muslim was in charge. Sometimes, if I couldn’t steer the conversation back to food, I would gently place the phone back in its cradle and let someone else pick it up the next time it rang.

When I joined the Forman’s team, Lance had just written a book with a Grisham-style cover, titled Forman’s Games – a sort of business history-cum-memoir of Lance’s dual career in politics and fish, in which Lance takes on the Olympic Delivery Authority and wins. He was keen to sell copies and made sure the book had a full-page spread in the back of the F&F catalogue, perhaps fitting for a person who goes by a professional name that matches his business (his real surname is Anisfeld). Status and privilege can confer an authority, even to food, that seems foundational, unquestionable. That’s not to say that the heritage isn’t real – I do believe Lance has the trade in his blood, and his book contains photos of old storefronts on Ridley Road and Queen’s Yard as far back as the 1960s – but every Google search yields the same result: page after page of glowing articles repeating Lance’s key talking points ad infinitum (I should know; I ghost-wrote a couple of Spectator pieces).

As much as I enjoyed him cheerfully talking to me about whether solar flares might be causing climate change, Lance’s idiosyncrasies and warmth were hard to reconcile with his political outlook. He would often come by my desk to share his thoughts on Nigel Farage (the right ideas but too tough a line on immigration); Brexit (essential for business); Jo Cox (deep sadness about the needless loss of life, real shame the left was politicising her death); the gentrification of Hackney Wick (inevitable, but good to keep the artists on side). Sometimes, Lance’s son would come in to see his dad and I heard he was planning to start a media channel of some sort, which was just the sort of vague endeavour you would expect of a smoked goods heir. (I had underestimated him: he later became the chief executive of Turning Point UK, a rabidly right-wing advocacy group imported from the US.)

Soon after I started, Lance hosted a Brexit rally, featuring Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Michael Gove. When I came into the office the morning of the Brexit vote I asked my director, Lance’s number two, how he was doing while he briskly walked by. His reply boomed through the office: ‘It’s a great day, Mina, we’ve taken our country back!’ I wondered how the mostly Lithuanian workers in the factory felt: not that I had much chance to socialise with the factory, whose workers clocked in and out much earlier than us in the office.

Ironically, the most notable thing that happened at Forman’s while I was there was its star product, the ‘London Cure’ salmon, receiving the European Commission’s PGI protection, which can’t be restricted to one business: it’s about geography and production methods, as Lance knew when submitting the application. In this case, the salmon needed to be cured and smoked with rock salt and oak smoke, and could only be manufactured in the London boroughs of Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets. The reason cited for this in the application was to preserve the East End’s rich heritage of salmon smoking, but of course, Forman’s was the only smokehouse meeting that criteria at that time. The successful PGI certification was celebrated in an early morning ceremony during which Michael Gove made a brief appearance to give a speech, with attendees making wink wink nudge nudge references to the EU being pointless. Soon after, Secret Smokehouse, based in Hackney, wrestled in on the action, leading to a very public salmon war.

If Lance was the easy-going owner, seemingly more interested in his nascent political career and prodigious tweeting, my direct boss was the director of operations, Lance’s ‘right hand man and rock’ (Lance’s own words). A bulky man with a no-nonsense disposition, the director was once a chef at Le Gavroche and brought the hierarchical energy of old-school kitchens to his management style. He would drive in from Essex shortly before dawn most days and clock in 12 hours of work or more before leaving, unless he decided to sleep on a camp cot.

They were a typical good cop-bad cop duo. Lance was forgiving of staff fuckups, having seen it all before. My boss, however, would stalk the office and factory. You didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his criticism. He talked a lot about how we were ‘a family’ and I think he sincerely believed this. Whereas the co-op talked a lot about community, and there was a notion that, together, members would batten down together to carve out a space of respite from the harsh realities of capitalism, this family was a fiefdom. Dissent was never tolerated, and what was expected was nothing short of total fealty. One Saturday, not long before my second Christmas at Forman’s, I received a group email from my boss, subject line: in the words of. It continued to reference the great MLK, but stated that my boss also had a dream – one in which his team would go into work on the weekend to support him, each and every week. When no one responded within a few minutes, he emailed again, displeased that no one had answered.

Somehow, this was the decisive moment. After my next pay day, I simply never turned up again.

Despite being on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, both food producers I worked for were inherently conservative: Forman’s politically and socially, and the co-op in its refusal to engage with the outside world. Even though the co-op wasn’t run by a political conservative, its reticence to affect material change stood at odds with the core tenets of progressivism and this meant it was putting its own survival at risk. At least at Forman’s the food was reaching a market, and by stocking Selfridges, Waitrose and restaurants up and down the country, it showed that artisan food could be produced at scale and be commercially viable. Unlike the co-op, with its existential anxieties about selling out or going mainstream, Forman’s had no problem being successful. In a journal at the time, I wrote: ‘They don’t seem to have the same set of facts about how the world works as I do. Their relationship with foreigners is riddled with contradictions. But they’re better to work for than a worker’s co-op: this is the real kicker.’

In May 2019, a little over a year after I left, Lance became a Brexit Party MEP. This made sense, I thought. Forman’s was an environment in which risks were taken all the time. It’s not that they didn’t ever fail – it’s that they were shielded enough from failure that they could keep trying things until something stuck. The bigger the punt, the bigger the potential success. From the salmon jerky to the politicking, Forman’s wasn’t a dysfunctional workplace after all. Everything was running just as it was meant to: I simply hadn’t been in on the joke.

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Credits

Mina Miller is a writer and recipe editor based in Sheffield. You can follow her on Twitter at @mina_um_so

The illustration is by Olga Prager. You can find more of her illustrations here.

Many thanks to Charles Baker and the editorial team at The Fence. Issue 10 is now out, which you can buy at https://www.the-fence.com/shop

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the latest newsletter on Turkish food in Enfield. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running. You can also now have a free trial if you would like to see what you get before signing up.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

Last reminder to subscribe to The Fence! Vittles will be co-publishing an article by Mina Miller next week all about salmon, Brexit, the Tories, gentrification and working for small producers. It will be out on April 8th in print in The Fence and April 11th on Vittles. In the meantime, please subscribe to The Fence for a v special price of £25, read their latest free meal column, or sign up to their newsletter for free — it’s a bargain for what you get, and there aren’t many other magazines in the UK which put so much effort into working with and promoting young and new writers.

I’m already looking back at this season even though, by my watch, there’s still a good third of it left to come (and between you and me, some of my favourite pieces). Still, it’s not a bad time to look back at what felt like individual, discrete articles at the time and see how they relate to the season as a whole.

There are multiple pathways you can take through this season. Two articles about taste and flavour and the middlemen of production were, in some sense, mirror images of each other: Max Fletcher’s newsletter on Great Taste was about subjectivity masquerading as objectivity; Barclay Bram on sensory panels was about the opposite (or was it?). There have been multiple critiques of foods as commodity: Jenn Rugolo on the value of coffee, Lily Kelting on bean-to-bar chocolate, Robbie Armstrong about the ownership of whisky. One of my favourite (and most fun) strands has been about industrial production: Joel Hart on the journey of bottled amba, Giuseppe Lacorazza on salsa inglesa, and Sean Wyer on the British factory. The last two of those have shown me a different way of thinking about Britain’s contribition to the food world.

The final sub-strand is about land and ownership, about tradition vs modernity, and the possibility that the two need not be dichotomies. It started with the compilation on urban gardens, and finding space within a hostile city, then to Hester van Hensbergen’s newsletter on land ownership and the farming left, which neatly tied into Katie Revell on the sociolinguistic history of the British peasantry last week. Today’s compilation fits into this strand, although it is more explicitly about the type of production you would expect in a season on food production ─ turning chestnuts, crabs, elvers and pigs into food. As I mentioned in last week’s intro, we are torn between the romance of the old ways, and denigrating them. These four traditions of food production, in England and Italy, are that contradiction made flesh: four different methods of making food that will most likely be extinct in the next generation. Do we protect them fiercely as the way things should be done, or embrace modernity? Or, like a dying language, do we accept that a loss to the diversity of the way we engage with food - romantic, redundant or otherwise - is something that should be marked and mourned on its own terms?

Dying Food Traditions

Bread of the Trees, by Max Jones

In the northern parts of Piedmont, chestnuts were once crucial to the mountain folk. They became known as pane degli alberi – bread of the trees – and were a staple for ensuring survival through difficult winters. They were so important that some of the first food eaten by the mountain folks’ children would have been chestnuts – chewed by the parent into a paste, then fed to the baby as it weaned off breast milk.

Each October, families would comb the hills with chestnut-wood rakes for as long as there was light to work by, bent double with the weight of the apron-sack tied round their waists, in order to gather, then harvest, the plump nuts from an auburn brush of prickly burrs. The chestnuts would be taken to a small two-story building called graa – this was the size of a beach-hut, and hewn from the hill’s mica-rich stone. Around 500kg of fresh chestnuts would then be unloaded onto the loose chestnut-wood rafters of the upper section, and below, a fire was lit that burned for forty days, fuelled by the previous year’s chestnut husks to gently desiccate with smoke the heaving load above.

Right up to the First World War, most of the family would go to live by, or even in, the graa, taking with them only a perforated pan for roasting the chestnuts, and a copper paiolo pot for boiling them with wild fennel stalks and bay. They would live off chestnuts for the duration of the smoke-drying process. The water in which the chestnuts were boiled was used in hair treatment, the leaves used to stuff mattresses, the wood used to produce distilled. The spiny casings would be boiled up with chestnut leaves and added to bathwater as a bone-strengthener and rheumatism treatment, and finally buried in the chestnut grove to break down and nourish the trees for the following season. 

Then the fifties and sixties saw mass abandonment of the mountain, with over 70% of its population leaving. Italy’s economic boom gave rise to new industry, and factories offered guaranteed work and stability. There was an appealing security there that went against the very core of the hardship of the mountain, when living at the mercy of nature. Bread of the trees became bread of the poor as the old mountain life was rejected by those who knew its perils, their outdated traditions representing struggle and shame. 

But the mountain is the mountain, and the handful of families that still dwell there are those that will never come out, silently propagating a tradition of resilience, survival and sustained life. At the start of the year, my research in supporting these traditions that barely survive led me to one such man, the last to preserve chestnuts in the Elvo Valley: D. Warmvalley. He doesn’t want to be known, but his surname comes from the valley’s dialect, referencing a seasonal wind that raises the valley’s temperature by a couple of degrees. He is of the place.

With twinkling eyes and the hands of a man that keeps cows, he passes me an old bread-bag, bidding me in dialect to smell its contents, ‘nusa, nusa!’, his eyes wide with a grin as I breathe in all the scents of a thousand past autumns, sweet and deep with a delicate hum of woodsmoke. Warmvalley tells me he operates only in nero – that is to say: I give you chestnuts, you give me cash. He no longer goes to the local market to trade his hyper-seasonal dried chestnuts, as his ephemeral ‘business’ is unregistered. (All traders are now required to print off tax-traceable receipts for each olive, biscuit, bean or bun sold in the market square, which is policed by the Guardia di Finanza who come dressed in civvies to catch Warmvalley out.) So to access his chestnuts, we must have a contact, and then be sussed out by another contact of the contact.

The few who stayed up there on the mountain are the raft in the sea of disconnection we are floundering in today. We stand to relearn so much from these people, who hold the key to an ancient freedom. They offer a glimpse at the life lived by the generations before them, carrying forward the knowledge of how to sustain life as part of nature. Floating raw butter in a glacial spring which acts as a fridge in summer; burning cotton to create a vacuum in jars to store salame; maturing cheese with rust-red lichen. I think of a quote I came across in 2013, from one of these Piemontese men. Born in 1931 as his mother went into labour whilst harvesting chestnuts, he is now dead, but in his life he was always true to the mountain; he said that ‘Today, everything has changed. Ours was a world made of simple and genuine things, but also of hard work that knew suffering, but we were the few that never resented it. We were faithful to our world. It was made up of habits and custom, where everything was done with calm, where work governed time and not the other way round. It was a world where we used our heads and hands, but above all, our hearts.’ 

Hand on heart, when I eat the bread of the trees, I become the mountain.

The Cromer Crab Crisis, by Lauren Fitchett

Since I moved here eleven years ago, I’ve become familiar with the Norfolk snapshots of the uninitiated: Alan Partridge, Delia Smith and Colman’s mustard. Leaning more towards reality than cliché is also Cromer crab, one of the county’s most famous exports, caught off its north coast. 

The crab connection runs deep here: cafés and restaurants in north Norfolk depend on a plentiful supply, tourists visit from all over the UK for a day of crabbing, and for fishermen, it’s in their blood. Each day’s haul – up to 500 on a good day in peak season – is loaded onto vans, prepared and delivered up and down the coastline (some is shipped further afield, but most stays local). There, it’s piled into sandwiches, baked into a Thermidor or, for purists, seasoned with a grind of fresh black pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. 

Yet Cromer crab is in crisis. Concerns over crews’ fishing pots damaging sensitive chalk reefs have led to threats of fishing restrictions, which would destroy the industry. Meanwhile, new longer-term recruits offering to take up the baton are few and far between. Early wake-up calls, the physicality of the work and high start-up costs are deterring younger jobseekers, despite recruitment drives and apprenticeships. In the nineteenth century the coastline was packed with fishing boats – today, they are much harder to spot.

Among them is the boat of John Davies, an eighth-generation fisherman who earned his sea legs as a child (he has photos as a babe-in-arms aboard his father’s trawler). He’s been out at sea for decades, each day facing choppy waves and bracing winds long before most people have blearily turned off the alarm.

‘It is tough going,’ Davies says. ‘I try to give my boys a couple of days off but it’s six, seven days a week. Like farmers, we have to make hay while the sun shines and fish while we can – that doesn’t always suit youngsters. It’s also not something you can learn from a book; you have to learn on the job.’

The demise of the Cromer crab industry would mean losing far more than sandwiches. Small towns relying on tourism would be dealt a severe blow. Those whose livelihoods rely on the daily hauls would be out of work. Decades of knowledge would be lost. It would end a tradition which has spanned at least 300 years.

The flipside is if the reef isn’t protected, we may lose Cromer crab entirely. The species itself isn’t unusual – Cancer pagurus is found around the UK and Europe – and the Cromer variety is actually smaller than those caught elsewhere. But its flavour has earned it popularity, and that flavour is dependent on the preservation of the reef. The nutrient-rich water of the chalk reef causes the crabs to mature more slowly, creating a distinctively sweet, delicate flavour, with a higher white-to-brown meat ratio. Fishermen – who often point to the length of time fisheries have existed, and lack of evidence that reef changes are as a result of their pots – say they are acutely aware of the need to preserve the environment and that, while restrictions would be a death knell, harming what causes the crabs’ distinctive flavour would destroy their livelihoods, too. 

For the time being, it’s business as usual. Restaurant deliveries will go ahead and, as the season ramps up in spring, supply will be plentiful. Davies is keeping positive. ‘I’m lucky the job I do is the job I always wanted,’ he says. ‘Other options never even entered my head. It’s not easy, but if I had my time again, I wouldn’t change it.’

Where Have all the Elvers Gone?, by Frank Kibble

From the calm waters of the North Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea where they are born, the elvers move with the Gulf Stream, migrating towards European shores. At this time of year, the River Severn is one of their favoured destinations to ‘recruit’ – to grow from juvenile elvers into adult eels – or at least, it once was. 

In the decades after the last bountiful period in the early 1980s, recruitment in the River Severn declined by 85%, according to Environment Agency figures. There is some debate as to why this happened, but it is likely that pollution, habitat loss, parasites and overfishing have all played a part. Despite admirable efforts to revive numbers, recruitment has never really recovered. While smoked eels grace London sandwiches, jellied eels have their place on Essex dining tables and Basque angulas complete any pintxo menu, elvers are too endangered, too expensive and (for some) too unappetising to eat nowadays. An unbroken tradition of eating elvers along the Severn is slipping past obscurity and into inexistence. 

It is a far cry from even living memory. My Gloucestershire family have told me of a great swarm of elvers swimming up the Severn in days gone by, a marvellous ‘eel fare’ visible from the banks, and men selling them in the villages – you’d bring an old pillowcase to carry the elvers you had bought back home to cook and eat. ‘Elvers in the Gloucester style’, as described by Jane Grigson in the classic English Food, has them cooked in bacon fat with a beaten egg: the elvers are placed atop the bacon rashers and served hot with vinegar. 

Grigson, writing in the early 1970s, noted that elvers were then the only fish fry you could legally catch for food on the river. Tons would be brought out of the Severn, particularly in the villages of Epney, Framilode and Frampton, providing food for agricultural and industrial workers and their families. Up until the sudden decline in the number of elvers migrating, Frampton also played host to the annual elver-eating championships, where the elvers were fried in massive paella-style dishes on outdoor barbecues. The championships were revived in 2015 after a near-forty-year absence, but contestants now gorge on a synthetic version of the elver made from Surimi fish paste rather than the real thing. Novel and quirky, the championships give a light-hearted nod to a unique local food culture that is no longer perpetuated. But they are just about the only nod to this heritage you’re likely to find in these villages.

Sustainability is now paramount when it comes to catching elvers on the River Severn. In the 1990s, massive demand from Asian markets caused the price of elvers to skyrocket, and they ceased to be an affordable meal option for people along the Severn. This demand led to further overfishing, and ultimately a ban on exports outside the EU as populations continued to decline. Elvers are now listed as an endangered species and catching them for sale is tightly regulated by the Environment Agency. With the UK no longer in the EU, prices remain volatile, but the market is even smaller – and there are fewer still who will buy elvers to eat. 

But there are those who persist with tradition. As captured in Isla Badenoch’s film The Elvermen, there remains a small group of licensed fishermen who still go out at night in the spring months to catch the elusive elver. Their families caught elvers before them, and they have been elvering all their lives. ‘We don’t want to lose this fishery … it’s in [our] blood,’ says Dave the Elverman. But for the most part, their catch is sold for repopulation initiatives in Europe, not for food. Tastes have moved on, and the elvermen must look elsewhere to make a living. All that’s left is the memory of the elver’s presence on a plate.

Killing the Pig, by Teresa O’Connell

Lumps of coarsely ground pig fat are melting slowly in a large copper pot, sitting on hot ashes. ‘First the feet, then the ears, the snout, the tongue, the rind, the kidneys’; Patrizia, wearing a napkin on her head, lists the recipe of the frittole out loud, stirring the contents of the quadara with a long wooden spoon. 

Across the yard, the pig’s carcass, split along the backbone into two mirroring halves, is hanging on metal hooks from the roof of the shed. At the concrete sink built into the side of the house, two women are cleaning the animal’s insides, scrubbing the intestines to make the casing for sausages and soppressate.

The pig was killed shortly after dawn on this late January morning with a slit to its throat, its dark-red blood left to pour into blue plastic bowls on the ground. The blood will be mixed with cocoa powder, sultanas, sugar and spices to prepare sanguinaccio, a metallic-tasting spread rich in iron which is said to help children’s growth. 

Its front and back legs still tied together with rope, the lifeless pig was rested on its side across a wooden stretcher, as Alfredo poured boiling water over the skin to soften the hair and his namesake grandson scraped it off with a sharp blade. Then, the butchering began.

Around the boarded-up old stone house, clementine-dotted plots slope downwards from the winding road climbing up to the church of Arcavacata. The hills outside the village in the southern Italian region of Calabria are covered in olive trees; the silver leaves on the branches that survived the recent pruning glisten in the winter sun. 

In the past, the wind carried the cry of pigs being slaughtered across the hills at this time of year, when keeping and butchering a pig was the only way many families could afford to eat meat. But new rows of houses have sprung up in the wind’s path, as more and more villagers have given up their crumbling buildings for the comforts of modern living. Now, it’s much easier to have a butcher do the work for you, and the families who keep up the fading ritual are few and far between.

At Gelsomina’s, who lives in the cluster of self-built new houses by the church, quadare blackened by years of use hang from the exposed-brick wall. Now eighty-four, Gelsomina hasn’t killed a pig since her husband Giovanni passed away. ‘People today are vacabunni – “lazy”’, she says in the local dialect. Her children, one working for the university down the road and the other a policeman, are uninterested. Gelsomina still procures pig fat from her sister-in-law’s brother, who is a butcher, to make blocks of soap, stacks of which lend the air in the dark basement a sticky smell.

Down the road, Sandro, a freelance graphic designer in his forties who works the land he inherited from his parents, hangs last year’s capicollo (a cured meat made from the muscle in the pig’s neck) from the ceiling of the ground-floor kitchen. Metal cans of home-made olive oil sit alongside the new wine, still fermenting in wide-bellied, dark-green glass bottles. ‘We’ve been too busy with work this year, we didn’t get round to buying a pig,’ Daniela, his primary-school-teacher wife tells me apologetically before offering me a breakfast of dampened fresa with olive oil and wine. Sandro plays Schlager music on his phone, telling me about his early childhood in Germany. 

It’ll take most of the day for Patrizia’s frittole to cook in the copper pot – until the cartilage has absorbed the fat and any meat on the offcuts is falling off the bone – just in time for a lavish dinner at the end of a hard day’s work butchering, grinding, and preparing the meat for the rest of the year. Neighbours and family will join, the first of the new wine will be opened, and it will be time to celebrate the killing of the pig.

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Credits

Max Jones is a traditional food conservationist who devotes his time to upholding imperilled food heritage. For more info on a series of upcoming course expeditions in helping safeguard traditions in food, from smoking wild salmon in Ireland to the transhumance in Italy, follow @uptherethelast www.uptherethelast.com 

Lauren Fitchett is a home cook and food writer in Norfolk, posting attempts at new recipes at @laurenfitchettfood and covering news and trends at laurenfitchett.com

Frank Kibble is a writer and fundraiser from South London with ties to Gloucestershire. He writes about culture and identity and works with locally-led community projects across the country.

Teresa O'Connell is an editor at Are We Europe. She grew up in Calabria and lives in Berlin. 

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for proof reading and additional edits.

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Another reminder that Vittles will be publishing an article in a couple of weeks co-produced with one of our very favourite publications, The Fence. The article will be out on April 8th in print in The Fence and April 11th on Vittles. In the meantime, please subscribe to The Fence for a v special price of £25, read their latest free meal column, or sign up to their newsletter for free — it’s a bargain for what you get, and there aren’t many other magazines in the UK which put so much effort into working with and promoting young and new writers. They have also just put up an article I wrote last year on Google Review restaurant beef, if you are into that kind of thing.

At the start of Ermanno Olmi’s hazy masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a priest informs a poor peasant couple that their child has been given the gift of intelligence by the Lord and that the boy should be sent to school. Dumbfounded, the man attempts to protest that the child is needed to work, but he is powerless against the knowledge embodied by the priest and the culture embedded into the church building itself; the architecture, the paintings, the altar, the icons. “What will they say” he worries to his wife “about a peasant’s child going to school?”

The film spends the next hour or so languishing around the the cascina, the communal compound that the peasants live in. Olmi shows how, in contrast to the opening scene, that the peasants do have knowledge, that they do have culture. They know how to harrow the land, to ready it for sowing, guiding horses carefully through the field; they know how to harvest corn, to dehusk it together while singing songs of sorrow, of joy; they know not to let the children disturb the new born foal in case is gets startled, how to calm an unruly horse; they know how to turn a meagre harvest into soup, how to mill flour, how to conserve for the next year. The cascina has the interdependent complexity of a factory operation; they know everything that keeps the town running.

Olmi is clear-eyed and unromantic about the peasants in his film. After half an hour of this, you start to wonder how long you could have lasted, how lucky you were to be born into an era of hot running water, washing machines and Magnum Double Caramels. Moreover, the film opens with subtitles explaining that despite the number of peasants in the cascina, the landlord owns it, owns the animals, owns the land, owns the harvest, owns everything. That this way of living was not Edenic, but fundamentally exploitative.

As Katie Revell explains in today’s newsletter, it’s hard to see a film like The Tree of Wooden Clogs get made in the UK. We are either scathing of our historical peasants, choosing to mock them, or we romanticise the life that goes on in other countries. The history of our peasantry explains some of it, the harrowing of being driven off the land and into factories, how this sowed distrust of the folk and the rural. But also, perhaps there’s something in the word itself. Maybe, as Katie says, it doesn’t matter who we’re calling peasants, as much as why, and who is doing the calling.

