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The Grand Trunk (GT) Road has run through the northern part of the Indian subcontinent for millennia. Referred to as Uttarapatha – or the ‘Northern Road’ – in Vedic and Buddhist scriptures, the GT Road runs from Kabul to Teknaf (near Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar). Today, it also connects connects Wahgah on the Indian border to Torkham (which crosses into Afghanistan), and in Pakistan, the highway also unites many of the country’s chicken-burger aficionados with their favourite British fast-food chain: Chicken Cottage.

Chicken Cottage started its life in Wembley, London, in 1994. Founded by Mohammed Khalid and Tahir Jamil, the brand offers halal renditions of the grilled and fried chicken dishes that are popular in chicken shops across the UK. Pakistan-born Tahir aimed to cater to South Asian and Muslim communities in the capital, and in 2004 the brand was franchised in Pakistan (which is now one of ten countries to host the chain, alongside Nigeria, Iraq and Malaysia, among others). While a number of the franchises have shut down over the years, there are currently ten functioning Chicken Cottage outlets in Pakistan. Five of these are situated in the mountainous region of Kashmir, a disputed region divided between India and Pakistan (Islamabad refers to Pakistan-administered-Kashmir as ‘Azad’, or free).

What is a British chain that is only mildly popular in Britain itself doing in the northernmost reaches of the subcontinent? In a country where chicken is popular on menus, and burgers so entrenched in the culture that they have become a nickname for an entire generation and class, what has prompted people to flock to this specific brand? Thousands of miles from its place of origin, Chicken Cottage is now the most popular fast-food franchise in Kashmir. In July last year, I went on what I could only call a Chicken Cottage pilgrimage – travelling to the Chakswari, Kotli and Sehnsa branches – to find out more.

Chicken Cottage’s popularity has some connection to the fact that approximately 70% of those who identify as British Pakistanis come from Mirpur, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. ‘Many [British-Pakistani] travellers from the UK make sure they break their journey at Chicken Cottage. In fact, even many of our international customers eat the first meal they have after landing in Pakistan [at the chain]’, Noman Tariq, co-owner of the franchise at Jhelum (a border town between Punjab and Kashmir), tells me.

On my way to Kashmir, it is the Jhelum outlet that I stop at first. It is 8pm on a Friday in July, and the restaurant is gradually being packed with customers eating plates of burgers, fries and fried chicken; others order takeaway wraps. Inside the mammoth two-story building, the walls are decorated with large paintings of Westminster, Piccadilly Circus, and the London Eye. Outside the window there is the rush of perpetual GT Road traffic, and inside, even as the dining area is fast filling up, the atmosphere is somewhat tranquil. At the entrance of the restaurant, a board reads ‘Top brand from UK’.

This ‘British ambience’, as Tariq calls it, is an integral feature of all Chicken Cottage restaurants in Pakistan. Aasia Ishaq, the franchise owner of the Kotli branch, tells me how recipes at the Chicken Cottages in Pakistan precisely follow the guidelines from the UK: ‘Hum chaahtay hain humaaray logon ko, khaas taur pe who jo kabhi UK nahi gaye, bilkul England waala zaaiqa aur mahaul milay [We want to give all of our customers, especially those who have never been to the UK, the authentic taste and ambience from England]’. This is why there are photographs of Piccadilly Circus. ‘We want to make everyone feel as though they are there’, Ishaq adds.

In the UK, the dishes at Chicken Cottage range from BBQ wings to grilled peri peri chicken and mozzarella dippers. In addition to offering items from the original British menu, the Pakistani outlets’ offerings include ‘Crispy Cottage’, ‘Spicy Chicken’ and ‘Mountain’ burgers. They also serve renditions of local specialities such as biryani, and pizzas with toppings that include tikka, barbecue and kebab. While the pizzas are hot sellers (‘Our people like bread’, Mohammed Bilal, the manager at the Chakswari branch, tells me), it is the burgers that hold the main appeal. ‘We started to come here when I was a baby, and now I am much older and it is still my favourite restaurant’, says thirteen-year-old Zainab Waqar – whose preferred dish is the peri peri burger.

After a couple of hours, during which I eat the chicken fajita pizza, I head off across the border of Punjab to visit the branches in Kashmir. At the Chakswari branch, Bilal demonstrates the cooking process, which is identical across franchise outlets: defrosted chicken is battered with seasoning and breading, then deep-fried. While the chicken and the bread are local, much of the seasoning and condiments used in the Chicken Cottage restaurants in Pakistan are the same ones used in the UK, Bilal says. ‘Unlike in other brands, which can only do desi variations of their Western offerings, in Chicken Cottage the recipes are authentically British’, adds Raja Zaheeruddin, general manager of Chicken Cottage across Kashmir. At the same branch, I meet Imran Khan, a chef who cooks at Saracens restaurant in Nottingham. He tells me he is a big fan of the chicken at the Chicken Cottage. ‘Aey sab ton changa aey [It is the best]. I visit every summer and regularly eat Chicken Cottage here in Kashmir’, he says, his accent a combination of thick northern British and Punjabi.

While the British origin and blend of South Asian flavours remain its unique selling point, Chicken Cottage also faces an existential challenge, rooted in the colonial British legacy of South Asia. The political consequences of the British partition of the subcontinent mean that the region’s favourite fast-food joint is affected by the volatility that disrupts life in Kashmir. In the months I visited, Pakistan and India were in a ‘state of war’, their deadliest clashes in over twenty-five years, when, following an attack by suspected militants in Pahalgam (in Indian-administered-Kashmir), India arbitrarily attacked Pakistan.

Since partition, the two nuclear-armed neighbours have fought four complete wars, along with numerous other skirmishes and constant crossfire across the Line of Control that always directly affects Kashmir. Even though businesses across Pakistan suffer every time there is cross-border turbulence, Kashmiri life is especially upended, and Kashmiris face the brunt of the crossfire every time the two countries engage in warmongering. The Chicken Cottage branches in Kashmir are no exception to this. Right before the Kotli branch was to be opened in May, Indian missiles began to hit the city, and the branch’s owners faced an agonising wait over the fate of their investment in the restaurant. One of the missiles even struck close to Zaheeruddin’s apartment. The Chicken Cottage branch at Khuiratta was literally in the line of fire and had to be briefly shut down. ‘We were a bit concerned when the war started, but this is unfortunately the reality of our region,’ Ishaq says.

The staff at Chicken Cottage also detail how branches reopened a few days after the clashes. ‘Most of us had vacated the area during the war, but we returned immediately once things calmed down,’ Zaheeruddin says. ‘Aik taraf se missile aa rahay thay aur duusri taraf se customers. [As the missiles were coming our way, so were the customers.]’, he adds. Others also tell me that the days around the clashes saw a rise in footfall at their Chicken Cottage branches. Bilal expected this, and he prepared his staff about how to provide comfort to customers during wartime. ‘Visiting Chicken Cottage brought respite to many locals who were naturally stressed by the unfolding events’, he tells me. ‘We are sick of the power play [between the Indian and Pakistani governments] and the blame games. We just want a regular life, and lasting peace.’

Neither the anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK, nor the fact that these borders were drawn by the place where the brand originated, appear to have a sway on the clientele that flock to the Chicken Cottages in Kashmir. Even as restaurants across Pakistan undergo financial constraints and closures due to cross-border tensions, more Chicken Cottage outlets are being opened.

Before I left on my return journey to Lahore, I suggested that the brand consider a butter chicken menu item, given the dish’s current popularity in the UK. As I took off, I could not help recall the request of Zainab’s family: ‘We miss the British hash browns they used to give with the burgers. They used to go so well with the chicken. It would be great to bring them back!’ they had said, citing yet another popular food item associated with British cuisine that did not originate in Britain.

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Credits

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is the Pakistan correspondent for The Diplomat. His work has been featured in numerous international publications, including the Guardian, the Independent, Foreign Policy, Asia Times, Haaretz, Al-Jazeera, among others. He has written and reported on food and culture for NPR, BBC, America’s Test Kitchen, Texas Monthly, the Food Section, Philadelphia Magazine, and others.

Nida Mehboob is a Lahore-based photographer and filmmaker specializing in documentary and editorial storytelling. Her work has been commissioned and supported by organizations including the Magnum Foundation, Goethe-Institut, and Berlinale Talents, with projects published and exhibited internationally. You can find more of her work here.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles. In today’s newsletter, Nisreen Fox talks to Fadi Kattan and Sara-Asad Mannings about working in hospitality during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the responsibilities of representation while running Palestinian food businesses in London. You can read Nisreen’s intro and the interviews below.

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In October 2023, Israel began carpet-bombing Gaza, beginning one of the largest genocides of the twenty-first century. Since then, Palestinians in Gaza, and the West Bank have faced starvation, torture, forced displacement and access to little humanitarian aid. For decades now – since before the Nakba in 1948 – Palestinians have experienced massacres, displacement and suffering. What we see in the news, and on our social media, does not encompass the entirety of the atrocities that have and are still taking place, not only in Palestine but also in Lebanon, across the SWANA region and, more recently, in the US-led bombings of Iran.

Being the child of the Palestinian diaspora raised in Lebanon, I have experienced the inherent struggle in my family – and in my sense of self – as we grapple with these times. In the UK, Palestinians, Muslims, people of colour and migrants are facing increasing hostility which is upending their day-to-day lives while far-right anti-immigration protests have also been on the rise, with a Unite the Kingdom march in London only last week. All this has affected Palestinian, Arab and Muslim-owned food establishments in the UK. These establishments are part of Britain’s daily life and culture, but over the years I have thought about how Palestinians in hospitality may be working through increasing hostility and pain.

Last year, I spoke to Fadi Kattan of Akub and Sara Assad-Mannings of Bunhead Bakery. In these interviews, Fadi and Sara tell me about the burden and responsibility of representation during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and how a food establishment can start to stand in for something more. Nisreen Fox

‘There’s injustice in Palestine that needs to be repaired, that’s the priority. We’re not going to make peace around a hummus plate.’

A conversation between Nisreen Fox and Fadi Kattan of Akub.

Note: This interview was conducted in August 2025

Nisreen Fox: Hi Fadi. How are you today? Can you tell me a bit about how you found yourself in the food business?

Fadi Kattan: I am Palestinian, born and raised in Bethlehem. I always loved food. I learned how to cook in my grandmother’s kitchen. My mother is an ongoing inspiration every day – I call her often when I am in Akub to ask for advice.

In the nineties, I worked in restaurants in Paris, then in London, after which I moved back to Palestine in 2000, where I started for the first few months working in a hotel. Then the hotel closed down during the Second Intifada, but I stayed in Palestine and joined my family business. In 2003, I organised the first Palestinian cooking competition, just at the end of the Second Intifada, and I saw that a lot of Palestinian chefs had been trained in the idea that only cooking non-Palestinian food was a sign of quality cooking. In France, there was a strong sense of the ‘local’, and I thought about why we weren’t doing this in Palestine.

Nisreen Fox: And why do you think that was?

Fadi Kattan: Our Palestinian kitchen is being erased by the occupation, it’s being appropriated, it’s being stolen. Plantations are continuously being destroyed by Israel. It took me the best part of fifteen years to figure out how to take the beautiful Palestinian food being cooked at home into the restaurant kitchen. In 2016, I opened the restaurant ‘Fawda’ in Bethlehem. I decided: I will not have a menu and [will] cook whatever is in the souk that day, and I will only have Palestinian wines [Fadi now co-runs Nabeeth, along with Anna Patrowicz, that brings Palestinian wines to a global clientele]. It worked well. Now, being able to cook Palestinian food in the West, what I really dream of is to be able to normalise Palestinian food. I want Palestinian food to be like Italian food, or Chinese food. That should be how it is. There is an exceptionalism imposed on nations that were colonised.

Nisreen Fox: Got it. And how does that kind of thing transpire in London today? Are people ready to be part of the conversation?

Fadi Kattan: Nisreen, if I were European, or only French, you wouldn’t be asking me this in an interview.

Nisreen Fox: You’re right.

Fadi Kattan: So that’s the point, precisely. Switzerland is just a boring place in the middle of nowhere, but they have fantastic food and wines. If a Swiss chef up in the Alps was doing a fantastic fondue in Gruyères, he wouldn’t have to justify anything. In the last seventy-seven years, what we have seen with food appropriation is – first, the colonisers were looking down at our food, then they were finding it exotic and attractive, then they simply stole some dishes. In parallel, there was the theft of the land and the produce, to shape the narrative that gives legitimacy to the occupation by linking food to the land.

Nisreen Fox: I find it interesting that you say, ‘We want to have it be the same as anywhere else’ instead of wanting to ‘represent’ Palestinian food. I guess what I’m asking is – how do we get to that point of normalising it? Having Palestinian food be just food?

Fadi Kattan: Well, first, we get rid of the dogmatic idea that we all need to be cooking ‘authentic Palestinian food’. I hate the word ‘authentic.’ I also hate ‘Levantine’, ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ because they are rubbish. But, authentic. What is authentic? For me, authentic is what my mother cooks. For my next-door neighbour, it may be the same recipe cooked differently. If you’re Palestinian originally and you were born in the UK and your parents were born in the UK, does it make you less Palestinian? No, it doesn’t. If you eat fish and chips, then add hummus, you’re still Palestinian. We shouldn’t be judgmental of this, because then what happens is we are falling into the coloniser’s orientalist trap.

When I hear people say, ‘Oh, but Palestine is a land of farmers’, I take a deep breath to not get upset, because Jericho is the oldest inhabited city in the world. No, we are not only farmers: yes we are farmers, yes we are cosmopolitan, yes we are diverse, yes the old city of Jerusalem has a Gypsy community, two African communities – one made out of Christian pilgrims and one made out of Muslim pilgrims. We have Sufi zawiyas that come from Tashkent and Bukhara. That is Palestine. We shouldn’t be tiptoeing away from that. Are we sixteen million people who have to agree on the recipe of falafel? La, I’m sure there are sixteen million different recipes of falafel.

But also, crucially, we need to reclaim what is being appropriated. We need to work towards more and more people’s awareness of what comes from where. It doesn’t mean others can’t cook it – I want everybody to cook Palestinian food. But they need to acknowledge Palestinian origin, especially today.

Nisreen Fox: And how do you see Palestinian food’s presence in the UK’s restaurant industry today?

Fadi Kattan: In the UK today, we see a lot of Israeli chefs who are being portrayed as cool Israeli chefs, but in reality, they are cooking Palestinian food. So – can you just acknowledge that this is Palestinian food? Say that batinjan battiri is from Battir and say that musakhan is Palestinian – don’t call it a national Israeli dish. Shakshuka is Tunisian, but then all of a sudden it is made Israeli? How? There are Israelis that come originally from Arab countries, including Palestine, and hummus is part of their cultural heritage, but it doesn’t make it Israeli.

Also, I don’t like it when people tell me that I, as a chef, am ‘preserving Palestinian food’. I’m not. It’s a cuisine that is alive, it’s alive in the diaspora, in Palestine, and it’s alive in Gaza also. Gaza is part of Palestine: it’s not a separate entity. Of course, I’m no fan of what I call ‘coexistence cooking’ because I think it’s bullshit. Like, we’re not going to make peace around a hummus plate.

Nisreen Fox: (Laughs.) Do you feel like we carry the responsibility of having to shine a light on the multiple aspects of Palestinian life? Do you feel like your restaurant, and cookbook Bethlehem, have the effect of introducing people to a broader perception of Palestine?

Fadi Kattan: I keep telling people: You know what a restaurant is about? Doing good food, serving good drinks and keeping our bathrooms clean. That’s what I should be doing – it shouldn’t be beyond this.

How many people go on holidays to Tuscany to learn how to make pasta? Why shouldn’t we see this with Palestine? Why shouldn’t we see beyond the horror of genocide and extermination and erasure? That energy and light are what also contrast the occupation’s darkness.

I have no pretence whatsoever to teach people, but I do think I have the luck with either the food that we do at Akub, [and] also with my book Bethlehem, to have people then ask themselves questions. And, for me, that’s good enough. However, in the time of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, it’s been exacerbating a lot of this moralising posture or pressure on Palestinians, where we also have to be very careful with what we say.

Nisreen Fox: I feel like, especially since the genocide started, I’ve gotten a lot more work just for being Palestinian. I live in Brighton, and a lot of people will say, ‘Let’s go and support all the Palestinian businesses,’ whether they even think the produce is good or not. How do you feel about this wave of thinking?

Fadi Kattan: If somebody walks into a restaurant that is Palestinian or buys Palestinian olive oil online because they feel it should be part of what they can do to support Palestine, then OK. But, as Palestinians providing a service, we have to remember those parameters and be very humble with it. When I talk about Palestinian wine, it’s not just because it’s Palestinian, it’s actually because it’s very good wine. As for the olive oil we source – I know the farmers, and it’s very good olive oil. The sea salt we use comes from a family that is the last Palestinian family on the shores of the Dead Sea. I personally think it’s the best raw salt in the world. Our cooking and food production techniques come from a heritage that has been around for a long time, from processes that have always been practised by the people of the land. So, don’t buy from us because you feel bad for us – buy Palestinian produce because it is fantastic.

But that said, the reality is that there are hundreds of people being killed every day in Gaza, and across Palestine. When my book came out, it was shortly after the start of Israel’s genocide, but I had written it and it had gone to print before the genocide began. I was very confused about whether it was the right time or not. If I’m being honest, I’ll say that I know that there is a part of the sales because there’s a genocide happening.

I think that [for] every Palestinian – whatever our life journey is – if we can tell the story through our link to the land, our link to those recipes, our link to the transmission of how we cook, then it challenges that narrative of occupation. But do we have to self-flagellate for being Palestinian? I don’t think so. I think it goes both directions, this idea of being Palestinian, being a voice for Palestine and at the same time it’s important to have that balance and that humility. Here at Akub, we have a team of twenty-six people, from nineteen different nationalities. And they all serve Palestinian food.

Nisreen Fox: To end, do you think there is any kind of priority for us when it comes to Palestinian food in the UK today?

Fadi Kattan: There’s injustice in Palestine that needs to be addressed and repaired: that’s the priority. Once that’s done, maybe we could do hummus together.

‘It feels there is this pressure that looms to prove that we are deserving of life’

A conversation between Nisreen Fox and Sara-Asad Mannings of Bunhead Bakery.

This interview was conducted in August 2025

Nisreen Fox: So, tell me about how you started Bunhead Bakery?

Sara Asad-Mannings: I have worked a little in some professional kitchens, but not really worked in food before. Even so, I’ve always cooked, I’ve always baked. In 2020, during the pandemic, I made some buns and dropped them off at my sister’s house, and she suggested I should start selling them. I just went, OK! I guess I’ll start selling them. When I first started the bakery, I wanted to show a representation of all the parts of my life. I had a bun that represented my British side (lemon drizzle), I had one bun that represented my Palestinian side (rose and cardamom,) and a bun that represented my step-mum being from New Zealand (milo).

Nisreen Fox: I live in Brighton, and we have maybe a few outwardly Palestinian businesses in the city. I feel there is definitely a gap throughout the country. Did this drive you when you started?

Sara Asad-Mannings: Being Palestinian, I’ve always felt passionately about having spaces that truly represent us. When I was growing up, some places would say they were ‘Lebanese’ but then you’d talk to the owners and find out that they [were] Palestinian. But there was nowhere that I remember that was Palestinian and proud, so it was a very conscious decision for us to have ‘Palestinian’ on the shopfront. It also speaks to when I was growing up and people would ask me where I’m from, I’d respond saying Palestinian, and they’d either say, ‘Oh, you’re Israeli’ or ‘It doesn’t exist’. Palestinians have been forced to grow up in so many places, with London being one of them. It means our expressions of identity are so varied, so it’s important we are represented within the diasporas that have raised us.

Nisreen Fox: I often feel like I have to be the token ‘good Palestinian’. As your bakery is part of the hospitality business, do you feel pressure as a business to be a positive force in the community?

Sara Asad-Mannings: I think so. Part of the motivation with Bunhead is to present a joyful Palestinian narrative. But, I do feel a pressure to always be doing the right thing. I remember when we first opened, we had just done our first round of fundraising, and made T-shirts that had the watermelon, the bun and the keffiyeh. We posted a picture of me holding it up, saying, You can come and collect them. Someone commented on the picture saying – I’m not going to get this exactly correct, but something along the lines of, ‘You have these T-shirts, but you don’t even have one Palestinian flag up in your shop, it stinks of capitalising [on the conflict] to me.’ And I commented back, saying, ‘As the Palestinian who owns this business, what you’re saying is deeply offensive. You’re welcome to come into the bakery and see lots of pictures that my dad took in Palestine. Hope to see you soon.’