Who are you calling ‘peasant’?, by Katie Revell

peasant

noun

UK  /ˈpez.ənt/ 

1. a person who owns or rents a small piece of land and grows crops, keeps animals, etc. on it, especially one who has a low income, very little education, and a low social position. This is usually used of someone who lived in the past or of someone in a poor country.

2. a person who is not well educated or is rude and does not behave well: Joe’s a real peasant.

   Cambridge Dictionary

When I was about six, my family visited some friends on their smallholding outside Derry. They grew fruit and vegetables and kept ducks and chickens. I loved it. I was a precocious nerd of a child, and I’d recently learnt a new word. One evening, I seized the opportunity to try it out. ‘Are you peasants?’ I asked. There was laughter. I didn’t understand why.

Think of a peasant. What springs to mind? I’ll bet you a bushel of grain it’s something like this: a miserable Medieval wretch, toiling in a field, bent double under the weight of their exhaustion and poverty. In the UK, the word ‘peasant’ is associated with ignorance, primitiveness, and a lack of culture. In the British imagination, peasants are the butt of the joke, comical in their wretchedness. I refer you to Baldrick in early episodes of Blackadder, or the Belle and Sebastian album titled ‘Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant’ (apparently inspired by graffiti in a pub toilet), or the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which King Arthur chances upon some peasants gleefully harvesting mud (‘Dennis! There's some lovely filth down ’ere!’). Here the comically wretched trope is invoked, then subverted: Arthur is caught off-guard by the peasants’ radical politics (‘I didn't know we ’ad a king – I thought we were an autonomous collective!’).

We do recognise that such a thing as ‘peasant culture’ exists – but only elsewhere. Indeed, we might even hold that culture in high regard for what we perceive as its resourcefulness, its rusticity, its charming authenticity. This is the other peasant trope: romantic poverty. Think of peasant cuisine – food that’s seen as simple, hearty, honest. We use the term to refer to French cassoulet, Spanish migas, or Italian ‘cucina povera’ dishes (but not to haggis, or cawl, or pasties). In fashion, there’s the ‘peasant look’, characterised by billowy cuts and faux-handicraft details. This was given haute couture kudos by Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic 1976 collection – which he claimed was inspired by the clothing of Russian peasants – and has been rehashed by the British high street on a regular basis ever since. But there is, it seems, no trove of widely understood UK peasant culture to raid for inspiration. So how did the British peasant come to be so shorn of any sense of culture – and the word itself relegated to the status of an insult?

peasant

verb

UK  /ˈpez.ənt/

Late medieval/early modern

3. To subjugate someone as a peasant is subjugated

   Cambridge Dictionary

The word that was to become ‘peasant’ originally arrived in Britain with the Normans, when they conquered England in the eleventh century. The Old French ‘paisant’ appears to have been pretty straightforwardly descriptive, meaning ‘local inhabitant’ or ‘of the area’: someone from somewhere. Anthropologist Marc Edelman writes that ‘Earlier Latin and Latinate forms … date as far back as the sixth century and denoted a rural inhabitant, whether or not involved in agriculture’.

But by the time ‘peasant’ entered common usage in English – in the sixteenth century, according to historian J. V. Beckett – it had become ‘a term of abuse denoting low character, simplicity and rusticity’. Beckett continues: ‘Shakespeare also used the word in a detrimental sense. “Peasant” occurs twenty-nine times in his plays, usually coupled with words such as servant, dull, vulgar, worthless, base, slave, rogue and low’. In Act 2 Scene 2 of Hamlet, the Danish prince acts mad, lamenting ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’

It’s telling that the word ‘peasant’ wasn’t coined by peasants themselves; it was imposed on them from above. The Norman rulers who first introduced it were French-speaking; those to whom it referred spoke English (or one of numerous regional languages and dialects). Traces of this hierarchy are still evident in our language – terms related to working the land often have Saxon roots, and those related to consuming food often have French roots (perhaps the best-known case: we farm cows, but we eat beef). In short: ever since people have had cause to refer to ‘peasants’, it’s been to define them by their relationship to non-peasants – and from the outset, that relationship was unequal and exploitative.

Robin Grey is the founder of Three Acres and a Cow, a show that describes itself as ‘a history of land rights and protest in folk song and story’. He points out to me that England was the birthplace of agrarian capitalism, and the first country to invent the idea that an individual could have absolute ownership of a piece of land. The English peasantry was the first to be dispossessed through enclosures, as land previously held and used in common was taken into private control. This process began with the Norman conquest when William the Conqueror, keen to maintain control of England from afar, introduced a feudal system, parcelling up swathes of land and assigning them to a small number of loyal noblemen. Many peasants became serfs, bound in servitude to this new class of ‘landowners’.

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 saw a broad coalition of people – peasants, merchants and artisans – march on London to protest new economic policies, including a poll tax and maximum wage. With the Black Death having greatly reduced the working population, those that survived had increased leverage – or so they thought. King Richard II promised reforms, including the abolition of serfdom, but later rescinded those offers. (Grey notes that the Peasants’ Revolt was known at the time as the Great Revolt, but was later ‘rebranded’ by the ruling classes in an attempt to downplay its significance).

According to Grey, the aristocracy saw the Great Revolt as a sign that they needed to ‘break the power of the peasantry’. During the 1400s, merchants and the (albeit then tiny) middle class were persuaded to switch their allegiance from the peasantry to the ruling classes. As feudalism declined and capitalism developed, successive waves of enclosure continued to deprive peasants of their rights and access to land – and to render increasingly obsolete the culture that had developed with, and was dependent on, that land.

During the Tudor period, landowners looking to benefit from a boom in demand for wool converted arable land into pasture, replacing peasants with sheep. From 1700 to 1850, a series of parliamentary acts accelerated the pace and scale of enclosures – and, with them, the growth of urban slums, as peasants became factory workers. (Others emigrated to colonies, often violently displacing local indigenous and ‘peasant’ communities in the process). As the peasant way of life was made increasingly difficult and marginal, the stigma attached to it increased, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Edelman points out that peasants were made a scapegoat for myriad economic and social problems: ‘These elite imaginings were typically espoused in order to promote policies aimed at pushing peasants off the land and turning them into laborers’.

The histories of the peasantry in other parts of (what is now) the UK differ in significant ways, but the trajectories, and the end results, are similar: the cultural lives of peasants – their cuisine, their dress, their relationships to the land, their community structures, their (often radical) politics – have been destroyed through ever-increasing material and social marginalisation. In other parts of the world, including other parts of western Europe, differing geographies, histories, inheritance laws and activist movements allowed remnants of peasant culture to survive far longer and, in some cases, to be preserved and celebrated even after they became detached from the conditions in which they had developed. In France, for example – where just 3% of the workforce is today engaged in any kind of agriculture – the peasant remains a potent political and cultural symbol. Journalist Lara Marlowe put it well when she wrote that ‘the French share a folk memory of a time when the vast majority of the population earned a living from the land’.

In the UK, though, any such folk memory has long been erased, and our understanding of what it means to be a peasant has been hollowed out. Can we fill it in again with new meaning – perhaps by drawing inspiration from elsewhere?

peasant

noun

UK  /ˈpez.ənt/ 

4. A peasant is a man or woman of the land, who has a direct and special relationship with the land and nature through the production of food and/or other agricultural products. Peasants work the land themselves, rely[ing] above all on family labour and other small-scale forms of organizing labour. Peasants are traditionally embedded in their local communities and they take care of local landscapes and of agro-ecological systems. 

   The term peasant can apply to any person engaged in agriculture, cattle-raising, pastoralism, handicrafts related to agriculture or a related occupation in a rural area. This includes Indigenous people working on the land. 

   The term peasant also applies to landless.

La Via Campesina 

When Rupert Dunn set up Torth y Tir (‘Loaf of the Land’) bakery in south Wales in 2015, he chose to call himself a ‘peasant baker’. This is a direct translation of ‘paysan boulanger’, a term used in France for someone who not only bakes bread, but also grows the grain and mills the flour.

Dunn believes this multifacetedness is characteristic of the peasant existence (though he’s also careful to emphasise that he doesn’t claim to speak for ‘peasants’ generally). Talking to me from rural Lithuania, where he had been visiting his wife’s family, he explained that, in his view, as well as being a farmer, a ‘peasant’ might well also be a forager, herbalist, craftsperson, builder, entrepreneur and storyteller. Sure, the peasant life is physically hard, but it’s also varied and sociable – in contrast to the specialised, sometimes monotonous and often lonely work of industrial production. It is, you might say, profoundly cultured.

I think Dunn’s understanding of ‘peasant’ can be summarised in two concepts: embeddedness and embodiedness. In his view, peasants are embedded – in community, in their relationship with the land and the seasons, in an ongoing ‘conversation’, as he puts it, with their surroundings – and embodied, in the sense that they use their whole body and being on a daily basis, without the binary distinctions we’re conditioned to make between ‘work’ and ‘life’, ‘manual’ and ‘intellectual’ labour, or ‘present’ and ‘future plans’:

… what we’re taught at school is to become disembodied and to be able to project our lives into the future and to have a ‘career’, in inverted commas … [Here in rural Lithuania] it’s less of a mental existence and I find it far more nourishing … There’s also a relationship here with money that’s very different, and [with] time.

Dunn believes being disembodied is partly a product of being indebted. It’s debt that locks us ‘into this linear, monocultural idea of a career that will be able to pay back the debt, but also pay the cost of living in the grid of the system’. By contrast, while a peasant might well trade goods or services with others locally, they would not do so as a full-time occupation – and usually only to the point at which their needs are met. As Dunn acknowledges, however, the irony is that, in the UK, ‘you have to be pretty well-off to be able to live as a peasant’. Arguably, the choice of living a truly embodied life – a peasant life – is a privilege few people in this country currently have.

Dunn’s understanding of what it means to be a peasant is echoed in the definition developed by La Via Campesina (LVC), which describes itself as an international peasants’ movement. Established in 1993, it has member organisations in 73 countries – including the UK – and claims to represent more than 200 million peasants worldwide. If you’ve heard of LVC, it might be because they coined the term ‘food sovereignty’ as an expansion on, and challenge to, the far more limited concept of ‘food security’. In very basic terms, food sovereignty means control of the food system by those who produce, distribute and eat food, rather than corporations and market institutions.

La Via Campesina literally translates as ‘the peasant way’, but the organisation’s own understanding of ‘peasant’ is expansive, as the above definition indicates – arguably, this could apply equally well to a crofter in the Scottish Highlands, a cattle herder in Ethiopia, a small-scale fisherperson in Indonesia or a migrant farm worker in California. Of course, this catholic approach means more potential LVC supporters and allies, but I think there’s more to it than that: what it suggests is that (as Dunn also argues) being a peasant is about much more than just material reality.

Dorset-based agroecological smallholder Jyoti Fernandes shares this view – but she’s not so keen to embrace an explicitly ‘peasant’ identity. Fernandes is a founding member of the Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA), a union representing ‘farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers’ – and one of the UK members of La Via Campesina. She explains to me that she avoids using the term ‘peasant’ in the UK precisely because, in colloquial use, it’s still so laden with negative connotations: ‘in our political work, if we went around calling ourselves a “peasant” organisation, I don’t think they’d take us very seriously’. ‘Landworkers’ was chosen instead as a word that encompasses the diversity of people and livelihoods the LWA aims to represent. (The one group not included, as Fernandes acknowledges, is fisherpeople – but then, the ‘Land-and-Seaworkers’ Alliance’ might have been a little clunky).

Fernandes also points out that categorising as ‘peasants’ those who live on (or, rather, with) the land – those who are ‘ecosystem-dependent’ in a more direct and obvious way than the rest of us – is often used as a way of justifying the colonisation and extraction of their resources. In Fernandes’ words, ‘It’s about legitimising power … If you give a negative connotation to a certain knowledge system or term or way of living, then it justifies accumulation of power in another sphere’. This is, after all, precisely what happened in this country – and is happening elsewhere today.

If ‘peasant’ is a slippery word, it’s even more crucial to take note of who is using it, and to interrogate what their motive might be in doing so. For producers like Rupert Dunn, ‘peasant’ denotes a way of being and relating to the world – to other people, and to the planet. By actively choosing to identify as a ‘peasant’ – by wearing what is still widely considered an insult as a badge of pride – this group are opening up a conversation about why the word means what it means, and about what it should mean, instead. Attempting to answer those questions forces us to reckon with our past – and, perhaps, to recognise that the processes that destroyed the peasantry, and peasant culture, in the UK (and arguably paved the way for all of us to become locked into disembodied, debt-driven lives) are ongoing globally. Enclosure of the commons on multiple fronts; insecurity of tenure and the belittling or plagiarising of ‘traditional’ knowledge: as La Via Campesina and the Landworkers’ Alliance make clear, these are challenges shared by peasants – whether or not they identify as such – in the UK and around the world.

Whatever word we use, what’s most important is that we recognise that peasants – or landworkers, or ecosystem-dependent people – in the UK and elsewhere, are not an anachronism, be it wretched or romantic. They don’t need help to ‘develop’ into industrial farmers or urban waged labourers. They have culture, and that culture is sophisticated, rich and valuable – in fact, it’s crucial to all of our wellbeing and survival. If Joe is, in fact, ‘a real peasant’, then I think we need more people like Joe.

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Credits

Katie Revell is a Glasgow-based audio producer and (lapsed) filmmaker, with a particular interest in food and farming. You can find her quietly lurking on Instagram and Twitter, and hear and watch some of her work at katierevell.com

The illustrations are woodcut prints inspired by the illuminations of The Luttrell Psalter 1325-40 made by Valerie Littlewood, an illustrator, designer and printmaker for many years, currently living and working in Cambridgeshire UK. You can find her blog at pencilandleaf.valerielittlewood.uk

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional proof reading and edits.

Additional Reading and Listening

The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood

On Enclosure Acts and the Commons by Ellen Rosenman

Torth y Tir episode of BBC R4's On Your Farm

The Problem with 'Peasants' by Gill Barron

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All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the latest newsletter on what British food people bring back home in their suitcases as gifts. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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A quick reminder that Vittles will be publishing an article next month co-produced with one of our very favourite publications, The Fence. The article will be out on April 8th in print in The Fence and April 11th on Vittles. In the meantime, please subscribe to The Fence for a v special price of £25, read their latest free meal column, or sign up to their newsletter for free — it’s a bargain for what you get, and there aren’t many other magazines in the UK which put so much effort into working with and promoting young and new writers.

The word ‘producer’ means something different depending on who you’re talking to, but crucially, which industry (or even which part of the industry) you’re in. Take the new Kanye documentary jeen─yuhs for example. In part 1, Kanye is a budding hip-hop producer looking to become a rapper. He is the originator of the music he produces ─ the music starts with him making a beat and it is put in the shop window, often for not very much money. It’s made clear in jeen─yuhs that although other producers and rappers respect Kanye, the producer is the bottom feeder in this chain (at one point, he says something to the effect that he’d rather be called ‘the 100th best rapper than the best producer’).

This contrasts with another recently released music documentary, Get Back, where the role of producer differs hugely. Here it is the exuberantly dressed, fur-coated Glyn Johns, who is not in any way the originator of the music (in this case, it is The Beatles), but something close to a freelance hired-hand whose job it is to lead the sessions in a way a film director might, and then, like an editor, make something of the music he’s been given. This, in turn, is also utterly different from the producer of a film, who is the most important person in the chain because they are the originator of the money and therefore utterly irreplaceable. This type of producer is the be all and end all: when a film wins Best Picture at the Oscars, it is the producer, not the director or cast, who claims it.

One of the goals of this season of Vittles has been to complicate the role of producer in food. Today’s newsletter by Barclay Bram is a companion piece to Max Fletcher’s newsletter on the Great Taste Awards (on those who produce taste), and a continuation of themes in Bram’s article for 1843 on where the production of flavour is headed. We usually see the food producer as someone in the Kanye mould ─ the originator and least paid person in the chain. But as Jenn Rugalo pointed out in her coffee newsletter, there are multiple producers of value; Bram’s is concerned with the production of flavour, via master tasters and sensory panels, but also how these unseen producers interact with and have an effect on the producers at source, changing categories and definitions they have to abide by.

I had never given a second thought to this subject before Bram told me about it, so I hope you find all this equally fascinating. Maybe the only thing we can say for certain about producers is that they all are, and wish to remain, invisible. That is, everyone except Kanye.

Sensory Panels and the Future of Food, by Barclay Bram

What is a flavour? Pick up an artisanal chocolate bar and you’ll notice it has tasting notes: blackberry, caramel, earth. A coffee might have ‘floral notes, acidity and an aroma of cinnamon-spiced pear butter’. Wine – and its obsession with terroir – is the most obvious place to go to seek the outer limits of our ability to describe flavours: ‘youthfully imploded dark fruit flavours’ or ‘cold bonfire’, for example.  

There is something poetic in these labels. You have (almost certainly, but I don’t want to presume) never tasted a cold bonfire. But the label is drawing you somewhere: the forest, pine, dying embers, a crisp night air growing increasingly cold as the fire dims. Primed in this way, you might perceive something in a wine that was previously ineffable. Here there is an attempt by the winemaker to give words to something pre-verbal and intimate, to create a bridge between consumer and producer, and among customers who are drawn to particular flavour notes. But there is still something inherently subjective in this choice of language. 

Flavour is different to taste. Tastes are cultivated class signifiers, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously argued in the 1970s, in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Tastes are culturally produced, as with something like the Great Taste Awards, in which panels of self-defined ‘experts’ arbitrate what is or is not a good sausage. Flavour, on the other hand, is an attempt to objectively describe the experience we have when eating a certain food, as mediated by our individual senses. The difficulty, of course, is that we struggle to be sure whether or not what we are experiencing is the same as anyone else. 

There is another, more measurable, area of flavour that exists right at the hard edge of sensory science; an interpretive process that occurs in the brain which allows us to perceive the nuances between different flavours, that we are then able to communicate to others through language. Within the food and beverage industry, this ability to measure flavour accurately is crucial: it enables us to describe products, to create new ones, and to measure batch quality. It’s how products like tea or whisky are able to always taste the same, despite the fact that the underlying ingredient at their core is always changing; in each case, a master taster is responsible for blending huge batches of different raw ingredients to create a seamlessly consistent end product. The goal here is to remove all subjectivity from describing the flavours in a given product, trying to create as objective a description as possible.      

Trying to harangue people into agreeing on whether they can taste something as precise as the percentage of cocoa butter flavour in a biscuit is expensive. In some industries master tasters have their taste buds insured for millions – Jim Beveridge (I shit you not, his actual name), the recently-retired master taster of Johnnie Walker, not only had his taste buds insured, he was also granted an OBE for his services to the Scottish whisky industry. The inventor of ‘cookies & cream’ ice cream, John Harrison, who is said to have tasted samples from nearly 200 million gallons of ice cream during his three-decade career, had his taste buds insured for a million dollars by Dreyer’s. Gennaro Pelliccia might have the most expensive taste buds in the world; his are insured by Costa Coffee for £10m.

At present, the way flavours are measured in the industry takes an arcane and human approach. As well as master tasters, there are also sensory panels: a collection of experts who together form a consensus on exactly what the flavours present in any given product are. (Working in concert creates a more objective measure.) Sensory science can therefore be seen as a form of creative production, as it tries to locate flavours at scale in replicable and reliable ways: this is largely invisible to the average consumer, but no less fundamentally shapes how certain products end up in our lives. 

In her lab at the University of Nottingham’s Sensory Science Centre, Dr Imogen Ramsey is tinkering with low-alcohol beer. The challenge is: How does one maintain the exact flavours present in a full-alcohol beer while removing one of the key components of the drink, i.e., the alcohol? Beyond technique, what this requires is an ability to compare the two beers accurately, to see exactly how they change now that one has less alcohol than the other. For starters, therefore, a key aim of her work over the past few years has been trying to create the first sensory lexicon for the commercial non-alcoholic lager category – something that did not exist when she started. 

Annals of flavour exist within the F&B industry. One such example, the Aroma and Flavour Lexicon for Sensory Evaluation, is spiral-bound and sells on Amazon for hundreds of pounds. Inside you will learn that terms which the layperson uses interchangeably actually have very specific reference points: acetic is the ‘aromatic characteristic of white vinegar – reference: white vinegar, 5% acidity’; acrid is ‘a burnt, harsh aromatic, often associated with burnt wood or smoke – reference: charred bacon, burnt pine or pine needles.’ But while certain terms exist industry-wide, they need to be refined for each product. For the purpose of Dr Ramsey’s study, the team of ten beer experts came up with 250+ different attributes across the eighteen different non-alcoholic beers they were sampling. 

This number was then whittled down across the panel of experts into something manageable and intelligible, so that they were all on the same page when identifying any of these attributes. ‘Some people might talk about sour and some might talk about acidic, but really they’re talking about the same thing’, Dr Ramsey notes. Nottingham has had a team of trained beer tasters for over twenty years, but it still took 3–4 months of shepherding to get her team to agree on the flavours they were measuring, till they could agree on a subset of twenty-three attributes1 that existed across the samples, for example, malty, hoppy, sour, and wheat.

Armed with this settled-upon language, the real work can begin. Once the data has been collected, the results come in, with a rating between 0–10 in relation to the defined attributes. Following this, a variety of statistical techniques are used to understand whether there are significant differences between the attributes: it is possible, for example, to find out whether Beer 1 has significantly more ‘banana flavour’ than Beer 2. This can then be mapped on top of consumer preference data, providing more robust insight into why a particular beer is more popular than another beyond the surface-level qualitative feedback of people saying whether they like it or not. To the untrained palate, Beer 1 might be nicer than Beer 2, but with granular sensory data, producers can steer products towards specific flavour profiles that consumers like, but don’t know how to express in any precise detail. 

This work allows producers to track with more precision the specific impact that changes in techniques or underlying ingredients have on the end flavour of a product. This is why producers themselves are often the funders of such projects, either sponsoring the PhD student/project, or supporting research councils. Dr Ramsey’s study was sponsored by a food and drink research institute called Campden BRI which delivers research outputs to all their members, including all of the main breweries (think Heineken, AB InBev).

Sue Langstaff, the founder of Applied Sensory and one of the world’s foremost experts on olive oil tasting, told me it takes her two years to train up a novice panellist at her company. It’s a process that requires the trainee to sample endless varieties of olive oil until they align with the other eight panellists on terms such as ‘tomato leaf’ and ‘green almond’. The philosopher in me swoons at the thought of this. Phenomenologists are obsessed with trying to understand whether or not there exists an objective world that we are perceiving, or whether the world exists only in perception, each to our own: a world as infinite as the senses accessing it. Is there a taste of green almond somewhere? Or is it simply a linguistic trick that people like Langstaff are able to cultivate, an approximation that allows people to communicate and bridge the infinite gap of our murky subjectivity?

Either way, Langstaff’s company serves two concrete functions within the olive oil industry. The first is that producers send her samples which she is able to provide precise tasting notes for; they can then use these in marketing materials, or to better understand their own products. The second is more consequential. Her panel is the only one in the United States that is qualified to certify olive oils as ‘extra virgin’ or not. This status was conferred upon by an organisation called the International Olive Council (IOC) which tests olive oil panels around the world, making them compete for the right to be able to confer this make-or-break status. An olive oil can be classed as extra virgin not just as a result of how it is produced agriculturally (unrefined, with less than 1% oleic acid content), but also because of how it tastes. Langstaff’s panel is there to ensure that producers are not getting away with secretly blending oils or cutting corners in their production that might have invited impurities into the end product. The stakes are high: an oil not passing the mark can tank an entire season’s harvest for a producer. 

In college Lyndsey Shackleton was in the dairy evaluation club, which meant that while some of her classmates were waking up early to go to soccer practice, she was joining a group of flavour nerds who woke up and tasted different butters. She ended up competing at the Collegiate Dairy Products Evaluation Contest in Chicago, where students see how closely they match up to experts in their ability to evaluate, for example, the exact percentage of fat in a sample of buttermilk. Today Shackleton is the lead scientist for Vivanda, a tech company that is using the historical data from over a century of sensory panels at McCormick, one of the largest food conglomerates in the world (it controls 22% of the world’s spice market, as well as owning brands like French’s mustard), to create a big data flavour prediction algorithm. Think Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’, but for food. 

From a tech perspective, the expensive and costly human process of sensory panels is ripe for disruption. ‘It’s wild to me that the sensory guru is the best we have at the moment,’ notes Shackleton. The AI system they have created is sophisticated enough, she tells me, that it can predict what a product would taste like ‘even if someone does not have descriptive sensory data for their product’. A company can use Vivanda’s technology to look at someone’s eating habits and predict foods or products that they don’t usually consume, but that they would probably like. Recipe websites can use it to suggest new recipes to consumers based on what they’ve made in the past, while for R&D teams it can be used to identify specific flavours that might work well in a dish when they want to push it in a new direction (cumin on pizza, anyone?). 