But, I do think it’s a slightly problematic narrative to push solely onto Palestinian businesses that it is our duty to raise funds. In some respects, I do agree, there is a responsibility that comes with representing our community which I don’t take lightly, but I also think that we are deserving of our success. Both things can and should exist at the same time. I do imagine it comes from a good place and people’s sensitivities are higher right now, rightly so. But for many people, it has been three years of witnessing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank – for us, this has been our whole lives.

Nisreen Fox: Right. And have there been any issues – which you are comfortable sharing – that have arisen due to having ‘Palestinian’ on the front?

Sara Asad-Mannings: Obviously, when we opened, I was expecting have a lot of pushbacks from Zionists and Israelis, but actually, some of the most uncomfortable situations that we have had are people trying to catch us out. The question that really just goes straight to my heart is: ‘So, what’s the connection to the Middle East here?’ or ‘What’s the connection to Palestine?’ and then someone or myself will answer that I am Palestinian, and they’ll go, ‘Oh, really?’ or, ‘Well, I never had any buns while I was in Palestine.’

I think a big motivator for me was to come into the scene and be known as a Palestinian business, saying who we are from the very beginning. To be able to achieve some form of popularity or success whilst being Palestinian felt like a big achievement. But it’s a difficult line to toe. We put in the offer for the shop in September 2023, so this has all happened alongside the genocide. It’s not lost on me that part of [our] success probably comes from that. This is painful, but it’s also more reason than ever to be loud about who we are, and make our mark.

Nisreen Fox: It’s like survivor’s guilt in a way. I don’t want to be exploitative, either, but it’s nice to hear that people other than myself are struggling with that. I feel like I see a lot of criticism against Palestinians or Lebanese people, saying that they are profiting off their own culture because they know it is ‘popular’ right now. But people who are not Palestinian have been profiting for a long time.

Sara Asad-Mannings: I guess there is pressure to share our culture, our food, something that isn’t scary to the world. So maybe, yes. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it like that. There is a part of me that just wants to show people that Palestinians and Arabs are just people. But it feels [like] there is this pressure that looms to prove that we are deserving of life.

Nisreen Fox: Let’s talk about some positive experiences. Could you share any stories about how your customers or supporters have come together for your business during these challenging times?

Sara Asad-Mannings: There are the small things – like we do a strawberry sumac bun and a syrup with our matcha, and it’s just like, flown off. When people come in to ask what sumac is, I get to see my front-of-house staff (who are not Palestinian) explain it. It’s so great knowing that we are sharing ingredients and dishes with people who will then go away and know that they are Palestinian. On a personal level, just people who have come from Gaza, and they take pictures of the shop, pictures with me … and it’s just … very emotional.

I always think of this moment, where I was at the table working, and these kids came into the shop with their dad. He said, ‘My kids are half Palestinian’, and the kids were looking really happy – they were also looking right at me. I replied with, ‘Me too’.

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Credits

Nisreen Fox (@nissfox) is a social justice journalist who specialises in marginalised communities that mean something to them. Growing up as a Palestinian in the West is a ever difficult struggle with identity, and she uses her journalism to seek out familiarity with community.

Sara Asad-Mannings is the co-owner of Bunhead Bakery, alongside Georgia Wickremeratne.

Fadi Kattan is a Franco-Palestinian chef, the author of Bethlehem, and the co-founder of London restaurant Akub, and Nabeeth Wines.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! In today’s article, Emily Kenway asks why we feed our pets the way we do, encompassing everything from Victorian ‘cats-meat sellers’ to the current vogue for foods that reconnect cats and dogs with their wild roots. It’s an ideal bank-holiday read.

If you haven’t picked one up already, our second print issue on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ is still available. We highly recommend buying a copy.

Finally, we have already sold through 70% of the initial print run of Ruby Tandoh’s guide to the ice cream of London, which we announced last week. You can pre-order a copy here (note: preorders are currently only available in the UK).

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It began as a joke. At half-eight in the morning, as the kettle was boiling, I retrieved a tin from the cupboard. ‘Beef today,’ I announced to my partner, spooning out slick flushed meat for our cat, Bear.

‘Very ancestral,’ he replied, pointing to the flyer that came in the subscription box from Untamed, which proclaimed the food the best for our ‘little predator’: human-grade, grain-free real meat. ‘But shouldn’t it be mouse or sparrow?’ Though Bear is gloriously strong and agile, he is unlikely to take down a cow in the wild.

As we laughed over ideas for more appropriate flavours – plump little wrens stuffed into pouches, mouse pâté, sparrow soup – I realised that I had never really questioned my choice of ‘ancestral’ food for Bear. Nor had I thought about the rise of a host of other brands, such as KatKin, Butternut Box and Blink, all similarly marketed on the basis of being ‘real’ food and linked to pets’ alleged wildness and animal natures. These premium food brands are taking an increasing share of the pet food market, but why are owners like me choosing them? And why, more broadly, do we feed our pets the way we do?

Part of the answer to this question is obvious: we feed dogs and cats with chicken, beef and fish because we farm and eat those meats ourselves. If the same were true of sparrows and mice, we would likely give those to our pets too. Historically, British pets ate rabbit and horse because we used those animals more, and a friend in Australia feeds kangaroo meat to her cat (which, she assures me, is perfectly normal fare for both humans and pets).

But that’s not the whole explanation. As historian Mary Elizabeth Thurston writes in The Lost History of the Canine Race, what we feed our pets ‘constitutes a kind of diary’ that documents the evolving nature of human–animal relations over time. And because our pets mostly lack gustatory autonomy – that is, because we, not they, decide what they eat – the choices we make on their behalf tell us about ourselves, too.

When we got Bear in 2023, we fed him run-of-the-mill supermarket cat food. Back then, I didn’t think much about these dubious brown slivers in equally dubious gravy. But, in April 2025, he was hit by a car. After two jaw reconstructions, a tail amputation and a period of being fed via an oesophageal tube, we wanted only the best for him and his tastebuds. By that time, the idea of healthier pet food had already been implanted in my mind by a steady stream of Instagram adverts (featuring peppy influencers explaining how their animals preferred these premium, unprocessed alternatives). These products are driving the global pet food market, which is projected to grow by over $100 billion in the next decade alone. I signed up to Untamed, becoming part of the growing anti-UPF movement – but for pets.

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‘I just want to give them the best,’ Mhairi – who owns two terriers, Toffee and Dexter, in Glasgow – tells me. For a while she made their food herself (stews of beef or chicken with rice and vegetables, a kind of slop-ified Sunday lunch), but now she opts for Butternut Box, which commits to being ‘cooked like you would at home’ and promises ‘human-quality’ food – that is, food that comes from the same supply chains as our own (rather than byproducts not fit for human consumption, which tend to be used in cheaper pet food). My cat-obsessed friend Alison, in Bradford, chose to go with Untamed like me. She tells me how happy she is when she opens the cans and sees recognisable strips of tender chicken or whole shrimp. ‘We could eat it ourselves in an apocalypse,’ she suggests.

These unprocessed pet foods can be understood as successors of the paleo diet trend, in which twenty-first century humans shunned grains and processed foods to mimic pre-agricultural practices – think lots of meat (sometimes raw) and moving boulders around in the great outdoors. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and where this concept transferred to pet food; various men claim paternity. These include Dr Ian Billinghurst, who created the Biologically Available Raw Food diet for dogs (BARF for short), and Will Post, a former US marine who claims to have launched the first paleo pet food in 2010 and believes that, when it comes to feeding our pets, ‘we need to go back to our ancestral roots’. After all, ‘Hollywood has really bragged about their Paleo Diets so why not our pets?’

While the language used has shifted, with ‘ancestral’ and ‘wild’ now preferred over ‘paleo’ by premium pet foods, the underpinning ethos remains broadly the same: pets are direct descendants of wild animals and should be treated as such. Indeed, if you spend enough time reading the websites of companies like these, you’ll encounter the idea that such diets are more authentic because dogs share 98% of their DNA with wolves, while house cats are 95% genetically similar to wildcats like lions and tigers. These DNA claims are ostensibly true, but essentially meaningless: according to one metric, humans can be described as 96% genetically identical to chimpanzees and 60% identical to bananas. Despite this, ‘super-premium’ pet foods are driving growth in the sector, with the most extreme end of this vanguard – raw food – forecast to double from its current market size by 2035.

This is a far cry from historical Western pet feeding practices. Before the twentieth century, dogs and cats were generally viewed as workers, strays or pests, and their menu was less considered (and less expensive) as a result. Dogs were fed table scraps, while cats were regarded as scavengers and left to hunt birds, mice and insects. In the UK, for felines whose owners had a little more income, horsemeat was the dish du jour, proffered by ‘cats-meat sellers’ – street hawkers who bought (and then boiled) maimed or elderly horses that could no longer be used for transport. One contemporary account describes cats rushing ‘frantically to the door’ when the cats’-meat seller appeared, then ‘running mewing toward him rubbing against his legs’.

Then, in the mid-1800s, an American lightning-rod salesman named James Spratt arrived at Liverpool docks. While disembarking his ship, he noticed dogs eating discarded hardtack (sailors’ biscuits). An idea struck him – and commercial kibble (or, in the words of his company’s advertisement, ‘Meat ‘Fibrine’ Vegetable Dog Cakes’) was born. These baked biscuits were made from 35% meat (animal not specified), beetroot, oatmeal and ‘other ingredients’. Spratt opened factories in London and New York in the late 1880s, and would go on to dominate the new pet food industry for decades to come.

His invention came as attitudes to domestic animals were changing. Whereas previously dogs and cats had been considered either working animals or problems, the Victorians began to view them as luxury items – and family members. Animals were groomed and trained to behave in ways that mimicked ideals of human decorum. Food was an important part of this discipline: according to Thurston, fresh meat was considered to ‘overexcite’ dogs and lead to ‘disgraceful bouts of nymphomania’. The dry, bloodless biscuits offered by Spratt, and others like him in the incipient pet food industry, were the perfect replacement for such hazardous victuals.

But the old ways remained: some people continued to feed pets with scraps and, surprisingly, cats-meat men existed into the early twentieth century. To oust these practices more fully, the commercial pet food sector used two tactics. First, it promoted the convenience of commercial pet food (aided by the advent of canned meats, which could be served alongside kibble). Second, it repositioned itself as the expert in animal nutrition – something with which scraps and sellers of horsemeat could not compete – and emphasised the risk of getting things wrong.

‘Now! A dog food with poly-unsaturates added!’ declared a 1962 Ken-L Ration advert, which also asserted that this ingredient (healthy fats) would enable pet dogs to lead unspecified ‘better’ lives. Businesses diversified into new pet food sub-sectors with discrete nutritional requirements, exemplified by Purina’s 1960s introduction of puppy food, which included the claim that it was ‘as carefully balanced as a baby’s formula’. The strategy worked: there are now several generations of people who would struggle to imagine a time before commercial pet food was the normal way to feed our animals.

But while much has changed, one thing has remained the same: the Victorian fear of pets’ animal natures. In 1974, market research conducted for Fidomeat (refrigerated ‘meat-brawn’) warned that food slogans focusing on energy and liveliness were disliked by pet owners. Likewise, the words ‘chase’ and ‘fetch’ were rejected by participants because they caused anxiety about ‘loss of control’. On the surface, this seems very different to today: the brand I feed Bear is literally called Untamed. After his accident and his months-long recovery, I wanted him to be as rambunctious as possible, even if it meant furniture was scratched and pot plants upturned. Similarly, Mhairi wants her terriers to be full of vitality and personality, not docile or mimicking genteel human behaviour. We don’t want our savage sidekicks to eat unnatural lab-concocted food and behave like ladies and gentlemen; we want real meat and real animal energy.

And yet when Alison’s cat had a meal of mouse on her bedroom floor, she texted me hysterically: ‘There’s a leg by my laundry basket!’ We might want our pets to eat ancestrally, but contemporarily that means something different to blood and bones. Our pets are predators who eat from cans and plastic pouches. Their food may be free from fillers and by-products, but it remains infused with commerce-driven nutritional notions too. It’s increasingly common for prebiotics, probiotics, glucosamine (for joints) and omega fatty acids (for fur coats) to be added to pet food, ostensibly to extend longevity, mirroring the growing human supplement market – not so natural after all. Nowhere is this contradiction more obvious than in relation to sex. It’s not a coincidence that this era of pet diets came after spaying and neutering became widespread – the marketing spiel focuses on wild ways, but you won’t find a single pet food company talking about libido or virility. Our animals might be little beasts again, but they must remain eunuchs.

In an era of polycrisis, this dualism makes sense. We live on the knife-edge of advanced capitalism, mired in its complexity and destructiveness. Alison’s observation that we could eat human-grade pet food in an apocalypse feels less like a joke and more like a premonition. For acolytes of the paleo ethos (and its offshoots, like these ancestral pet foods), pre-history seems to provide a calmer, simpler mode. But, just as finding joy in cosplaying people who are compelled to hunt and scavenge is conditional on the comforts of contemporary life, our pets are permitted their ‘wild’ natures only because we have domesticated them.

The irony of this seems to be lost on the premium pet food industry, with all its talk of predators and wildness. Or perhaps it’s not that the irony is lost, but rather that it’s carefully avoided. By feeding pets as if they were still wild, we conjure an intimacy with nature that has been forgotten, for them and for ourselves, too. They might be domesticated, and we might be enslaved to capitalism and technology and all the other ills of the twenty-first century, but a small part of us still believes in a shared and deeper wildness, captured in that brief moment when we decant ancestral meat mush for our sexless little carnivores.

Credits

Emily Kenway is a writer and sociologist based in Edinburgh. Her most recent book, Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It (Hachette, 2023), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay by Fenja Akinde-Hummel is a reflection on microwave conspiracy theories, and the sometimes-uneasy relationship with the device in her extended family.

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About a year ago, an Instagram video about microwaves was posted in my extended family group chat. It was titled ‘Benutzt du immer noch eine Mikrowelle?’, with the English caption ‘never ever again 🚫⚠️’.

‘Never again’, a phrase with very specific connotations – particularly in Germany – was here being deployed to warn people against reheating food in the microwave. In the video’s opening sequence, a woman opens a microwave (I’m guessing not her own) and removes the glass plate to show the three little ledges that keep the plate in place. The hazardous radiation symbol then pops up on screen, revealing its uncanny resemblance to the ledges. The machine, it seems, bears a warning, buried within its own functionality. If this creative engagement with symbolism (akin to the close reading of bank notes for hidden illuminati symbolism) wasn’t enough, an unidentified doctor then appears to provide the hard science: using a microwave is the ‘best way to kill yourself’, he says, claiming that ‘everything out of the microwave is highly toxic’.

In short, Your machine is killing you, says the video, its caption implying that unsuspecting microwave users are the victims of a slow genocide they don’t even know is happening.

The video’s maker is, as far as I can tell, a white German woman. In her other videos, she argues that the arrival of migrants to Germany is part of a plan to destroy the country by 2030, warns of the dangers of microplastics and suggests that feminism is a ploy to coerce women into paying taxes. How had her microwave video found its way into this chat, which is populated with UK-based uncles and aunties and cousins of various African diaspora configurations sharing, mostly, birthday greetings and embarrassing photos recovered from an old Sony Ericsson? (For context, I am a London-born Nigerian-German living in Berlin.)

Somehow, the video’s appearance wasn’t entirely unexpected. Various well-intentioned, if naive, warnings have appeared in the chat over the years – a notice about razor blades being snuck into packs of Hobnobs; cautions about 5G towers. I sent back articles and videos, seeking to gently convince my family that the microwave is not actually a killing machine. And yet, despite my broad appeals to ‘facts’ and ‘science’, I understand, and often share, this suspicious disposition. To be Black in the UK (or in Germany) is to be in an almost perpetual state of vigilance – it can be hard to know what is actually dangerous to us when it feels like anything could be.

We are familiar with the racism of state and corporate institutions, and experience a proximity to precarity, to violence, embedded within the structures that order and arrange our lives. And yet we are told that these things that we see, feel and witness do not exist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this racism also presents itself when it comes to food: Black people in the UK are more likely to live in food deserts and experience food insecurity than white people, making it harder, more expensive and certainly more time consuming for us to get what we need. When our socioeconomic system feels like a conspiracy, it’s hard to have faith in such a system, or the technology that this system produces. In this context, the microwave has become a site for the projection of anxieties around food, health and power. But how has that come to be?

*

The heating capacity of microwaves (the actual waves, that is, rather than the machine) was accidentally discovered in the USA in 1945, during World War 2. When testing the microwave-generating magnetron tube – a radar technology originally designed to detect enemy planes and ships – engineer Percy Spencer discovered that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted (given that chocolate bars tend to melt in pockets anyway, more culinary investigation followed). Spencer filed a patent, and in 1946 the first commercial microwave, the RadaRange, was sold by Raytheon (yes, that Raytheon). The RadaRange was large and expensive, designed with restaurants and large canteens in mind. It wasn’t until 1967 that the first domestic, countertop microwave was released. Microwaves started to gain popularity in the mid-seventies in the USA and then the UK, and by 2013 80% of British households had a microwave.

It is strange to consider the relationship between the guided missile and the mundane process of reheating leftovers, yet perhaps this connection goes some way to explaining the suspicion that has surrounded the microwave since its introduction to the home. The microwave was a break with traditional cooking and heating methods which had, largely, gone unchanged for centuries. It was a modern technology, a locked box with the capacity to violently burst your beans. For some, the technology was (and remains) an unwelcome interruption of these more traditional modes of cooking, but, like it or not, it has fundamentally changed how we use the kitchen.

‘I don’t believe in microwaves – if my granny ain’t use it, neither am I,’ a friend told me. By contrast, I do believe in the microwave. As much as I aspire to worshipping food and flavour so much that I don’t use one, I just cannot bring myself to cook every day. I have learned that to remain fed, I must cook for a future version of myself, freezing my food and then defrosting and reheating it when cooking feels impossible. The degradation of texture and flavour is, for me, minor, and the moralising disavowal of the microwave annoys me.

Yet when I am met with a strong anti-microwave sentiment, I can’t lie, I still feel some shame (though clearly not enough). Fundamentally, oppositions to the microwave often hinge on the rejection of convenience. One of the comments under the Instagram video reads: ‘Anyone who uses a microwave has lost control of their life 😂’, the implication being that using a microwave represents a lack of discipline (something I’m intimately acquainted with).

But what happens, practically, when you are a Nigerian in North London? When not every shop has the ingredients you like to cook with, so you trek across the city on a Saturday to get the things you need to make the food that you and your family love, food that may even last a week? This is what my grandmother would do. The stew she’d make would sit atop the stove, from where it would be dished out in Tupperware to the stream of visitors who knew it was there waiting to be carried home, reheated, enjoyed. My grandmother always cooked for many, in part so that her family didn’t all have to. Her cooking anticipated its reheating – which, for many of us, meant using a microwave. Rather than cutting us off from tradition, the microwave facilitated the connection.

In this context, the centrality of the microwave in the diaspora is an exchange of one scarcity, or abundance, for another. In the UK, because Nigerian ingredients are harder to come by, we rely on the fridge, freezer and microwave to pace access to our foods. But in Nigeria, ‘believing in’ a microwave only really makes sense if you have a stable source of electricity (for said fridge and freezer) and broadly functioning state infrastructure. For many of my relatives who live there, especially those who do not have generators, there is absolutely no point in having a microwave because, in many parts of the country, electricity comes and goes erratically – an occurrence that almost has a divine quality.

Four years ago, on an extended visit in Ibadan, the house I was staying in (which blessedly had a generator) contained a microwave that had not been touched in years. I tried using it, only to hear the generator groan an octave lower, as if physically carrying the electrical load of the machine. It was almost like I could hear the monetary cost of my poorly considered decision. To use a microwave in a context like this is to be well resourced, or to invest belief that the state infrastructure will provide you with what you need. Such a belief is not available to many of my relatives in Nigeria. Neither is it available to many of my relatives in London.

*

Among my friends and family in Nigeria, the microwave is not given much thought, because it is functionally irrelevant – a fuel-sucking, mostly useless object. But among those of us in the diaspora, its extreme convenience, coupled with the mysteries of how it works, can draw suspicion. Even though the microwave occupies the intimate space of the domestic kitchen, its functioning remains opaque. When I asked my friend why she was reluctant to use one, she responded simply: ‘What even is a microwave?’ I’m not sure if this was an actual question or a rhetorical flourish, but it communicated the continued air of mystery that surrounds the device.