But while Vivanda’s process remains predictive, Aromyx, a Silicon Valley start-up, is trying to create a system that would tell you exactly what flavours exist within a given product. According to Josh Silverman, the CEO, flavour is no different to any other sense; it is just orders of magnitude more complex. Where our eyes have three receptors that can detect millions of shades of colour, our noses have 400. For him, it is not that flavour exists on some inscrutable nexus of memory, subjectivity, culture and biology – it is just a big data problem that we haven’t historically had the technology to solve. He’s now trying to clone the genes from those 400 olfactory receptors to create a biotech solution that will convert flavours into numbers. 

‘Once you figured out the three colour sensors, red, blue and green, you could then build colour spectrums like Pantone and create any colour that could possibly be perceived,’ he told me over Zoom from his office in Silicon Valley. ‘Flavour is more complex, but it operates on the same principle – instead of mapping the three-dimensional space of colour, we’re having to work in the twelve-dimensional space of flavour.’ Instead of trying to get ten people together to agree exactly how ‘hoppy’ or ‘malty’ a beer is, his sensors will show exactly which receptors are firing at any given moment, and thus tell you exactly what the flavour of the beer is. This could be a boon for producers, as it would significantly streamline the process of bringing a product to market. If consumer testing proved that a particular flavour was more popular, the producer could find ways to tweak their recipe to precisely hit the notes that people were looking for. 

People debate over whether our ability to perceive flavour is its own sense, like smell, sight, touch and taste, or whether it’s a perceptual system that combines all those senses with harder-to-quantify aspects like memory and culture. ‘Even if you do manage to map the twelve-dimensional space of flavour,’ says Dr Johnny Drain, who holds a PhD in material sciences from Oxford and consults some of the top restaurants in the world, ‘I think that space is pallid without the subjective layer.’ 

‘We still understand so little about the brain and exactly what is happening when we taste something,’ he continues, ‘that perhaps in a hundred years we will have a company called Neuromyx rather than Aromyx.’ Flavour, perhaps, is too abstract, and encompasses too many of our senses, to be easily captured. It might require something more substantial, like a better understanding of how our mind works, to get close to its digital approximation. 

Until then, I still get excited by the idea of panels of people sitting in rooms, looking each other in the eye and trying to figure out what exactly the other person is experiencing. I will never know if you are also tasting a hint of blackberry in this coffee, but I am delighted by the fungibility of language as we grope around for something we can agree on. Until someone finds a way of nailing it down and cementing it in code, flavour remains one of the only ephemeral things in the digital age.

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Credits

Barclay Bram is a writer based in London. You can find more of his work at http://www.barclaybram.com/

Michelle Wong is an illustrator and designer based in London. Previous clients include BBC, gal-dem and Shado Magazine. Her work focuses on narrative, identity and politics. You can find her on Instagram @michelle.cywong

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for proof reading and additional edits.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the latest newsletter on my favourite fifty things I’ve eaten in London this year. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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A very special announcement: this is the first in a series of teasers, edgings if you will, for an article coming up next month co-produced with one of my very favourite publications, The Fence. If you don’t know The Fence, you can think of it as something like Private Eye if it was still funny, or Punch if it focused on mocking Peter Hitchens rather than Kaiser Wilhelm. With a short story section worthy of Granta. In short: it’s good.

The Fence is no stranger to food stories ─ they published one of my favourites last year, Sejal Sukhadwala’s tale of the lost Memsahib restaurant ─ so it made a lot of sense for us to co-publish Mina Miller’s rollicking tale of working in food production, first for a chaotic urban farm, and then for a Brexit obsessed smoked salmon producer. It’s one of the funniest articles I’ve had the pleasure working on for Vittles, and I think you’re going to love it too. I want to give a huge thanks to Mina for writing it and The Fence for their vision, editing and legal budget.

The article will be out on April 8th in print in The Fence and April 11th on Vittles. In the meantime, please subscribe to The Fence for a very special price of £20 a year — it’s a bargain for what you get, and there aren’t many other magazines in the UK who put so much effort into working with young and new writers.

Here’s a question for you. What is the one British food or drink that has a reputation for quality outside of the UK? No, salsa inglesa doesn’t count. Pork pies? Well Generation Z are killing those off, apparently. Fish and chips? Unfairly, fish and chips is put into that bracket of brown British food, like baked beans and potato smileys, that keep being dunked on by American Twitter accounts with anime avatars every single month, asking how a country that invaded half the world could have such a parochial cuisine. Tea? Well, there’s a case to be made there, but it’s not really British. No, the answer is whisky.

Whisky stands pretty much alone in being a British agricultural product that is desired and respected by the rest of the world. Except it isn’t exactly British, is it? It’s Celtic, with the best examples made either side of the Irish Sea and the North Channel. That whisky was originally produced in such a relatively small area should be a strong argument for terroir, but I’m always gently skeptical of the concept (in fact, I once called it a scam). By this, I mean I’m always wary about the reasons we talk about terroir, about what it really means to say that this tomato is better than another because it’s from Italy, about how all these bold assertions about the superiority of land can start sounding a bit ‘ein volk, ein reich’ when taken to their logical conclusion.

Today’s article by Robbie Armstrong’s shares some of my skepticism although adds far more rigour, nuance and knowledge. It’s about a subject you may have already heard or read about recently ─ terroir in whisky ─ but asks the bigger questions, about who these discussions really benefit. Working in tea, there’s a lot of obsession with terroir, about microclimates, soils, elevations. There are unfair price differences in teas that share the same land but cross artificial borders (see Nepal and Darjeeling). They all seem to benefit the same people: big companies and countries who wish to commodify an agricultural product. But I’ve always been convinced that they key thing is never terroir, but the farmer, their intention, and the community of people who make it. Perhaps we need new words for this. Or perhaps they are already there, just not in French.

The Scotch Industrial Complex, by Robbie Armstrong

Think of whisky as part of Scotland’s contribution to humanity, as claret is a great part of the munificence of France . . . This multiplicity of delight, conveyed in the single word claret, is known or acknowledged by all. But to the majority of people whisky is merely whisky, an amber spirit unfairly diluted by obtuse authorities, in a bottle whose shape is more often variable than its contents . . . Yet if distillers were fairly treated, and encouraged to take a pleasure and pride in their art, they could produce whisky as variable in flavour and character as claret.

 Eric Linklater, The Lion and the Unicorn, 1935  

In 2001, former fine wine merchant, whisky bottler and Burgundy enthusiast Mark Reynier reopened the silent distillery Bruichladdich with the strapline ‘We believe terroir matters’, touting his new, progressive approach to distillation, production and provenance. Some in the whisky world looked askance, questioning this Sassenach’s obsession with a term exclusive to winemaking; others expected the project to fall flat on its face.  

Instead, in the years that followed, Bruichladdich garnered international acclaim and a reputation for tireless experimentation under the helm of master distiller Jim McEwan. The distillery was sold in 2012, and Reynier set his sights on County Waterford in Ireland to establish Waterford Distillery, whose focus would be on ‘barley-forward, terroir-driven, natural whisky’. On its website Waterford proclaims: ‘Unashamedly influenced by the world’s greatest winemakers, we obsessively bring the same intellectual drive, methodology and rigour to barley – the very source of malt whisky’s complex flavour.’ At the heart of Reynier’s enterprises there lies a question he hopes to answer decisively, once and for all: Does terroir exist in whisky? 

Terroir is usually defined as ‘the complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including factors such as the soil, topography and climate’. The question of terroir’s existence in whisky, therefore, sounds like an easy one to answer: single malt is made with just three ingredients – water, malted barley and yeast – so it follows that barley imparts different flavours depending on the varietal and soil in which it is grown. Yet few distilleries grow their own barley or buy it locally; historically, much of it has been imported from England, or as far afield as Sweden, Ukraine or Canada. 

Before Reynier, others had tried to prove whisky terroir. Campbeltown’s Springbank released their first single malt made with local barley in 1988 and, back in 1966, they were already beginning to champion terroir with their nascent Local Barley series – using barley, peat, water and coal sourced from within an eight-mile radius of the distillery. In his 1951 book Scotch: The Whisky of Scotland in Fact and Story, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart highlighted the importance of ‘home-grown barley for the malt, the unpolluted water of the hill burns, the rich dark peat of the moor [and] the pure air of the mountains’. Even earlier, in his 1930 book Whisky, Aeneas MacDonald (pseudonym of the Scottish writer George Malcolm Thomson) wrote in defence of geographical diversity: ‘Geography exerts an influence, secret and subtle, upon whisky – and so far no one has been able to determine through what precise media it operates.’ MacDonald believed strongly in the superiority of single malt over blended whisky, likening the differences between classic malts to the great wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. 

Equally though, there are many who dispute barley’s importance on the final flavour of whisky. Some talk up the importance of each site to the flavour, as well as factors such as fermentation times, still shape and copper contact; others believe peat (still used by some distilleries to dry malted barley) offers a far neater argument for terroir in whisky. For a long time, the prevailing opinion in the whisky industry seemed to be that barley’s relative homogeneity meant it had little discernible impact on flavour. Even if it did, it was argued, any difference would be obliterated by the distillation process, before oak ageing finished the job of removing any remaining trace. For two decades the terroir debate raged in the pages of specialist whisky magazines, columns, podcasts, online videos and even in a book.

Then, in 2021, the Whisky Terroir Project (a joint venture between Waterford Distillery, Enterprise Ireland, Teagasc, Oregon State University, Minch Malt and independent whisky analysts Tatlock & Thomson) released a study stating that terroir does exist, and that it does have an impact on the flavour of single malt whisky. The study explored the difference between new make (unaged high-proof spirit) made from two barley varietals – Olympus and Laureate, grown on two farms in different environments in Ireland. Using gas chromatography and trained sensory experts, researchers found more than forty-two different flavour compounds, half of which were ‘directly influenced’ by the barley’s terroir – not only the varietal but the area’s microclimate and soil. Headlines that followed – ‘Decades of terroir debate settled’ and ‘Study proves terroir’s influence on whisky’ – appeared to lay the debate to rest once and for all. 

I have even tasted the influence of barley myself, having tried two noticeably different-tasting, but almost identically produced, whiskies from Kilchoman – the only variable being the barley varietal in each (Octavia and Concerto, grown in the same field). ‘The war on terroir’, as Waterford had styled it, looked like it was finally over. 

Once upon a time it was as natural for a Highlander to make whisky as for a Frenchman to make wine. Distilling was a rural craft in which nearly everyone was skilled, and in every home from croft to castle there stood the immemorial crock of whisky, until the Government’s covetous hand reached out from London to grasp it… Money from the ever-growing world sales of whisky pours into the Exchequer, but the Highlander’s crock is empty.

 F. Marian McNeill, The Scots Cellar, 1956

So, what’s your favourite whisky? The oily peat lick of a Lagavulin, its label evoking salty sea air and moorland peat? Skye’s sulphurous Talisker, its bottle embossed with a craggy coastline? A meaty Mortlach and its eagle insignia, if you prefer a Speyside? Or the Singleton range, with a stamp of River Fiddich salmon, if you can’t make up your mind on a single malt? Maybe you’d rather the smoothness of a blend: Johnnie Walker, J&B or Buchanan’s? So many options, so many terroirs – and yet, all these brands belong to the world’s largest drinks company, Diageo.  

Whisky, I’m afraid to tell you, is produced on an overwhelmingly industrial scale. A handful of conglomerates control the majority of Scotch production, and almost 70% of these are owned by companies outwith Scotland. Diageo accounts for two-fifths of market share, while Pernod Ricard (Chivas Brothers) holds around a fifth: combined, the two control over half the Scotch whisky market. Add in William Grant & Sons and Bacardi, and four companies make up three quarters of production. Even Bruichladdich was sold to the French spirits group Rémy Cointreau in 2012. (Reynier voted against the sale.)  

Although the Does terroir exist in whisky? debate is related to, and intertwined with, the industrial-conglomerate control of Scotch, the attention paid to a single oenological concept can feel somewhat disingenuous when so few distilleries remain independent. Scotland has all but sold out its most famous product to the free market, but marketing campaigns still trade on Scotland’s heritage and traditions. Distillery tours, too, have latched on to an implicit idea of terroir as a marketing technique – the streams that run through the peatlands, the salty sea air and barrels that breathe it all in. The barley is little more than a footnote, and for good reason: much of Scotch whisky is mass produced using nondescript barley, chosen for consistency and high alcohol yield rather than provenance, heritage or flavour, and stored in bonded warehouses far from the distilleries themselves. Even then, they are often blended with mass-produced grain whiskies to be sold as blends. Scotland’s unique landscape and natural resources are merely marketing fodder for brand ambassadors and billboards; meanwhile, distilleries’ extractive processes have done little for the land itself, instead burning alarming quantities of coal, peat and oil. 

It’s perhaps here that Scotch and claret have something in common. Both evoke prestige, quality and tradition, and have seen a rapid expansion in production alongside diminishing family ownership. Both introduced strict rules to stop cheap knock-offs from flooding the market, helping to maintain high standards, prices and a global reputation for excellence. Both industries have experienced a disconnection with grain and grape respectively, as investors pursue growth and maximisation of profits: Bordeaux is no stranger to debates about terroir and conglomerate ownership, either. But while discussions about terroir in Bordeaux feel more natural, with its distinctive soil types and fifty-seven appellations, in whisky, discussions about terroir have become a distraction from the industry’s actual problems. 

Last year I visited Kilchoman, a young farm distillery on Islay that is a part of the resurgence in smaller independent distilleries. Kilchoman grow, malt and fire 20–30% of their own barley before distilling, maturing and bottling on-site. Completing almost all parts of the whisky process is rare these days, and puts Kilchoman in a small club of distilleries; only eight have their own floor maltings, while only a handful grow a portion of their own barley (these include Daftmill, Bruichladdich, Balvenie and Abhainn Dearg). 

For some whisky experts, a company’s size is not necessarily a guarantee of any meaningful difference. Highlighting the standardisation in industrial distilling processes across the board today, whisky writer and broadcaster Rachel McCormack states: ‘I think there is a fantasy about artisan production, but there is no difference between the way a Diageo distillery makes its spirit and a small indy … or a social enterprise’. Blair Bowman, a whisky consultant and broker, adds that ‘smaller distilleries will never be able to quench the world’s thirst for whisky’ because they produce such low volumes. ‘Without these [bigger] distilleries being there,’ he argues, ‘there would be a lot fewer jobs in those pretty rural communities.’ 

Yet while out-turn and profits have grown thanks largely to industrial and automated production methods, jobs supported by the whisky industry have declined by 50% in the past four decades. Kilchoman has a production capacity of only 480,000 LPA (litres of pure alcohol) yet has over thirty full-time employees, a relatively high number for its size. Islay’s biggest distillery in terms of production capacity, Diageo’s Caol Ila (6,500,000 LPA), employs roughly a dozen people due to its largely automated production process. Counterintuitively, as distilleries increase capacity they support fewer jobs than they once did, due to the outsourcing of many aspects of production which has, over time, been distilled to its necessary components. Many large distilleries employ no more than a dozen people today, whereas once they supported whole villages and communities. 

It’s here where smaller distilleries retain inherent value and remain markedly different in a space crowded by conglomerates. While a Kilchoman may not be intrinsically better than a Caol Ila, a working farm distillery benefits a small island in a way that a whisky factory does not. Production methods might be standardised today, but through job creation in rural areas, support of local farmers, a fairer redistribution of income, and pioneering, environmentally friendly, transparent distillation methods, independents prove that another way is possible; their very existence bolsters a stronger sense of sovereignty and claws back the industry from the reach of oligopolistic control. 

But even the mom-and-pops succumb to the Scotch industrial complex. Kilchoman recently announced it would increase production by 40% and grow its brand globally after securing a £22.5m funding package from Barclays Bank. Herein lies an inverse correlation – as production capacity grows, the authenticity of a barley-to-bottle farm distillery shrinks.  

Perhaps where whisky should be looking for inspiration is not Bordeaux but Burgundy, a winemaking region distinguished by its family-owned vineyards, small parcels of land, and smaller-scale approach – a tradition that has endured in spite of the growth of large négociants who buy grapes and bottle under their own brands. It is by no means a perfect system – the region has seen the arrival of billionaire owners, with investor demand for these tiny parcels leading to soaring prices and concerns over the future of the region – but with its patchwork of domaines and micro-terroirs, Burgundy has proven that small-scale production and international success can be not only compatible, but mutually inclusive. 

Whisky writer Dave Broom argues that the unique qualities of whisky distilleries themselves are akin to a Burgundian notion of terroir – each site has its own particularities which are irreproducible; each produces a product that is unique despite almost identical base ingredients. He discounts the importance of regional terroir in whisky, pointing out that the borders of Scotland’s five regions are often political in nature, and the regions themselves do not necessarily have intrinsic qualities. Rather, he highlights the ‘alchemy between copper and vapour, liquid and oak’, the latter playing an increasingly important part the longer the whisky is left in the cask.

According to Broom, the one element often overlooked is the human one: the intentions of the founding distiller and the people who craft the whisky. Both whisky journalist Becky Paskin and Compass Box’s John Glaser have echoed this sentiment – social terroir, they say, has a stronger influence than any yeast strain, barley type, local water supply or environmental factor. A whisky should both benefit and reflect the people and agroecological context that magic it into existence through fermentation, distillation, alchemy and patience. 

But the significance of terroir is growing; Broom’s upcoming book A Sense of Place will examine Scotch whisky ‘from the point of view of its terroir – the land, weather, history, craft and culture that feed and enhance the whisky itself’. Broom has neatly applied G. Gregory Smith’s concept of ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ to Scotland’s national drink – ‘the presence of duelling polarities within one entity considered to be characteristic of the Scottish temperament’ – reflecting the contrasts between the Highlands and Lowlands, Protestantism and Catholicism, Britishness and Scottishness, and many other facets of the complicated Scottish psyche. There’s a duality at play in the world of whisky too: the industrial and the artisanal; the oligopoly and the independent; the global and the local; the blend and the single malt. 

Rather than terroir, Blair Bowman highlights a Gaelic word, dualchas; though not readily translated into English, the word can roughly be interpreted as ‘cultural inheritance’, and conveys culture, tradition, heritage, character and patrimony, all at the same time. Dualchas is connected with another concept, dùthchas: a sense of place and belonging to the land, and a responsibility to stewardship of it, rather than ownership. Perhaps these notions better encapsulate the drink’s complexity – that interconnection of people and place upon which whisky depends. And applying such a term to this behemoth of the drinks industry might help us think beyond profit and buzzwords, towards how Scotland might continue to produce whisky that protects people, place and planet for years to come. 

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Credits

Robbie Armstrong is a journalist, reporter and audio producer from Glasgow. You can find him enthusing about foraging, fermentation and the joys of magnet fishing on Twitter and Instagram.

All photos credited to Robbie Armstrong.

The Fence x Vittles illustration is by Alex Christian, a designer and illustrator based in London. You can find more of his work at https://www.alexschristian.com

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits.

Further reading, listening and viewing

Arnold, Rob, The Terroir of Whiskey: A Distiller’s Journey Into the Flavor of Place

TX Whiskey’s master distiller makes the case that terroir is as important in whisk(e)y as it is in wine, visiting distilleries in Kentucky, New York, Texas, Ireland, and Scotland. 

Broom, Dave, The World Atlas of Whisky

A guide to over 200 distilleries and 400 expressions across the globe.

Barnard, Alfred, The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom 

First published in 1887, this is based on Barnard’s two-year tour around Scotland, Ireland and England.  A wonderfully written tradebook-meets-travelogue which was published at a critical juncture in whisky’s history.

Maclean, Charles, Scotch Whisky: A Liquid History 

Entertaining and informative, this book charts whisky’s story from its roots to recent history.    

MacDonald, Aeneas, Whisky 

Considered by many to be the finest book on whisky ever written, this was penned pseudonymously by George Malcolm Thomson in deference to his teetotaller mother. 

Terroir-Driven: The Waterford Whisky Podcast

Quite an undertaking at eight episodes, but this provides great insight into the production processes and terroir approach at Waterford, as well as the ‘intellectual drive, methodology and rigour’ that they say marks the distillery out in a crowded market. 

The Liquid Antiquarian YouTube Channel

Presented by Dave Broom and Arthur Motley. Dave recommends three of his videos: ‘Improvements, Clearances And Whisky’, ‘The Lynx-Eyed Whisky Distillers Of The 1820s’ and ‘Up Yer Kilt! How Scott-Land Became Scotch-Land’. 

Further drinking

Ardnamurchan 

Sustainability and transparency is key for Ardnamurchan’s owner, the independent bottler Adelphi. They use a hydro-electric generator in a nearby river for cooling, a biomass boiler with wood chips from a local forest for heat, while draff heads to local herds and pot ale is used as fertiliser for the fields. Each bottle comes with a QR code and uses blockchain technology to detail its complete supply and production chain.  

Arran 

Offering a quick route to Glasgow, the Isle of Arran was once home to over fifty illicit distilleries. The independent Isle of Arran Distillers opened Arran Distillery in 1995, and later Lagg in 2019, on the site of what was once the island’s only legal distillery. 

Bruichladdich

Mothballed at various points in its 140-year history, this Islay distillery reopened 21 years ago under the stewardship of Mark Reynier and legendary master distiller Jim McEwan. Rebranding themselves as ’Progressive Hebridean distillers’, Bruichladdich decried chill-filtration and the addition of the E150 food colouring. Their Islay Barley bottling was the first time a whisky had been made with local barley on the island in recorded history.  

Glenfarclas 

Owned by the Grant family, the Speyside distillery matures on-site in traditional dunnage warehouses, producing a traditional Highland malt with a strong sherry influence. 

Glenmorangie 

A Speyside smoothy owned by LVMH with corporate social responsibility credo. Their anaerobic digestion system filters effluent from the distillery, with the remainder taken care of by the native oysters they’ve reintroduced to the Dornoch Firth. Their Tùsail bottling used Maris Otter, floor-malted by hand, a flavourful varietal replaced by higher yielding barley.   

J&A Mitchell & Co 

Owner of Springbank and Glengyle distilleries in Campbeltown, as well as independent bottler William Cadenhead. In total more than sixty people are employed by the company, keeping what was once ‘the whisky capital of the world’ alive.

Waterford Distillery 

Ireland is now home to one of the most exciting and innovative single malt distilleries, and the maker of some very fine drams indeed. However, it’s not hard to see why Reynier rubs some people in the industry up the wrong way, with his stated intention to create ‘the most flavourful litre of alcohol ever created’ and ‘the most profound single malt whisky’.

Small announcement: I’ve revamped the home website of Vittles to make things a bit easier to use, and to make articles easier to find. All columns have their own separate pages, including all my London restaurant writing which you can find here.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the latest newsletter on my favourite fifty things I’ve eaten in London this year. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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When people find out that you work in tea, often the first thing they do is make a joke about coffee as if you are life-long arch enemies, like cats and dogs. Customers would catch me drinking a filter coffee on the street or spot me in a café and would say with a wink ‘don’t worry, I won’t tell your boss!’ not knowing that he was also just about to go on his coffee break. The whole thing was a bit silly. Coffee and tea for me are bedfellows, ‘caffeine cousins’ as my boss is fond of saying, not adversaries. In fact, it was through tea, and the coffee obsessed people that came through the shop, that I ended up learning more about coffee than I had ever anticipated.

There were two things though that we in the tea world envied about coffee. The first was its sense of community; that, in the early days at least, all the coffee people were friendly with each other, recommended each other’s businesses, lent each other knowledge and resources. These were the halcyon days of Gwilym Davies’s disloyalty card, a wonderful idea that maybe someone should do with food newsletters? The tea world seemed insular, fragmented, unfriendly in comparison. The nearest place you’d ever recommend to someone would be in Malaysia.

The second thing was how quickly the coffee world had added value to their product. By this I mean the price people were willing to pay that went beyond the monetary value of the beans. In the late 2000s in London, it was possible to go into a cafe owned by a World Barista Champion, get coffee made with beans roasted by another World Barista Champion, and brewed by the UK’s brewer champion. This wasn’t just a cup of coffee; you were paying for an experience unrivalled in the world. How much wouldn’t you pay for that? Yes, the coffee world was talking more about sourcing, about provenance, about terroir and production, but the thing people were really paying for was latte art, competition winners and your favourite barista. And here we were trying to sell tea based only on the producer’s name!

While we were wondering when tea’s moment would ever come, trying to find ways of adding value to a product whose value was inherently determined by the producer, the author of today’s newsletter, Jenn Rugolo, was looking at that value chain and asking an even more important question: if the value of coffee is being produced by many different people, are they also being properly recompensed? If we know that producers are always underpaid, then does this not also stretch to the people we don’t traditionally consider producers, the producers of value? It’s the big question today’s newsletter hinges on.

As for tea, it took a while but we finally got people paying £5 a cup. It’s called bubble tea.

Who Produces the Value of Coffee? by Jenn Rugolo

Conflicting notions of coffee’s price and value seep into the oddest places. When you’re paying for it, coffee is ‘too expensive’. Used as a proxy for inflation and the cost of living, its price becomes a marker of how ‘affordable luxuries’ aren’t affordable anymore. (Coffee’s arrival in a neighbourhood, too, is often a sign of gentrification.) Yet the tables turn when the perspective shifts from ‘paying’ to ‘being paid’. ‘Please consider paying me for the work that I’m doing; all I’m looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month – that’s it’, beseeches podcaster Blindboy on a weekly basis. Heck, there’s even a platform dedicated to the connection: Ko-fi – literally pronounced ‘coffee’ – is a virtual tip jar that fans use to ‘buy their favourite creators a coffee’ to support their efforts, usually paying around £3. While the pervasiveness of coffee as a benchmark for price and value is clear, the origins of these notions are less so: where do our ideas of what coffee should cost come from? And why have they been so hard to shake? 

While these examples suggest otherwise, there is no such thing as a single ‘price of coffee’; there are many – some intersecting, others seemingly unrelated. There is the ‘Price of Coffee’, with a capital ‘C’, of the New York International Commodity Exchange – this is the price that, when it goes up, causes journalists to warn of impending increases. This price, the ‘C price’, is not dictated by the cost of producing coffee, but by the trading and hedging of future contracts by traders who may never see the coffee they’ve bought and sold. Related as the sum paid for a pound of green (unroasted) coffee, the C price has always been marked by extreme volatility; graphs mapping the daily fluctuations over time look like the work of a toddler with a crayon, scribbling between highs ($3.39 in 1977) and lows ($0.42 in 2001). When there is a downswing in the C price – and there is always a downswing – the industry asks questions about coffee’s profitability, seeking new ways to reorient the price of coffee to the cost of its production and, more recently, to its value.

Our understanding of the relationship (or distinction) between ‘price’ and ‘value’ is important, if complicated. Perhaps billionaire Nick Hanauer described it best in his 2019 TED Talk: ‘[the] neoliberal economic assumption is that the price of something is always equal to its value . . . [but] people are not paid what they are worth; they are paid what they have the power to negotiate.’ This idea – that we don’t pay enough for our coffee – is not a new one, and people have tried to solve it in different ways. 

Where commodity required homogeneity of the final product, despite production in vastly different circumstances, efforts arose in the Global North to tie distinctive attributes to price premiums based on their perceived value. ‘Specialty coffee’, a term first coined by American coffee trader Erna Knutsen in 1974, introduced the concept of quality premiums for differentiated – or ‘special’ – coffees, while certifications like Fairtrade, established in 1994, offered set percentage premiums in relation to the fluctuating C price. Shortly after, the notion of ‘direct trade’ sprung up in opposition to these ideas; it offered more flexible (and often larger) premiums tied to quality and long-term relationships.

When the C price fell below a dollar in 2018 (later bottoming out at $0.89 in May 2019), conversations again turned to the question of profitability. This time, industry investigation suggested a deeper root cause: inequitable value distribution. ‘These untenable commodity prices are juxtaposed against a roaster and retailer sector that is thriving’, a Price Crisis Response Initiative Summary of Work flatly states. Coffee is ‘valued’ in the marketplace – in 2015 it achieved US$200 billion estimated retail – but barely any of that value was returning to producers. 

Coffee drips with socio-cultural significance. It phases, not just from solid to liquid, but from an agricultural product to an object of social, emotional, and aesthetic value. Because of this, only a fraction of the price paid at a café till for a flat white is allocated to coffee in its raw form. Even at a basic level, costs are variable from location to location: the difference in rent, services, and staffing is one simple explanation, but even a café’s choice of milk supplier, brand of compostable cup, or decision about how many stirring sticks to buy in a single order will impact the final price you pay. Average calculations, aiming to communicate how and where value is created and translated across the chain, vary widely – some estimate that roasted coffee accounts for only 4% of the total price paid, others 22%. Strip it back to green coffee costs – that is, what returns to the producers of coffee in its processed but unroasted state at the ‘farm gate’ – and the amount drops further, with averages suggesting anywhere from 0.04% to 4%, and everything in between. 

What does this mean in pounds and pence? Using a World Economic Forum illustrative breakdown (built on a US specialty coffee industry benchmarking study), let’s translate the price of the last cup of filter coffee I paid for in London, a city with ‘middling’ coffee prices (at least, according to the World Coffee Index 2021): £3.20. 

First, there’s the cost of growing, picking, and processing coffee cherries. Establishing a farm takes at least three years, the point at which coffee trees mature and begin producing fruit. The costs associated with this process include land purchase, ‘plantlets’ (seedling trees), three years of labour preparing the land for planting, then actually planting, and then maintenance (pest/disease management, weed control, and fertilisation). Once the trees have matured and begun producing, the labour and equipment costs expand to include harvesting, which is often performed manually by skilled labour. Only once the coffee cherries have been processed (removed of their skins and pulp, then dried) are they ready to move to the next stage. It’s estimated that 2.5% of the cost you pay for your cup of coffee goes to the coffee producer – or, in the case of my last coffee, £0.08. 

Exporting – shipping, customs, warehousing, logistics, and export markup/import margin – accounts for £0.18 of my £3.20 (but £0.16 of this is attributed to ‘exporter markup’). Next comes roasting, which encompasses a whole host of costs: the labour associated with roasting and packing, for sure, but also packaging materials and shipping, as well as general business costs (administration, interest, depreciation, amortisation, and lease), plus any certification. Nearly £0.40 is attributed to this, and that’s without the ‘roaster markup’: an additional £0.05. 

Finally comes the point of purchase: retail, or the café. A whopping equivalent of £2.48 is allocated to this stage of coffee’s production, but this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The café’s lease alone is responsible for £0.32; labour, £0.67. Administrative costs account for £0.48, and then cups, condiments, lids, and those flimsy wooden stirrers add up to approximately £0.27 – even if you don’t use them. Utilities, repairs, and marketing account for £0.24, before we introduce the idea of what the café supposedly made on my purchase (‘retail markup’, £0.50). But again, this is only illustrative, and I strongly suspect – based on personal experience – that this café’s hip London location accounts for far more (and the ‘markup’ far less) than estimated here.

This type of calculation reflects a common depiction of coffee’s value chain as a linear ‘seed-to-cup’ diagram. Oriented from left to right, the diagram usually follows six or seven ‘steps’, tracing a path from producer to consumer without ever naming them directly: planting the seed, growing the tree, harvesting the cherry, processing and milling, exporting the green coffee, roasting, brewing. The simplicity of this diagram suggests value is created and captured equally as coffee moves along the chain – which we now know isn’t true. A different visualisation is needed. 

In 2019, a gathering of seventy-five stakeholders, with a heavy representation of smallholder coffee farmers from Central and South America, met in Brazil, tasked with identifying who – and what – was missing from the basic seed-to-cup diagram. Transportation, agrochemical companies, banks, and access to credit were readily identified. Although absence from the diagram could be demonstrative of an actor without power (farmworkers, for example) this wasn’t always the case: traders, who often provide technical assistance and access to credit, have quite a lot of power, but were missing – perhaps because it’s easy to oversimplify their role as moving coffee from one place to another. 

The meeting’s end product was the Coffee Systems Map, a circular tangle of connections between twenty actors1 and their intersections across six central actions2 in the specialty coffee industry which, according to its creators, ‘illustrat[es] the complexity of this global value-generating ecosystem’. By outlining the production of value in the system, the map poses several interesting questions. Does this – technically – make all the actors producers? When we speak of ‘producers’, do we reference them in terms of raw material or value? Are they one and the same?  

The coffee industry still tends to view the idea of ‘production’ directly in relation to the raw product rather than value creation, despite the fact we know this stripped-back definition is more complicated than it may seem. Although the Coffee Systems Map defines ‘producers’ as those who ‘transform land and sunlight into coffee (eg. farmers, washing station owners)’, the ‘farming’ action touches no fewer than fourteen of the twenty actors – and that’s before we get to ‘processing’, the second action required to produce green coffee (which touches fifteen). 

In trying to explain the complexity of coffee’s chain, value and price, it becomes all too easy to focus on the idea that only a fraction of the value created by coffee goes to those working to bring its raw material into existence. This is true, absolutely and beyond doubt. But just as the oversimplification of an actor’s role in the diagram can belie their power, limiting our definition of what it means to produce coffee in relation to raw material can conceal other troubling dynamics. It suggests that all of coffee’s value is created at the early stages of its journey, obscuring all the other points in the system where others invisibly benefit by capturing more value than they create. 

If we broadened our view of a ‘producer’ to include someone who produces value, would it help us to better notice where an actor’s relationship to value creation and its capture are lopsided? Much of what consumers value, even when it comes to specialty coffee, is rooted in what is closest to them – the café, or point of service. Just as coffee farmers and farmworkers see only a fraction of the value they generate, so too do independent cafés and baristas. A convenient location, a charming interaction, a beautiful space, that well-brewed and beautifully presented coffee in your compostable cup – the price we’ve established we’re willing to pay for these things rarely goes to those who make it possible. (In London, average barista wages sit at around £9/hour, more than £2 below the city’s living-wage benchmark.) As with so much of the hospitality industry, the independent businesses we choose to support make a lot less money serving us than the landlords from whom they rent the space. 

And yet, even if our choices don’t reward the people we think they should, consumers hold an inordinate amount of power within the system. The most recent definition of specialty coffee suggests ‘a coffee or coffee experience recognized for its distinctive attributes’, further qualifying that these attributes achieve significant extra value in the marketplace.

Here, the notion of what it means to produce coffee is expansive, articulated across the entire spectrum of coffee’s phases: roasted, ground, liquid, experience. It also acknowledges the role of the consumer as a receiver – and translator – of value. It openly states what we, as industry actors, have known for years: value is realised by every hand that touches the coffee, including that of the consumer. The port worker reviewing and safely stowing a container’s bill of lading – the piece of paper that proves coffee’s identity, and thus its distinctive attributes – is an integral part of the value that coffee achieves when a customer reaches for their wallet at a café till. So, too, is the motorbike driver, quickly transporting heaving sacks of ripe coffee cherries to the local mill, or the local exporter, who extended additional access to credit so farmers could purchase much-needed (and, this year, exorbitantly priced) fertiliser. Further, it reaffirms that the idea of ‘price’ isn’t a passive number but an active site of co-regulation: a price is just a number if there isn’t someone on the other side to agree to pay it; the value generated isn’t realised until the transaction is complete. 

It’s an overt, if somewhat uncomfortable, recognition of consumers’ power in the system to realise value as price. It’s also a chance to try and redress the way value moves throughout so many of the systems underpinning our food and drink. For me, it’s all about expectations: every time two actors interact in the system – usually as a buyer and a seller – the translation of ‘value created’ to ‘price paid’ is mediated by the buyer’s expectation of what they will receive. At each point, the buyer holds the power to agree (or disagree) with the proposition the seller makes. And, just like our complicated relationship with coffee’s price as a proxy, where each one lands on the spectrum of ‘too much’ to ‘too little’, it generally depends on whether they are purchasing or paying. By the time a cup of coffee – or any agricultural foodstuff, really – makes it into our hands, it will have gone through this process more times than you could imagine, each layer of expectation inadvertently chipping away at the power of the producer and the amount of value they created that they’re able to capture.   

My hope is not just that we become more comfortable paying more for our coffee; that’d be too simple. (I’d much rather we question why we expect ready access to coffee whenever we want it.) But if more of us, upon feeling that creeping, familiar indignation at the thought of paying more for something so embedded into our daily lives, just stopped to question our expectations – if we just questioned our understanding of how, when, where, and by whom it was created – we might begin to shift the balance of power back to the producers of value, rather than its consumers; and all without asking for more work than they already do. 

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Credits

Jenn Rugolo is partner in playset.coffee and editor of 25, the Specialty Coffee Association's biannual publication. She'd like to thank Ever Meister, Kim Elena Ionescu, Julie Housh, Dale Harris, and Jonathan Nunn for discussions that enriched this piece.

The illustration is by Heedayah Lockman, a Glasgow-based freelance illustrator and graphic designer, with an architectural background. Inspired by still life and food, she enjoys exploring colour and different techniques by using grids and patterns that contrast the shapes of everyday objects. You can find more of her work on Instagram @heedayahlockman.

The Coffee Systems Map by the Specialty Coffee Association is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the latest newsletter on chai cafés in Harehills, Leeds. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

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The first time I had a sabich from Balady in Temple Fortune, it had just started raining and I had flung myself into the nearest interesting looking café just to escape from what looked like an oncoming storm. I was attracted by the outside of the shop, a pale blue of a morning sky, with the same word repeated three times in three different scripts ─ English, Hebrew and Arabic ─ a word that roughly translates as native, or local. What country was this sandwich shop native to, I wondered? How should I categorise it? Was it Jewish/Israeli/Middle Eastern/Levantine/Mediterranean? Or did categories flatten or hide what this place was, and what it was selling?

In an interview in The Funambulist with his brother Karim, the Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan is scathing of the categories many restaurants have used to name their food. “Sadly we self-orientalize under labels such as Middle-Eastern, Levantine or Mediterranean cuisine, which don’t mean anything, to me” Kattan says. “If you’re having a meal in Northern Algeria it has nothing to do with the meal that you could have in South Turkey. And if you are having a meal in occupied Jaffa, most probably the only thing in common with Marseille is that some of the fish are the same, but it stops there.” This quote reminded me of a seminar I attended by an Israeli academic a few years ago who called these labels a ‘kind of euphemism’ but when used by Israeli chefs. In both cases, the specific is being substituted for the general, but for two different reasons.

How can you talk about the general without losing the specific: this is the problem of cuisines. Ingredients and their paths show a way, as Joel Hart shows in today’s newsletter. At Balady, we got talking about amba, that runny mango pickle whose sourness can activate salivary glands and flick on synapses in your brain that you didn’t know about. I’m a ‘put everything on’ kind of sandwich guy, ‘chilli sauce, garlic sauce, everything’ but I had to be careful with the amba, which was surgically applied. “Try it first” one of the brothers told me “and if you like it, I’ll give you more”. I did like it. We got talking and it turned out that the brothers were from Israel but also had Moroccan heritage, that they cooked their grandmother’s fish recipes on Fridays, that the sign above the door was a mark of respect and also of welcome, and that amba belongs to everyone who has produced it.

Amba: A Tale of Four Cities, by Joel Hart

मुंबई 

The vast amount of mango cultivars in India is surpassed only by the plethora of savoury and sweet ways in which they are processed and eaten. You might be most familiar with the sticky-sweet chatni that is eaten with poppadoms at the beginning of a meal in any classic high-street curry house, or the refreshing mango lassi that cools the mouth in between mouthfuls of curries packed full of chillies. But there is only one form that provokes as much obsession as the mango itself.  

Amba is a mango pickle sauce made from the pickling of brined mango with vinegar, mustard and usually fenugreek. Known outside of India as amba, the Marathi word for mango, it is loved for its acidity and umami – and hated for the profound stink it can produce in a person’s sweat. It is manufactured in India, primarily under two Bombay-based brands, ‘Ship’ and ‘Camel’. Ship’s label reads ‘Original Amba, established 1883’, and is decorated with a crest of arms and a ship. It is less pungent and acidic than Camel, which is made with the addition of fenugreek, making it a powerful product, permeating through every nook and cranny of the palate. 

Indicating the scale of their mango-sourcing operation, Camel also sells – under ‘Ashoka’, a brand familiar to Brits – Alphonso and Kesar mango pulps; mango and lime pickle; Gor-Keri pickle (shredded mango relish); Gujarati Methia mango pickle; a Punjabi mango pickle in olive oil; and hot, sweet ginger mango chutney. Amba is arguably an iteration of this repertoire, yet its identity was consolidated not in India, but Iraq.

بغداد

In the Baghdad of the mid-twentieth century, the bustling Shorja market was brimming with dates, tomatoes, and okra, as well as a panoply of turshi (pickles), blessed by Iraq’s ideal eco-geographical conditions for the cultivation of vegetables and fruits. One curious – and perhaps incongruous – product, however, was amba. Alongside an already globally renowned turmeric-heavy dust known as ‘curry powder’ were vats and bottles of the sauce, identifiable by the crest of arms belonging to its branding.

According to legend, it was the Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon family who began the process of importing mangoes to Iraq from India. On discovering the golden, luscious flesh of the famous Alphonso mango, they felt their compatriots in Baghdad must experience the same pleasure. On realising mango’s limited shelf-life would not allow the fresh fruit to be exported, they decided to pickle them according to their Baghdadi palate. 

By the late nineteenth century – when Ship was established –  we can be sure that the amba we know today was being consumed at large by the Iraqi public. Ship’s amba soon became the go-to condiment for masgouf, kubbat mousel, and various grilled meat cuts, cutting across religious and ethnic boundaries. The Iraqi-Jewish artist and food writer Linda Dangoor emphasises how, during her childhood in 1950s Baghdad, it also transgressed class boundaries; she remarks that ‘it [was] like bread’, equally at home on the dining tables of upper-middle-class homes as it was in the seemingly unbranded barrels of street vendors. 

There was one such vendor called Abu Karem, who worked outside the Jewish Frank Iny School, which had some Muslim attendees. If you were twelve or older, it is likely that you would have snuck out at break to have the intensely sour snack of a ladle of amba spread generously between two halves of a samoun. This was usually prohibited by parents and involved a crossing of class boundaries. For those who indulged and now no longer live in Iraq, amba is the taste of memories of rebellion on Baghdad’s al-Rasheed Street, and a sensory connection to home.

Amba’s global trails since then have become sinuous, such that, through a deep dive into the pickle, the forms of obfuscation and connection that are mediated by consumption and globalisation appear complex. When Camel arrived in Iraq, decades after it was first produced, the brand labelled their mango pickles as being ‘Arabic-style’ and extended amba’s circulation to the Arabian Peninsula, sending it to consumers in Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Oman. The expanding geographical spread of Camel, paired with the range of ‘Arabised’ Indian products that became available, indicates amba’s significant integration to Middle Eastern cuisines beyond Iraq. As Camel joined Ship in the Iraqi market, amba continued to assume a central place in Iraqi cuisine while still being associated with its Indian origins.

תל אביב

Amba’s journey out of Iraq began in 1951, with the dramatic airlift of 123,000 Iraqi Jews from Baghdad to Lod Airport (Israel’s major international airport, now known as Ben Gurion). This was an unprecedented moment of rupture for the Iraqi Jewish community, whose presence in the country could be traced back to the time of the Babylonian exile in 598 BCE. While around 6,000 Baghdadi Jews stayed (subsequently relocating to London over the following decades), Iraqi culture would face a difficult battle for survival in the new State of Israel. In her book Impossible Exodus, historian Orit Bashkin describes the processes of state-led discrimination that Iraqi Jews, along with other Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern origin), faced in the first few decades of their lives in Israel. Ship’s amba could no longer be purchased: amba would have to be revived in a new context. 

For amba to get to the point of being a widespread, divisive ingredient – adored and abhorred by Israelis of all ethnicities – it had to transcend a darker history of food-based racialisation. In the film Forget Baghdad, the Iraqi-Jewish cultural theorist Ella Shohat elaborates on this reality. She recalls being referred to by her Ashkenazi classmates as ‘iraqit mesreecha’ (stinky Iraqi) after she came to school with beid’im amba (egg with amba), an experience that led her to identify her Iraqi culture as un-Israeli. The geographical dispersal, and the concentration, of Mizrahim in peripheral towns and neighbourhoods has had a major effect on the ethno-class structure of Israeli society to this day.

In the working-class Hatikvah neighbourhood of South Tel Aviv, Iraqi Jews, along with Yemenite Jews and other Mizrahim, have undergone the challenging process of ‘becoming Israeli’. More recently, the neighbourhood has become home to migrant workers from Thailand, China and India, as well as asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea. A large covered market runs through the centre of the neighbourhood – here, it is not uncommon to see Palestinian women from the ‘Southern Triangle’ selling baladi (homegrown) vegetables, but the market is mostly parcellated into sections of vegetable grocers, spice and deli products, butchers, and small restaurants. Dispersed throughout are street-food stands selling borekas (Turkish borek), Yemeni breads with zhoug, and an array of Iraqi delights. Reconstituted from the memories of consuming Ship at Hatikvah, amba production here is diverse and plentiful. Variations emerge from the use of, or amount of, particular spices – particularly fenugreek (which arguably emerged due to urban co-habitation with Yemenite Jews) or lemon salt; the amount of water used to achieve a thicker or thinner sauce; and, most importantly, the use of mango. 

After generations of producing homemade amba, some families have turned this practice into small businesses and begun selling branded amba. One of them, produced by the brand Shemesh, is labelled ‘Amba Hoodit’ (Indian Amba), and comes complete with garish branding, Hebrew letters, and a yellowy-orange label not dissimilar to the colour of the sauce the bottle contains. Meanwhile, at Ma’adaney Ofer in Hatikvah, large blue plastic barrels containing pre-brined and spiced mango are shipped in by Camel – the mango is then washed so it can be re-fermented with the desired mixture of spices. In this premium version, large chunks of mango remain, and fenugreek, salt, hot paprika, sweet paprika, and turmeric are added. A less premium version using Israeli-grown mangos is combined with acidity regulator, vegetable oil, and a range of preservatives and stabilisers, and sold in plastic tubs. (Indian mango has more fibre and therefore a softer flesh, but Israeli mango is picked while still green and needs to spend up to six months in brine before it is ready to turn into amba.) Ma’adaney Ofer even sells amba rotev (amba sauce), a version of amba without any mango at all. Advertised as ‘a spicy sauce with the taste of amba’, its production indicates how amba has transformed, in an Israeli context, into a loose sauce used to add umami depth.

For the vendors at Ma’adaney Ofer, amba is still very much an Iraqi product. One vendor describes his joy at eating amba ‘the Iraqi way’. This includes lahmaniya ‘im amba (a bread roll with amba) – a clear continuation of samoon wa amba – as well as in a salad with tomato. Amba hoodit and amba rotev may be the most significant new developments in how amba is produced in Israel today – although a similar process has happened in Iraq where shrees, a mango-less powder, is turned into a liquid by adding water.

Ma’adaney Ofer is now a popular brand nationwide, and also extends beyond into the occupied Palestinian territories. The same vendor recalls, ‘Coincidentally, a few months ago a man came and told me, “listen, I want twenty buckets of amba. Bring it to the territories for me.”’ Prior to the Oslo Accords, Palestinian travel to Israel for work was commonplace; this phenomenon led to the discovery and subsequent adoption of amba into Palestinian street food, where it accompanies falafel and shawarma.

At a sabih stall called HaSabih shel Tzion Ha Gevah shel Hatikvah (Tzion’s Sabih, the Pride of Hatikvah), one can choose between amba or a homemade spicy version which Tzion calls amba harif; Iraqi Jews have maintained their cultural connection to the memory of Baghdad’s streets by embracing homemade amba. At Melech HaKubbot (which literally translates to ‘the king of kubbeh’), a turmeric-stained steamed kubbeh filled with fragrant lamb is doused in amba which has been made in-house. Here, the vendor  inquired about whether we have such a dish in the UK. I told him that we can get kubbeh, but that it wouldn’t be served in the same way. Acknowledging my point with a nod, he then replied ‘In the Muslim areas.’ 

London

The arrival of amba to London can be traced back to the arrival of Iraqi exiles in London and Manchester. While London is now home to a full spectrum of the ‘Iraqi mosaic’, Mandaean, Kurdish, Christian, Shia, and Sunni Iraqis came two to three decades after the arrival of Iraqi Jews, also fleeing religious or political discrimination.