Microwaves have long been viewed as dangerous, with warnings about standing in front of them or near them while they’re on passed down through the generations, and their cooking process positioned as uniquely detrimental to the nutrients in food (even though over-boiling vegetables in a pot does the same thing, perhaps even more so). The relative who posted the microwave conspiracy video in the family chat expressed fear about microwaved food being ‘cooked from the inside’, which quickly became: ‘It cooks you from the inside.’

This concern – that microwaves cause some sort of nefarious, unspecified internal damage – reflects one of the long-standing anxieties about the appliance. Other modes of cooking all involve the application of heat from an obvious source to the surface of the thing being cooked. There’s a certain comfort to cooking that you can hear and see happening, that is manual and tangible: the flame is hot, the food is heated. By contrast, how microwaves produce heat remains mysterious. Waves are an invisible form of power: they can heat food, transmit information, make us sick or treat illness – almost entirely beyond our visual and physical perception. We experience the results of their effects, but we cannot see them working. As a result, it’s not obviously apparent how the food gets heated – and even the technical explanation of waves causing the vibration of particles in the food, producing friction and thus heating the food ‘from the inside out’ can seem more like a provocation than an answer. (While I do not, personally, fully understand the science, I understand it enough to comfortably eat food the microwave lovingly heats for me.)

In this regard, I can see the wave as a proxy for the often opaque structures that inform how we experience the world. In lots of ways, our material lives are arranged by architectures of power to which many will never have access, or even understand. I can easily see why the microwave, a box in which an invisible kind of power is at work, becomes a site of projection. But it is crucial that it does not remain so, as this kind of projection obscures the structures that actually endanger us.

When the video popped up on the group chat, only I responded. I guess on some level I was also defending my own relationship to reheating lentils or even coffee (gasp), while attempting to stem what I believed to be a tide of misinformation. After sending one final link, a video proving that microwaved water does not, in fact, kill plants, I concluded my defence, triumphant. No one replied.

Then another link appeared: ‘Man’s Hilarious Plane Crash Interview Goes Viral’. It seemed that everyone had moved on.

Credits

Fenja Akinde-Hummel is a keen microwave advocate, writer, and PhD candidate between KCL in London and Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. She researches Black diasporic temporalities as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant Project Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. And she loves Arsenal.

Sandy Christ is a London-based illustrator, designer and professional daydreamer working across editorial, event visuals, murals, merchandise and self-initiated projects rooted in print culture, music and her multi-heritage identity. Through intuitive mark-making, expressive linework and texture-heavy compositions, her work explores themes of identity, emotion, movement and the spaces between clarity and ambiguity. Selected clients and collaborators include New Balance, Adobe, University of the Arts London, Where Are the Black Designers, Gurlz with Curlz and publications like The Wire, Vittles, Chutney, Synonym and Scary Boots.

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I first heard about Mercato Metropolitano in the summer of 2017, only a few weeks after moving to London. A friend living in Elephant and Castle had mentioned it sold piadina, a flatbread from Romagna in northern Italy that I’d never seen in the UK. When I finally went, I found not the generic ‘Italian’ I’d grown used to in London, but an unprecedented breadth of regional variation. Inside a vast post-industrial hall with long communal tables and an apparently endless line of food stalls, I found pici from Tuscany, risotto al salto from Lombardia and proper Neapolitan pizza, alongside Venezuelan arepas, Caribbean jerk chicken and ramen. It called itself ‘London’s first sustainable community food market’.

Mercato felt like an easy entry point into a city I was just starting to discover – familiar enough to be comforting, but cosmopolitan in a way I’d never experienced before. At the time, it seemed Mercato was an island, completely disconnected from its surrounding neighbourhood – a mere coincidence that it existed in Elephant and Castle and not anywhere else in London. I saw it as a place where I could start figuring out how life in the city might look. During that first summer, Mercato was the place I took my English (now ex-) boyfriend to make him try ‘real’ Italian dishes, and where I went with visiting friends and family to show off London’s diversity.

While my first year in London was beginning to take shape around Mercato, a long-running conflict over space was unfolding just down the road. Traders and activists were organising against the property developer Delancey’s plans to redevelop the Elephant and Castle shopping centre – a project that threatened to close around a hundred businesses. The same area had already seen the demolition of the Heygate Estate, council blocks where around 3,000 people had lived until the last residents were evicted in 2013.

Over the next couple of years, as Mercato became established as a destination, it was increasingly framed as Elephant’s success story – proof that the area was ‘on the up’. But at the same time, businesses inside the Elephant and Castle shopping centre began to close one by one, weakened by falling footfall, rising uncertainty and years of neglect. Despite a traders’ and activists’ campaign against the redevelopment, by 2020, the shopping centre shut its doors for good, leaving traders facing an uncertain future. I didn’t question this contrast at the time, but it was clear that Mercato, having turned Elephant and Castle into a ‘food destination’, also helped shape the narrative of a new, shinier neighbourhood into which the shopping centre no longer fit.

Six years on, the cycle has turned again. In April 2025, Berkeley – the developer that owns the land on which Mercato is based – secured permission to build three residential towers on the site (one of them forty-one storeys high, with flats priced far beyond local incomes). In December, it was confirmed that the market is scheduled to shut its doors in late 2026, leaving more than forty traders facing the same uncertainty as those in the shopping centre before them. When I first heard the news, I was struck by the irony: something that had so recently been celebrated as new and exciting was being threatened by the forces which had initially helped bring it into being. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised: what has happened with Mercato Metropolitano is only the latest incident in the ongoing story of London street food vendors, and their uneasy relationship with those who own and control the land.

Mercato Metropolitano started in Milan in 2015, when its founder, Andrea Rasca, opened a food market inside a disused warehouse on the Navigli, just as the World’s fair Expo Milano was drawing crowds into the city. The concept was unusual for the time: a market that mixed traditional traders – a baker, a fishmonger, a butcher – with street food vans and community events, all inside a vast, half-derelict industrial space. It was consciously rough around the edges and deliberately anti-corporate, a reaction to the Expo’s heavy sponsorship by brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. Rasca’s simple idea was that a market could run on high-quality food, minimal advertising and a basic level of affordability.

I met Rasca on a Friday afternoon last July, inside an empty Italian restaurant in Mayfair. At the start of our conversation, he was quick to point out that Mercato is not merely a business to him, but rather a project shaped by two key influences: Adriano Olivetti’s vision of socially oriented enterprise and Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement. Rasca talks about food as something that should be ‘adequate’ in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sense – nutritious, culturally grounded and accessible. In practice, this meant every trader in Mercato had to offer at least one low-cost dish (say, a €5 marinara), even as some stalls sold premium items. This framing helped set it apart from Milan’s existing food scene – it felt less like a street food market and more like an experiment in how markets could operate.

When Milan’s city council told Rasca it would only let him stay on the Navigli site until December, he decided to bring the idea to London. By then, the city had begun embracing so-called ‘meanwhile uses’: temporary occupations of land already destined for redevelopment, tolerated precisely because they were not meant to last. A disused paper factory in Elephant and Castle that had long been abandoned became the site of the first London Mercato in 2016. Most people around Rasca thought the location was a mistake, overshadowed by Borough Market to the north and isolated from footfall, but the scale and the roughness appealed to him. The result was a market with the same calling card as the original, with traders given room to build their businesses, minimal branding and an unpolished aesthetic that distinguished Mercato from the more corporate food halls emerging elsewhere in the city.

Rasca recalls that the negotiations with Peabody (the land’s owner before they sold it to Berkeley in 2020) were surprisingly smooth. Peabody had recently submitted a proposal for redeveloping what they named ‘the Borough triangle’, a piece of land including the paper factory, the London School of Musical Theatre and the 100-year-old Institute of Optometry. Confident that the planning application would go through, they granted Rasca a ‘meanwhile use’ for one year; they saw it, in Rasca’s words, as ‘a practical solution to a temporary problem’.

Eva Fino is one of Mercato’s longest-standing traders, running a cocktail caravan she brought to the Elephant and Castle site in 2016. She started her cocktail business in Milan after the wine bar she co-owned lost its regulars when the nearby Prada offices moved away. The newly opened Mercato on the Navigli offered the stability she’d been missing, and when the London Mercato opened, she followed, caravan and all. Like me, she arrived expecting postcard London and found something messier, louder, more familiar. She treated it as an experiment, assuming it would last a year or two at most. Instead, she put down roots. She learned Spanish first, from the Latin American traders around her, then English. Her business grew alongside Mercato; she hired staff, met her partner, and had a child. ‘I always say he’s Mercato’s baby,’ she tells me, laughing.

Fino remembers the early years, when only two caravans – her own, and another selling arancini – sat in the empty hall. The space gradually became a market as more vendors moved in, and Fino recalls Rasca’s attention to detail: there was a central team of around forty staff organising cultural and social programming (like a summer camp for local kids where families who could pay effectively subsidised those who couldn’t) and cooking classes run with Migrateful. Back then, she says, it really did feel like a community: traders helping each other out, management incubating new businesses. The success meant that the brand expanded, too: a Mercato Mayfair opened in 2019, then Canary Wharf in 2021 (plus a short-lived Ilford site in 2024, which closed after just six months).

In 2022, Rasca sold 75% of Mercato to Andrea Iervolino, an Italian film producer currently under investigation in Italy for alleged tax fraud, tax evasion and the use of false invoices linked to another business. From that point, Fino says, the atmosphere shifted. The central staff was cut from forty to four employees, the social programme thinned out and quality controls weakened. Footfall dropped, but rents didn’t. And only three years later, in 2025, Berkeley’s plans to build residential skyscrapers on the site were approved by Southwark council.

Mercato’s new owners have successfully won the bid to manage a temporary market that will be built under the railway arches while construction takes place. The catch is that this new space will host only twelve of Mercato’s forty-plus traders. Because of this, many of the traders I approached didn’t feel able to speak on the record, worried that saying the wrong thing could decrease their chances of being included (although some highlighted that Mercato deals with traders one by one, under different terms, with little transparency and no shared guarantees).

Despite being one of Mercato’s earliest traders, Fino was originally excluded from the project. The reason was technical: the current Mercato owners’ bid will give them exclusive control over beverages, arguing it’s the only way to keep the reduced site financially viable. Fino was offered £12,500 to relocate – nowhere near enough to cover finding a new space and fitting it out, or paying severance to her staff. She was determined to keep her cocktail caravan, but eventually had to accept that she could only claim a space in the temporary market if she changed her business entirely. She won’t be allowed to sell drinks, so she’s developing a fresh pasta menu instead. Though she will now have to reinvent herself as a food trader, what worries her most is the setting: the temporary market will sit inside a construction site for at least five years, and there is no clarity about what comes after. By then, the neighbourhood may have shifted again. Fino wonders whether there will still be space for her business at all.

To put what’s happening at Mercato into proper context, it is essential to go back to the origins of modern London street food. In the late 2000s, Petra Barran – who had been selling chocolate from a truck in the first half of the decade – had grown frustrated with how difficult it was for independent street food vendors to find space in the city. Her solution was simple: band traders together and negotiate collectively. What started as a loose network quickly became London’s first street-food consortium, KERB. By 2012, KERB had become the go-to partner for developers looking to animate underused sites. Barran remembers being invited to set up a market on a newly opened road in King’s Cross – the first new street built in London in ninety years – and realising how the gates had opened. ‘It was intoxicating,’ she told me. ‘Suddenly we were being invited to an empty car park in Peckham, the plaza under the Gherkin, spaces all over the city that we would have never dreamed of claiming as ours. It gave us a real sense of agency, as if street food could help us bend the city in a new shape.’

But these invitations weren’t a transference of power so much as a controlled release. Street food could make a newly opened road, an empty car park or a corporate plaza feel temporarily shared and open, even when the land wasn’t. A 2017 Guardian investigation, led by Jack Shenker, noted that many of these sites are ‘pseudo-public spaces … that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers’. What often gets described as ‘placemaking’ – creating shared public space with the collaboration of the local community – is ultimately a marketing strategy, a way of selling the idea that life is being brought to an area when, in reality, life is already there. What’s being ‘made’ is a version of place that’s easier to manage, market and redevelop.

Nowhere has that paradox played out more clearly than in Elephant and Castle. When Mercato opened, Elephant and Castle’s shopping centre still functioned as a dense ecosystem, where Colombian cafes sat beside Nigerian hair salons, Latin American butchers next to phone-repair stalls and bingo halls. It embodied what the sociologist Richard Sennett calls an ‘open city’: messy, porous, shaped by use rather than design. Yet with nearby housing disappearing and redevelopment plans taking hold – conditions for survival being steadily withdrawn – footfall thinned and anchor shops left. Mercato arrived with a different proposition: a curated, branded version of multi-ethnic food, legible to visitors, investors and developers alike. The two coexisted uneasily and, for a time, it was the older, messier space that was framed as obsolete.

When I spoke to Sophie Wall from the charity Latin Elephant, she explained that the comparison between Mercato and the shopping centre was more nuanced than it appeared. On the surface, the two served very different audiences: Mercato catered to aspirational newcomers, while the shopping centre was used by people who had lived in Elephant and Castle for decades. But from an organising perspective, Wall explains, the differences were largely cosmetic. ‘Once you strip away the branding, the businesses weren’t that different,’ she tells me. ‘They were small, often migrant-run, often women-led, and operating on very thin margins.’ This tallies with my own interviews with Mercato traders: many are refugees or migrants, and their stand is their first business.

The difference for Mercato was that it occupied a different space in the regeneration cycle. In 2016, Mercato was useful to developers: a signal that the area was changing, a way of attracting footfall and attention while the future of Elephant and Castle was still uncertain. By 2025, that work had been done. With endless lines of brand-new buildings, a new shopping centre about to open and foreign investors crowding in, Mercato was no longer needed as a promise of transformation. The land it sat on was now valuable enough to speak for itself.

Jed Holloway, a planning solicitor at Southwark Law Centre, suggests that the shopping centre’s fate mirrors what is now unfolding at Mercato. Given Delancey’s recent redevelopment of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, Berkeley already had a blueprint for how much they could get away with at Mercato. Initially, just like Delancey, Berkeley offered nothing to Mercato traders; when pressured, they proposed a business relocation strategy that closely mirrored that of the shopping centre. The difference was that, this time, an experienced activist network was already in place. Campaigners had learned how to navigate negotiations with the council and the developer, and they secured what looked like meaningful concessions: a temporary market and a £200,000 relocation fund – more in relative terms than traders at the shopping centre ever received.

But when you look closer, those wins are marginal. The £200,000 pot is to cover the collective costs of relocation for all affected businesses, in an area where fitting out a new unit can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds alone: Holloway mentions that one Mercato trader is facing costs of up to £800,000 for installing the kitchen, plumbing and electrics needed to operate their business. ‘Most of the businesses are going to struggle,’ Holloway tells me. ‘Most of them won’t be relocated or, if they are, they probably won’t survive.’ The temporary market raises further concerns: reduced footfall, rents comparable to Mercato’s but with fewer customers, and no guaranteed right of return. Again, the shopping centre looms as a warning. After its closure, some of its traders were relocated to Castle Square, a temporary, container-style space whose tenants now face eviction over a backdated electricity bill. Others are holding on to unprofitable units in the hope that staying visible and close by will improve their chances of returning to the new shopping centre. Years on, many still don’t know whether that right will come.

Nina Wessel, an activist and spokesperson for the Save Borough Triangle campaign, is also concerned about the fairness of Berkeley’s plan. She got involved after distractedly picking up a flyer about the redevelopment, and has since become a key link between Mercato and the council. She takes me around the building that will soon be replaced by Berkeley’s vision, telling me the market currently provides 450 jobs. ‘And then Berkeley comes along promising 500 jobs,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘But what kind of jobs? They say it like it’s a gift. But those jobs are imaginary, maybe in the future, probably in chain stores. What we have here, now, are independent businesses, real families relying on them.’ (This would not be the first time that a vision for the development is not followed through in practice – last month, Berkeley put in an application with Southwark council to reduce the ‘affordable housing’ at the development from 35% to 10%.)

Displacement is not an abstract process or a line in a planning document, but the slow unravelling of lives built around a place: shopping centre traders waiting years for relocations that may not come; Mercato traders forced to gamble on temporary sites with no right to return. Fino, who is one of the lucky ones, arrived in London without expectations, convinced she was only passing through; nearly a decade later, her life is bound up in a place that is now disappearing beneath her feet. As for Rasca, he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of Mercato’s London sites. He talks about the split obliquely, but it’s clear that his break from Mercato’s current sites was ideological as much as operational. Potential investors, Rasca told me, wanted to talk about returns; he wanted to talk about how people eat. At a certain point, those conversations stopped overlapping. He insists that what matters to him is the ‘movimento’, the idea of a metropolitan market built around decent food, affordability and social life. He’s already looking for the next location, and is writing a book to set out his philosophy. In his telling, Mercato was never meant to be permanent: it was a prototype, something that could be picked up and reassembled elsewhere.

Maybe he’s right, but the story of Elephant and Castle suggests a deeper contradiction. In a city where land is valued first and foremost for the wealth it can generate, markets like Mercato are only tolerated while they animate space and help tip a neighbourhood into its next phase. Once that work is done, their value is quickly reassessed. Mercato’s fate is the clearest proof that an ethical experiment that doesn’t reckon with the space around it cannot remain protected from these forces. However carefully designed, it is still caught in the same regenerative currents it helps to set in motion; eventually, it will get carried away by them too.

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Credits

Caterina Urbano is a writer based in East London. Originally from Italy, she is interested in cities, food, and the changing politics of urban life

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, we are publishing a graphic essay by Ella Bucknall about eating through childhood, and grief. We strongly recommend reading this version of Ella’s essay, which has been drawn and designed by Ella, in your web browser, but you can read it in standard text format below.

We have sold three-quarters of our print run for Issue 2, themed around ‘Bad Food’. You can buy a copy here.

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As children, my brother Patrick and I were obsessed with sharing. When a big glass bowl of Angel Delight was deposited onto the kitchen table, we would carve a territorial X onto the sugary surface of the mousse and mark each butterscotch quadrant with our initials: C for Caroline (Mum), A for Aidan (Dad), P for Patrick, and E for Ella. Even so, the milky dessert could still become a battlefield if – at a certain angle – the convex backs of spoons threatened the delineated borders.

Aside from Angel Delight, Patrick often rejected food, a cause of great anguish for our Mum. She tempted him with vegetables through green bean races and blind pepper tasting games but, for the most part, he only wanted sweets. I often joke that I became vegetarian around the age of six because of The Simpsons – that haunting image of the little lamb bleating ‘Please Lisa, I thought you loved me’ – but I wonder now if it wasn’t also a bid for parental attention. As we grew older, my eating habits became more constrained, while Pat’s former fussiness turned into an expansive and indiscriminating appetite. He had seen my hunger win praise, I had seen his restrictions garner concern.

In any case, no one ever refused Angel Delight. It experienced a revival in the nineties after a promotional campaign featuring Wallace and Gromit. On Christmas Day in 2024, Aardman Animations released a new Wallace and Gromit film, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which Pat watched while working his way through a party-sized cylinder of Twiglets – one of several – which he always ate during the festive period. In the spirit of Wallace and Gromit, we also ate plenty of cheese over the holidays, dipping toast into baked camembert and sharing Waitrose fromagerie selection boxes.

We were no longer so scrupulous about equitable divisions by the time we were adults.

Just over a year earlier, Pat had returned from six years in Montreal and moved into a flat four doors down from me in my building in London. While we were living in such close proximity, I would frequently knock on with a leftover tray bake or a stew. I did not have a freezer, and have always struggled to cook for one, so I plied Pat with food, like he might waste away without my intervention. Spag bols. Enchiladas. Blue cheese, shallot and chard pies. In return, he would brew thick, melty hot chocolate with bars of Tony’s Chocolonely. He baked apple pies with apples scrumped from the tree next to the stairs of our flats.

That year, I was sad all summer after a relationship had ended. Still, Pat knew how to coax me outside. ‘Pick blackberries with me.’ We harvested the fruit from the bramble in the garden, and ate it with my banana bread, his golden syrup and yoghurt. As adults, food became a shared language when words failed us.

Pat and I did not always get along. In fact, we argued a lot. Usually, I think, the crux of these arguments was that we both sought some acknowledgement from one another: I matter too. I have suffered too. Sometimes, during a dispute, Pat would say, ‘Hm, either way’, an economical phrase to end a disagreement without conceding. It was infuriating. After one row, I left a box of chocolates on his windowsill, but he did not answer my texts for several days. The next time we saw each other, we went on a walk around Brockwell Park. Ordinarily, we would pretend that nothing had happened and never return to the argument, but this time I forced an excruciating conversation.

‘It hurts my feelings when you shut me out,’ I said.

The next time we fought, Pat turned up at my door after a few days with a tray of potato dauphinoise. On another walk towards the end of the year, he told me that he thought we could talk about anything with each other now.

As Christmas approached, we decided to put together stockings for our parents. Amongst other things, Pat gifted them a bee decoration, a ceramic apple each, and pots of honey. I bought them honey, too, as well as a t-shirt with an oak tree graphic on it (for Dad) and a journal with an oak tree illustration on the front (for Mum). Something about the stockings made Dad tearful.

After we returned from our parents’ house in Stockport to London, we saw each other a few more times, once on New Year’s Eve, when we lit sparklers and watched the fireworks in the garden with our neighbours, and once incidentally when we were both leaving for the shops at the same time.

Pat was very excited about a new shop which sold pistachio spread and organic veggies. Walking home, vegetables flew out of his overloaded backpack. ‘My leeks!’ He exclaimed, comically, hands raised to the sky, as he scrambled to retrieve them. I had bought a loaf of sourdough. When we got back to our building, we broke the bread in two.

Less than a week later, Patrick was dead.

Patrick died of a heart attack on 6 January 2025, completely unexpectedly. Since moving back to the UK, he had become especially interested in English and Celtic folklore, inspired by our joint English and Irish heritage. The day before he died, he had been drawing a Dara knot, which symbolises the oak tree, a gateway to the Otherworld. Celtic knots are intricate never-ending lines that represent eternity, the interconnectedness of life, and the cyclical nature of existence – a striking image for Pat to have etched just hours before death.

In retrospect, other things he had done in that last year started to feel like signs. His return to London, our birthplace. His insistence that we visit Glastonbury Tor, considered a gateway between worlds or a ‘thin place’, en route to our Granny’s funeral in October. Even the stockings for our parents – bees being messengers of the dead in Celtic mythology, apples the fruit of the Otherworld. It felt as if somehow, unconsciously, he was preparing.

I think that I had been preparing, too. The night before I discovered Patrick’s body, I picked up a book from my over-stocked bookshelves and read the first fifty pages. It was I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson, which charts the aftermath of a sister who receives a phone call saying that her brother has suddenly died. In an entry in my diary dated seven weeks prior, I had written: ‘I am terrified about Pat learning to ride a motorbike. I feel like I can foresee his death; it’s awful … I need to exercise patience and enjoy him for his quirks etc. while he’s here.’

In May 2025 after he died, I went to Wales with my friend Sophie over Beltane, a time in the Celtic calendar when the veil between worlds is believed to be thin. Having dreamt of Patrick in the night, I awoke with a sense of living half in reality, half in a dream. It was a beautiful spring day, and Sophie had made sandwiches which we took with us to a nearby lake. They were among the best I have ever eaten: fresh white bread cut into thick, pillowy slices, melting butter, sharp cheddar, tart and chunky pickle. We were hungry for them after a swim and ate quietly, drying off in the heat of the sun.

I broke the silence to tell Sophie that, since Pat had died, I had been fluctuating between a feeling of complete ‘what’s the point’ nihilism, and then feeling like I wanted to savour every bite. ‘Maybe it will always be like this,’ I reflected. Nevertheless, right then, in that moment, I felt joy.

I wrote in my diary that night on 1 May: ‘Intense dreams about Pat. Sad morning. Took delicious cheese and pickle (with lots of butter) sandwiches down to the lake and swam. I told Sophie, “this is what life is about. This is all we have.” ’

Ten days later, I was back at home scrolling through my phone when a suggested poem popped up on Instagram called ‘The Gate’ by Marie Howe. The poem begins: ‘I had no idea that the gate I would step through / to finally enter this world / would be the space my brother’s body made’.

I felt a chill as I reached the end:

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

I couldn’t believe it. The cheese sandwich. The demonstrative pronoun – ‘this’.

My parents have their own experiences of ‘cosmic coincidences’, as we have come to call them – Yeats poems, circumzenithal arcs, asking an oak tree for a sign, receiving a clap of thunder. There are different ways to explain this phenomenon. Psychologists might call it apophenia, the human tendency to perceive patterns in disparate information. A physical explanation might be entanglement, what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’. Entanglement is the idea that once two particles have become intimately linked, they will share a single quantum state, regardless of the distance separating them. In other words, they will continue to interact outside of space and time. Others might call this God.

However, the Celtic understanding of the world has suited me best in grief, the idea that time is not linear, that everything is interconnected. Through Patrick’s interest in our ancestral mythologies, it was as if he had unknowingly carved out a narrative to help us make sense of his sudden death.

We spread Pat’s ashes at the Drake Stone in Northumberland, somewhere we used to go as children, another thin place. At the Drake Stone, I placed an apple on a cairn. I drizzled honey over the rocks, the dandelion goo oozing slowly from the jar. Finally, as in the Irish tradition, I poured whiskey onto the ground.

After he had dispersed, we ate Tunnock’s Teacakes, his favourite snack. I took a bite. ‘I don’t actually want this,’ I laughed. ‘Give it to Pat,’ Dad replied, so I set the half-eaten confection down on the cairn, an offering.

It feels impossible to write about Patrick without guilt. I do not have his permission, and his is not my story to tell. When I wrote his eulogy, it felt absurd trying to flatten such a rich life into 2,000 words, but I wanted to transcribe as much as I could remember in case my brain could not contain it. I continue to feel this urge to record and catalogue. But I cannot write him alive again.

For Christmas 2025, our first without him, we ate our meals as a family of four, on a table set for three. He is never not in the room.

On New Year’s Eve, I moved out of mine and Pat’s old building and into a new flat with a freezer, where leftovers will no longer feel painful. I brought Patrick’s pans with me. Every time I cook, I think of him.

Credits

Ella Bucknall is a writer and illustrator based in SE London who specialises in graphic narratives. Ella is currently working on a graphic biography of Virginia Woolf and studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at King’s College London. Ella’s clients include the FT, BBC, and TLS, among other publications.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, we are publishing a graphic essay by Ella Bucknall about eating through childhood, and grief. Ella’s essay has been laid out as an image file. To read the essay in a standard text format instead click here.

We recommend reading today’s piece in your browser.

We have sold three-quarters of our print run for Issue 2, themed around ‘Bad Food’. You can buy a copy here.

Subscribe now

Credits

Ella Bucknall is a writer and illustrator based in SE London who specialises in graphic narratives. Ella is currently working on a graphic biography of Virginia Woolf and studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at King’s College London. Ella’s clients include the FT, BBC, and TLS, amongst other publications.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Robin Craig writes about the role that food plays in his sex life, and the broader connections between food and kink.

In other news, there’s just one week left to apply for the British Library’s Food Stories Fellowship Award. The winner of this fellowship will receive £1500 to support them to use the British Library’s food collections to produce a piece of new writing on some aspect of contemporary food or drink culture, which will be published in Vittles. More details are available here (deadline 27 April).

Today’s essay is free to all subscribers. To support our work, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including our restaurant coverage. You can also support us by buying Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, which is available here.

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There is a pile of pad thai in front of me, ordered from a delivery app and hastily dumped onto a plate. It’s still hot – steam rises in tendrils, the noodles glistening, coiled and ready like snakes, in the low light of my bedroom. The sight makes my stomach churn. I petulantly turn my head away and say that I don’t want it anymore.

For a moment, there is silence. My palms are clammy and my breath comes in short and shallow; I know there will be consequences for my transgression. Slowly, my companion’s hand finds its way to the back of my neck, where it rests in a display of both care and domination. He sighs deeply, as though disappointed.

‘Eat it,’ he says. The hand on my neck squeezes slightly. Again I say ‘No’ and try to turn my head away, but the hand slides up into my hair and grips it tightly, then pulls me back towards the plate. He scoops up a forkful of noodles and pushes it against my lips.

‘Eat it,’ he repeats, and I relent, opening my mouth for him. The pad thai is salty-sweet on my tongue and slides easily down my throat. He watches me chew, and swallow, then raises another forkful to my lips for us to begin again.

*

This was a pre-arranged kink meet-up (also known as a scene) I did a few years ago, in which I had explicitly requested to be treated poorly. Specifically, I wanted to be fed – or rather, forced to eat – and my scene partner, whom I knew well, enthusiastically agreed. The scene was part of a wider dynamic of domination and submission: I willingly gave him power over me in exchange for a space where I could relinquish autonomy and drift, easily, on the decisions made by someone else. Within its confines, there in my bedroom, I could pass control of my life over to his competent hands for a few hours, including what to say, what to do – and, crucially, what to eat.

It was not the first time I had asked someone to control my food intake. Over the past decade, I have sought partners who have variously ordered for me at restaurants, held my hair back and forced me to down a pint of water, and tied me to a chair and fed me cake as part of erotic play. Each of these scenarios was requested and pre-negotiated, and each fulfilled a need in me: often, my partners have play-acted ‘forcing’ me to eat foods I like and enabled me to indulge in my desires. I have a relentless drive to give control of my food over to someone else – I have, in a sense, hungered for it.

My proclivity for being fed is defined as a kink, as sexual activity or desire that falls outside social norms. Kink is, however, difficult to define on its own terms: as soon as you land on a stable and steady definition, it begins to morph again into something new. (It is also relatively common: in a Canadian study, nearly half of the 1,040 individuals surveyed expressed an interest in an ‘unusual’ sexual desire like voyeurism or masochism, while a third had tried out an unusual sexual practice at least once.)

Of the many kinks that involve food, one of the better-known ones is feederism – sexual attraction and gratification related to fatness or gaining weight, often involving highly eroticised feeding sessions in which one partner feeds the other ‘unhealthy’ or high-fat food with the sole intention of inducing weight gain. Beyond feederism, food shows up across the kink spectrum in various ways, whether in softer acts of sensory deprivation (think: feeding a blindfolded partner erotically charged foods like whipped cream or strawberries), sploshing (being covered in gooey substances like pudding or pies) or as an element of pet play, in which one partner play-acts as an animal and may be fed treats for good behaviour. In my case, food is part of a Dom/sub kink dynamic I have enjoyed with various partners over the past decade, where food acts as a tool of control.

Since antiquity, food has been associated with sexuality, pleasure and carnality, with phallic gourds and sapphic figs cropping up throughout art history, and the connection remains strong in the contemporary imagination. So, the link between food and kink is not particularly surprising: kink takes the often unspoken associations, power dynamics and desires that are already present in culture and renders them visible, tangible.

‘Our cultural relationship with food is very complex,’ Anastasiia Fedorova, author of Second Skin: Inside the World of Fetish, Kink and Deviant Desire, tells me. ‘It’s a cornerstone of feelings like shame and desire, especially if we think of diet culture.’ Food also has ‘huge associations with control and agency, which can be eroticised by voluntarily and consensually giving that agency away,’ she continues. ‘It can be a way to let go of shame and control.’

Certainly, that is true in my case: food has personal associations with both shame and indulgence that, when forced upon me, are fertile ground for erotic enjoyment. To give control to someone else in this manner can be intensely vulnerable – they can do what they like with you, and letting someone else feed you is allowing them to put whatever they want inside your body. With this vulnerability comes intimacy and care: the person doing the feeding provides an almost parental act of nourishment. For my part, in a culture in which our worth is consistently defined by our bodies, our weight and our diets, giving over responsibility for what goes in my mouth can be blissful. The constant awareness of calories – and the imperative to make ‘good decisions’ and ‘healthy choices’ – slips away, and I am, for a moment, left to simply exist and eat. Playing at refusing to eat and then being ‘forced’ to, as with the pad thai, is merely a way of pushing at the boundaries and being pleasurably reminded of my place within them.

Feeding someone during a scene can bring just as much enjoyment. A friend of mine who likes baking for people as part of kink dynamics tells me that she enjoys the mixture of care and discomfort. ‘When someone is eating [something you’ve made], they’re in a very vulnerable place,’ she says. ‘You’re watching the person eat, watching their response, and making sure they finish it. It’s not an explicit domination, but it’s a subtle and quite powerful one.’ Gender factors into it, too: she describes her baking kink as a form of ‘empowered feminine eroticisation’ that takes a traditionally feminine role and reconstitutes it as a domineering form of care.

Fundamentally, this heady mixture of care, shame and control is at the heart of kink and our cultural relationship with food. To be fed is to be sustained, looked after and, often, to be loved. Kink hits many of the same notes. When I ask someone to feed me as part of a scene, I am seeking their attention and care just as much as their control. Truly comprehending what makes a person tick – and how to provide that for them, safely – takes significant effort. It’s an act of devotion similar to cooking a dish for someone that includes their favourite flavours. Certainly what Fedorova says about the importance of care in kink could just as easily apply to making a meal for a loved one: ‘You take your time understanding the person and they take time articulating their boundaries and desires. Then you care for them in a way which maybe they can’t be cared for elsewhere.’ That is, perhaps, all we can hope for from another person – regardless of whether they are feeding us, fucking us, or both.

Credits

Robin Craig is a sex, health and culture writer based in London. He has previously written for the Guardian, Huck, and Feeld, among others, and is currently working on his first book, Perverts: A History (John Murray Press, 2028). He runs the Substack Body Hunger and can be found on Instagram (@robin__craig).

Olivia Sterling (born 1996, Peterborough) earned her BA in Fine Art from the University of Derby in 2018 and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2020. She has had solo exhibitions at Dirimart Pera (2026); East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts (2026); Meyer Riegger (2024); Goldsmiths CCA (2021); and Cob Gallery (2021); and participated in group exhibitions including ‘I’m so gay for you’ (miłość gallery, 2025), ‘Rage Comics’ (Huxley Parlour, 2023), ‘Out Here’ (Steve Turner Gallery, 2023), ‘Saints and Sinners’ (Guts Gallery, 2023), ‘The Object Stares Back’ (Tube Culture Hall, 2023) and ‘London Grads Now’ (Saatchi Gallery, 2020). Residencies include HQI Summer Residency (2020) and Extended Contexts, National Trust IIam, UK (2016). Olivia lives and works in London.

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Further Reading

• ‘Disaster Cooking’ by Robin Craig

• ‘Sweetness and Substance’ by Robin Craig

• Hannah Levene on the role of food in lesbian feminist literature

Good afternoon, and welcome back to Vittles. First of all, thank you so much to everyone who came out to the Food in Print Fair at the weekend to support independent food magazines. We hope you found a new favourite publication, or were inspired, perhaps, to start your own. A huge thanks too to FatBoy Zine and Pit who put it on with us. We’re already thinking about next year…

The fair means we have officially sold out of Issue 1 of our print magazine, but we do have some copies of Issue 2 left. If you haven’t got it yet, then make sure you don’t miss out.

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Unfortunately, today’s newsletter is about a subject that is becoming a running theme in London: evictions of small food businesses. Frankly, in the last ten years of writing about food in the city, we have never known it to be so bad. In October last year, we reported on the evictions at Castle Square, which included one of London’s best restaurants – Kaieteur Kitchen. Last month, it was Brixton Plaza. Last week, we reported from the protests at the Ridley Road Indoor Market.

Today’s newsletter by Zoe Suen reports on perhaps the biggest story of all: the proposed evictions at Queensway Market, which houses some of central London’s best restaurants, including many we have recommended over the past decade. What these evictions show is that, despite acclaim from food publications or hidden-gem reels, the survival of some of London’s most accomplished restaurants is dependent on precarious, short-term contracts and the whims of landlords and developers. There is a petition to sign here and at the end of this email, but do please support these businesses in person: both with your continued custom, and, when the times comes, by showing up for them.

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In 2024, Rafidah ‘Fidah’ Aslam left the West Midlands to set up Kampong Bites, a casual Malaysian food stall in London’s Queensway Market that serves nasi lemak, char kuey teow, and teh tarik. Ten years earlier, Fidah, a single mother, had quit her engineering job to sell Malaysian curry puffs from home, enabling her to spend more quality time with her sons. After selling her pastries in Aldridge and Nottingham, she wanted to try her luck in the capital.

She was drawn to the indoor market, which is at the heart of Queensway’s ‘Malaysian village’, partly because of its diversity (Queensway is also home to Greek, Russian, Brazilian and Arab communities) and partly by the low costs, which made it a hub for accessibly priced and acclaimed food. Inside its dense maze of ‘anything-goes’ vendors selling iPhone repairs and bargain haircuts, you can find beloved restaurants like Uzbek Corner, Brazilian House and Syrian spot Abu Maher. By opening in the market, Fidah was joining a winning Malaysian contingent headed by Cham Kampung Boy and, of course, Normah’s, which for years has been touted as one of London’s best restaurants.

Soon after Kampong Bites opened, Fidah began to hear rumours that the market might be in danger of closing. This was nothing new: the market has, for decades, yo-yoed between closure and a charmingly chaotic brand of business as usual. There were often investors sniffing around and contractors taking measurements, but nothing ever came of this interest, longtime tenants assured Fidah.

But in early March, the management team warned her in person that ‘the place 100% would close’. A fortnight later, on 20 March, traders were served break notices stating that their leases would be terminated on 23 April by solicitors acting for their landlord, Happybadge Limited (a company founded by Bourne Capital, which counts Ronnie Scotts among its property portfolio). Since the notices were served, a one-month extension has been granted, meaning that the market is now scheduled to close for good on 23 May. Most of the tenants are speaking to a solicitor, although management is offering to relocate those who do not do so to a stretch of stores around the back for four-to-six months.

When I spoke with Fidah last week, she was packing. ‘I found this place and put my heart into it,’ she tells me, scrolling through photos of the renovations she paid for with £30,000 in life savings. ‘It’s heartbreaking.’ Despite the substantial personal investment she made in the site, as a recent tenant, Fidah says that she isn’t entitled to much compensation.

The traders have learned since being served notice that at least a chunk of the market is destined to become a Whole Foods (the Amazon-owned retailer is on an opening spree, with another new outpost planned a ten-minute walk away in Notting Hill Gate; there’s already a branch within walking distance on Kensington High Street). A rumour is circulating that the remainder of the site will become a gym. The fate of Normah’s, Cham Kampung Boy, Riz Garden and Uzbek Corner – which have been written about extensively in this publication or elsewhere as being among the best food stalls in the capital – remains uncertain.

Queensway Market is the latest, and most high-profile, potential casualty in a wave of redevelopments targeting London’s most diverse and affordable indoor markets – from Brixton Plaza to Ridley Road. Located amid some of London’s most expensive real estate, the market is a curious anomaly – a ramshackle, suburban mall right in the centre of the city. It was originally part of the Queens Ice Club, the 1930s predecessor to Queens Skate Dine Bowl (which is now located next door), and was converted to retail use in the late nineties. For nearly two decades, it operated on a series of temporary planning permissions, which effectively placed it in a state of perennial limbo.

Consistent lease renewals helped Queensway Market to survive despite opposition at times from Westminster Council and some locals, while its temporary standing kept it affordable for independent traders. However, this lack of long-term security also left the site vulnerable when a wave of gentrification hit the area in the 2010s – a few years after the market was acquired by Happybadge in 2007.

In 2013, a consortium led by Meyer Bergman (now known as MARK Capital Management) and the Brunei-backed fund SIAHAF consolidated much of Queensway’s real estate, including the landmark £115 million Whiteleys shopping centre (now rebranded as The Whiteley). By the end of the year, the consortium controlled around 75% of Queensway’s properties, paving the way for large-scale redevelopment.

Now, opposite Queensway Station sits Park Modern, a £500 million apartment block, on the ground floor of which resides Jeremy King’s restaurant The Park. Although some hoardings are still up at The Whiteley, open businesses include a Third Space gym (somewhat ironically named), a gallery, a Guillam coffee branch, an Everyman Cinema and a branch of the five-star Six Senses hotel. The price of the luxury apartments in the upper floors of the former shopping centre – with one-bed flats going for £1.85 million a five-bed penthouse on the market for almost £40 million – gives a sense of the target customers for gentrified Queensway businesses.

‘We actually like the grit and grunginess of Queensway,’ Neil Jacobs, the former CEO of Six Senses Hotel Group, said in an interview with Spear’s last January. ‘Although the gentrification of the area will be well received, we don’t want it to change too much.’

The effects of redevelopment are also visible elsewhere. Along Queensway, other sites are in limbo; opposite The Whiteley, storefronts are boarded up, destined for demolition. Having lived in the area for years and eaten at its restaurants more times than I can count, I can’t help but see Queensway Market’s fate as a harbinger of the future for other independent restaurants in the vicinity, establishments that are increasingly anomalous in central London as VCs and developers mould more and more neighbourhoods into a whitewashed, palatable urban pockets infused with cherrypicked Euro-aesthetics for good measure (case in point: the Queensway Steering Group, which includes Bourne Capital, has laid out plans for pavement dining en terrasse).