Ship is the most popular brand of amba among London’s Iraqi-Jewish immigrants, who mostly arrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s after increasing state-led discrimination under the Ba’ath party of Saddam Hussein. The popularity of each brand might even be defined through class origins, with some of London’s upper-middle-class Iraqis longing for Ship’s speciality version of whole green mangos in brine, which could be found in specific vendors in Shorja Market. Likewise, a preference for Ship indicates how late-nineteenth-century Basra-Bombay trade routes continue to define the postcolonial Iraqi citizen, whether in Iraq or the diaspora.  

In recent years, however, new references have emerged. At ‘Shuk – Tel Aviv Market Food’ in  Borough Market, bronze, gridded shelves hang adjacent to the stand’s sign. Behind the grids are rows of sauces in jars. The first two, with English typography and a tidy emerald label, are harissa and za’atar tahini, produced by the brand Med Cuisine; next to them is the instantly recognisable ‘Indian amba’ produced by Shemesh. 

Shuk is the Hebrew word for market, and this self-stylisation – around the Tel Aviv market, rather than Israel – suggests such products have emerged in the dynamism of a bustling, cosmopolitan urban environment. Yet in London, forms of diasporic continuity are often missed when food is presented as Israeli. Indeed, on the Shemesh bottle at Shuk, Amba is not marketed as Israeli, but rather as ‘hoodit’ (Indian); one would need to be able to read Hebrew, however, to know this. Indeed, amba signifies an Israeliness that does not seek to claim ownership of contested foods. In the London context, it seems a trick has been missed.

Conversely, just metres away at Kubba, the first Iraqi food stall in London, amba’s origins are more clearly represented. Philip Juma, whose father is an Iraqi Christian, presents amba as one of the main dipping sauces for accompanying kubba – deep-fried ground bulgur wheat or rice stuffed with spiced meat. He uses the Camel brand of amba, which he purees and combines with ‘secret ingredients’. At Kubba it is recommended to eat amba with kubbat haleb, a gleaming golden and artfully constructed oval, rice-based kubba, perfectly crisp, filled with lamb, and flavoured subtly with baharat (spice mix). 

Iraqi cuisine is not one but many, regionally and ethnically defined; in building his version, Philip brought together immediate heritage – the family baharat; the kubba hands of his grandmother – with the influences of all of Iraq. For Philip, ‘It will always have a place in what we do [at Kubba]. The response from people has been overwhelming. So many people make a point to come back to the stall, smiling, and say, “What on earth was in that yellow sauce?!” They want us to bottle it and sell it. It just works!’

One of the newer brands to arrive in the UK market is ‘Roz’. In Israel this is marketed as ‘genuine Indian amba’, and the design of the logo carries this message as it enters a global market. Now repackaged as gourmet, the entry of some of these products to the London market complicates links between heritage and production; its consumption in London indexes the diasporic identity of amba, but also the ways in which the multi-layered origins of foods become clouded in new metropolitan contexts. 

Amba is a product that signifies diaspora. With amba hoodit preferred to an amba that may be understood as tozeret ha’aretz (a product of the land), amba’s destiny might continue to be led from elsewhere, and not amenable to strong nationalist claims. Indeed, it is through the production, circulation and consumption of amba that historic forms of commonality can be recognised.

Its versatility, however, should not be over-indulged. As the production of foods moves away from the source, our comprehension of how they are made – and where they originate from – becomes watered down, which allows nationalist geographies to emerge without much competition. Appearing on a menu alongside ‘Israeli couscous’ or as part of a ‘Tel Aviv-style’ restaurant menu, amba may be misunderstood in the London context. It was only on doing further research, I discovered that, written in bold letters on the Ship bottle, below an Arabic transliteration of ‘ship’, are the English words: ‘beware of imitations’.

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Credits

Joel Hart is a social anthropologist and freelance writer focusing on urbanism and food cultures in London and the Middle East. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. You can find him on Instagram @joelhart or email at joelraphaelhart@gmail.com.

Jonah Schulz is a part-time illustrator and designer and full-time American expat living in London. He is mainly interested in food, films, and basketball. You can find his work @brause513 on Instagram.

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

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Last year, while pottering about a field outside Stevenage which had become the setting for the regenerative agriculture festival Groundswell, I spotted a familiar name: The Landworker’s Alliance (LWA). It wasn’t a particularly busy stall, although the people who came over were all passionate about the work that the LWA was doing. They certainly had, by far, the most interesting set of pamphlets available: a manifesto for a people-led national food policy, a vision setting out how global food sovereignty might be achieved, a case for small farms. My editor Jonathan Shainin took one look at the stall and said to Jyoti Fernandes who was running it “so you’re the Farming Left?’. This got a laugh and an affirmative reply.

Yes, this is the Farming Left, or at least a part of it. That a festival like Groundswell, dedicated to a progressive form of agriculture, didn’t have many other stalls like the LWA, seemed emblematic of the farming world, where the problems afflicting it have been divorced from the radical politics that may solve them. That the Left has been marginalised in British farming isn’t surprising when you look at who owns land in Britain (1% of the population owns half of it) and consider that the most powerful interests in farming will always seek to consolidate ownership of that land above all else. It’s estimated that in 2017, around 72% of farmers voted Conservative ─ not surprising when the Conservative Party are essentially the political arm of a landowning-class, and that they have been deftly able to absorb green policies without alienating that base.

This domination of rural areas has also meant that the wider Left itself has abandoned the notion that questions of farming and agriculture is for them. One of the few leftist publications bucking this trend is the New Socialist, whose Ecologies season has been putting forward progressive solutions to agricultural problems for the last year, exposing where seemingly radical policies act as a smokescreen for arguments which are essentially conservative. In an article published yesterday, entitled Renewing the Land Question: Against Greengrabbing and Green Colonialism (which, in a nice symbiosis, covers some of the themes in today’s newsletter by Hester van Hensbergen), Alex Heffron and Kai Heron argue that rewilding is one of these policies, and that the first thing that must be discussed, to work out who really benefits from it, is land.

“Until the turn of the 20th century, land lay at the heart of British radicalism” Heffron and Heron state; “the fight must be for equal access to the land and resources of food production” today’s newsletter replies, almost in response. The conclusion of both articles is clear: there should be no Farming Left, only a united Left that takes farming seriously, else it will abandon the biggest political questions of our time to those who cannot and will not solve them.

Who is the Farming Left?, by Hester van Hensbergen

The Dorset landscape is marked by a familiar paradox: it is shaped by the many, but owned by the few. There are thousands of years of steady work by human hands and feet in its snaking holloways – hidden ancient pathways that act as chutes to the sea or highways between settlements – and terraced suntrap hillsides. But just a handful of individuals lay claim to large swathes of this land. 

Today, the largest individual landowner is Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, Conservative MP for South Dorset, whose 13,870-acre Charborough Park estate is enclosed by the longest brick wall in England. He is also the current owner of Drax Hall in Barbados, a former slave plantation that has been handed down in an unbroken chain of Draxs since the seventeenth century, and which is now the subject of a campaign for public access in the new republic. 

In West Dorset, there is the 2,000-acre Mapperton estate, owned by the Earl of Sandwich’s family and currently overseen by Viscount Hinchingbrooke and his wife Julie Montagu, host of An American Aristocrat’s Guide to Great Estate. There are more than 3,000 acres of Duchy of Cornwall ownership in Dorset too, including the land on which Poundbury, an architectural chocolate-box experiment developed at the behest of impassioned urban designer Prince Charles, was built. 

Between them, these three landowners cover nearly 3% of the county. 

Springtail Farm, a one-acre patch of sea-facing hillside in West Dorset currently occupied by Lally Owen and Tomas Carolsfeld, is different. A disco ball hangs from the roof of the plastic tunnel where Owen is working. It shimmers over a long table packed with rows of squash: silver blue Crown Princes, fist-sized acorns with green seams, and a fleet of Cinderella carriages. Owen is soaking tubers that look like desiccated sea creatures. Down in the field Carolsfeld is grappling with a mechanical seeder and a package of landrace wheat seeds. 

As new entrants to farming, Owen and Carolsfeld – who met studying human ecology at university in Maine – are a rarity. Less than 3% of working UK farmers are under the age of thirty-five, while the average age of a farmer is sixty. The biggest challenge young farmers face is land access: the cost of a single arable acre now averages almost £10,000. ‘We get frustrated a lot with how the price of land is attached more to land as a financial asset, rather than to land as a way of serving [the] community and growing food’, says Carolsfeld. Despite the vast open hills of the Dorset countryside, finding land to grow on has been difficult for the pair. ‘It feels like quite a hard reality,’ adds Owen. ‘To desperately want to grow on a bigger scale, and to be surrounded by land, but to be constantly told that there isn’t any.’

Owen’s problem hints at a very real lie of British politics: a narrative of land scarcity that contradicts the evidence presented by the naked eye. The true pattern of land ownership is, as campaigner Guy Shrubsole puts it, Britain’s ‘darkest, best-kept secret’. This obfuscation is necessary, according to that impeccable, time-honoured logic: if it’s only the landed elite that know the vastness of their own estates, the gross inequality is less likely to incite a revolution. 

The land Carolsfeld and Owen have found is unusual in another way. Their acre is rented from the farming families, who share ownership of the larger forty-three-acre Fivepenny Farm. There are goats, ornate-horned Jacob sheep, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens. There’s a large hand-built barn with a thatched roof that contains equipment for fruit, dairy, and meat processing, which is shared among fifty-two local smallholdings as a cooperative. Fivepenny is not simply a family farm, it’s a different model of ownership which values resources held in common, giving everyone involved the ability to work the land and produce food. 

Before 2003, the land that is now Fivepenny Farm was mostly open fields. One of the original buyers of the farm was Jyoti Fernandes who, alongside her husband and another family, saw its potential. The group planted hedgerows and fruit trees, diversifying and remaking the landscape. Fernandes’s partner built their house – a timber cabin with rough-sawn cladding, a porch, and solar panels on the roof – and later the group raised funds for the barn and established a formal cooperative in 2006.

In 2012, inspired by the international peasants’ and indigenous peoples’ movements, and by her years spent working with farmers’ organisations in India, Fernandes co-founded the Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA), a union of small-scale farmers and other land workers across the UK who share a vision of a more democratic, ecologically viable and people-centred food system. 

She and fellow smallholding farmers in the UK want to foster grass-roots activism and progress their vision of agroecology – farming systems that work with nature, improving soil health and nurturing biodiversity – and good food for everyone. Now the LWA has 1,895 members who collectively farm around 80,000–100,000 acres of land. Since its founding, the organisation’s influence in Britain has grown substantially. ‘It filled a necessary gap, which was more of an ecological voice for farming’, Fernandes explains over tea and mince pies, after an intense week running the farmers’ constituency at COP26. 

As the LWA’s policy coordinator, Fernandes spends a lot of her time negotiating with Defra to ensure that post-Brexit subsidy schemes support farms providing a positive ecological and social impact. It’s important to find ways to reward smaller farms, including those in urban settings, that can’t offer the large-scale nature restoration projects of great estates. The clear vision espoused by the LWA – of farming’s potential to positively contribute to the environment – sets it apart from the other major player in British farming politics, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), which frequently lobbies for the interests of massive agribusiness – and against worker and environmental protections.

But there is a growing movement of rural farmers, peri-urban community farms and organisations which share common cause. A collaborative project between the LWA, Land in Our Names (LION) – a land and racial justice collective – and the Ecological Land Cooperative (ELC) will look at the barriers to access to land for agroecological farming for Black people and people of colour in the UK. 

This is The Farming Left: these land workers share a politics, united by the concept of food sovereignty: the right to control of local food systems, which originated with farmers in the Global South. ‘We’re talking about equitable access to resources to enable localised food supplies’, explains Fernandes. These organisations are tackling the challenges of access to land in an unequal landscape: the ELC, for example, purchases large plots and obtains planning permission for dwellings before parcelling them up into affordable smallholdings. 

The Kindling Trust in Manchester is also seeking to foster a new generation of agroecological farmers. The Trust, which was established in 2007, has a veg box scheme and a community garden, and also offers training to new entrants, but there has always been a long-term plan to establish a cooperative farm. Since raising over a million pounds from more than six hundred investors last year, the Trust is looking to purchase a 120-acre farm in the Manchester area. ‘We want people to feel ownership in whatever way they get involved’, explains co-founder Chris Walsh. Whether they are founding members, workers, investors, or tenants, they will all be represented equally on a governing board.  

There ‘is a need for a rural radicalism’ of this kind, argues Chris Smaje, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future (2020). ‘It’s about trying to de-commodify land and take it out of speculative ownership’, he explains. For Smaje, who plans to purchase a 20-acre plot to be divided up among several small-scale farmers, the goal is ‘to build a land-based community’ and ultimately ‘generate more of what we need within our own communities’. 

While the radical agrarian community in the UK pales in comparison to the strength of conservative farming interests, this fight for land – and the right to use it – is happening on a global scale. The international peasants’ movement is connected through the 200-million strong La Vía Campesina, linking groups such as Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or ‘Landless Workers’ Movement’, which has, since the 1980s, been occupying land to their counterparts across the world. The world’s farming Left is a David to big agribusiness’s Goliath, the latter having been bolstered by states, major international institutions, and the liberalising of global political economy since the Second World War. From Zapatistas to Scottish crofters, the peasants’ movement is fighting to turn the tide on our social and ecological future before it is too late.

Farmers are often seen as inherently conservative, rather than as agents of historical change, but this has not always been the case. In Europe, during the tumultuous decades of the mid-twentieth century, Left agrarian parties were players in national politics. Agrarian anarchists fought for their vision of the good life in the Spanish Civil War until Franco’s brutal crackdown. From 1939 to 1965, Ireland’s Clann na Talmhan represented the interests of small farmers from the west of Ireland and adopted social democratic principles. Romania’s agrarian political tradition was particularly strong, and the Ploughmen’s Front had a million members by the mid-1940s. These groups produced a rich variety of Left agrarian ideas: from land cooperatives, to visions of a democratic ‘peasant state’, to campaigning for social security for the countryside. As an early industrialiser, Britain lacks its own strong twentieth-century Left agrarian vernacular – one has to go back to the seventeenth-century Diggers for inspiration. Worker politics have been dominated by industrial labour, while environmental and agrarian politics have been closely linked to conservative traditions of thought. 

Even today, the LWA often finds its allies in unexpected places. Fernandes has worked with brothers Zac and Ben Goldsmith – Zac is a prominent Conservative politician, Ben a libertarian financier – and considers them friends. The environmentalist brothers are passionate advocates for rewilding, and the stewarding of the natural world. ‘There are some core values that stand on their own outside of the political spectrum’, says Fernandes, including localism, traditional farming techniques, and the relationship to land and nature. ‘Obviously I don’t agree with everything they do’, she adds, ‘but it’s been really useful to have that political leverage.’ 

Though Zac is the better known of the brothers, Ben is the more interesting environmentalist. He joins Sir Charlie Burrell, of the 3,500-acre Knepp Castle Estate, as a landed pioneer of rewilding. Others, including, improbably, Ed Sheeran, are set to follow suit. Over a cup of tea in his kitchen at the Mapperton Estate, Viscount Hinchingbrooke recently told his wife’s Instagram followers of his plans to ‘take back’ the 180-acre Coltleigh Farm, one of five farms on the estate, and allow it to rewild. 

In biodiversity terms, these are undeniably valuable projects (which will be substantially rewarded with taxpayer money), but they also point to an important and unfortunate fact: the narrative about how best to use land in Britain for an ecologically viable future is being dominated by the people that own vast tracts of it. A true cynic might add that these projects are convenient tools for the ongoing legitimisation of property inequality: while estates are being put to good use, the possibility of land reform – through redistribution or nationalisation – gets pushed further away from the Overton window. 

While allying with powerful environmentalist Conservatives is good politicking, for the Farming Left in Britain to progress, the fight from everyone must be for equal access to the land and resources of food production. Conservatives aren’t likely to be the best allies here. But has the broader political Left been any better? ‘Land for the Many’, a June 2019 report to the Labour Party led by George Monbiot, made ambitious recommendations: for reforms to rental laws, a Community Right to Buy (which already exists in Scotland), a compulsory sale scheme for derelict lands, a Community Land Fund directed at purchasing agricultural land for smallholdings, and a Right to Roam across all uncultivated land and water (another Scottish precedent). These policy ideas weren’t reflected in the 2019 Labour manifesto, however – this promised a Food Sovereignty Fund, but with a focus on farmers in the Global South, as if the concept of democratic control of food production within the UK were irrelevant. 

In a recent report, the democratic ownership thinktank Common Wealth suggested bringing private land into public ownership to create experimental agroecological farms. ‘I’d situate myself within the tent of a Green New Deal for agriculture’, explains Rob Booth, the author of the report. Booth is particularly interested in county farms as a potential model for democratic ownership of land and agroecological innovation – established in the nineteenth century in response to agricultural depression, these farms are owned by local authorities and rented out at reasonable rates to tenant farmers. They still cover 200,000 acres of land (down from double this amount forty years ago). Booth sees a state-led county farm renaissance with a focus on agroecological practices as a potential keystone of a Green New Deal. ‘These are examples of how public ownership in the classic sense can create space for new environmental practices and more equitable access’, he explains. ‘With tools that aren’t a million miles away from what we have now, we can facilitate a more democratic use of land.’

Land workers and food activists differ on their hopes for land reform, however, and few point to state ownership as the best tool going forward. For Smaje, the ideal society is one in which private land is sufficiently dispersed to allow everyone ‘a degree of personal or household autonomy to produce’. For the Kindling Trust, the ‘consensus is diversity’, says Walsh. ‘We don’t have a diverse ownership structure here. It’s very centralised and concentrated.’ They’d like to see a greater mix of private smallholdings, cooperatives, and charitable and public ownership. 

Walsh is keen to point out that access to land, however, isn’t always the biggest issue per se. ‘There are so many other challenges’, he explains. ‘The workforce isn’t there; access to markets isn’t there. And the second you do get onto land, it’s the challenge of massive underinvestment for the last thirty or forty years.’ Perhaps the most prohibitive barrier is not the cost of an arable acre, but the cost of nearby housing, adds Walsh. ‘All of us who have created things in the last ten or fifteen years, it’s because we bought houses dirt cheap.’ For new entrants, that’s simply not an option.  

Owen and Carolsfeld, like other new land workers, are hopeful and ambitious. ‘We believe that growing food doesn’t have to be marginal’, explains Owen. ‘It’s marginal because of the system that we are in. But what can be produced on land is incredibly abundant.’ Owen’s insight is striking because it has been voiced so rarely. There is widespread reticence on questions of land ownership and access to the resources of food production, ensuring the prospects of building a better food system remain remote. But these ideas shouldn’t be novel: we’re an agrarian country, with 70% of British land devoted to agriculture. The broader political Left seems to forget this fact all too readily; for the farming Left it is central, and the contest is for the future of British agrarianism, acre by acre.

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Credits

Hester van Hensbergen is a writer and cook interested in the intersection of food, politics, and environment. You can find her on Instagram @hestervandelemme. 

The illustration is by Josh Harrison, a full-time waiter and part-time illustrator from Yorkshire. Get in touch at joshuajsharrison@gmail.com or @kingvold on Instagram.

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the last newsletter on the North Circular Road. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

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On a particularly lazy Boxing Day afternoon last year, my channel hopping alighted on the 1968 children’s film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a mainstay of my VHS collection that I had not watched for at least a decade. I was struck by the strange darkness at the heart of the film ─ not just the child catcher, but the reasons behind the child catcher (a baroness who is physically unable to have children so she rounds up every child in the land so she is never reminded of them). For a film you thought was about a flying car, there are various unexpected personal subplots: the depression of a man whose wife has left him as the sole parent of two kids, the sadomasochistic relationship between the Baron and his wife. But if you strip the film down to its plot elements, and discard the bits which are stories within stories, then you can say Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is actually about an artisan sweet manufacturer who decides to sell his recipe to a famous sweet producer, upgrading his rickety set up for the might of the British industrial factory.

Now within the context of children’s films from this time, this real plot beneath a plot isn’t exactly unusual (Mary Poppins, after all, is not a film about a nanny but an anti-capitalist critique of the British banking system and its codependency with the exploitation of colonial resources). But I think it’s significant that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a British depiction of factory production. In the song Toot Sweets, the factory floor is portrayed as an clean, open space where quality is produced and monitored (the tastings suggest that there is no homogeneity in the factory method). It’s a wonderland of colour: yellow lollipops, dark green boiled sweets, pink and white sticks of rock, orange toffees, gleaming brass stills. In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s vision of Fordist labour, the workers do twirls and cartwheels.

After reading Sean Wyer’s newsletter today, you may agree with him and me that this could have only been a British film. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is only one of many sympathetic depictions of the British food factory (both real and fictional) that have existed ever since the factory became largely responsible for the way we eat. From early 20th century propaganda films right up until an early 21st century TV series presented by a perpetually horny bald grocer, we do not lament it as an encroachment on traditional foodways, but celebrate it as a technological achievement. This is perhaps understandable ─ it is, after all, as I mentioned in the last newsletter, our true legacy on food culture and production. Yet as Sean points out, our fascination with the factory rarely extends to the very thing that keeps it running: the producers themselves.

Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Gregg Wallace, by Sean Wyer

In his English boarding school, a young Roald Dahl dreamt of chocolate factories. His imagination was fuelled by news stories about what went on behind closed doors at confectionery rivals Cadbury and Rowntree, who were known to send spies into one another’s factories to steal trade secrets. When, in 1964, Dahl released Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – a novel which describes children and adults similarly desperate to see inside such a place – it was still possible for the public to realise his dreams: Cadbury hosted regular guided tours of its Bournville manufacturing site until 1970, when it finally closed its factory doors to the public. Two decades later, the tours were replaced by Cadbury World: an entertaining simulacrum of the chocolate-making process, but a theme park-like ‘experience’ rather than a factory tour. 

When a TV news reporter asked why Cadbury’s popular tours were ending, the head of the company’s visiting department explained that ‘increasing automation’ had ‘robbed the visitor of some of the more interesting facets of the work.’ The assumption was that visitors went there to watch Cadbury’s chocolatiers practising their craft, and were far less interested in the monotony of mechanised production.

Karl Marx would probably have been surprised that Cadbury’s tours had ever been in demand. In Volume I of Das Kapital, written just over a century before Cadbury’s final factory tour, he suggested that consumers were not particularly bothered about how their food was made: ‘In the act of eating,’ he wrote, ‘it is of no importance whatsoever that bread is the product of the previous labour of the farmer, the miller, and the baker.’ 

Marx may have foreseen many things with prescient accuracy, but the rise of Gregg Wallace was not one of them. Since 2015, Wallace has been a host on the BBC show Inside the Factory, where he shows viewers how some of the UK’s favourite industrially produced foods – from biscuits to baked beans – are made, by following the products from raw material to finished commodity. Wallace is anything but indifferent to the repetitive whirring of the machines that produce much of our food – on the contrary, he seems mesmerised by the sheer scale, speed and efficiency of modern industry. 

Wallace’s excitement is infectious. We may not quite believe him when he says he had never previously given a second thought to how supermarket staples are made – he is a former greengrocer and a MasterChef presenter, after all – but millions of us nonetheless follow him on his voyages of discovery. He is not the only person curious to find out how instant coffee is made, or how molten chocolate can be poured onto a Magnum without melting the ice cream.

The urge to glimpse ‘Inside the Factory’ comes partly from the draw of the unknown. There is something tantalising about peering into what Marx calls the ‘hidden abode of production.’ Marx and Wallace both understand this well: as Marx offers to sneak us across the threshold of the factory and reveal its mysteries, so too does Wallace promise to share his ‘privileged access’ with us. In both cases, we are encouraged to feel the adrenaline that comes from trespassing. Our guides are letting us in on a secret. 

Except, of course, that programmes like Inside the Factory are not sharing secrets at all – instead, they showcase recipes or techniques that are never actually divulged to the viewer. Like Arthur Slugworth, Willy Wonka’s rival in Dahl’s novel, Wallace tries to charm factory employees into revealing the ‘trick’ – but, with a smile, they invariably keep their cards close to their chests. (Of course they do; their employers are watching.) By refusing to reveal how the trick is performed, the impression Inside the Factory gives is that these manufacturers still have something magical up their sleeves. 

The food factory has long loomed large in Britain’s cultural imagination, with the Industrial Revolution and the economics of imperialism making it an early and enthusiastic adopter of industrial food processing. The historic circumstances that propelled Marx to examine the ‘unlimited extension of the working day’ in London’s round-the-clock bakeries are the same ones that inspired Dahl’s sweet-toothed dreams, and that also fuel Britain’s intimate relationship with processed foods today. 