The irony is obvious, but staggering: the virality and acclaim of places like Normah’s is proof that the very things developers are working to ape – culture, community, character – are most concentrated in the very sites they’re gutting. As Mohammed Ali Salha put it, Queensway Market is ‘a place that’s doing what The Whiteley or other developments and food halls hope to accomplish (and rarely do), which is to incubate unique, imaginative food talent’.

And though the market’s history of temporary planning permissions discouraged landlords from investing in the site, its vendors have done the opposite. Like Kampong Bites’s Fidah, Zafarjon Odinaev, who opened Queensway Market’s Uzbek Corner with his brother, invested heavily in his unit. He estimates that he’s poured over £100,000 into the kitchen and interiors. Zafarjon, like almost all the other vendors I spoke to, lives locally. ‘We built a community over ten years, and now we have to tell them we are closing. It is not enough time; it is not acceptable,’ he says. ‘As tenants, we should know what’s going on, but it seems we are the ones running after them.’

As I speak to vendors, I glimpse the market’s ecosystem at work, as well as its place in the wider organism that is Queensway. Fidah takes me to chat with Muna Noor, who for eight years has helped run the Sudanese spot Zanoor Café, the go-to for coffee, karak tea and basbousa for those leaving the market’s community mosque. Riz Garden’s Michelle – whose Cantonese desserts, such as red bean soup and black sesame soup, have sustained my cravings since she opened in mid-2025 – gets her screens fixed by fellow traders. Luai Gabani, who’s leased a spot for computer repairs since 2002, takes his family to Normah’s, Uzbek Corner and Zanoor Café. Mohamad, who has run the market’s juice stall since 2009, tells me his customers live near Joe & the Juices but buy his drinks instead.

‘You might be able to get better coffee elsewhere, but here, you aren’t a stranger,’ Khaled Heidar, a longtime customer at Zanoor Café, says. ‘You’re treated with care and love. It’s like walking into your own house.’

Though they have loyal friends and clients on their sides, Mohammad Zaiaznoorrul Shah, who serves Malaysian classics like nasi lemak at Cham Kampung Boy, echoes a common sentiment: the vendors aren’t equipped to fight the evictions. ‘I’m upset, but what can I do? I’m just a small potato. I have to look for somewhere else,’ he tells me.

Like Fidah, Michelle and Zafarjon, Mohammad has built a community of customers through word of mouth and social media. But also like the others, he’s struggling to hatch a plan that doesn’t entail high rents. Fidah paid £450 a week, electricity included, in her first year at the market, and £472 in her second – a fraction of what it costs to rent a commercial space in most of Central.

Amid the ongoing spate of evictions across London, Queensway was proof (perhaps most of all) that uncurated food spaces could exist in the heart of the capital and thrive, not in spite of their unglamorous locations but because of them. But as the other markets hang in the balance, some of the best restaurants in the city face the very real possibility of having nowhere to go.

‘There is no point if I have to sell a dish for more than £20 – people won’t come anymore,’ Mohammad says. For him, the market was always meant to be a stepping stone to a permanent space, but if he can’t find a reasonably priced alternative, his plan is to go fully online. It’s an option Michelle – who is looking for spaces in Queensway and Paddington, as she doesn’t want to lose her local clientele – is also weighing.

‘Some vendors say they’ll put money together and share a space, someone suggested renting a big space to all move to,’ she says. ‘But it’s all talk so far, all up in the air.’

A petition to stop Amazon from turning the market into a Whole Foods currently has amassed over 1,000 signatures. But as things currently stand, London is set to lose one of its most vital food and community hubs – one that is so its own suspended time and place that it couldn’t exist anywhere else. Once Queensway Market is gone, there won’t be anything like it left.

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Credits

Zoe Suen is a Hong Kong-born, London-based writer covering topics including fashion, beauty and food. You can find more of her writing on her newsletter Floss.

Zaineb Abelque is a photographer and artist whose work explores belonging, spirituality, ritual, cultural memory and identity. Through documentary photography, Abelque creates a visual record of people and place. Capturing moments from everyday life, she tells individual and collective stories, as personal observations meet shared experience.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today we have a longread by Dora Taylor, who reports from Jamaica on how food systems and farmers are faring in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa.

A quick reminder that we are partnering with the British Library Food Awards again this year on the Food Stories Fellowship Award. The winner of this fellowship will receive £1500 to support them to use the British Library’s food collections to produce a piece of new writing on some aspect of contemporary food or drink culture, which will be published in Vittles. The deadline for applications is 27 April. More details are available here.

Finally, we have sold the bulk of our print run for Issue 2, themed around ‘Bad Food’. You can buy a copy here.

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How Hurricane Melissa Affected Food and Farming in Jamaica

Report by Dora Taylor. Photographs by Ailsa Jones.

It’s the week before Christmas in Hopewell, a small coastal town in the parish of Hanover in northwest Jamaica. The town is bustling, cars stacked impossibly across side streets, people yelling greetings across the road. In front of me, a man leans out the window of his battered pick-up truck, signalling to someone walking past. ‘How ya family?’ he shouts. ‘Nobody dead!’, the friend replies, beaming.

It’s two months since Hurricane Melissa, the strongest to ever hit the island, made landfall in Jamaica on 28 October 2025. In Hopewell, most businesses have only just reopened, though shelves are sparsely stocked, several stores have no power, and shops are only taking cash (with no functioning cash machines nearby). Nevertheless, life bubbles defiantly on. I smell frying chicken and the pungent ocean tang of fish tea from the nearby street-food vendors who have returned to business, but I cannot find ackee, plantain or soursop, which would be plentiful right now if the storm hadn’t stripped them from the trees. Most of all, I have been craving the fragrant burn of country pepper. So, when I spot a man selling the small, wrinkled bulbs in yellow and green, I am elated. I ask about the price: four thousand Jamaican dollars (~£19) per pound.

I am joined by other shoppers when I exclaim in protest at this fourfold increase, but the seller remains firm. Beside me, Bernadine, who’s selling cabbage, carrot and scallion, is watching. ‘That will all get wasted because they’re selling it for too high a price,’ she tells me, ‘and people hungry right now. It don’t make no sense.’ Since the hurricane, food scarcity has caused prices to jump: cucumbers and yams have doubled in price; carrots, cabbage and scallion have all tripled; sweet peppers have gone from $100 to $1000 dollars per pound (~50p to £5). Because Bernadine has had to increase her prices, her offering is small; she doesn’t see the point in stocking crops like country pepper that people can’t afford.

The proportion of foreign produce in the market has also increased. Although Jamaica has long been heavily dependent on imported produce, around 60% of this has historically gone to hotels, restaurants and institutions; local markets usually stock a majority of of domestic crops, often sold by the farmers who’ve grown them. But since the hurricane, Bernadine tells me that ‘Our own onion mash up, our own potato mash up’ – she gestures round the market – ‘all the onions you see here are from Canada.’ None of Bernadine’s produce is imported, but another vendor shows me her fist-sized American tomatoes, which sit alongside the smaller Jamaican ones. She also has Canadian cabbages, which are light green and smooth, compared to the Jamaican ones, which are darker with wrinklier leaves.

Hurricanes are common in Jamaica, but the intensity of Melissa was unique – a direct effect of record-high sea temperatures. An estimated 279,000 people were displaced, and around 70% of people lost electricity, some of which was still out last month. The western part of the island was affected most severely, including the parish of St Elizabeth, which, known as the ‘Breadbasket of Jamaica’, produces more food than any other parish. The Category 5 hurricane’s 185 mph winds and heavy rains flooded fields and also toppled or destroyed trees. Over 1.25 million livestock died and staple foods were wiped out, with 90% of banana and plantain crops and 70% of yams across the island gone. In the immediate aftermath, communities relied on stockpiled goods and emergency aid and, as farmers rushed to replant or simply waited for floodwater to recede, shops remained closed for weeks.

My trips from London to Jamaica are normally characterised by my seeking out of favourite foods. But as I packed for my trip in late November, I knew that this would not be a normal visit. When I first heard from my brother-in-law after the hurricane, he said there were ‘no vegetables anywhere’; my sister asked me to bring ‘easy-to-cook foods’ in my suitcase. Requests from family for solar panels, water filters and clothing were added to pleas for seeds, which I stashed throughout my luggage: beetroot, pumpkin, cucumber, courgette, lettuce and chilli. I boarded the plane, deciding to find out more about what people were eating, and how farmers were coping, in the wake of the hurricane.

‘It was a crazy experience’

To eat Jamaica’s food is to learn the island’s history. In kitchens and restaurants, you will taste the movement of people, crops, animals and recipes that have been incorporated into the rich batter of Jamaican cuisine. Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and saltfish, pairs the fruit of the ackee tree – brought to Jamaica from West Africa – with salted cod, a food brought from the North Atlantic by colonisers to feed enslaved people. Jamaican curries are seasoned with scallions and country pepper, a chilli brought from Central America to Jamaica by the country’s indigenous Taíno people (who also originated jerk cooking, and who were almost wiped out by Spanish colonisers). Jamaica has continuously composted its histories of erasure and subjugation into vibrant and delightful dishes. The country’s motto – ‘Out of many, one people’ – could equally be ‘Out of many, one plate’.

However, long before Melissa’s disruption, the food system in Jamaica harboured many dysfunctions. Food is disproportionately expensive and import-heavy: in 2019, eating a balanced diet would cost someone on minimum wage 44% of their income, even when buying the cheapest available foods. The island also imports over 60% of its food. In an article in national newspaper The Gleaner, Carolyn Cooper writes, ‘Wi love foreign food too much. Coconut oil an powder did bad enough. From all bout: Trinidad an Tobago, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia an Sri Lanka. Now dem a import coconut water? From Guyana? Wa mek?’

This reliance on imports has always struck me as strange, but it is a feature of a colonial methodology that has its roots in the plantation slavery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Jamaican land was captured for the violent extraction and international distribution of sugar, while goats, chickens and preserved fish were brought from the Global North to feed those growing cash crops. While enslaved people and indigenous communities kept non-extractive food cultures alive in their homes, growing heirloom crops and sharing meals in their communities, the partial severance of people from the land restricted their agency and self-sufficiency. Layered onto this are unfavourable international trade agreements and an increasingly intensified global food system, all of which have caused food imports to increase steadily (while in 1950, food imports to Jamaica were a little over a third of the value of exports, in 2022, imports outweighed exports by four times). This means that Jamaica is heavily reliant on external markets, even more so in the face of disaster.

At the heart of this fragile system are farmers. A few days after I visit Bernadine’s stall, I drive to the parish of St Elizabeth – a thirty-mile journey from Hopewell that takes three hours on winding hilltop roads – to speak to Jessie, a cabbage farmer, about how she’s been recovering from the hurricane. She meets us on the roadside wearing wellington boots and a wide smile. The level of destruction is much more extreme here than in Hanover; most people’s roofs have blown off and been replaced by sheets of tarpaulin. Churches and schools are piles of rubble. Houses lie collapsed like stacks of cards, and flooding makes many roads impassable.

‘It was a crazy experience,’ Jessie tells me about the day that Melissa landed. ‘We had to evacuate the building through the window … and then when I go to the farm, I realise that I don’t even have a farm anymore.’ Before the hurricane, Jessie (who goes by ‘Farmer Girl Jessie’, but is Sherka Braham when she’s not in the fields) employed ten people and sold her produce wholesale in the local town of New Market. ‘It brings me peace to see my field just green and beautiful … Cabbage is a part of me,’ she says. Her field had 40,000 cabbages in it before it was flooded; all were lost. Following the hurricane, she replanted seedlings salvaged from the rubble of her greenhouse. On the day we visit, I comment that they are looking healthy, but Jessie corrects me. ‘There is some sort of residue left in the soil [from] the hurricane water,’ she says. Parts of St Elizabeth received a metre of rainfall, and the parish capital of Black River experienced storm surges of up to sixteen feet. Soils across the parish were polluted by floodwaters containing saltwater, sewage, chemicals and debris. ‘[It’s] burning the roots of the plant,’ Jessie adds.

An hour away, in Santa Cruz, Dean and Michelle’s plot has also flooded. They are permacultural homesteaders, cultivating crops to feed themselves and selling herbal remedies. ‘This whole area, it looked like a lake … [it] ran into the house, up to the knees,’ Michelle tells me. As we walk around, they list the trees that they’ve lost: annatto, mango, ackee, banana, breadfruit, coconut. ‘Our first thing was needing a chainsaw … because everywhere, the trees were down.’

Insufficient Government Assistance

The 70,000 farmers across the country affected by the hurricane have been provided insufficient help by the Jamaican Government. The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining promised in November to ‘start the distribution of $40 million worth of seeds through our Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA)’; however, by December, this has not had a tangible impact. Jessie says she ‘received a few packs’ of seeds from RADA (‘It’s not much, but I’m grateful’), but she didn’t get to choose the crop. When I speak to Valderine Biggs, a farmer near Gutters in St Elizabeth, she tells me that ‘RADA don’t really give [her] anything’. Valderine lost three-quarters of her chickens after Hurricane Beryl in 2024, but this ‘didn’t warrant assistance’, RADA told her. 40% of the country’s egg-producing chickens were lost in Hurricane Melissa and 41,000 hectares of farmland damaged, but government intervention for farmers has fallen well short of what is needed. In its absence, NGOs like the Jamaica Organic Agriculture Movement (JOAM) have provided short-term assistance, lending machinery to help with clear-ups.

Government food provision was also inadequate. Valderine tells me that army vehicles delivering food missed out her community: ‘They just drive straight through.’ Instead, communities self-organised and charities, again, stepped in. People spent Sundays travelling from as far as Kingston to communities in St Elizabeth and neighbouring Westmoreland in order to help with rebuilding, purchasing water, rice and saltfish along the way. Jessie tells me her community ‘received help from many different organisations bring[ing] food items’.

Chefs have also played a key role – not just in feeding people, but in keeping morale high. International charity World Central Kitchen coordinated the delivery of a staggering 40,000 hot meals every day from the start of November (they would deliver over 6 million meals by the end of January). Menus were designed and cooked by local chefs, who were paid by the charity. Local cooks everywhere stepped up too. My friend Barry owns a cook-shop near Lucea, beloved for its traditional puddings and fried chicken. The cook-shop’s roof was lost in the hurricane, but with help from his neighbours, Barry was soon back to cooking, making just one pudding a day instead of his usual three. By offering smaller slices for a lower price, at times even trading his meals for other goods, he ensured that everyone could eat.

‘I can’t afford to lose my crop to pests due to going organic’

One hefty intervention that the government has made is a chemical one. After Melissa, agrichemical company Newport-Fersan gave $25 million of chemical fertiliser to the country, with the agricultural minister praising them as ‘one of … our most loyal partners in the agricultural sector’. Government policy promotes the most potent pesticides as a response to storms: ‘Once you are anticipating … increased rainfall, from your hurricane[s] or storms, you want to make the switch over to systemic pesticides,’ reads a 2024 statement from RADA.

When I ask Michelle about this, she tells me Jamaican food is ‘pretty, but it dutty. We don’t grow clean.’ Jamaica has long depended on agrichemicals manufactured and distributed by multinationals such as Syngenta and BASF. A 2019 report by the Caribbean Poison Information Network (CARPIN) and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) notes there have been ‘detected pesticide residues in soil and water since the 1990s’, including lethal levels of highly hazardous pesticides such as diazinon. ‘You go to the farm store. You get seeds that are treated, and chemicals. But if you ask for anything natural, them nah have it,’ says Michelle. Valderine echoes this: ‘Lots of farmers would want to go organic’ but ‘there is not enough organic products in the farm store’. So, she uses Caratrax and Sevin, broad-spectrum pesticides that harm life indiscriminately (Sevin contains some of the sixty-six pesticide ingredients used in Jamaica that are banned in other countries).

Pesticide manufacturers make profits at all levels of the food system: Jamaican company GraceKennedy – one of the country’s leading distributors of pesticides – is also an international food conglomerate whose products (ranging from beans to sodas) populate shelves all over the world. The agrichemical lobby puts overwhelming pressure on farmers to reach for chemicals to protect against disasters, despite their high price tag: Valderine tells me that ‘a small bottle of chemicals’ costs $5000 (~£25), just under a third of the weekly minimum wage.

Neither do the chemicals always work. ‘Sometimes we don’t get what we pay for. Sometimes our farms are infested totally by pests,’ Jessie says. Despite this, when I drive around St Elizabeth in December, many people are wearing knapsack sprayers, and Jessie tells me that she’s used additional pesticides in the wake of the storm. ‘I can’t afford to lose my crop to pests due to going organic,’ she says.

‘These are important skills’: Relying on Indigenous and Community Knowledge

When I’m back in wintry London in January , I phone Valderine. She is planning to plant melons ‘which the price is going to be good for soon’, but it is the dry season in Jamaica, so she is fixing her irrigation system, which will take ‘some weeks’. As she speaks, I am hoping that her price predictions pay off. As if reading my mind, she tells me there is a glut of cucumbers, tomatoes and cabbages, after a flurry of planting in November. ‘People are hungry, but vegetables are rotting in the ground,’ she says. ‘The government should be taking the extra and giving it to schools. They should be tinning up the tomatoes, but there is nowhere to process them.’

Though Jamaicans are at the mercy of dysfunctional systems, they possess a deep well of ecological knowledge, passed down from African and indigenous Caribbean cultures. ‘What the older farmers used to do, which would have been considered organic … [was] just using what was on the land, using ashes and different means to fertilise [their] plants,’ Latoya Panton, a farmer in Eastern Jamaica, tells me. In the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, Latoya started ‘Seeds of Hope’, sending free seeds to farmers around the country. This was well received; in the second phase of the project, she is focusing on heirloom seeds and ‘teaching [farmers] to save the seeds, then pass them on … each one, teach one.’ These skills are important, she says: ‘should there ever come a time where we just don’t have access to the seeds or the fertilisers coming in, then what’s going to happen?’ At Source Farm in St Thomas, Nicola Shirley-Phillips teaches permaculture design, rooted in indigenous practices from Africa and Central America. Her focus this year is on supporting farmers across the island in rebuilding their farms to be storm resilient. ‘We found that farms using organic and permaculture principles fare better [after storms],’ she says.

Many still use these methods in their home gardens, even if they depend on chemicals for their farms. When I gifted Jessie some heirloom seeds that I brought from the UK, she said she would ‘plant these in my home garden’, which is ‘more organic’. Valderine, meanwhile, intends to build permanent beds, as she knows they are more resilient against floodwater. She is already making organic applications and saving seed from her callaloo plants. Despite the industrial and chemical-dependent practices being pushed by government institutions, heritage crops and techniques remain a cherished cultural value.

Jamaica is celebrated globally for its food, and its diaspora keeps versions of the cuisine alive. Yet food producers in Jamaica are barely surviving, and its inhabitants struggle to access food that is healthy, local and ecologically grown. These problems are entrenched within the global food systems that implicate us all. Like many countries in the Global South, Jamaica continues to be pushed towards the kind of development that the Global North has modelled, while neoliberal Western capitalism is already eating its own tail. In the midst of increasing wealth inequality and exacerbated climate change, vibrant food cultures – and the producers and ecosystems that sustain them – are slowly being asphyxiated.

At the start of 2026, communities are practising getting on without government support. Wealthier people are buying generators and becoming refrigeration hubs for neighbours. Those who have chickens left are gifting bowls of eggs. These acts of generosity and collaboration are crucial for survival, and provide hope in times of crisis. Farmers and communities clearly have the capacity to adapt to challenging times, but the food system cannot rely only on their resilience.

When reflecting on the hurricane back in December, Jessie said, ‘I’m grateful I have life and I can pick up the pieces. You have to keep moving, one foot and the next.’ But when she posts a video online a few months later, I sense her optimism is wearing thin: ‘There is always an issue,’ she says. Farming is a hugely risky livelihood in Jamaica. With the prospect of increased weather instability in the future, farmers require better infrastructure, more autonomy and long-term solutions that decentre corporations. ‘Being a farmer is a gamble not everyone can win,’ Valderine tells me. ‘But a bird doesn’t cry when he loses a feather, because the feather can grow back.’

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Support Jamaican Farmers

• Jessie’s Go Fund Me can be found here; her Instagram is @FarmerGirlJessie.

• You can find Michelle at @mitchelledawn on Instagram and Michelle and Dean’s farmstead and regenerative forest garden at @omowalefarmsteadjamaica.

• You can find and support Seeds of Hope on Instagram.

• Source Farm is on Instagram; you can also donate to them.