Brands like Cadbury, alongside others featured on Inside the Factory, such as McVitie’s and Mr Kipling, are often perceived as quintessentially British. No matter where their parent companies are headquartered, or where in the Global South their ingredients are farmed, British national identity is interwoven with the homogenised, highly processed foods they produce. British factories may elicit mystery or intrigue, but they are less often viewed with suspicion or fear – as they are in many other countries.   

Early in the twentieth century, the US saw polemics like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, an early indictment of the American meat-processing industry. In French and Italian representations of industrial food production, it is common to lament the threat that factories pose to culinary traditions. In China, the popularity of rural, back-to-basics ‘cottagecore’ videos, often centred around food culture, can be read as a critique of rapid urbanisation. A Bite of China, a popular food documentary produced by the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, hardly features factories at all, instead training a rose-tinted lens on the lives of growers and producers.

In British food documentaries, on the other hand, the factory itself often takes centre stage, and is even presented with the same reverence A Bite of China reserves for its artisans; Channel 4’s Snackmasters, which challenges chefs to recreate industrially produced food in a commercial kitchen, best epitomises this. Fuelled by the British obsession with the ‘magic’ of the food factory, which Roald Dahl harnessed so masterfully, the usual conclusion – that you or I could never come close to recreating KitKats or Quavers at home – is pushed even further. Not even highly trained artisans can quite get it right. 

Inside the Factory, meanwhile, celebrates artificial intelligence, around-the-clock manufacturing, and the sophistication of twenty-first-century industrial methods. On occasion, the show glances back in time, with historian Ruth Goodman exploring how food was made before mechanisation. The effect is to contrast the back-breaking labour of yesteryear with the efficiency of today. According to this logic, history is a straight line, from a bleak past towards an ever-brighter future. 

In one episode of Inside the Factory, Wallace interviews a long-serving employee of a dairy factory who explains that, before the distribution process was automated, he ‘effectively was a robot.’ On the surface, there seem to be no losers from technological progress. The remaining employees get less boring work; their boss saves a fortune: ‘A robot never phones in sick,’ Wallace jokes. We are told that 300 people would have worked in the distribution hall before automation. What happened to them afterwards is never addressed; Wallace never asks the question.

In the early 2000s, many of my school friends’ parents worked at Sun Valley, a chicken processing factory in Hereford founded by Lieutenant Colonel Uvedale Corbett, who was known locally as ‘The Colonel’ long before KFC arrived on the West Midlands chicken scene. The rest of us listened intently to the fanciful stories our friends told about their parents’ workplace, including one in which the factory employed a priest to bless each chicken heading for slaughter. As well as demonstrating a shaky grasp of theology, our credulity showed just how clueless we were about the meat-processing industry.

The Chicken Factory, a 1988 BBC programme about Sun Valley, begins by following the familiar formula we recognise from Inside the Factory. We see the products – chirping yellow chicks – zooming along on a belt, being sorted into boxes. The employee explaining the process feeds us large numbers without any real context; an attempt to demonstrate the efficiency of the factory and its workers.

Minutes in, however, we realise that we are not watching a ‘normal’ programme about food production. The scene fades to my old secondary school, Aylestone, where final-year pupils are half-heartedly singing their last hymn in the assembly hall. The presenter interviews a pair who are due to start work at the chicken factory the following week. We get the most valuable and intimate insights into the lives of Sun Valley workers from the scenes filmed outside the factory. 

The presenter asks the pupils directly: ‘Did you think that’s what you were going to be doing when you were studying at school?’ ‘No, no no no,’ replies the boy. ‘So you had more ambitions than that?’ the presenter asks. So far, so patronising. But the fictional premise that is so central to Inside the Factory – that everybody working in food production is delighted with their job – has already been broken here. 

The Chicken Factory is not a revolutionary documentary, but it is quietly subversive. In Inside the Factory, while we do hear from a spectrum of workers, managers and owners, they seldom, if ever, contradict one another. In The Chicken Factory, on the other hand, we still hear from managers, but their assessments of the factory conflict with the voices of those working on the production floor. 

‘Not everyone wants to go on to have the pressures in life to earn high wages,’ a Sun Valley manager says. ‘Some are quite happy just to earn a living.’ An interview with a young couple, engaged to be married, casts doubt on the idea that working at the factory allows them to do this, though. ‘For a man it’s not very good wages,’ the woman explains, with her fiancé in view. ‘But for me it’s OK, so long as both of us work [ . . . ] We still have to do so much overtime, really, to keep us going.’ Her fiancé tells us he works at the factory seven days a week. 

Towards the beginning of the documentary, we see the new employees learning the ropes. They are being introduced to the dangerous ‘shackles’; these are used to hang dead chickens, but can also trap workers’ fingers and drag them along the production line. ‘It’s a good company, they do look after you,’ the instructor insists, but it is clear that corporate paternalism has its limits. 

We are shown scenes of chickens being butchered at speed, and of carcasses thrown unceremoniously onto large piles of meat. But some of the stories we are told by the factory workers are also unsettling. Interviewed in his garden, one of the workers tells us how he dreams of ‘waking up one morning in a chicken shed,’ before ‘great big chickens’ come in to deliver him to the factory.

He is smiling at first, as if to suggest, ‘What a silly imagination I have!’ Over video footage of chicks in cages, he continues: ‘Fancy just waking up one morning and finding some great big chicken walking towards you, with hands, or something stupid like that, and grabbing you, throwing you on a lorry. And then you’re just whisked away about twenty miles, and you don’t know what’s going on. Next thing, you arrive at the factory and boom.’

It feels depressing that, in comparison to today’s Inside the Factory, 1988’s The Chicken Factory looks positively radical, although it is nothing of the sort. It is messy and ambiguous, however – neither a whistleblowing exposé, nor a glistening infomercial – and therefore human. This contrasts with Inside the Factory, which always depicts food processing as seamless. 

The one major exception to this is a special series of the show called Keeping Britain Going, produced in 2020 during the first Covid-19 lockdown. It revisits factories that had previously been featured on the programme to see how they are adapting to the pandemic. According to the episode of Keeping Britain Going set in the McVitie’s factory in Park Royal, London, up to 20% of the McVitie’s workforce was off sick during the first lockdown. An uptake in demand led factory managers to ramp up production and to lengthen the hours of remaining staff. This is described on the show as ‘putting in the extra mile,’ which implies that taking extra shifts is akin to a patriotic duty. A haulage driver who slept in his cab overnight and then worked the next day is congratulated for his ‘can-do attitude.’ The programme never asks whether ‘sacrifices’ like this are strictly necessary for the Covid-19 ‘war effort.’ 

There’s a feeling of wartime propaganda about Keeping Britain Going. Indeed, the UK’s first notable propaganda film, Britain Prepared (1915), features scenes from a military bakery, operating with a factory-like efficiency. In the chapter of London’s Kitchen about the McVitie’s factory, Catherine Flood notes that the brand imagines itself as a great unifier in times of crisis. ‘The country may be imploding, but we all still share the love of biscuits.’

The onset of lockdown saw an increase in demand for groceries, but particularly for foods like biscuits, which provide easy fuel throughout the day. They are seen as essential in the home worker’s arsenal. As with earlier food factory documentaries, Keeping Britain Going never entertains the possibility that some of its audience members might work in the industry themselves. Instead, ‘we’ (the viewer) are assumed to be working from home, and to be thankful for ‘their’ (the worker’s) work making ‘our’ biscuits; just as the viewers of Britain Prepared are supposed to be grateful for the sacrifices of soldiers in the First World War.

Watching Keeping Britain Going, you would be forgiven for thinking that the companies featured are charities, selflessly volunteering to feed the nation. But they are not. It was the profit motive, not pure altruism, that made factories ramp up production during the early months of the pandemic. In many cases, shareholders were rewarded accordingly; the parent company of McVitie’s, United Biscuits, experienced a ‘pandemic boost’ in 2020, with pre-tax profits up 18.3% on the previous year. That did not stop McVitie’s from announcing the imminent closure of its Glasgow factory in May 2021, causing 400 workers, many of whom will have worked overtime to ‘Keep Britain Going’, to lose their jobs.

There is no one reason why Britain’s mainstream food factory documentaries are so rarely nuanced. Perhaps the answer has something to do with the sophistication of the twenty-first-century PR machine. Perhaps television commissioners believe that working in a labour-intensive food factory is too jarring, too incompatible with the Thatcherite illusion of a post-industrial Britain to bear thinking about. Perhaps they are more pressured than ever to choose viewing figures over political relevance, and assume that they cannot achieve both. 

And yet, when I watch these documentaries, I cannot help but compare them unfavourably to the most successful British representation of a factory, one that foregrounds the almost carceral regimentation of working life. This interpretation shows how bosses encourage workers to see themselves as powerless individuals, rather than members of a collective. It reminds us that high-tech automation is rarely aimed at improving the lives of workers, but is more often introduced to combat falling profits. It is sceptical of the factory’s dehumanising and alienating effects, and of the dangers inherent in being managed by a computer programme. 

This masterpiece also happens to be specifically about food production. It pays close attention to animal welfare, and can even be interpreted as a searing critique of factory farming. At times, it feels explicitly Marxist in its inspiration, suggesting that gradual reformism, or a reliance on bosses’ paternalism and goodwill, can never be the solution to a system that is exploitative at its very core. 

I’m talking, of course, about Chicken Run, which achieved something that Gregg Wallace’s documentaries have not: a wildly successful representation of a food factory that is deeply political, and focused on workers and their lives. The choice between mainstream success and political relevance is clearly a false one, then: if a group of plasticine chickens can manage both, so can the BBC.   

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Credits

Sean Wyer is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is usually based in London. He writes an occasional free Substack, and is on Twitter, Instagram, and email. 

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, a graphic designer and illustrator based in Essex, UK.

Sing Yun uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore in their personal work. 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 others. Their work was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award for Best Artwork 2018 and 2020 respectively. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits.

Additional Viewing

The Chicken Factory (BBC)

Inside The Factory (BBC)

Snackmasters (Channel 4)

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the series of 60 South Asian Dishes Every Londoner Should Know. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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The goals of the food contingent at COP 26 last year were modest: transition global agriculture towards more sustainable, climate resilient systems, whilst, at the same time, ensure that these methods of farming are responsible for lower emissions and make it less likely that we’ll have to have another summit in Glasgow in 10 years time saying exactly the same thing. None of this was secured, but something else almost as important was discussed: the secret recipe of the soft drink Irn Bru.

You may vaguely remember this ─ Irn Bru kept being wheeled out as a form of soft diplomacy mostly to the bafflement of delegates. Only US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seemed to be game (she was handed one by Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon but you get the impression she would have snuck out to an offy if she hadn’t). Her video follows the front-facing phone camera format of most first-time-tasting Irn Bru YouTube videos, the reveal of the can to the camera, the shock of the first sip, the mentally scrabbling around for words to describe the taste. AOC, however, hits upon something that was completely surprising: the affinity of Irn Bru’s taste with something from her own childhood. “It tastes like Kola Champagne!”

Why did a Scottish and Puerto Rican soft drink taste similar? Scouring the internet I found that other people had made the same connection, if only in trying to describe the drinks (“bubblegum” and “fruit cream soda” comes up a lot for both ─ “like sucking off God” was only used for Irn Bru). This led me down a rabbit hole of British and Latin American soft drinks, discovering that the original Iron Brew essence was created by an American chemicals company, that the first Iron Brew was created by a British drinks company in Jamaica, that many Latin American soft drinks were created by British drinks manufacturers or people trying to compete with British ones. It appeared that not only was there a specific chemical accord these drinks shared, one that has now become a secret, but the movement of British industrialists heavily contributed to international soft drinks culture.

The result of my investigation is pending, but Giuseppe Lacorazza’s one is in and it’s a banger. It’s changed my view of British food culture ─ that in the same way a French chef with a huge toque was seen as the authority in cuisine, a British industrialist with a huge factory was once the authority in food manufacturing. Forget fish and chips, roast dinners and beans on toast ─ those are things only we eat and we deserve to be rinsed for it. But if you measure culture by what it inspires in others then it’s clear what the real British legacy on food culture is: Irn Bru, Twisters and salsa inglesa.

Salsa inglesa - A Mexican Sauce, by Giuseppe Lacorazza

Sit down to eat at a restaurant in Mexico City and you will find a recurrent topography: there are your freshly made salsas, maybe some lime wedges, raw onions or something pickled, and often a few bottled sauces – a family that includes El Yucateco, Valentina, Maggi, and a dark little dropper bottle filled with a sweet-and-sour brown sauce. This small bottle is among the most common sauces used in the kitchen, in preparations like petroleo, a jet-black concoction that is added to beers to make refreshing micheladas and clamatos (more on these later), as well as cubanas. It’s also used for dishes like aguachiles negros, which is a delicious plate of raw seafood pooling in chilli-lime water with cucumbers, red onions and other things, and good enough for a crippling hangover. It’s a favourite for topping raw clams and marinating grilled beef. Most bizarrely of all, people love to drench their pizzas with it. 

This condiment is known as salsa inglesa, or ‘English sauce’, and if it tastes very much like Worcestershire sauce – well, that’s because it very much is Worcestershire sauce. 

I was familiar with salsa inglesa before living in Mexico – it’s got the same name all over Latin America – but I had never seen it as prominently as I have here, cropping up in what I would consider unlikely settings and unlikely recipes. It struck me as an interesting anomaly: a brown British condiment holding its own in the land of colourful salsas. Yet it doesn’t feel like an intruder; more like a fully integrated expat.

I soon noticed that most people here only use Crosse & Blackwell or Lea & Perrins, two British brands which also have an industrial presence in the country – the former is produced in Nuevo León, the latter is bottled in Jalisco. But after doing some sleuthing I realised that there are also a lot of locally produced craft salsas inglesas around. I tried to write about them, but when I approached the producers they immediately rejected my requests to visit their kitchens and see how their sauces are made. I know the original recipe of the big brands is a closely guarded secret, but after two hundred years, even the people who copy it won’t share it. Why? We already know the main ingredients: tamarind, molasses, anchovies, onion, vinegar, cloves. I wondered if there was a bigger story here, a secret shared by all these salsas inglesas. 

So I started an investigation.

The Investigation

Right from the start, the sauce’s story is packed with mystery and tight corners. In the early 1800s a fellow named Lord Sandys asked two chemists in Worcester – John Lea and William Perrins – to prepare a recipe for him based on a fish sauce he had tasted while serving in Bengal during the British Raj. They failed to deliver a satisfactory result, so the sauce was discarded and left to rot in a basement. The chemists retrieved it after a while and tried again; the ageing process had added a long, puckering savouriness and mellowed down the funky fish, giving it a pleasant taste.Who’s the originator? Who knows, but that’s how the first official Worcestershire sauce was born, even if, like all good stories, it’s probably not entirely true. 

Since then, the sauce has been a British staple, used mainly, according to my British sources, to add piquancy to melted cheese on toast. Lea & Perrins also produced and distributed their sauce to great success, so much so that it became part of the diet of the Empire’s fleet exporting goods to the colonies. It was marketed as ‘the only good sauce’ and the recipe was kept a secret.

It seems that the enigmatic nature of the recipe accompanied the induction of the sauce into Mexican culture. I started to track down all the local brands I could; the first reply was from a guy called Franco, who makes a salsa inglesa in Coyoacán, on the outskirts of Mexico City, under the brand name Oviedo. He replied only to let me know that there was no space in his schedule to invite me over, or even to talk to me, but that I could buy a bottle of his sauce in La Merced, the huge ‘everything market’ downtown. So I went to La Merced and bought a big plastic bottle of Oviedo, complete with an orange label listing the ingredients: water, spices, salt, sodium benzoate. I went home, opened it and bam! the cap blew right off in my living room. Sauce all over the wooden floor. It was still fermenting; I still tried it, of course, but it wasn’t a good one. It smelled like inglesa, but tasted like muddy saltwater with a dash of onion and mustard powder. Not good for my tastebuds, my floor or my quest for answers. 

The next clue came from Arturo Zacarías, who runs his family business, Chelamatic, in Puebla, south-east of the city. Chelamatic makes mixes for micheladas, those famous salt-rimmed beers with added lime juice and secret sauces, which include salsa inglesa; he created his own business because his wholesale clients wanted to buy a salsa inglesa along with their michelada mixes, of which, pre-pandemic, he could sell up to two tons during the Feria de Puebla. Arturo was more open and polite than Franco, answering my every question – but he still denied entrance to his kitchen. This time it wasn’t up to him – the sauce is produced at a local laboratory, much in the fashion of Lord Sandys, because they are able to emulsify it, stabilise it, and preserve it in a way he couldn’t, and the final recipe is only known by the lab folks. ‘I hope no one else knows it, although everyone in Mexico is susceptible to having their ideas stolen. Each [producer] has their own formula, but we all copy a little bit from each other’, he admitted. 

Theft and forgery, however, are not just Mexican susceptibilities; they have been part of salsa inglesa’s history since the beginning. Late-nineteenth century British newspapers are full of adverts taken out by Lea & Perrins to warn against imitation sauces peddled by opportunists, but that didn’t stop Crosse & Blackwell, at that point one of the biggest wholesalers of Lea & Perrins, eventually copying the sauce and producing their own. To this day those two remain the most popular brands in Mexico and, continuing the tradition, the ones that Arturo used as his main source of inspiration. 

Chelamatic is a bit stronger-tasting than the British brands, though. Lots of clove comes out of it, which Arturo confessed to using, and it’s sweet and sour with a savoury MSG depth. He disclosed a few of the key ingredients when I told him I wanted to try to make my own. ‘Protein is very important, as well as seasoning’, he said. ‘And you need a strong condiment: garlic, clove, black pepper, soy sauce, tamarind, even Tang works. People think it’s a simple recipe, but it’s not: it’s complicated and it has a lot of ingredients. Mine is tropicalised. It’s a Mexican sauce.’

This was the first time I ever thought of Worcestershire as a Mexican sauce. As a Latin American, it still feels counterintuitive to see British cultural traces so entangled in the foods of the region, but salsa inglesa is just a recent example in a long lineage of industrially produced British foods that switched home grounds across the Atlantic soon after the independence of the republics. 

‘Superficially, Britain and Latin America appeared to be made for each other in the nineteenth century’, Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, former Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of London, writes. ‘With its strong manufacturing base, a consequence of nearly two centuries of industrial modernisation, Britain was well-placed to supply the newly independent countries with manufactured imports.’

These imports were mainly things like fabrics and railroad technology, and mostly arrived to Argentina and Brazil. However, some industrially made food and drink did percolate deeper into the continent, like my beloved childhood drink, Kola Román soda. Kola Román started because in 1865 a Colombian pharmaceutical heir named Carlos Román Polanco imported some carbonating machines from London to Cartagena. He was looking to compete with Kola Walter, a local brand made by a British family. His ruby-red soda became so immensely popular on the northern coast of Colombia that he crushed Kola Walter (this was a full two decades before Coca-Cola was even invented). Then there’s the story of Inca Kola, the Peruvian national drink started by a British immigrant called Joseph Robinson Lindley, or the pastes of the State of Hidalgo in Mexico, which were heavily influenced by the Cornish pasty recipes that arrived with British mine workers at the turn of the nineteenth century. Surely there are many more. I wondered when it was that Worcestershire sauce made its way into Mexico, and how. 

My third clue arrived as a Facebook message from a brand called Inglesita, a ‘premium brand’, as they called themselves on their gold-and-black label that reminded me of a Guinness stout can. They replied to my approaches saying that they would be very happy to tell their story but that unfortunately I couldn’t come to Guadalajara, where they produce it. No reason, just not open to the public. 

Flavourwise, Inglesita is a delight. It’s tangy and mildly sweet and not overly salty. It tastes of tamarind, black pepper, cinnamon and clove, with a hefty vinegar base. It’s made by two brothers, David and Sergio Camarena, who encouraged me to try making my own but, when asked about the recipe, revealed only what was already listed on the label: nineteen ingredients, including vinegar, cardamom, three types of peppercorn (tellicherry, muntok, and red), piloncillo (cooked down sugar cane syrup – to replace the original molasses), ginger, and white mustard. 

The two reasons for starting Inglesita were the drudgery of the Camarenas’ daily jobs, and pizza. Unsatisfied with work and with what they were tasting in their Cross & Blackwell pizza-inglesa combo, they decided to solve both problems at the same time. They made a recipe of their own using only natural ingredients, no preservatives, and aged the sauce in former Tequila oak barrels. ‘How long we age it for is part of the big secret. It’s an important part of the original recipe and, although we are in Mexico, we wanted to create an authentic Worcestershire sauce. People love it and now we even export to the US. We make between four and five thousand litres a month.’ (Lea & Perrins’ own website says that the sauce is aged for eighteen months, so there’s no secret there.) 

I asked Sergio how he incorporated the fish, and that was when things actually changed: Inglesita, he told me, didn't use fish. He said that the addition of fish made the sauce smell too strong, and the company thought the product would be more marketable if vegan. The lack of fish was intriguing, but after asking around it seemed that no one else in Mexico used it, either. Would that be the secret, or was it just a secret? Is it even a Worcestershire sauce if it’s made in Mexico, and without any fish? Maybe the secret is that there is no secret; or rules, for that matter.

By December, I had a whole new salsa inglesa pantry, a few open tabs on my computer, a stained floor, some history lessons, but no real revelations. I also had enough recipes to make my own salsa inglesa, but that wasn’t really the goal. I needed a breakthrough, an actual conclusion, or else: why was I here?

I was sent a lifeline by my friends Ixchel, Juan Carlos, and Jorja, who own a fermented products brand called Umani. They invited me to cook a small pop-up meal with them; I thought the change of mindset would help me stop thinking about salsa inglesa for a day. On a beautiful sunny afternoon, as I was grilling some shrimp over very hot coals, Jorja came over to offer me a drink. ‘Do you like clamato?’ she asked. I love clamato – the velvety drink of tomato, clam juice, lime, chilli and some sauces, plus beer over ice, is like a Bloody Mary but for a tropical beach. ‘We make our own clamato mix, with fermented tomatoes and our own salsa inglesa made with fish sauce to replace the clam juice.’ Whaaat? Jackpot! 

I chased them for a couple of weeks until they finally invited me to come and see their sauce in its production state, (or so I had believed, at least). I went over to the apartment in Colonia Nápoles where they usually prepare and bottle kombuchas, vinegars, and cold brew coffee. We sat down and they presented me with a small bottle wrapped in wrinkly kraft paper, sealed with masking tape. It was their first bottled salsa inglesa, the one they used for my very thirst-quenching clamato. I tried it. It had a noticeably fishy background, with cloves and allspice ever present. It was not thick nor sweet like other ones I had tried, more savoury and sour, but not pungent, with a flatter landing on the tongue and a long, fruity aftertaste. 

Ixchel explained that, according to their interpretation, salsa inglesa is a garum and vinegar-based aromatic maceration. They used inoculated koji to ferment their fish garum, which took six months. In the meantime they macerated two separate batches of aromatic compounds, one with a more traditional Worcestershire recipe (clove, apple cider vinegar, tamarind, molasses) and the other with lots of Mexican ingredients, like nanches (a strong cherry-like yellow fruit that is harvested in the fall), mandarins, mezcal vinegar, and four types of chilli (manzano and serrano, which are fresh, and pasilla and costeño ciruela, which are dry). Then they mixed the garum with the aromatics and let them rest for another few months. It was all made as a collaboration with another project called Sexto, a collective of cooks, designers, and scientists, who explore the intersection of food, culture, and science in Mexico. 

They said it was a very volatile process, and that the sauce changed drastically along the way. ‘The more organic ingredients it has, [the] more enzymes and less stability’, Juan Carlos explained, adding that he didn’t see a wood barrel as a necessity, although he would like to have one. ‘It’s not as important as time. Time is the key ingredient.’

It was time as well (and a bit of corporate heft) that converted Worcestershire sauce into salsa inglesa. By 1960, British food conglomerates had become part of global ones, and the Swiss-owned giant Nestlé had acquired Maggi (of stock cube and sauce fame) and Crosse & Blackwell, pushing them to sell their cubes and condiments in African, Asian, and Latin American markets. Mexico was a big part of this plan – Nestlé’s sales strategy included publishing recipe books that used their low-cost and easy-to-use products, targeting cooks and housewives looking for efficiency. I tracked down a 1986 edition of Cocina con Maggi (‘Cooking with Maggi’) that heavily features Crosse & Blackwell across both Mexican and European recipes, which is also probably why salsa inglesa pairs in many recipes, like the petroleos and aguachiles, with salsa Maggi. Whatever Nestlé did, it worked – salsa inglesa is now part of the fabric of restaurants and home kitchens across Mexico. 

The whole project got me thinking about volatility, as well as time, the universal stabiliser. Things almost never turn out quite the way one plans them, do they? It happens within recipes but also the context around them. I’m sure the people who came up with, and first commercialised, Worcestershire sauce back in nineteenth-century England never thought they were starting a food heritage that would spread all the way to Mexico, nor could they have predicted its usages. Here it is enjoyed the way all sauces are: you put them everywhere you can think of as long as the combination tastes good. You explore the possibilities you’re afforded. Worcestershire sauce in Mexico is Inglesa in the way it’s made, but not in the way it’s used. In that way it’s as Mexican as masa.

Addendum

At the end of our interview, Juan Carlos brought me a little spoonful of another dark sauce. ‘We added some vinegar to the bottled one you tried before, for balance. This one is still resting untouched. It tasted very bitter last week, but today it’s pretty good.’ Finally! A salsa inglesa in its raw production state. I had reached the source. It was meaty- and fatty-smelling, like a bag of room-temp suet, and a lot saltier and more compact-tasting: it definitely needed the added vinegar at that point. While it was far from the traditionally produced Worcestershire sauces, where this all began, it was definitely salsa inglesa. Umani will call it salsa libre – free sauce. I imagine myself using it over some grilled meats and seasoning raw seafood with it. While Juan Carlos agrees with me on the meats, he won’t use it in anything else; he is more of a traditionalist. Jorja and Ixchel, on the other hand, swear it’s great on pizza.

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Credits

Giuseppe Lacorazza is a cook and writer based in Mexico City. You can read him at Gula, a bi-weekly newsletter in Spanish that uses food to talk about life in Latin America.

The illustration is by Natasha Phang-Lee. You can find more of her work over at https://www.natashaphangleeillustration.com

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the series of 60 South Asian Dishes Every Londoner Should Know. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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It is a feature of our age that not only is everything measurable, that everything must be measured. As Amelia Horgan points out in her excellent book Lost in Work, the advent of neoliberalism coincided with the introduction of new methods of measurement, to quantify everything from how efficient a train network runs to how good a teacher is. “How do you record data on something so inherently relational and reciprocal?” Horgan asks. “The first step is to change the tasks…so they can actually be recorded”.

This is where food miles comes in, a way of quantifying the goodness of a food by how long it’s taken to travel to our plates. There is some usefulness in this metric, particularly in the way it was initially conceived, but the media focus on food miles has not only led to an undue emphasis on distance as a measure of ethics, but also a backlash to the idea of local food being important. A part of Jay Rayner’s publicity for his book A Greedy Man in a Hungry World focused on (correctly) debunking the idea that less food miles meant a lower carbon footprint. Localism was just a shibboleth, some commentators insinuated. For some food writers, the pendulum of discourse swung back to there being absolutely no harm shipping our meat from across the world; that to eat locally and seasonally was a nice but valueless idea.

Of course, there are many things that cannot be measured, which is where today’s newsletter─written by six writers in five cities─comes in. In a newsletter tackling the backlash to food miles, Lisa Elaine Held talks about the unquantifable aspects of local eating ─ the protection of land, the building of relationships between producer and eater, sustaining rural and urban communities. In a world where most of us now live in the sprawl that means looking at the urban garden seriously, not as a way of self-sustaining a whole city, or reducing our food miles, or cutting down our emissions (even if they may end up doing so) but for something more ineffable: because they enrich our lives.

Glasgow

The Kailyard Precedent, by Meg Bertera-Berwick

‘The colewort or green kail was for long the chief vegetable of Scotland.’

~Glasgow’s 1911 Scottish Exhibition catalogue 

From the time it was introduced to Lowland Scotland by the Romans, kale (or ‘kail’) loaned its name to everything it touched: the insect that preyed on it (green kail worm), the bell that heralded mealtime (kail bell), and the meal itself (your kail). For the working classes of the early modern era, the kailyard was the space around the home where one grew vital green things to supplement bought-in oats and barley. It was functional – at its most grand, there might have been a cow or a patch of bere – but not unromantic: Patrick Neill’s 1813 Board of Agriculture report details that the kailyards of manufacturing towns in the west of Scotland were particularly famed for their pinks (dianthus) and carnations. 

As both the Highland and Lowland Clearances led to mass displacement and rampant urbanisation of Lowland towns, access to kailyards spelled the difference between a grim life and a good one. In his 1854 book Rambles Around Glasgow, Hugh MacDonald wrote about the village my own now densely urban Glasgow neighbourhood used to be: ‘The majority of the inhabitants are weavers, who manage to make ends meet better than the generality of their city brethren, by the cultivation … of their bits of kail-yard, the produce of which adds materially to the comfort of their families.’ But by the early twentieth century, the kailyard was largely extinct. No access to land meant limited access to vegetables, meaning it was easier to force unlanded people into a diet of white bread, jam, and tea, which in turn created a stable consumer base for trades developed through the exploitation of land and people in the Global South. 

Where the future of sustainable agriculture is posed as a creative resurrection of historic practices (reviving hedgerow systems, replanting woodland, revitalising soil life), urban agriculture is presented as something ultra-modern and innovative: vertical hydroponic ‘farms’ cast in the purple-blue gloom of grow-lights. But the historic precedent for urban agriculture is not the factory – it’s the garden. In the UK, the garden as a place of subsistence was destroyed post-war, when it was commodified as a place of leisure, but the kailyard offers an accessible model for what it could look like if we redistributed land to the unlanded and made it a political right to once again grow food around our homes. Cities do not suffer from lack of space: in 2019, Glasgow had 954 hectares of vacant land. Despite the fact demand for allotments has never been higher, the council continues to green-light developments that offer no interactable green space, thus perpetuating the work of their nineteenth-century predecessors who transformed citizens into consumers.

The modern kailyard need not be large enough to keep a cow, but it does need to be protected by law from the whims of landlordism. In Glasgow, this might look like replacing the environmentally unfriendly landscaping of housing developments with plots for residents’ use, creating more allotments on vacant land instead of selling to developers, and making it illegal for landlords to deny or restrict tenants’ use of gardens. A kailyard system wouldn’t merely address Glasgow’s food apartheids or promote urban biodiversity – it might also recover, for many, an intimacy with land that has been made to seem unnecessary; a historic relationship we long for nonetheless.  

Beirut

Foraging produces the forager, by Kathryn Maude and Christian Sleiman

In October 2019, mass protests, known here as thawra – ثورة (revolution), began across Lebanon. After signs of economic collapse, downtown Beirut was filled with people claiming the streets. This part of the capital had been sold off after the end of the civil war in 1990 to Solidere, a private company that turned it into an area of expensive shops and empty investment properties. However, in the revolutionary moment, people moved into the privatised part of the city. A tent encampment sprang up, and people from all over Lebanon started settling there. 

One of the protesters, Togo, pitched his tent next to a plot that had been kept intact after an excavation uncovered an important archeological site. The site suddenly became accessible after protestors removed the fence during the revolution. In Togo’s short period of time there, foraging for food from this site offered him a way to map out the area through the lens of shrubs. He identified where a frog pond had formed; which type of shrubs were taking over; where anises, dandelions and mallow leaves grew. Foraging became a tool with which to reclaim the land at the heart of the city, as well as connecting ancestral knowledge and day-to-day survival.

Foraging in Beirut’s private lands does not just happen in explicitly revolutionary moments. During Lebanon’s Covid lockdown, in an empty parking lot in Hamra-Beirut, one of us witnessed an elderly man walking slowly around the plot with a carrier bag in his hand. Every few steps he leaned down and plucked some leaves to add to the bag. After around fifteen minutes he wandered off with a bag full of mallow leaves – bitter-delicious dark green leaves normally sautéed with onions or used to make a tea to relieve stomach ache. This shrub grows in the climate of the city; it occupies places with direct sunlight and a source of water. The roots grow deep in the soil which makes it more likely to sprout again once picked.

There is always a difference between foraging in the city and rural areas. You have to accept the fact that, when in the city, you also gather some toxicity as the land is more polluted – though perhaps embracing a certain level of impurity is part of the protest while foraging on private land. More importantly, collecting foraged greens and flowers in the city brings community involvement back into the food production process.

When you forage, you take what you need, leaving some for another person to take their share, with the rest of the shrub left intact so it is able to rejuvenate in the next season. It’s an activity that is performed individually, but practiced collectively. You can’t easily learn to forage alone: someone needs to teach you how to pick the chard, leaving enough for others and ensuring the plant regenerates the following year. Someone needs to show you how to dry the flowers to make tea, ensuring you pick out all of the bitter stems. A community starts forming around gathering and processing shrubs; people sit together to sort out the collection, discuss local politics, and share their own discoveries and recipes. This is how knowledge spreads.

Foraging isn’t a means of food production in the traditional sense; rather, it is about knowing which plants to pick and when to pick them, and how to turn them into food without poisoning yourself. Once you learn to forage, you take the knowledge with you wherever you go, and it changes your relationship with the city you inhabit as somewhere that changes with the seasons. You see food on every private plot of land. Foraging produces food but, perhaps more than that, it produces the forager too.

Bristol

Back When This Was All Farmland, by Charlie Harding

Before the Industrial Revolution, Windmill Hill, a hill south of Bristol, was all farmland, used for growing crops and rearing livestock. The march of progress brought with it factories, warehouses, shops, pubs and urbanity, while heavy bombing in the war reset the area again. In the 1970s, a small four-acre plot of derelict land was earmarked by the council as a lorry park. Seeing the potential, a group of residents called The Dustbin Group successfully lobbied the council to be allowed to create a farm again. By the 1980s, the Windmill Hill City Farm had found its feet and was selling fruit, vegetables and meat to locals.

As the farm grew, adding polytunnels, greenhouses and a café, the city grew around it. Windmill Hill now sits in the looming shadow of a large Asda, a metaphor that is slightly too on the nose. There is a notion, mainly imported by outsiders writing about Bristol’s independent food scene, that the city is vastly populated by the sort of people that want to know the name of the farmer whose produce they’re eating and do their weekly shop via the butcher, the baker and the brewer (reports that the Stokes Croft riot in 2011 was down to a new Tesco Express opening ignored the fact it was mainly due to a squat eviction). Yet I don’t recognise this version of Bristol. When I took over the social-media management of the farm for a year from 2020, I found that families who were happy to use the cafe were less interested to know they could buy potatoes grown in BS3 soil to take home. 

One small farm can’t feed a whole community – according to an article in AG Daily, a city of 500,000 residents would need more than 10,000 acres of urban farming to achieve self-sufficiency. Yet the city farm still plays a vital role in imagining an alternative food system. Of course, back when ‘this was all farmland’, people grew what they could, kept what they needed and sold the rest, but as the food system becomes more complex, the role of the city farm isn’t simply to look backwards. Hyper-local set-ups, where what you eat has been harvested within your city limits, means you can access, even for a part of your diet, a more equitable model of communal food production, with money going back to the community rather than shareholders. Bristol has retained its abattoir, which means that the few animals at Windmill Hill destined for the table are able to be processed in a calm environment with a focus on welfare, something other small-scale farms and smallholdings are struggling to do up and down the country. Instead of just selling produce, the cafe also creates ready meals for customers to take home and enjoy.

Yes, you can trace the apple, the cabbage, and the pork chop back to one place, but that place is one that also contributes to the community with volunteering roles. It’s a place for families without access to outside spaces to experience nature and greenery, and to meet animals face-to-face for the first time. It’s a place for children and adults to learn about the food cycle and make connections between what grows and grazes on the land and the food on their plates. City farms are much more than urban nostalgia for ‘back when this was all farmland’; they are a modern solution to a modern problem.

Chengdu

The Guerilla Gardeners, by Joseph Attlee

The sun hasn’t risen over Chengdu’s towering high-rises, but I’m already sweating as I leave the pavement and scramble over the old brick wall. The space I land in looks like an overgrown wilderness, but is actually a cornfield. Concealed from the surrounding suburbs by high walls, the space is interspersed with plots bearing tomatoes, squash and chillies; it’s as if I’ve been transported back several decades to the village that once stood here. Half-hidden in the grass, a sign reads: Cutting, planting and burning are all strictly prohibited. No random construction! 

When the CCP began using its centralised banks to fund the wholesale urbanisation of China at the turn of the millennium, vast swathes of productive land such as the space in Chengdu were buried under new urban infrastructure. As well as a radically reduced rural-to-urban ratio, the result was a country full of newly urbanised farmers. 

Displaced but not deskilled, farmers grow food wherever they can, but these spaces for growing produce are not part of Chengdu’s master plan: China’s ‘Western Capital’, with a population of sixteen million, is undergoing an unprecedented period of government-driven urban greening. Tens of thousands of trees have been planted, entire landscapes have been constructed, and the world’s longest pedestrianised greenway is being built. 

The stated intention of such greening is to improve residents’ quality of life by ensuring they are never more than ten metres away from accessible green space. But clearances and resettlements have attracted criticism and, in his PhD on Chengdu, Edwin A. Schmitt examines the limitations of top-down greening projects. While they do provide ‘affordances’ to locals, when a population is disconnected from actively caring for and maintaining their lived environment, those affordances ‘are not necessarily anchored into a web of meaning that [is] central to residents’ environmental consciousness.’

It strikes me as ironic that, while the city is eager to project itself as a gongyuan chengshi – a city within a park – its guerilla gardeners always operate under the radar, precisely where urban beautification is absent: they squat land encircling slums; on railway embankments; along abandoned stretches of canal. The miniature greenhouses and growing frames on this site are all made of salvaged materials, and its periphery is marked by shattered tiles and netted hardcore. 

A few of my elderly neighbours arrive and hand me some caigua – loofahs. While I’ve seen the fibrous husks of mature loofahs sold as sponges in the market, I’ll follow their advice and fry these still-tender gourds with ginger. My neighbours don’t seem too bothered about the warning sign, but of course they understand its implications: when construction commences, a team of Chengguan (‘urban management officers’ with a reputation for heavy-handedness) will show up in an unmarked van, drag nets over the crops and drive everybody out.  

As I leave, I ponder the contribution these farmers make, forging such webs of meaning themselves while drawing nutrition from the most unloved corners of this megacity. After decades of rapid urbanisation, green space has become a scarce, luxury commodity in much of China, flaunted by property developers to entice potential buyers. Chengdu’s urban gardeners disrupt this negative cycle, discreetly restoring land’s true value to the community. 

London

The Garden of Memory, by M.Z. Adnan

The first thing you smell when you enter the community garden of the Nubian Life Resource Centre is the clean scent of citrus. A trellis in the middle of the patio is overrun by lemon verbena, green and unwieldy. The Palestinian lady who everyone here knows as ‘Wissam’s mother’ is picking the leaves, which she will use to make a tea with sage that she says is good for sufferers of long Covid. Growing nearby there is African basil that becomes more potent in flavour and smell after it is crushed between one’s fingers, alongside false daisy, or bhringraj, that chef Sumati has planted to use in an oil for greying hair. To the left, in the garden area itself, a jiaogulan plant Sumati recommends for stress relief; ashwagandha that is good for the bones; marshmallow leaves for chest ailments. Elsewhere on the patio there are jasmine, geraniums and canna lilies whose tubers are edible and which, gardener Susannah Hall tells me, serve as a reminder of the Caribbean. 

Nubian Life was established in 1995 to provide a culturally specific daycare service to the elderly Caribbean residents of Hammersmith, Fulham and Shepherd’s Bush, before expanding its services to Asian residents. The garden, named after Nubian Life member and gardening enthusiast Josiah Braithwaite, opened three years ago as a sustainable and wildlife-friendly space. It sits, incongruously, in the shadow of the Queens Park Rangers’ football stadium. Carrots, potatoes, kale, mint, squash, courgettes, parsley, tomatoes, apples, and cherries have all grown here, among other vegetables, fruits, and herbs for use in the elders’ meals.  

It is the Saturday after Diwali and Sumati, who is from Bangalore, is preparing a celebratory feast. We will eat chicken biryani, lentils, lasagne, and a salad of pea shoots and nasturtium leaves that were harvested moments ago, with spaghetti bolognese for the children whose parents live near the garden. Today, Susannah is teaching the children about quails. She has brought her own, three or so, and will give the children eggs to take home. She puts a small portion of the dishes on offer in a pink bowl and tells the children that they can give thanks by breathing on the dish. ‘Your breath is like your signature. So when this arrives in the soil, those little tiny creatures, they’ll go, “oh yes, oh, that’s right … that’s Ethan, oh, that’s Nina saying thank you.”’ 

Susannah’s gardening philosophy is rooted in a celebration of both horticultural and human diversity, and what she calls the beauty-making of different traditions. In the past, she has planted South American tubers like mashua and oca, callaloo, corn beans and squash. She questions the notion of a crop being native to British soil (‘How native is native?’), citing past ice ages. She and Sumati both see the garden as a place that can nourish and heal the elders and the community. In this way, the garden’s abundant harvest also becomes a collective community resource. 

But the fundamental purpose of the garden – with its sensory component and its ingredients – is to evoke and remind. Many of the elders have Alzheimer’s or dementia, and they will often tell Sumati that her food reminds them of home and their mothers’ cooking. She makes an aubergine dal with chapati that they love; a nettle soup using leaves from the garden; a tea of ginger, black pepper and turmeric with the leaves of an ajwain plant that she boils, which is good for colds. Sweet cicely helps sweeten desserts made with apple and rhubarb and, in the coming months, she and Susannah will plant rosemary. They say it is good for memory. 

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Credits

Meg Bertera-Berwick is a writer based in Glasgow with a PhD in Post-Colonial Criminology, not used as manufacturer intended. You can find her on Instagram and lurking on Twitter. 

Christian Sleiman is an artist examining the vegetative souls through minor rituals and recipes. His practice weaves a collection of invitations between foraging, cooking and serving food. You can find him on Instagram @chrisssleiman.

Kathryn Maude is an academic at the American University of Beirut who writes about the Middle Ages, gender and food. You can find her on Twitter @krmaude.

Charlie Harding is an ex-food blogger, barmaid and FOH who now works as a freelance social media manager working with hospitality in Bristol and the South West. You can find them on Twitter @charlievivante .

Joseph Attlee is a writer and adventure cyclist living in Chengdu. He travels China on bamboo bikes with his partner and their two Chinese rescue dogs, seeking out grassroot solutions to the climate Crisis. Their newsletter is called Dogmatic and you can find them at @dogmatictweets.

M.Z. Adnan is a writer based in London. 

Many thanks to Sophie Whitehead for additional edits.

Photos all authors’ own.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

All paid-subscribers have access to the back catalogue of paywalled articles and all upcoming new columns, including the series of 60 South Asian Dishes Every Londoner Should Know. It costs £4/month or £40/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing on Vittles then please consider subscribing to keep it running.

If you wish to receive the newsletter for free weekly please click below. You can also follow Vittles on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much for your support!

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“You gotta read the labels, you gotta read the label” the RZA once told us. People have been “getting misinformed, thinking everything is everything”.

We’re all familiar with those euphemisms ─ farm fresh, British-reared, no additives ─ and take them with a punch of naturally flavoured salt. But what about labels from smaller companies? From the company who make the coffee beans we take extra care to grind each morning, or the chocolate makers we might buy once in a while as a treat for ourselves.

I wrote about these labels at length in an article last year on the tea industry. What unites tea, coffee and chocolate is that they are, fundamentally, inequitable industries. By this I mean that they have been set up to be export commodity crops grown by the Global South to supply the Global North with a cheap and stable product. With the exception of east and south-east Asia in tea, and Ethiopia in coffee, these are not products that generally stay within their country of origin. Rather than deal with this head-on, companies have come up with other terms ─ ‘gardens and estates’ rather than plantations, ‘small batch’, even, to an extent ‘organic’ ‘Fairtrade’ and ‘direct trade’ ─ all to obfuscate the only thing that is important. How much are people being paid to make this? How much autonomy do they have?

Today’s newsletter by Dr. Lily Kelting is about another one of those euphemisms ─ bean-to-bar. It does literally mean something of course, and started out to refer to a specific craft process. But it has morphed into its own industry, promising not only good chocolate but good lives of the people who make the chocolate. Is this really true? And is the new label ─ tree-to-bar ─ any better? Max Fletcher suggested last week that we should become more critical of awards; we should do the same with labels. “If you don't read the Label” carefully, as the RZA reminds us, “you might get poisoned.”

The perils and promise of bean-to-bar chocolate, by Dr. Lily Kelting

In 2011, chocolate makers Rick and Michael Mast commissioned a three-masted schooner to carry cacao beans from the Dominican Republic to their warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was the PR stunt of the decade, cementing their position at the forefront of the burgeoning ‘bean-to-bar’ movement. Mast Brothers bean-to-bar chocolate was, at a whole ten dollars a bar, almost laughably expensive in 2011, but it didn’t matter. The old-timey schooner was representative of a shift in the craft food revival – a return to a simpler, better way of doing things. People were willing to pay for a piece of it, for sustainable, ethical sourcing and small-scale, handmade, analogue manufacture.

Until, that is, in 2015, when a dogged food blogger broke the story: Mast Brothers didn’t start out working with farm-fresh, schooner-imported cocoa beans; they were working with couverture. Couverture is chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa butter which is added for smoothness and workability. Buying other producers’ couverture, melting, and re-tempering as bark or truffles is standard practice among chocolatiers. But the Mast brothers promised something different for chocolate – they were not chocolatiers making confections from couverture, nor industrial giants stamping bars from prepared ‘cocoa mass’. Rick and Michael Mast were chocolate makers, crafting chocolate itself, from cacao beans to luxury bar. The Mast brothers’ subterfuge was marketplace death. After the scandal, the brand became a punchline; the brothers shuttered their factories and slowly faded from view.  

It’s easy to take potshots at 2010s hipsters and their crappy, overpriced, not-even-handmade chocolate. But it’s not just two guys. Take the Dutch bean-to-bar brand Tony’s Chocolonely, which was founded by a journalist, Teun van de Keuken, who was researching human rights abuses in the mainstream chocolate industry. Tony’s double-thick, joyfully presented bars are scored with unevenly sized hexagons, laden with virtuous promises. ‘To us it doesn’t make sense for chocolate bars to be divided into chunks of equal sizes when there is so much inequality in the chocolate industry!’ the brand chirps. But the harder they come, the harder they fall. In February 2021, the pressure group Slave Free Chocolate took Tony’s off their recommended list when eight former child labourers on chocolate plantations sued Nestlé, Hershey, Mars and Barry Callebaut, who happen to work with Tony’s Chocolonely.

The issues entwined with chocolate production are very real, very serious, and very complicated: contemporary slavery, child trafficking, deforestation. The bean-to-bar industry promises more ethical chocolate, but a handmade chocolate bar can feel as hollow and performative a solution to problems of this scale as a three-mast schooner. There have been more serious attempts to address these issues: in 2012, a group of chocolate makers and cacao farmers joined together to found the direct-trade organization Direct Cacao. Direct-trade chocolate makers usually offer far-above market prices and cultivate long-term, personal relationships with individual farm owners. They start schools on cocoa plantations. They keep open books. They share profits. They do all the right things.  

The Direct Cacao alliance founders planted a criollo cacao tree at the spot that Christopher Columbus first made contact in the New World. I want to believe in that little tree; I want to believe in bean-to-bar chocolate’s symbolic promise. But the more I learn about chocolate, the less certain I feel about anything. 

The term ‘bean to bar’ was first used in the late 90s by John Scharffenberger in Berkeley, who started using the term to distinguish small-batch, handmade Scharffen Berger chocolate bars from industrially produced ones. Scharffen Berger is now owned by Hershey; they too are being sued. 

While the phrase ‘bean to bar’ makes it sound simple, the transformation from cacao beans to a chocolate bar is pretty amazing, and involves three steps of production. It begins with the yellow-red fruit pods of the small, evergreen theobroma tree. These pods are harvested by cacao farmers and split open. The beans inside, along with their pulp, are fermented at the farm. The farmers then dry the fermented beans in the sun or, in wetter climates, by smoking. After this, the dry beans are packed and shipped; the chocolate makers on the label take over production. The manufacturers sort, winnow, roast, and grind the beans to a uniform liquid called cacao liquor, then process this liquid again with sugar. This is now chocolate, which the chocolate makers temper to a crisp snap, set in a mould, wrap in a smart package, and sell. 