Related Reading

• ‘Bittersweet Waters’: How British dam engineering policies created food scarcity in Pakistan by Zubair Ahmed Pirzada

• ‘Sowing Solidarity: How Lebanon’s Wineries Remain Rooted’ by Farrah Berrou

• This is our Indigenous Food’ by Makepeace Sitlhou

Credits

Dora Taylor is a freelance writer and chef, and an activist working around social justice and sovereignty in food systems. She writes journalism and poetry, and makes podcasts as part of the Farmerama Radio team. She is based between Hanover, Jamaica and London, UK.

Ailsa Jones is a freelance photographer based in Negril, Jamaica. Her Instagram is @ailsajonesphoto.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A last reminder that the Food in Print Magazine Fair is tomorrow at St Giles Cripplegate. There will be more than fifty independent food magazines to browse, along with pastries from Lucky Yu Bakery. You can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend – no tickets needed. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Before we get into today’s newsletter, a quick update on the situation at Brixton Plaza. Evictions of small food businesses are happening all across London right now – we are currently working on four separate articles about them, including today’s newsletter on Ridley Road by Amel Mukhtar. However, there is a spot of good news. This week, the twenty-seven traders of Brixton Plaza have been granted an injunction from the High Court stopping their eviction until the landlord, Governside Limited, obtains a court order to do so. There is also hope that the traders’ precarious tenancies are protected under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, which ‘provides business tenants with statutory rights to proper notice, compensation in certain circumstances, and protection from eviction without a court order.’ For the meantime, Brixton Plaza will go on as usual – please do go down and give the traders your support and custom if you get the chance.

Today’s article is not paywalled, but to report on situations like Brixton Plaza and Ridley Road we rely solely on reader subscriptions. To support this work, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the entire back catalogue, including all of our restaurant coverage and guides.

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‘Certain food you get here, you can’t get anywhere else,’ says Wess, a trader at the Ridley Road indoor market. He’s been trading here for fifteen years, after arriving from Montserrat twenty years ago.

Inside Wess’s compact grocery shop sit sea moss packets, cerasee leaves, moringa powder and incense sticks. There are pops of colour from Sun Lolly boxes and packets of Kool-Aid and Shirley biscuits. In one of the fridges is a full shelf of malt drinks (Supermalt, Mighty Malt, Vita Malt, Malta Guinness); underneath are glass bottles of Fanta and Ting.

This market offers a taste of home for Hackney’s Afro-Caribbean community. Every so often, Wess is reunited with people he hasn’t seen for years. ‘I see people that left home twenty years ago … They didn’t tell you they’re coming here,’ he recalls. ‘We might’ve grown up together and when we come to England, someone might live in Birmingham [for example]. But then everyone comes to Ridley.’

Dinka, his friend keeping company by the register, a Rastafarian man with a grey beard and loc cap, adds: ‘People look forward to coming here, just to get a feeling – because then you’re among your own.’

The indoor market sits in the heart of Dalston, inside what was once a Tesco. The community that has been built there is a spot of sunshine in a country that often feels cold to Afro-Caribbean migrants – like today, 31 March, the day of the proposed eviction of traders from the market.

It’s a fate Wess and his fellow traders have been trying to come to terms with for the past two months, asking themselves what will become of their grocery stores, record shops, fabric and tailoring services, shoe shops and beauty and grooming outlets. Back on 17 February, Wess and the others were sent letters by the property owner, Larochette Real Estate, saying they had six weeks to vacate the premises, due to ‘antisocial behaviour’ in the market.

Yet there has been little clarity on the precise conditions of the eviction. Some traders are under the impression that it’s a temporary closure affecting them all, while others understand that only a select few will be able to return. Even if the eviction is only temporary, there’s still the question of ‘who’s going to pay for us in the months you plan to close it for’, Wess says. There’s no trust that the market will ever be reopened once it’s closed.

Since it purchased the market eight years ago, Larochette Real Estate has already attempted to evict the traders and turn the building into luxury flats twice, first in 2018 and then again in 2020. These proposed redevelopments inspired resistance from the community, and in 2022, Hackney Council stepped in and committed to take over the lease for fifteen years (at £306,000 per year rent) once Larochette completed a six-month renovation. But now, four years later, traders tell me that after being turfed out for long periods for the revamp, Larochette still hasn’t completed the work, and the council has done nothing about it. In fact, Hackney Council has not taken over the lease and has reverted to the position that the building is privately owned and therefore out of their control. ‘The council ain’t doing nuttin’ at all. [They’re] all in this [together],’ Dinka tells me.

The council’s offer to traders is that they can open a stall in the middle of the outdoor market, which does not work for most of the businesses. For Wess, with his fridges and boxes of confectionery and fridges that can currently be shuttered and reopened each day, an outdoor stall is not a feasible alternative: ‘Am I gonna put my stuff in the middle of the market, coming out and packing up every morning?’

As reported by The Londoner, the indoor market was bought by Larochette in 2016 for £6.5 million. Larochette, which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, is owned by Guy Ziser and his father, Shmuel, who appeared in the Panama Papers. Together, the pair own or direct roughly fifty companies, including Rainbow Properties, which manages the Ridley Road indoor market.

Larochette and Rainbow have shirked basic responsibilities. Since the renovations began, they have not installed heating. Wess tells me that leadership has never met with him or other traders. There’s no on-site office or office manager – just security. ‘When you ask something, they don’t respond,’ he says. ‘I’m paying you for providing me with a service. You take my money every month and you haven’t come one time.’

Furthermore, the police have claimed that Larochette misrepresentated concerns about antisocial behaviour in the eviction notices it issued to traders. Although the police had issued a Community Protection Warning (which, as The Londoner reported, was due to ‘the continued failure of the building owner [to take] reasonable and necessary measures to address safety concerns’), they never suggested that the market should be shut down.

‘When you come in here you don’t find no issues whatsoever, just people trading,’ Wess says. He feels that the landlord is weaponising a stereotype. ‘Do the statistics and see how much Caribbean people have a business in here,’ he adds. Ever since the Windrush era, when Caribbean people were encouraged to come to Britain to fill labour shortages, they have been cruelly disenfranchised. Increasingly they’re being pushed out of areas that they’ve played a huge part in building (often via market stalls), areas like Hackney, Brixton and Notting Hill. ‘Then they want to come and tell us about Windrush, like we’re supposed to celebrate coming back into slavery after we were freed,’ Wess frowns. ‘We come back to build a white man’s empire when we can’t live in it. And we’re supposed to celebrate being Windrush? … There’s nothing to celebrate about it.’

The Ridley Road traders refuse to be kicked out so unceremoniously. On the planned eviction day, 31 March, a protest takes place. The ragtag group that forms outside the market is a microcosm of Hackney: women in wheelchairs, hijabis, queer fashion guys, purple-haired liberals, filmmakers in keffiyehs, club baddies, goth-lite guys, mothers with colourful braids, socialists in army caps, elderly couples, all united in mission. They hold up red flags and makeshift cardboard signs reading ‘Don’t Evict, Stop Greedy Landlords’ and ‘Protect Our Traders’. The Caribbean traders stand in front of the door, watching despondently.

By 4:30pm, the individual stalls are already shuttered. Outside, a protester asks: ‘Has the landlord been here? Has anyone seen the landlord? Has the Mayor of Hackney been here? Has anyone spoken to the Mayor of Hackney? Shame!’ A speaker outlines the demands of the protest: that everyone should be able to return to the indoor market, without exception, and that if the building closes, traders need to be adequately paid. A Caribbean man on the side yells, ‘This is Windrush market!’

Watching the scene with bemusement from the back are three massive security guards, who were sent as muscle that morning, Dinka informs me. One is vaping, smirking through fat clouds, while the ringleader wears a black fur coat. At 5:30pm, they spring into action, moving to shutter the doors. Protestors, led by Mariam Bafo, a British-Somali community organiser, head inside to stop them, saying that they plan to occupy the space until the landlord agrees to the traders’ terms.

When protestors stand directly underneath the shutters, fur coat tells the muscle to just pull the shutters down anyway. The protestors try to appeal to their conscience: ‘We’re all immigrants here.’ The guy with the vape in his hand chuckles and kind of nods – he appreciates the point. But fur coat calls the police, and a squad of four in fluorescents arrives, led by a blonde woman with hard eyes. She tells the protesters and traders to leave, that they can collect their stuff tomorrow. But they refuse: not without a written agreement. Not without any of their demands met.

One protester, a British-Caribbean woman, tells me that this is exactly how she was tricked into losing her livelihood. ‘We lost our site in SE16, and our landlord lived in the Costa del Sol,’ she says of PlushSE16. ‘Five businesses … All working, all popular. Twenty-two years on the ground. Part of a community.’ The landlords told her she could retrieve her stock the day after the eviction, but she was never able to get it back. ‘We’re still not trading, still not earning … That’s been two years now.’

A tsunami of shutdown attempts has hit small food markets in London. Shepherd’s Bush Market, Brixton Village and Plaza and Seven Sisters indoor market are also engaged in fights to continue operating. Others, like PlushSE16 and traders in Elephant & Castle, have already been shut down. These evictions have mostly affected ethnic minorities, with Caribbeans being hit hard. ‘They give us a very hard fight,’ Wess says. ‘We, the ones that went into slavery … they’re always fighting to get us out.’

The irony – or, really, the precise way such inequality and corruption is able to function – is that in some of these cases, the shadowy property developer threatening eviction is incorporated in Caribbean tax havens. While the maligned face of immigration painted by parties like Reform is working-class Black and brown people who have made hotspots like Hackney attractive and valuable (the inverse of the so-called no-go areas that figures on the right portray them to be), the people who are truly making the city unliveable are the often-invisible wealthy ‘expat’ and non-domicile property developers. While they gut the city’s pubs, cinemas and markets to replace them with luxury flats, they feel none of the dearth left behind. The luxury flats often sit unoccupied, while housing prices skyrocket. London gets hollowed out by people who do not care that they’re turning the city into a ghost town.

In the end, the police decide that it’s a civil dispute and leave. It’s around 6:30pm, and the muscle is getting antsy too – as long as the protestors are occupying the building, they cannot do anything, it seems. After such a bitter battle, this is a big win. The traders and protestors are galvanised. Dinka is laughing and smiling. ‘Security a-run out!’ he says, beaming. ‘We ain’t going nowhere!’

Wess is laughing with another trader. ‘We really appreciate the support,’ he says, a new light in his eyes. The protestors speak over the loudspeaker of their plans to occupy the space. People volunteer to stay overnight along with the traders, while they push for their demands to be met. When I return at 10pm, groups of protestors sit chatting cross-legged on the floor, playing Vybz Kartel on a mini-speaker, and some traders stand together to the side. It’s good energy, festival-style, but with a touch of growing fatigue.

It doesn’t feel right that these Ridley Road traders essentially have to sleep on the street to protect their businesses, to suffer so much to receive the bare minimum. The next day, 1 April, the same security forces return, waiting for people to tire so that they can swoop in and shut it down. All this to guard a fraction of the assets of a multi-millionaire. The landlord has been sending intimidation emails via Rainbow Properties to local Green councillor Zoë Garbett – who has been on the frontlines for the traders’ justice – aiming to bully traders without any terms nor agreements made. (‘We are unable to progress with future plans given the illegal occupation that will have to be dealt with via lengthy legal proceedings before we can consider reopening the market. The Save Ridley Road campaign, together with other agitators who claim to be acting in the best interest of traders are, in fact, doing the exact opposite,’ Larochette Real Estate wrote.)

But it’s not just the muscle who return. More and more protestors have been arriving each day. In a group chat, over 100 locals mobilise to bring vegan and gluten-free food for all, sleeping bags, cushions, blankets. Mitchum deodorant and snacks. A sound system to play reggae, and microphones for traders and protestors to say their piece. People paint huge signs: ‘HANDS OFF OUR MARKET. We are one community.’

Most of these people were strangers tothe traders. But this is the point of a neighbourhood, and the beauty of local trade, where you can see and feel each others’ contributions and kindness, even when you haven’t formally met. It’s a reminder that the worst form of antisocial behaviour is that of the developers seeking to replace the love of thy neighbour with barren flats that are only home to corrupt money. You can’t share dal in an empty city. This is a London worth fighting for.

Editor’s note, with an update from the Save Ridley Road campaign.

Some traders along with the community peacefully resisted attempts by security to close the market on 31 March. The landlord has now cut the power, so the local community has been supplying power banks and generators. Traders now have weeks to prepare and finance a court case for their right to stay. A community occupation is helping them keep the space running.

A community fundraiser will allow traders to take their fate in their own hands, by defending their tenancy rights in court, and supporting and sustaining the community occupation. To donate, you can follow this link.

Credits

Amel Mukhtar is a freelance writer for Vittles, Vogue, 72 Magazine, Dazed, Crack Magazine and more.

All photographs courtesy of Save Ridley Road community.

Vittles Restaurants is edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn. This article was sub-edited and fact-checked by Odhran O’Donoghue.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A quick reminder that the Food in Print Fair is just four days away - you can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend - no tickets needed!

In today’s special newsletter, we are partnering with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) on a story about the non-payment of employment tribunal judgments in London restaurants, and why this is rife in the UK hospitality sector. In particular, this newsletter covers one restaurant that had twenty-one employment tribunal decisions go against it between 2021 and 2025 and didn’t pay out on a single one.

We’re delighted to be partnering with TBIJ, which has been one of the best investigative outlets in the UK over the past fifteen years, especially on the subject of food – from delivery work to agricultural labour. In 2022 and 2023, TBIJ journalist Emiliano Mellino led a series of nationally significant investigations on seasonal and migrant workers on British farms, which uncovered exploitation, terrible living conditions, wage theft and illegal fees. This reporting led the UN special rapporteur to say he feared there was forced labour on British farms. As much as we urge you to read today’s article, we also hope you check out the back catalogue of TBIJ’s work on food and labour, which you can find at the end of this piece.

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The restaurant chain that lost twenty-one tribunal claims – and didn’t pay a single one.

Tayla Lewthwaite had £1.90 in her bank account on the day in 2023 that she was evicted.

She should have had a lot more. Lewthwaite worked as a duty manager at a restaurant in Kew called Antipodea, a self-defined ‘Aussie brasserie’ that opened in 2017, capitalising on London’s obsession with brunch culture. Lewthwaite tells us that, while working at Antipodea, she endured several months when she was paid less than she’d earned. Exasperated at her treatment, she eventually quit. After she left, most of her final month’s wages never appeared.

For weeks, she chased it up with the owner, an Australian businessman called Jason Wells. At first, he told her she’d get her money ‘the next day’. Then he stopped responding altogether. With her wages not forthcoming, Tayla was kicked out of her rental property and ended up homeless; she needed the help of a charity to get back on her feet. Before she quit, Tayla, 32, had confronted Wells. ‘I very clearly said, “If you do not pay us, I’ll just take you to court,”’ she tells us. ‘He laughed in our faces and said, “Fine. Then take me to court.”’ To this day, Antipodea has not paid her the more than £2,600 it owes her.

Wells’s reaction might seem reckless, but it appears he already knew he could get away with non-payment of wages. Between 2021 and 2025, the company that ran his Antipodea restaurant chain lost twenty-one claims at the employment tribunal. We understand that the company hasn’t paid any of the sums ordered by those tribunals. This is alarmingly common in the UK: last year, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported that more than 5,000 people who won tribunal claims have not been paid what they are owed – even after turning to the government for support. Since 2016, the government has been asked for help in recovering awards and settlements totalling more than £46 million, over three quarters of which remains unpaid.

The non-payment of tribunal awards is particularly common in the hospitality sector. ‘It’s the wild west,’ says Bryan Simpson, the hospitality lead for Unite, the UK’s largest private sector trade union. ‘It’s the lowest paid, the most precarious … of any sector by a country mile.’

Government data shows that hospitality is the sector with the highest number of breaches of minimum-wage law, and Simpson tells us that Unite has spent thousands trying to get bosses to pay what they’ve been ordered to by tribunals. TBIJ’s own reporting backs this up – most people who spoke to us as part of our investigations into the tribunal system worked in restaurants, cafes or bars. The employers we heard about included the director of Peckham Levels, who sacked a whistleblower, a restaurant-owning Reform councillor in Portsmouth who lost three tribunal claims without paying a single one, and the director of the Crussh cafe chain who openly gloated that he would not be handing over the £30,000 payout ordered by the courts. Meanwhile, in September of last year, The Londoner reported on Victor Garvey’s Michelin-starred restaurant SOLA, which did not pay out £16,000 to a former employee after a tribunal decision went against it.

All of these employers have benefitted from a failing enforcement system that allows hospitality owners to break the law repeatedly and simply ignore their punishment. ‘I was quite naive in thinking the tribunal system would work,’ Mark Leonard, the father of a former Antipodea employee, tells us. ‘Only in digging further have I discovered that the system is broken.’

In 2009, Jason Wells moved to London from Melbourne and soon after founded the Brew cafe chain, which quickly grew to several branches around South-West London. Six years later, together with Marc Shimmel, a former WeWork investor, he founded Antipodea. (Schimmel has not been an Antipodea investor since 2019.)

Antipodea was regularly featured in the press, including Time Out, The Londonist and Eater London, while Wells appeared in magazines showing off his home in Richmond or sharing insights into where he draws inspiration from as a successful businessman. ‘I’m ... driven by my staff,’ he noted in an interview with hospitality trade publication The Caterer. ‘Being able to treat them well is very important to me.’

But interviews with several of his former staff and analysis of hundreds of pages of tribunal and company-insolvency documents tell a different story. They show that, over the years, Wells has withheld tens of thousands of pounds that he owed employees. Furthermore, he pocketed hundreds of thousands from businesses that eventually went insolvent. One chef formerly employed by Wells alleges that, after the pandemic, he worked for three months without a day off. When he eventually resigned, the company failed to pay his last month’s wages and his unused holiday allowance. This was a common practice at Wells’s company, according to a former senior manager: ‘[Wells] knew that if he didn’t pay people, [he’d get away with it]. That’s why he was so comfortable doing it. The company culture was just really toxic.’

One of the reasons for this is that even if a worker wins a tribunal claim, they have no guarantee that their bosses will pay up. Since 2023, Mark Leonard, 64, and his daughter have tried everything to get the nearly £3,000 the employment tribunal ordered Antipodea to pay her. When the company refused to pay, Mark and his daughter approached a government enforcement scheme and their local MP, Munira Wilson. Wells dodged every attempt to enforce the judgment. Mark wasn’t ready to give up, so in early 2024 he started picketing the Kew and Richmond branches of Antipodea, handing out flyers that read: ‘[Antipodea] has a history of not paying its staff … My daughter has been waiting over a year for her final month’s wages.’

Antipodea called the police on him, but what Mark was doing was completely legal. As he told the police, it was Wells, not he, who had broken the law. Mark felt that Wells had stolen money from his family. ‘I didn’t believe that was right or fair,’ he says. ‘My overriding thought was he shouldn’t get away with this.’

At one point, Mark spoke to Wells on the phone, hoping to convince him to pay his daughter. ‘He ranted for some considerable time trying to tell me that he was the injured party and everybody else was at fault: the government because of their Covid regulations, his staff who were ripping him off, banks … it was quite something,’ Mark says.

Mark and his daughter also hired high court enforcement officers (a role akin to that of a bailiff, but with greater powers), but soon discovered that the company that owned Antipodea, STR 48, held no assets that could be repossessed. A report by one officer describes how they went to a couple of Wells’s restaurants to enforce an award, only to be shown documents detailing how the leases and physical assets were owned by other entities: STR 49 and STR 50.

Michael Jackson, a veteran high court enforcement officer, tells us that strategies like these are particularly common in the hospitality sector, which has a higher proportion of smaller companies. In the vast majority of cases, it is not possible to bring a tribunal claim against a director or owner, which means that claims tend to be made against companies instead. However, there are several strategies that companies use to avoid paying.

One strategy is known as phoenixing, which describes the process by which a company is either liquidated or dissolved and then reopened under a different name. In many instances, phoenixing is completely legal, but it can be used as a way for owners and directors to evade accountability. TBIJ spoke to a woman who won a 2025 tribunal claim for nearly £700 in unpaid wages against Flows, a cafe in Llandeilo, Wales. Three weeks after the ruling, the company was dissolved, leaving the woman with no way to claim the money. But the cafe had continued to operate: the woman discovered that the owner had registered a new company less than a month after she had started legal proceedings. This company had the same directors and owners as the previous one, and the cafe kept the same name throughout. Although it’s unclear whether this company was started because of the legal proceedings, it means that, since the cafe is on paper now run by a different company, high court enforcement officers couldn’t repossess any assets.