The phrase ‘bean to bar’ subtly shifts the focus to manufacturing that happens ‘in-house’ – like sorting and grinding – rather than the agricultural work of cacao production, such as harvesting, fermenting, and drying. The child labour lawsuits that seem to plague the craft chocolate industry make it clear that, although Western chocolate makers may control the bar through their manufacturing (the word control gets thrown around a lot in craft chocolate circles), they certainly don’t control the origin of the beans.      

Of course, roasting does change the flavour of chocolate, and conching – the grinding of beans and sugar – provides the silky texture. But it is fermentation that ultimately determines how a chocolate bar tastes. Bacteria are responsible for those plump tasting notes you see on the labels of luxury chocolates: red fruit, raisin, moss, molasses. More crucially, farmers are responsible for this process. So the ultimate flavour of the chocolate bar, the cultural component of that terroir you’re tasting, is controlled by farmers in the Global South, not chocolate makers in the Global North1. Working with beans, the very origin of chocolate, is fundamental for bean-to-bar chocolate makers; it is why many contemporary brands list their beans’ sources in big type. But in the descriptions of their chocolate, European and American chocolate makers choose to give more credit to themselves for sourcing quality beans than to their farmers for growing them. 

Even with all the direct trade and school founding and profit sharing and cacao-tree planting, these imbalanced systems of labour and credit remind me that consuming craft chocolate is just another way of consuming colonialism: its aesthetics, its history, its ongoing economic impacts. The industry’s continued lack of engagement with this is pretty obvious. In 2017, for example, writer Megan Giller published a book about American bean-to-bar chocolate. Here, San Francisco’s Dandelion Chocolate is mentioned twenty times, enslaved Africans once; colonialism, not at all. Missouri-based Askinosie Chocolates demonstrate commitment to their farm partners by putting their black and brown faces on chocolate labels; they showcase photos on their website of the white company owners surrounded by grateful, smiling Black workers. Even when a craft chocolate maker is doing good, it looks bad. Cringey bad. It looks colonial. 

It is at once ironic and obvious that most chocolate bars are not consumed in the beans’ country of origin. In Pune, India, where I live, a chocolate bar is a Cadbury. Cadbury Dairy Milk bars are milky and sweet, an affordable treat at five or ten rupees. They taste, for many Indians, like nostalgia. Cadbury may be a British multinational, but it is also as Indian as it gets. Ribbony Cadbury Flakes are blitzed into afternoon cold coffees for high school and college students, while Cadbury Celebrations are regularly gifted at Diwali. A residue of British marketplace monopoly on its ex-colony, Cadbury today controls over seventy per cent of the chocolate market share here, and on the agriculture side, Mondelez (which owns Cadbury) and CAMPCO have edged out other buyers of cacao so that there has been no market for better ecological and labour practices, nor higher quality beans. It is within this context that an Indian bean-to-bar movement has taken off. In India, I have become a bean-to-bar consumer and grudging evangelist.       

I still raise an eyebrow when I see chocolate makers’ ethical claims around direct trade, sourcing and craft manufacture. But these claims seem more credible in an Indian context. In a cacao-growing region, it’s easier to determine where your chocolate comes from; to confirm there’s no child labour on your chocolate plantation when your office and manufacturing unit are located within close reach. Over the last couple of years, it has been exciting to see a new group of Indian bean-to-bar chocolate makers striving to understand and make sustainable as much of the chocolate production process as they can. These chocolate makers are even trying to reclaim the term ‘bean to bar’ to demonstrate their commitment to the agricultural side of craft chocolate making, branding their chocolate instead as ‘farm to bar’ or ‘tree to bar’. When Tamil Nadu’s Soklet say they’re tree to bar, it means they are doing it all, really, everything themselves.      

Soklet is not just single origin – it’s single estate as well. The company grow chocolate through intercropping – between coconuts, nutmeg, pepper and banana – in the verdant Annamalai hills. The crop rotation prevents the cacao from leeching nutrients from the soil, and the staggered harvests also mean that Soklet can provide year-round employment to women from local villages. From the other parts of the cacao plant, Soklet sells cacao tisane and spicy roasted snacking nibs, among a range of other products. The completeness of the culinary ecosystem around Soklet – the very fact that this luxurious chocolate can be farmed, produced, sold and bought in Tamil Nadu – feels radical in a world where few chocolate farmers would have the opportunity to try the finished product at all. Almost no American chocolate makers note the importance of drying and fermentation when describing the taste of their chocolate; almost all Indian chocolate makers do. 

This movement in India is smaller, and more nascent than its Western counterparts, but it excites me much more than the American-European direct-trade craft chocolate boom. It gets me hyped about the eventuality that other chocolate-growing regions across the Global South – like West Africa, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Brazil – will seize the supply chain, and with it a piece of the bean-to-bar market. It’s happening in India, in Chile, in Ghana; it must be happening elsewhere. Who is making bean to bars in the Côte d’Ivoire? In a near-future Lagos, could local chocolates be seen as more luxurious than Ferrero Rocher? Is there a market for ‘snacking nibs’ in Amazonia? Is there a writer like me, sitting in the mall in Tegucigalpa, pitching a piece about Honduran chocolate? 

Yet the story is too good to be true. Much of the Indian bean-to-bar industry is still marked by the low-key hum of Europhilic aspiration. My first experience of bean-to-bar chocolate in India was at La Folie du Chocolat, a small chocolatier in South Bombay. I was intrigued by the jewel-box interior, the narrow marble staircase, the store’s Francophone promise. I was sweaty and La Folie looked well air-conditioned. I entered. It was. I splashed out an indulgent 1,200 rupees on a box of truffles and the Black Jaggery bar – a two-ingredient chocolate with cacao and India’s delicious, deep-brown, unrefined sugar. It was good; really good – bracing, just barely sweet. 

But La Folie’s whole schtick is pretending that we could be anywhere, even Brooklyn. It’s almost aggressively anti-terroir. Like its Western counterparts, La Folie gets its beans from Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. Though I am sure the brand is popular, I have never seen another customer in its shop. I don’t really know anyone but me who buys and eats Indian craft chocolate. I’m a little embarrassed about how unwelcoming these brands are to anyone other than super-rich self-styled cosmopolitan Indians. I’m embarrassed that they seem marketed to people like me. 

Mason & Co is one of India’s most popular bean-to-bar brands; they are a product of the Conscious Living Fraternity, located in Auroville, Tamil Nadu. Mason & Co bars are single-origin, direct-trade, and delicious, delicious, delicious, but they also produce profit for a business owned by a white Australian woman who lives and works in a gated, neo-colonial enclave. Mysore-based Naviluna, too, is owned and run by a white expat. As a purchaser of these brands, the lasting ties between whiteness, colonial resource extraction, and Indian capitalism make me profoundly uncomfortable. 

It's not just about the money (although of course it’s always about the money) – these Indian craft chocolate companies are niche luxury brands not only because of the cost, but because of the taste. In interviews, Indian chocolate makers somewhat condescendingly stress the difficulties of marketing dark chocolate to Indians accustomed to milk-based mithais. Regular Cadbury consumers often find Indian craft chocolate too bitter, too acidic. Some of the flavour combinations coming out on the Indian craft chocolate market – like Naviluna’s bar with fermented bamboo shoot candied in cigar syrup – verge on parody2. A Dairy Milk from the pharmacy, a Godiva bar from the Duty Free – who could turn those down? They’re smooth. They’re creamy. 

I’m asking these questions because bean-to-bar chocolate is seemingly everywhere. The surge of new brands, markets and appetites is nowhere close to slowing. Even the Isle of Wight has its own make, Seaforth Chocolates. Seaforth, like several other craft chocolate makers worldwide, aims to be carbon-negative or carbon-neutral. Founder Abraham Seaforth achieves this not by purchasing offsets, but by transporting beans via the wind-and-wave powered schooner, the Tres Hombres. How many schooners before someone starts asking questions about compromised ethics and neo-colonial aesthetics, about whether it’s even possible to do a moral calculus on craft chocolate and come up with an answer? Two, apparently. 

A friend recently brought me a small bar of handmade chocolate from a vendor in Goa.  The label was obviously printed at home, with no graphic design. Out of curiosity and now habit, I scanned for sourcing information for the beans. She asked what I was doing; I explained, probably at length, the perils and promise of bean-to-bar chocolate. ‘Wait. I thought bean to bar was good. Is bean to bar bad?’ she asked. I felt terrible. I should have said ‘thank you’. Chocolate, is after all, about nostalgia and childhood and comfort. Which is why, despite reading up on last year’s child labour lawsuit against Mars, I continue to buy Bounty bars. Chocolate is about delight. But it’s also about colonial history, enslaved labour, direct trade and food justice. Can craft chocolate create space for all these? In my deep, stupid, Marxist way, I just want farmers to get what they deserve. And maybe chocolate makers from the cacao-growing world can show us how. 

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Credits

Dr. Lily Kelting is an assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Flame University in Pune, India. You can find her at @lilykelting.

The illustrations are by Samia Singh, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Chandigarh, India. Please find more of her work on her website or on Instagram.

This article was edited by Sharanya Deepak, with additional edits by Sophie Whitehead.

Additional Reading

Grist, ‘A guide to ethical chocolate’ 

From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, ‘On Chocolate’

Diaspora Co., ‘The Bitter Global History of Chocolate’ 

edible issues, ‘Celebrating Cacao on World Chocolate Day’

The Slow Melt podcast 

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £500 for writers and £200 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack. If you would prefer to make a one-off payment directly, or if you don’t have funds right now but still wish to subscribe, please reply to this email and I will sort this out.

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I first became cynical of food awards about ten years ago, just as I was starting out in the tea industry. When you enter any trade you have an amateur interest in, you quickly have the wool removed from your eyes — I was surprised to find out that so many small companies bought their teas, even ones marked as premium, from the same two or three German blenders who had the market on cheap, industrial blends cornered. I was also amused to see that some single estate teas being sold by small, boutique companies as ‘unique’ had actually emanated from us. All these teas were being entered for the same set of awards ─ the German companies practically sold them on how many stars they got; I even noticed some of our teas had won awards but the accolades were going to the companies who had bought them rather than the actual producers in China and Japan.

There was another reason that I started to feel these awards were a scam. Tea already has awards in countries of origin which are hyper-localised and judged on the basis of things we don’t privilege so much in the West. A Long Jing’s taste might be fleeting, but it should be pure and fill up the entire body. A dancong might be judged on its longevity; a puerh on its qi. There are multiple intersecting cultural reasons why a tea might be more valued than another, as well as things like age, altitude, or the exact location of the trees. The knowledge on how to judge these teas often stays within their regions ─ what would British judges know about any of this?

You might well ask why should we care about awards. Farming and food production is a long, thankless process; awards are often the only way that the people who make our food ever get the credit they deserve. And yet, what are we valuing with these awards? What are we saying is important and not when it comes to assessing our food? And who is saying it? And who are we saying it for? I must admit, I was excited recently to hear that a producer had sent us his most prestigious tea of the year to try, which had recently won a big award. I asked whether it was because of the production method or the age of the trees but the answer I got was curious: “No, it’s because it tastes great”

And with that, here is Max Fletcher on awards and great taste. Welcome back to Vittles!

‘What is Great Taste?’ by Max Fletcher

When Silvija Davidson was growing up in Lancashire, her garage was always full of sauerkraut. Her family were émigrés from Latvia and arrived penniless, so there was a lot of amateur food production. ‘But quite good food production’, she clarifies. ‘We would go foraging, so we would have barrels full of salted mushrooms to last the year’. When her father went fishing he would exchange any leftover fish for venison from the local park rangers; eels would be cured in his smokery. 

Davidson’s childhood taught her to appreciate foods which, in those days, were not in vogue. It also taught her how to discuss them: the quality of each potato; whether a particular fish was muddy or not. ‘I was just so used to discussing everything on the plate and appreciating the nuance of very simple food,’ she says. ‘It was the European peasant thing to do.’ 

When she discovered the writing of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, Davidson realised it was possible to translate an intellectual and sensory interest in food into a living as a food writer. One of the books she went on to write is called The Language of Taste. It’s an unusual, slim volume – just 150 pages – and it outlines the desirable characteristics of thirty-four broad categories of food by instructing the reader to observe a distinction between taste and flavour. There are only five discernible tastes, Davidson points out – sweet, salt, bitter, sour and umami – and these are not subjective. Flavour, by contrast, is ‘hugely dependent on […] retro nasal receptors’ and is ‘highly individual’. Once you know how to taste, you can judge anything, from haslet – the traditional Lincolnshire pork meatloaf which should, apparently, have ‘a robust flavour but a tender texture’ – to kefir quark. 

The Language of Taste is not commercially available. It was commissioned by a company called the Guild of Fine Food to provide information on each of the categories judged by its most famous offshoot, the Great Taste Awards. The range of produce the awards judge is so diverse (pretty much everything except wine, baby food and fresh fruit) that, in Davidson’s words, ‘it’s impossible to expect every judge to have technical knowledge of everything.’ The Language of Taste compensates for this lack, and over the years the book has grown to accommodate the ever-increasing diversity of entries the award receives. These changes are a good barometer of food trends; recent edits, for instance, include more detailed entries on fermented foods, and Davidson is currently considering whether to include anything on dietary supplements. ‘Do they really have a taste?’ she wonders, though some of them must: this year, among the thousands of starred entries for marmalades, balsamic vinegars and honeys was a cacao and collagen drinks powder.

When the Guild of Fine Foods was founded in 1992, the chief criteria against which most retailers judged food was cost. European supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl had recently invaded Britain, undercutting Tesco and Sainsbury’s and setting off a race to the bottom in terms of price. Unable to compete, independent food retailers declined. According to the Guild, there were ‘no more than 1,400 independent fine food shops’ left in 1993 – that’s roughly one for every 41,000 people. 

To help counter this downward trend, Bob Farrand, founder of the Guild, started the Great Taste Awards in 1994. Initially, the awards only provided feedback to producers, aiming to revive artisan production by encouraging higher standards. But in the early 2000s, when producers started advertising the accolade on their labels, Farrand realised it had potential as a consumer-facing award too. The number of entries jumped accordingly: in 1994 fewer than 100 products were judged; in 2000 there were 1,500; in 2020 there were 14,000. Today, Great Taste is the most prestigious food award in the UK – producers pay the Guild to enter the competition, and pay extra to use the black-and-gold roundel if they win, hoping that it will do for them what it has done for producers like Blanka Milfait, whose Winnebago is emblazoned with the two gold stars she won for her marmalade in 2013. She now runs a factory and in 2017 was voted one of the top twenty-five businesswomen in the Czech Republic.

Like many of the producers it serves, the Guild is a family business. Bob Farrand’s son John is the current Managing Director; he is a bluff, friendly man who embraces our discussion as a welcome distraction from the reality of running an award. ‘It’s romantic and lovely to be sat in the room, judging the food and drink,’ he says. ‘But actually, behind the scenes, we’re spreadsheet people.’ When asked to situate the awards in the market, he holds out his hands. ‘Some products have their technical industry assessment process, like the Cup of Excellence for coffee, which is over here,’ he says, gesturing with his right hand. ‘And then over here,’ he says, indicating with his left, ‘there’s the fluffy, consumer, glossy magazine, giving-it-out-to-anyone-because-it-suits-them-editorially kind of award.’ He places Great Taste closest to the right, but not wholly there.

If the award had nurtured a more specialist style of judging, it could be less fluffy, more serious. In the early days, Great Taste used to judge each category separately, meaning one person would have to sit and taste twenty olive oils in a row, or twenty types of jam. They still, for logistical reasons, judge some products separately – tea and coffee, for instance, since they require special equipment to prepare, as well as beer and cider. But usually the categories are mixed – a methodology known in the trade as ‘monadic’ – which means you might taste a collagen powder right after some haslet. It’s a style of judging that seems counter-intuitive, but monadic tasting can help ensure a product is rewarded on its own merit rather than comparatively, and it also elides subjective bias. Because each of Great Taste’s 500 judges taste a largely random selection of only around 50 of the competition’s 14,000 entries, a single palette will never dominate. On top of that, products are tasted blind – judges only know about the product’s ingredients, production methods and country of origin, so that neither price nor packaging can distract from the product’s taste.

On the day of judgement, the mood at Great Taste is frenetic: Karyn Noble, a food writer and coordinating judge, describes it as ‘incredibly fast’. Each judge has around four minutes to assess each product – this includes tasting, discussing and writing up feedback for the producer. ‘We run through the emotional gamut of being curious, frustrated, bewildered, excited, and occasionally exhilarated if we find a three-star product,’ Noble says. Three or four judges discuss a product, and feedback is typed up by a coordinating judge. It will then passed to another table who either agree or disagree with the previous verdict before passing it on, until at least three tables have confirmed the award status and the number of stars. This means one product will normally go through around 9–12 judges before its fate is sealed.

At the combatively named Superior Taste Award (Great Taste’s more high-minded continental cousin), Ferran Centelles, formerly master sommelier at El Bulli, describes a rather different atmosphere. Run by the Brussels-based International Taste Institute, judging for this award is conducted in formal dress – and in complete silence. Images of these sessions show serried ranks of betoqued chefs sporting the medals or sashes they’ve been awarded by their governments, while uniformed flunkies stand at the ready as though it’s an ambassadorial reception.

‘We always follow a very strict methodology,’ Centelles says. ‘We’re not asked if we personally like the product, but rather if it is well made and how its organoleptic characteristics compare to those expected for its category.’ Products do not receive written feedback, but rather a percentage which represents a weighted average of the product’s scores in the five so-called ‘International Sensory Analysis criteria’. This is just another way of asking judges to reward food according to its ‘appearance, aroma, texture and taste, as well as how all elements come together’, which is how this process is termed in The Language of Taste. 

Despite superficial differences, these awards are, in reality, very similar: they both refine the spectrum of taste into a discrete percentage point or agreed-upon number of stars. The verbal feedback Great Taste entrants receive, however, often emphasises how subjective taste can be, even among experts. A few years ago, London’s Catalyst Coffee entered Great Taste with their ‘coffee sriracha’, a hot sauce made from coffee grounds. It didn’t win a star, but Catalyst was surprised by the unconstructive and internally contradictory feedback they received. The first table said that their condiment had a ‘deeply unpleasant’ texture. The next, however, described the condiment’s texture as ‘pleasingly creamy’. The same table also said that ‘the coffee element lets it down very badly’ – this, despite having, a few sentences earlier, called the coffee ingredient ‘a great USP’. Catalyst ignored the comments, and the sauce has since received a cult following. Other producers, even those who have won stars, have mentioned similar ‘baffling’ feedback.

Naming an award Great Taste of course begs the question: According to who? There is no way of knowing exactly whose taste is being privileged: unlike the International Taste Institute, the Guild does not publish a list of its ‘jury’. Noble says she has judged alongside ‘chocolatiers, food buyers, chefs, recipe writers, food PRs, deli managers and cheesemongers’; one might wonder what kind of formal expertise a food PR might have, or how well an expert on chocolate might judge cheese, or vice versa. One producer told me they saw a judge, who they ‘knew categorically hated cheese’, judging cheese. Another producer who entered was surprised that one of the judges was an investor in their company.  

Even Davidson acknowledges that the judging style has its limits. She recalls one judging report which praised a bar of chocolate for its ‘really interesting green flavour’. As a well-known expert, she recognised that this, in a technical sense, was a fault, the result of either under-roasted or under-fermented beans. Similarly, having tasted very mature balsamic vinegars, she is sceptical when judges enthuse over young examples, ‘even if they’ve never had one that’s three years old.’

The heads of real connoisseurs will probably not be turned by Great Taste. It’s most useful for people with a general interest in food but without the time, money or inclination to try every product for themselves – consumers like author Joel Golby. ‘I think about it like films,’ he says. ‘I could spend all year watching obscure Scandinavian subtitled stuff, or I could just watch everything that’s shortlisted for Best Picture at the Oscars and have more or less as good a time. I don’t mind outsourcing taste when it comes to certain things. When I’m trying to decide between two six-pound jams then I normally go with the one that has an award sticker on it.’  

Its potential to speak to this market makes the award most attractive to new producers looking to break through, or established brands looking for validation – and of the two, it perhaps best serves the latter. Bill Dowling of Compton McRae, a deli based in Dorset, near one of Great Taste’s two judging facilities (the other site is in Borough Market), tells me that while the awards help his staff pitch products to undecided customers, obscure products struggle to sell even if they’ve won awards. For multi-nationals, on the other hand, Dowling believes that the awards can serve as a relatively cheap way of getting expert feedback, regardless of if they win. And for every Blanka Milfait, there’s going to be a landslide of corporate winners.  In 2021, twenty-eight years after the awards were founded to counter their influence, Aldi won ninety-six stars and Lidl won seventy.

In 2016, Anthony Heard, the founder of London-based Cypriot cheese producer Kupros Dairy, won two stars for his fettle. In 2020 his halloumi-style anglum became one of the 1.5% of products awarded a full three stars. Heard, however, doesn’t place much weight on this, and not just because his sales didn’t shoot up. ‘I don’t believe the cheese was merited on the things I would merit it on,’ he says. The central problem is that ‘Great Taste doesn’t reflect or differentiate products which have been toiled over and food which has been outsourced by a contract manufacturer.’ Heard asserts that producers who know the rules of the awards are at an instant advantage. ‘As with any award system that has a formulaic approach,’ he tells me, ‘you can learn to game it’, but there is no consideration for the things you can’t game: the ‘quality, philosophies or ethics’ of a producer’s ‘actual work’.

Davidson was closer to these types of evaluations in her previous role as Chair of Slow Food UK, an organisation which won’t support any product that isn’t connected to a local tradition of some kind, regardless of how good it tastes. They primarily work in Italy, where some food traditions remain unbroken in the present day – in Britain, the organisation seeks to revive ‘forgotten foods’ like Shetland Reestit mutton and Devonshire Quarrenden apples. While Davidson mourns the scarcity of such foods – ‘I’m occasionally reminded what a good cherry might taste like,’ she says, ‘I only have about four or five a year’ – she came to find Slow Food’s approach restrictive. Working with Great Taste, she feels free to admit that an Iranian saffron is the most amazing saffron she’s ever encountered. ‘But Slow Food wouldn’t be interested in that, unless there was a particular community in Iran that they felt they needed to support’, she points out. ‘Slow Food exalts tradition at the expense of taste.’

Heard, however, is adamant that any kind of award or certification constrains producers; he sees them in the same light as copyright or trademark patents. ‘They’re all just another form of narrow-visioned gatekeeping built on corporatisation that tend to prevent creativity, increase entry levels and exclude those who don’t interface,’ Heard laments. ‘These things are really only there to perpetuate themselves rather than to merit a producer’s achievements, and this type of power relationship is very tired. But you go along [with it] because to not is probably more harmful. Residing in obscurity and etherealism doesn’t sell food; […] using the tools of a financialised world does.’

Awards have perhaps always been inextricable from capitalism. Pick up a legacy product such as Menier chocolate or Bacardi rum, and you will see emblazoned on its label various medals awarded at the many world’s fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; these showcased, in the words of the 1851 Great Exhibition, ‘the works of industry of all nations’. These competitions judged products according to less hedonic criteria than Great Taste. The Council Medal, for example, which was the Great Exhibition’s highest award, was judged according to ‘workmanship, beauty, utility and adaptability’. It went to things like Gail Borden’s ‘meat biscuits’, dry disks of pulverised beef mixed with flour that could be preserved almost indefinitely, but which were so disgusting that Borden was ultimately bankrupted. Another medal was given to Peter Lawson for his ‘scientifically arranged collection of the vegetable products of Scotland’.

When judging food, we’re bound to privilege certain criteria over others, and this means that no award will be perfect. We could take that as an injunction to abandon awards altogether – or we could take it as encouragement to think more seriously about how we judge what we eat; we should become as critical of awards as we are of food. Perhaps, in a hundred years, we will regard Great Taste, with its blindness to the contextual factors surrounding food production, as a historical curiosity. Until then, however, when Karyn Noble is judging, she knows what the bottom line is. ‘Regardless of what it is, what it looks like, where it’s from or what ingredients are used,’ she says, there is only one thing that matters: ‘Is it great taste?’

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Credits

Max Fletcher is a writer based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @max123fletcher.

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