Another legal way of working around tribunal decisions is to employ workers through companies separate from the ones that hold assets or cash. This is what Antipodea did. Government records show that Wells held a web of companies, with names ranging from STR 44 to STR 54. Most of these companies filed dormant accounts, so their purpose is uncertain. What is clear, though, is that from 2018, Wells’s companies racked up more than £10 million in debt as well as a string of insolvencies and tribunal claims. In total, businesses owned by Wells have lost twenty-four employment cases. Company representatives did not turn up to any of the hearings to defend themselves against the claims. We could only confirm one instance where the company sent a written response to a tribunal on time.

When his Brew chain went insolvent, the administrators discovered that Wells had personally borrowed nearly £600,000 from the company that he hadn’t paid back. Liquidators working on the ongoing insolvency process of STR 48 – the second time the Antipodea chain has gone through administration (the chain had previously been owned by Antipodea Operations Ltd, which went insolvent in 2019) – have also said they suspect there could be ‘an overdrawn director’s loan account’ and ‘potential misuse of government-backed support schemes’, although no findings have been made and the liquidators’ investigation continues.

Those insolvency proceedings, which kicked off in June 2024, brought some good news for workers who had brought tribunal claims against Wells’s companies: the government’s redundancy service paid some, though not all, of the money they’d been awarded (there are caps on the wages or holiday pay they cover, while compensation isn’t covered at all). In some cases, this pay out came years after employees had won their original tribunal claims, but to date, only twelve former Antipodea employees, who won cases as far back as 2021, have claimed money this way.

The liquidation of STR 48 seems to be the end of the road for Wells, even though his wife continued to briefly operate one of the Antipodea branches under a different company. Fittingly, she also faced a tribunal claim in September of last year for unpaid wages – and lost. All branches of Antipodea have now closed. In July 2024, Wells was banned by the government from being a company director for his conduct in relation to a construction company he owned, Ironbark Design and Construct. This was followed by a bankruptcy order in February 2025. Wells is now listed by the government as a tax defaulter to the sum of £150,000, a fraction of the total debts his companies have racked up.

But the question remains as to why the system allowed Wells to spend years running businesses that persistently underpaid staff and ignored court judgments. A government spokesperson told us in a statement that they have already allocated ‘£25 million in funding to tackle the misuse of phoenix companies’. The money will be given over the next five years and will fund a fifty-person taskforce in the Insolvency Service to investigate directors who liquidate companies to evade debts. But it’s worth emphasising that this approach will not ensure that workers, such as those at Antipodea, are paid when the company is solvent but holds assets elsewhere.

A group of MPs led by Labour’s Andy McDonald and also including representatives from the Green Party and Your Party has recognised these gaps in enforcement and are now calling for changes, including giving the government the power to pursue company directors whose companies ignore tribunal judgments.

For Bryan Simpson from Unite, the problem within hospitality runs deeper. The government, like society more broadly, treats the sector’s workers with neglect – even Unite has only started organising hospitality workers in the last decade. But it is starting to see results, he says, winning millions of pounds for workers through campaigns and strikes, and helping to strengthen laws around tipping.

‘I have absolutely no faith in the legal system to achieve what is needed to win even individual rights for hospitality workers,’ he says. ‘But there is a major enforcement mechanism which wins – and it’s called unionisation.’

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What Next?

• In March, more than thirty MPs signed an early day motion calling for ‘a more proactive and transparent [tribunal] enforcement regime’. If your MP has not signed the motion, you can get in touch and ask them to add their name to it.

• Today, the government launches a new labour-enforcement body called the Fair Work Agency. Among other things, it will have the responsibility for enforcing tribunal awards. However, questions remain around its funding and powers.

• If you won a tribunal claim against Antipodea and are still owed money, you can contact the Redundancy Payments Service.

• If you have any more information on restaurants avoiding tribunal payments, please get in touch with Vittles (vittlespitches@gmail.com) and TBIJ (emilianomellino@tbij.com)

Further Reading

• Thousands of Rogue Bosses Have Failed to Pay Tribunal Awards: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-10-02/revealed-thousands-of-rogue-bosses-have-failed-to-pay-tribunal-awards

• How British Farms Run On Exploitation: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-03-27/they-treat-you-like-an-animal-how-british-farms-run-on-exploitation

• Migrant Fruit Pickers Charged Thousands of Illegal Fees to Work on UK Farms: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-05-27/migrant-fruit-pickers-charged-thousands-in-illegal-fees-to-work-on-uk-farms

• This is How People Picking Your Vegetables Have to Live: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-04-13/its-almost-the-same-as-living-on-the-street-this-is-how-people-picking-your-vegetables-have-to-live

Credits

Emiliano Mellino is an award-winning investigative journalist specialising in migrant and worker rights. His investigations have uncovered widespread exploitation of gig economy, care and seasonal agricultural workers, as well as the failure of the state to enforce employment rights.

Ero Partsakoulaki is a reporter and fact checker. Her work has appeared in outlets across the USA, the UK and Greece.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Vitória Croda reports from Brixton, where food and drink traders are being evicted from Brixton Plaza – a mini-mall of immigrant-run food businesses covered previously on Vittles. Potentially more evictions are on their way too.

Today’s article is not paywalled, but to report on situations like Brixton Plaza we rely solely on reader subscriptions. To support our work, please consider a subscription to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year, which gives you access to the last six years of the newsletter, including our restaurant coverage.

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On 1 March, Kevin Agila received a phone call from the manager of Brixton Plaza, who asked him to withhold the upcoming month’s rent. Agila is the owner of the Ecuadorian restaurant Kasama, which opened less than a year ago and is one of eight small food retailers that operate in Brixton Plaza – a mini-mall inside a Grade-II-listed building on Brixton Road that also hosts Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza. The retailers serve everything from Ethiopian and Chinese food to cuisines you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the city.

Agila found the request to withhold rent strange, but the manager assured him it was just part of a regular procedure the landlord does every once in a while. A couple of days later, he received an eviction notice, telling him that he would have to leave by 7 April. He would have roughly a month to pack his stuff and find another location for Kasama.

Then all the other traders in Brixton Plaza received similar phone calls, including Cathe Figueiredo, who runs the Brazilian restaurant Delicathe Gourmet with her brother, Dery. Delicathe, which, as I wrote for Vittles last year, specialises in Afro-Brazilian dishes from the northeastern state of Bahia, and opened around the same time as Kasama. It was going well, thriving even, with regular customers every single day. Figueiredo had another reason to be happy: she was five-months pregnant with her first child, a little girl. The same week she got the news that Delicathe would need to move, she sadly lost her daughter too. ‘I honestly think it was due to the stress I felt,’ she tells me. Even though she was hospitalised, she kept receiving phone calls from the management company of Brixton Plaza, demanding that she pack up Delicathe as soon as possible. (The restaurant remains closed until Figueiredo is physically recovered from her loss.)

While Brixton Plaza’s traders were the first to get evicted, publicly available planning documents (note: you’ll need to search for the reference number 25/02874/FUL) show that the entire building – currently a heterogeneous mixture of small businesses, clothing retailers, barber shops and independent restaurants – has been approved for internal demolition by Lambeth Council. It will be replaced by an Aldi, according to the Brixton Plaza manager, although the documents make no mention of this. The future of traders in Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza remained uncertain when I spoke with them last Saturday (21 March), although many are now reconsidering their future in the neighbourhood altogether.

‘Poor Shopfronts’

414–426 Brixton Road was originally built as a Quin & Axtens department store in 1906. The building was bombed during World War 2, but since the 1950s, it has been refurbished, listed and subdivided into units of mixed use (most notably, it was a Mothercare, until it closed in 2018). The building was quickly rebranded with temporary signage as Brixton Mall and Brixton Plaza (and, later, SW9 Plaza). These spaces are used interchangeably and have the same owner: Governside Limited, an offshore company registered in the Isle of Man, which has owned the freehold for the building and leasehold for the ground floors since 1999. The complex has been referenced in planning documents as having a ‘neglected and shabby’ appearance and accused of having ‘poor quality shop-fronts’ that ‘detract from the quality and significance’ of the area. The heritage report attached to the application registered with Lambeth Council says the new development could enhance the area and make it a ‘more attractive tourist destination’ for those coming to O2 Academy events.

However, once you step into the building, it is clear that the place is far more interesting than these documents claim. From young professionals queuing to buy shawarma at Forno, to entire families having a weekend lunch at Estación 504, the building is widely used by Brixton’s many communities. Its narrow corridors have been the testing ground for some landmark London restaurants: in 2022 it housed Burrito Cocktail, the first place to sell Honduran dishes in London; in 2024, the space now taken up by Delicathe was Pura Vida, London’s first Costa Rican restaurant, which has since relocated to Bounds Green. It is a spontaneous version of many purpose-built indoor markets around London, including elsewhere in Brixton. It is also the epitome of the diversity and bustling neighbourhood that estate agents brag about in their Brixton area guides.

Nara Araújo, who is from Brazil and moved King Churros to SW9 Plaza a year ago, tells me how diverse her customers are. On the day I first interviewed her, many of them were heading to see The Vaccines at the O2 Academy Brixton, but there are many locals too – ‘especially women and the LGBT community, they have become my sweeties’. Inside Brixton Mall, Honduran restaurant Estación 504 offers traditional chincharrón con yuca and pollo con tajadas alongside daily soup specials for lunch (for no more than £7.50, you can get a beef shank soup with slow-cooked vegetables, also known as sopa de res). The restaurant’s customers have become part of a wider ecosystem that props up the Mall: before eating at Estación 504, they might also stop in at Vivien’s, the manicurist next door, then ship a package at Paquetería, where Jenny offers shipping services.

Mixed Communications

Like in Elephant and Castle last year, when multiple traders were evicted at short notice over non-payment of electricity bills, the traders at Brixton Plaza have little to no recourse for legal action. When they moved into the complex, they signed precarious fixed-term contracts with the management company that allow only one month’s notice to be given in case of eviction. But what has been most disappointing to the traders is how poorly communicated the regeneration has been to them. None of the traders at Brixton Plaza, Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza have direct contact or contract with the landlord, Governside; instead all communication goes through the manager, Solomon Berhe, who is himself a tenant and who refuses to disclose information about the landlord.

Looking into the landlord, Governside, things get interesting (and a little complicated, so please bear with me). One of the listed ‘beneficial owners’ (ie a person who directly or indirectly ultimately owns or controls a corporate entity) of Governside is Mushtak Ibrahim. Ibrahim’s listed address is also the registered address for companies named Crown Insurance Services, which has a ‘Mustak Ibrahim’ as a director), Crown Properties and Yashmin Properties Limited. All three of these companies list Yaumna Sattar Mahomed as a beneficial owner. Among Yashmin Properties’ former officers, two – Mohammad Hassan and Haroon Abdul Aziz – have links to Golfrate, the company set up by property developer Asif Aziz. Asif Aziz is no longer involved in Golfrate, but via his other company, Criterion Capital, he has been linked with a slew of other evictions across London (which have recently been reported on extensively by London Centric).

London Centric

The "Azizification" of London housing

Coverage of Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital went mainstream this week, with news outlets across the political spectrum covering the mass evictions that London Centric has been reporting on for weeks. There’s increasing political pressure, from central government down to the mayor of London’s office and local councils to get a grip on the issue…

Read more

3 months ago · 93 likes · 17 comments · Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, and Cormac Kehoe

We’re unable to say definitively that the Brixton Plaza landlord Governside is directly linked to either Golfrate or Asif Aziz, but the connection is strong enough that when Brixton Plaza opened, some residents believed that Crown Properties and Golfrate owned the building. Irrespective of whether the companies are linked, the evictions in Brixton involve a level of confusion similar to that seen with Criterion’s evictions.

Even though the planning application has been approved for the entire building, traders from the Mall and SW9 Plaza have been receiving mixed information from Berhe, who told them that Brixton Plaza is the only one being refurbished. (I reached out to Berhe for comment, who told me as a fellow tenant he ‘has no idea what they [the landlord] are going to do’.) ‘They told me that I would probably have more years here,’ Araújo says. ‘I just wish we could have been better informed. We haven’t been told anything.’

Some traders have told me they invested significant amounts of money in their businesses only to have the rug unexpectedly pulled from under them. James Vasco, who owns a small barber shop inside Brixton Plaza, moved his business to the premises just a month ago, and is feeling particularly frustrated after receiving his eviction notice. ‘We’re all small businesses. Something like this can destroy people,’ Vasco tells me. Vasco claims that Berhe told him he didn’t know about the demolition plans. ‘But how could they not know? Of course they knew.’

At Brixton Plaza, rumours were going around late last year about contracts potentially ending, but these rumours were quickly denied by management, who reassured traders that their businesses were safe. However, Lambeth recorded the proposal to redevelop the building in its database in September 2025. Until earlier this week, some vacant shopfronts in Brixton Mall still displayed ‘to let’ signs with a contact number. When I rang the number last Monday (16 March) and inquired about renting the space, the manager told me that it was promptly available at a monthly price of £2,500, with a contract that could be renewed every six months.

While many traders from Brixton Plaza are struggling to find other sites at short notice, proper communication could help those in Brixton Mall and SW9 Plaza to save money to move their businesses. As Brixton’s commercial rents continue to rise, many are still uncertain about their future in the neighbourhood. Araújo wants to stay in Brixton, as it’s where most of her clientele is. Jenny would like to be a part of the diverse ecosystem that the other Latin American businesses brought to her Paquetería, but is afraid that this might not be possible. Figueiredo has had to pause her search, which puts her at greater financial risk.

Agila, meanwhile, has found another place to rent for Kasama, though not in Brixton, where he was born and grew up. Kasama blends his Ecuadorian roots with British food culture. His alitas, chicken wings coated in sweet and slightly spicy passionfruit sauce, combine the street food of both of his heritages and are one of the restaurant’s most ordered meals. His menu’s success is reflected by the wide range of customers – a mix of Latin American diaspora and people trying Ecuadorian-inspired food for the first time.

Agila acknowledges some improvements in the area from his teenage years, but he tells me that advances shouldn’t displace locals. He emphasises how important small businesses are to the area; how chains like Leon and Costa tend to close in Brixton while its residents seek the sense of community that places like those in Brixton Plaza can offer. But the ongoing gentrification of Brixton puts this ecosystem at the risk of becoming homogenised. ‘People forget that the main reason people come to Brixton is the community, the small independent businesses,’ Agila tells me from behind his counter. ‘They don’t want to come here to eat at a big company. For that, they can go anywhere else in London.’

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Vitória Croda is a journalist and immigrant from Brazil. She’s been in London for five years, and is currently doing her PhD at Loughborough University.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Zanta Nkumane explores the sanitised version of South Africa sold by The Savanna (a London-based chain that stocks South African products) and the complicated feelings that it inspires among Black migrants.

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When I was at boarding school in Eswatini, the food was something you survived. The rice came in stingy portions, never enough to fill our stomachs; the stews were grainy, so thin you could see the bottom of the bowl. Everything tasted faintly metallic, as though the pots were bleeding their aluminium coating into the food. I ate quickly, swallowing more air than food, my body learning that being full was a privilege reserved for school holidays.

The night before the end of term – both when I was at boarding school, and later, when I was at university in Cape Town – my grandmother would call to ask what I wanted to eat. My requests were always the same: dombolo, hard-body chicken (freshly slaughtered, heavily salted and boiled to fall-off-the-bone perfection) and wild spinach (if in season), and sijeza (or sidvudvu), a dish of pumpkin and mealie beaten together with milk until it is the thick consistency of porridge. These dishes required considerable effort and preparation time. They made up for the neglect I experienced at school.

When I moved to the UK years later, this was the food I cooked to try to soothe the pangs of homesickness. But my attempts were characterless, nothing like the dishes I was trying to replicate. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t not a good cook (although I’m not), but also that I was looking for something more than flavour. I was cooking to summon the people and things that I missed: my aunt’s stews that always began with heaped spoonfuls of yellow Rajah curry powder, Sunday missions to Soweto or Midrand with friends to buy braai meat at a shisanyama, the inevitable stop at a service station for steak and kidney pie after a night out. Small, almost inconsequential rituals that became central to my longing once I left.

Then I found The Savanna. The first one I came across was in Liverpool Street Station – across from Boots, sandwiched between a Pure and a Holland & Barrett. Founded in 2005, The Savanna is a shop that specialises in South African groceries, snacks and freshly prepared meat products like biltong and boerewors. Of the ten or so other branches scattered across London, most are in train stations – Victoria, King’s Cross, Paddington and London Bridge – tucked neatly into commuter corridors. At first, the locations seemed incongruous to me: a South African food store amid the rush of London’s train stations. But the more I think about it, the more their placement feels apt. These are the places you pass through when you’re between worlds, neither at home nor quite away from it – a feeling that mirrors the in-between nature of diasporic life.

The shops themselves are bright and orderly, gleaming even. They do not immediately announce themselves as ‘South African’, and at first glance could be mistaken for any other shop selling snacks. But if you peruse, you’ll find shelves filled with Mrs Ball’s chutney and Ouma rusks, and fridges stacked with Castle Lager and Hunter’s Dry. I normally go in for biltong – a small indulgence I reward myself with when I commute to London. Coming from a meat-centric food culture back in Johannesburg, biltong taps into something truly carnivorous in me. Growing up, it was the snack we always bought for family road trips, passing it around the car in paper bags. Perhaps that’s why it fits so easily into my life now.

On one level, The Savanna is simply a food store catering to South African migrants and people like me, who are familiar with South African products. (I am from Eswatini, but South Africa has long functioned as both neighbour and centre in my life. I studied in Cape Town, lived in Johannesburg, and have family and friends there.) It sells the taste of home – or at least a version of it – to anyone who can afford to spend £9 on a packet of dried meat. But on another level, it’s something stranger: a miniature South Africa, carefully staged for export. When I’m in one of the shops, seeing the shelves of products I’d see in a supermarket back home does provide a comforting familiarity in a city that is not my own. But as soon as I leave, I remember that it’s less the food I eat in South Africa that I miss, but rather the intangible universe of memories that surrounds it.

The Savanna, on the other hand, offers a kind of empty nostalgia. Its shelves are arranged to mimic a culture or place without carrying any of its weight. It trades in the aesthetics of belonging while remaining hollow. Each visit feels like standing between two kitchens: one I remember and one that sells a curated version of that memory back to me. But still, I go back – sometimes for the biltong, sometimes just in hope of hearing someone say ‘eish’ in passing.

As US anthropologist Amy Cox Hall argues, this type of food nostalgia isn’t neutral – it’s produced, curated and marketed. It transforms the complexity of national histories into consumable feelings, selling versions of culinary cultures in which the pain of the past is replaced by an illusion of belonging. In the South African context, this nostalgia smooths over histories of colonial dispossession; the racialised control of land; and the way that Black ingredients and dishes were considered low-status, snubbed in mainstream markets and rarely exported. The uncomfortable legacies of labour, class and race are then reimagined as heritage by those with the power to curate what a nation remembers of itself.

Of course, no diaspora food store is truly ‘authentic’. These shops inevitably offer a distilled, export-friendly version of a nation, closer to a tourism board brochure than a lived archive. They rely more on recognition than being exhaustive, selling foods that travel or sell well. In this sense, The Savanna is doing what diaspora stores everywhere do. But the stakes are high here: South Africa’s food history is so deeply racialised, any act of curation is also an act of political memory.

The Savanna’s tidy displays of imported goods construct a South Africa without dissonance, attempting to sustain the post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation’ rebranding even while white South Africans own 65% of the nation’s wealth, despite accounting for just 9% of the population. The Savanna soothes its customers by erasing the prickly truths of South African food culture and reassuring them that what was once broken can perhaps be made whole again – even if only on the plate.

Many foods now marketed as quintessentially South African carry longer, more obscure histories. Biltong is often sold as an Afrikaner delicacy, but the practice of preserving meat through salting and air-drying predates colonial settlement, with indigenous Khoisan techniques later adopted and reframed by settlers. Colonial and apartheid policies also reshaped which foods were considered respectable or valuable. Indigenous grains such as sorghum and millet – once central to Southern African diets – were marginalised, as colonial agriculture promoted wheat and later maize as superior options. Foods like mogodu, amanqina and chicken feet, sometimes stigmatised as ‘poverty food’, emerged from systems that forced culinary ingenuity under limitation.

Such foods are, for the most part, not sold in The Savanna. In its efforts to construct a national cuisine, there’s an obvious skewing towards the foods of white South Africans, who make up around 86% of the 227,000 South Africans in the UK (a skew that is presumably related to the differing economic prospects of Black and white South Africans). When I tell Cape Town-based food anthropologist Anna Trapido about this aspect of The Savanna, she’s not surprised. ‘At first glance, they have that really creepy “when-we” type nostalgia for a faux “good old days” that were only good for certain sections of society,’ she says. Until very recently, she explains, the only people with the money to start international businesses were white, resulting in ‘predominantly white food genres … reflected in communities away from the motherland’. (Unsurprisingly, Lisa Gardshol, the founder of The Savanna, is white.)

Trapido does offer another potential explanation for the absence of Black South African food from diaspora shops: because much Black South African cuisine lives in technique rather than in ingredient, it can be hard to package and sell commercially. Fermentation, timing and local knowledge are harder to commodify than branded condiments or dried meats. That said, the absence is still noticeable. There is a small, almost-afterthought shelf with samp, amabele and maize meal in the Liverpool Street Savanna. Foods and staples that are common in South African supermarkets or informal markets, such as amasi, morogo and dried offal, are largely absent from the store.

A significant portion of Black food culture in South Africa (and across the world) has been delineated by the limits imposed on Black people. Under apartheid, access to food was deliberately restricted, forcing Black families to make meals from whatever the system allowed them to have: offcuts, starches, bones, innards. Our contemporary cuisine was born from scarcity, necessitating culinary innovation to make food stretch and feed large families for less. Our kitchens can be considered political archives, telling the story of who had access to what they needed and who didn’t.

In my own life, that history is subtly threaded through the meals my grandmother made for me. Though we were middle class and she had more latitude than most, she was also feeding a large family, so her cooking was always about creating fullness and making simple things feel generous.

The neatly apolitical foodscape conjured by the pristine aisles of The Savanna does not convey any of this history. As someone who seldom makes it back home, The Savanna becomes a small bridge to the flavours and rituals I left behind. Memories live in the body, and taste is one of the most immediate ways to reconnect and feel grounded. I also continue to go because a glimpse of home – even a partial one – still brings solace. But I remain all too aware that this comforting version of my homeland that The Savanna offers seldom resembles the one that made me.

Credits

Zanta Nkumane is a Swazi writer and journalist.

Joy Yamusangie is a visual artist from the UK. Yamusangie’s work exists both within dream and reality, and involves creating fictional characters and worlds that provide insight into the artist’s real life. They experiment with a range of processes such as drawing, painting and printmaking to produce mixed media pieces.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Further Reading

• ‘Hospitality is Not Conditional’ by Sharanya Deepak

• ‘When Food Doesn’t Taste Like Home’ by Doha Kahlout (trans by Katharine Halls)

• ‘The Spaza Shop Poisonings’ by Tsitsi Bhobo and Winile Ximba

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today we are very excited to publish an essay by Stella Swain, the winner of the inaugural 2025 Food Stories Fellowship Award run by the British Library Food Season in partnership with Vittles. Stella’s winning essay is about the Land Settlement Association, a curious chapter in British agricultural history that could offer some solutions to the contemporary farming crisis.

We’re also delighted to announce that we will be partnering with the British Library Food Awards again this year on the Food Stories Fellowship Award. This prize will be awarded to someone who needs to use the British Library’s unique food collections (encompassing everything from manuscript recipe books, published cookery books and oral histories to food magazines and trade literature) to inform a piece of exciting new writing on some aspect of contemporary food or drink culture. The winner will be awarded £1500 to facilitate use of these collections, have access to British Library curatorial support, be mentored by editors at Vittles, and have their finished article published in the magazine.

This is a great opportunity, so if you have a fascinating and significant food story to tell that would be transformed by use of the British Library’s collections and our editorial support, then we urge you to apply for the award here by 27 April.

In July 1980, a group of farmers gathered outside a supermarket in Chichester. Described by the local paper as ‘militants’ preparing for a ‘tomato battle’, they took to the streets armed with boxes of freshly grown tomatoes and handed them out for free. Their aim was to draw attention to the plight of British farmers due to the impact that increasing imports were having on their livelihood: while supermarkets were able to drive down the price by importing Dutch tomatoes for next to nothing, the farmers’ tomatoes, grown just a few miles down the road, were barely able to fetch what it had cost to grow them.

One of the protestors handing out tomatoes was my grandmother, Edna Swain. She and my grandfather, John, were part of the Land Settlement Association (LSA), a national scheme that, between 1934 and 1939, set up local farming cooperatives comprising over 1,000 government-funded farms known as smallholdings. Each smallholding was made up of around five acres of land, complete with livestock and a newly built cottage. The largest settlement was a cluster of 134 smallholdings covering 591 acres in Sidlesham, West Sussex – where my grandparents lived and worked, where my dad and his siblings were raised, and where I spent much of my childhood.

At the time of the 1980 ‘tomato battle’, the LSA produced nearly half of all British-grown salad crops. Although repeat protests would be held in the following months, the farmers didn’t ultimately have much success in encouraging supermarkets to buy British vegetables. In 1982 – just two years after the protests – the closure of the LSA would be announced by Thatcher’s government, drawing the curtain on nearly half a century of state-supported cooperative agricultural production. Now, the UK imports 84% of its fresh tomatoes.

These days, farming in the UK has become even more industrialised and corporatised. Small, independent farms are less and less able to survive, and the vast majority of LSA smallholdings, including my grandparents’, have been sold – either subsumed into bigger farms or developed into housing. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an agricultural sector that is set up for maximum profit over sustainability or workers’ rights. At a time when the UK farming landscape is increasingly reliant on the exploitation of migrant workers, and when food inequality and food insecurity are ever more pressing concerns, radical action is needed to ensure a more just future of food production. Perhaps looking back to the collective, centralised model of the LSA can offer a vision of what such a future could look like.

*

The LSA was born in 1933, when Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government agreed to match the money raised by the National Council of Social Service (now the National Council for Voluntary Organisations) and the Society of Friends for an experimental plan to address high levels of unemployment. This involved relocating those made redundant by closures in the coal and steel industries (and their families) and training them to become farmers in the countryside. The LSA purchased plots of land and built a house on each one; both the house and the plot were leased to participants on a long-term basis. It trained the men and paid for livestock, feedstuffs and tools, as well as the fruit trees, bushes and seeds needed to start production. The scheme proved popular: the first period of recruitment saw 1,709 previously unemployed men joining the organisation to be trained in the basics of farming. By 1951, when the scheme was fully nationalised – moving into the control of the Ministry for Agriculture and Fisheries, with all estates coming under government ownership – there were 740 named tenants in place across 7,768 acres of land. Sidlesham was transformed by the LSA: between 1920 and 1970, its tiny population almost doubled and a new wing had to be added to the school (which was also one of the first in the country to provide hot school meals, in part due to the perceived need for hungry LSA children to be given proper nutrition).

Initially, this land was to be farmed according to the ‘milking stool’ method (which did not include any milking): on each smallholding, farmers would raise pigs and poultry for bacon and eggs, as well as a range of fresh fruit and vegetables that would enable them to sell produce throughout the year. Diagrams mapping the layout for the early farms show sheds for poultry; a pigsty; glasshouses for cultivating tender vegetables like tomatoes; half an acre for beans, lettuce, cauliflower, sprouts or cabbage; half an acre for gooseberries, blackcurrants and raspberries; and an acre for an apple orchard. My grandad recalled his parents growing half an acre of peas, two varieties that cropped at slightly different times. They also had chickens, and mushrooms grown in repurposed wartime plane hangars. But as the LSA developed, farms in different locations began to specialise in different produce. The southernmost farms, like those in Sidlesham, successfully grew huge quantities of soft fruit and salad vegetables under glass and, by 1970, 2,655 tons of tomatoes were passing through Sidlesham every year.

Although it was presented as a radical experiment, the LSA did not exist in a vacuum. In Wales at the turn of the twentieth century, cooperative allotment societies had been formed by struggling mining communities to help make ends meet. However, while these ad hoc, small-scale projects struggled in the face of competition from larger farms, the LSA avoided such problems by being intentionally cooperative from the outset. Although each resettled family was given their own smallholding, the farms were grouped in clusters. Each cluster had a central farm from which packing, grading, sales and purchases were centralised, and the LSA provided machinery pools so that farmers could access newer hardware. All produce was bought, marketed and sold through the LSA, and farmers had to sign an exclusivity agreement to be part of the scheme, which meant they couldn’t sell their produce elsewhere. As the LSA’s second annual report remarked, the scheme was based on the principle of ‘doing for [the farmers] collectively what no one of them could do for himself’.^[1]

This political collectivity sounds like utopian socialism, but the early proponents of the LSA were motivated by quite the opposite: on paper, cooperative farming was simply a means through which farmers could make maximum profit. As the Portsmouth Evening News cannily put it in 1936, the aim was to ‘provide the scene for a remarkable transformation … [of] former Trade Unionists into little Capitalists’ – to separate unionised workers from the conditions that produced and sustained class consciousness. Indeed, the scheme was criticised by socialists (like G D H Cole) because it was motivated by the expectation of profit, and because they thought it would only succeed in displacing the problem of unemployment from industrial centres.

This displacement was in fact at the heart of Labour policy: at their annual conference in 1930, MacDonald had made an impassioned speech about moving people ‘off the pavements, which have no roots and no rootable capacity, and put[ting] them in the fields, where they till and grow and sow and harvest’.^[2] A doomed, rootless existence in cities would be rendered productive and fertile by the countryside (and, presumably, make those who underwent this pastoral transformation less troublesome than their unionised fellow workers in factory towns).

A ‘Back to the Land’ narrative dominated early adverts for the LSA. It presented an explicitly masculine dream of the bucolic British family farm – led by the strong father, who was set against the figure of the unemployed miner, emasculated and unable to support his family. This positioning of the traditional family as the only support a person needs implicitly placed the LSA in opposition to class-based solidarity and an understanding of collective causes that go beyond the four walls of the patriarchal home. The selection process for the LSA involved interviewing the applicant’s wife – he had to have a wife, of course – and placed a heavy emphasis on the (unpaid) family labour needed to maintain the smallholdings. A 1939 LSA report even suggested calling the smallholdings ‘family holdings’, frankly describing the family as ‘a unit of production’.^[3] My aunts remember being small enough to stand on the square base of the flat-pack LSA vegetable boxes, folding them into three-dimensions around themselves; my dad, after years of cutting it daily, still doesn’t like celery.

Despite attempts to codify LSA tenant families as individual units, the cooperative structure at the heart of the organisation meant that most LSA members understood themselves to be part of a collective rather than quiet little capitalists. My grandad, who was thirteen when his family moved to a Leicestershire LSA smallholding in 1945 (he later moved to his own in Sidlesham in 1968), remembered the estate manager telling them what crops to grow and when to harvest them as part of the LSA’s overarching plan for crop production. This centralised direction allowed first-time farmers to become productive very fast, increasing the scale and helping farmers target demand. It also meant that each smallholder relied on those around them.

The very architecture of the LSA settlements enabled and reinforced connection. Plots were lined up next to one another, with the houses at one end and the space for growing crops at the other, all in a row. Sometimes farms would sow from one end of the row to the other, suggesting little concern for the boundaries between individual properties – after all, the produce would be sold collectively. In the earliest smallholdings, the individual houses were in the middle of each plot, but fears about isolation – expressed by the women, who were used to community living on busy Durham streets – led to later developments grouping the houses together.^[4] Most settlements had a purpose-built social centre, which also served the broader local community, offering everything from lectures and dances to whist drives. In recognising the necessity of cultivating more than vegetables, and of fostering community spirit between farmers and workers in the local towns, the LSA ultimately had more in common with more radical visions of communal living than its original proponents would have dreamed of. Such collectivity produced a very material understanding of community among LSA farmers: their personal and economic successes were intimately bound with those of their neighbours.

*

In the early years of the LSA, some of the men who had been recruited dropped out, citing the difficulty of farm life and the hostility of local residents; it also took time for the recruits to train, and for the farms to become productive. Crucially, however, the LSA supported tenants during this period: they were paid a flat rate until their farms were up and running. Recruitment of tenants only increased once the selection criteria were broadened during World War 2 to include people with previous farming experience, and by 1956, only six holdings were vacant across the whole country (with 107 new tenants having taken up smallholdings the previous year). However, as the 1960s progressed, industrialisation meant that locations specialising in pig and poultry farming suffered, and in 1966, the LSA closed four of the northern estates due to an inability to maintain production. (I wasn’t able to find evidence of the extent to which the government influenced this decision, but 1966 was a tough year for nationalised industries: that summer, Harold Wilson’s Labour government announced cuts to planned spending on them by £95 million, which would have hit the LSA.)

Without a firm commitment to maintaining the centralised, nationalised basis of the LSA, the diversity of farms couldn’t be supported. But even in 1966, there were still ninety-eight suitable applicants on the LSA’s waiting list, showing continued demand for smallholdings, despite it being a time when tenant turnover was relatively high and some farms were really suffering. That same year, among the 220 new tenants who joined the scheme nationally, only eighteen had come from outside agriculture. The LSA had moved away from its initial aim of attracting the unemployed from industries outside farming, but was still proving popular both within the farming industry and as a self-reproducing system, with the children of tenants, like my grandfather, becoming tenants themselves.

Perhaps these strengthened links with the broader agricultural sector were a factor in improving LSA farmers’ relationships with local communities. The early resettled miners were often distrusted, stereotyped as unclean, work-shy outsiders who could know nothing about farming, and there was at least one ‘mass meeting of protest’ (by the Conservative Club in Potton, Bedfordshire) opposing the establishment of an LSA settlement. However, the social centres at the heart of each LSA estate helped to show locals that they too could benefit from such a scheme, and certainly helped LSA farmers to integrate into rural communities. By 1974, a report described the LSA as the ‘community centre’ for the whole village.^[5]

In 1967, this community spirit drove the National Association of Land Settlement Association Tenants (NALSAT) – a kind of trade union specifically for LSA farmers – to lobby for the scheme’s cooperative practices to be extended to other local farmers so that they could also benefit from the centralised sale of produce. Since 1951, NALSAT had been given a role in ‘setting the main direction’ of the LSA; they had to be formally consulted on the scheme’s operation, and had representatives on the LSA’s executive committee, alongside the minister for agriculture. Every tenant was automatically entitled to membership of NALSAT, and there were no subscriptions. NALSAT advocated on the tenants’ behalf, and also consulted on the Wise report, a government-commissioned investigation into the success and sustainability of the LSA (which was ultimately used to justify its closure). According to the report, the NALSAT chairman argued that most of the tenants on profitable estates (mostly those in the south) thought that they should continue to support the less profitable estates, even in hard times. Contrary to the argument that collective farming was somehow against the natural (capitalist) order, these farmers were keen to uphold the core tenets of the LSA. The main improvement suggested by NALSAT was that the farmers should have greater participation in the management of the LSA – just like what other unions were fighting for at the same time.

*

Although the average income of LSA farmers continued to increase until as late as 1979, in the 1980s, various factors (the fuel crisis, competition from farms on the continent that were subsidised by their own governments, and the increasing monopoly power of supermarkets to set cheap prices) meant that it was difficult for the LSA to make money. Had the government chosen to prioritise the production of food for the people of this country, it could have stepped in, as the protestors in Sidlesham handing out free tomatoes were demanding. Instead, the Conservatives announced, just weeks before Christmas in 1982, that the LSA would be shut down the following spring, bringing to an end almost five decades of centralised collective farming. It simply wasn’t deemed profitable enough for this new era of mass privatisation. Nearly 8,000 acres of previously government-owned land was privatised almost overnight, with LSA tenants pushed to buy their land if they wanted to continue to farm. Most of the smallholdings formed local cooperatives, but they struggled without the support of the LSA. My grandparents continued to produce fruit and vegetables as part of Sidlesham Growers, a cooperative of eighty-nine former LSA farmers. I remember helping to pick tomatoes in the early 2000s, using those old boxes emblazoned with the LSA logo. Today, the standard-issue LSA houses still dot the country lanes of Sidlesham, but brambles have long since overgrown most of the glasshouses.

It feels almost inconceivable today that a government in this country would introduce a system to enable fair and equitable production of food based on communal practices and government investment. Yet small-scale farms like my grandparents’ are almost always financially unworkable without the support and organisational principles of a scheme like the LSA. Despite substantial unrest in the agricultural sector, no party or political project today seems to be offering a real solution to this farming crisis. The LSA demonstrates that collectivised and centralised farming methods could offer farmers a better deal, by seeing them as members of their community and investing in them and their industry. Industrial, privatised farming, by contrast, removes farmers’ ability to negotiate on their conditions as a collective – and removes any government responsibility to support them.

In the near future, if we wish to survive, we will have to move huge numbers of workers out of the industries that are destroying our planet, whether that is mass agriculture, fossil capital, or the arms trade. The LSA is evidence that a government could choose to transition workers from one industry to another, and to support those workers in the process. Farming does not have to come at the cost of the environment, or of workers’ rights. In the spirit of the LSA farmers, we must organise towards a form of farming that could provide food for the people, by the people.

^[1]Land Settlement Association (1937). Second Annual Report for the Year Ending December 31st 1936. Land Settlement Association.

^[2]The Labour Party (1930). The Labour Party 1930 Report of the 30th Annual Conference. The Labour Party.

^[3]Land Settlement Association (1939). The Use of the Land in Relation to Unemployment and Agricultural Policy. Land Settlement Association.

^[4]Dearlove, Pamela. (2007). ‘Go Home You Miners!’: Fen Drayton and the LSA. Pamela Dearlove.

^[5]McCready, KJ, Plunkett Foundation for Co-operative Studies. (1974) Land Settlement Association: Its History and Present Form. Plunkett Foundation for Co-operative Studies.

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Stella Swain is a writer and organiser based in London. She spends most of her time campaigning for a free Palestine, but when she’s not doing that she’s cooking, thinking and writing about food and building a better world.

This article was based on research conducted at the British Library and draws from collections including newspapers, manuscripts, government publications, ephemera and trade literature.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today’s essay by Saba Imtiaz digs into the archives in Karachi to see how women have continuously forged and documented culinary histories in Pakistan.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, is still available. You can order a copy below.

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Aloo mattar – potatoes and peas – is one of Pakistan’s canonical everyday foods, but the most notorious version can be found in an incredible interview clip from 2022, during which a woman is accused of poisoning someone with the dish.

Woman: He brought me Ativan pills and I served them in the food.

Interviewer: What did you make?

Woman: I made aloo mattar.

Interviewer, deadpan: Shorbay walay? [With gravy?]

Woman: Yes.

I know little about the case, and there isn’t much that can be found about it online, but now, in Pakistani internet speak, ‘aloo mattar, shorbay walay’ turns this otherwise routine dish into a cultural reference to murder.

Much of contemporary conversation about Pakistan’s cuisines exists in piecemeal form like this, in undated newspaper scans, clips, memes and reels. These trump the more formal tomes of Pakistani food legacies, there is no all-encompassing online guide to its gastronomic culture, which means that there are no quick answers to the questios that plague me. Mysteries like: why am I addicted to putting crunchy, spicy crisps on everything? What is the origin story of the fantastical creation that is qeema achari macaroni in a box?

To answer questions about Pakistan’s ever-changing food histories, I had, for years, relied on fractions of anecdotes from the internet. This was until 2019, when, during research for my book, I spent days rummaging through decades-old newspaper files in the cramped study room of Karachi’s Liaquat National Library. On one of these days, I found a piece on Chinese cooking, complete with recipes for sweet and sour sauce and fried rice and prawns, tucked in a 1971 issue of the Pakistan Times. Following this, I came across an article on Lahore’s Anarkali Bazaar in a 1948 edition of the Civil and Military Gazette, which mentions ‘a number of small stalls and pushcarts, making made-to-order “kebabs”, potato cakes served [with] fresh sliced onions and green chillies and other indefinable and doubtful-looking delicacies for the jostling crowd’.

Both of these articles were in the women’s pages, which are often found in older newspapers and magazines in South Asia and across the world. As I looked further, I found more recipes written by women, alongside dispatches and observations about how their appetites, techniques and roles in the kitchen were changing in a newly independent Pakistan. While today, talking about food is often the domain of dudebros on TikTok, women have been documenting Pakistan’s food since the country came into existence. What else could the archives tell me?

Women’s magazines have long held clues to culinary and national histories. Before the era of the celebrity chef, ‘cooking’ was largely considered to be women’s work, and coverage of trends and recipes were often found in publications marketed to women. In Pakistan, this existed mostly in newspapers like the Pakistan Times and the Gazette. The Gazette was one of the newspapers that catered to the elite in colonised, pre-partition India (Rudyard Kipling was, famously, one of its writers) and was printed in Lahore and Simla. Its women’s page was published on Sundays – which, during British rule, consisted of content for memsahibs (a common term for colonial officers’ wives and elite Indian women). The Gazette continued to be published during and after August 1947 – the month of Indian independence, partition, and the creation of Pakistan – but eventually folded in 1963.

Throughout and after partition, the lives of memsahibs – who were both the audience and writers of the paper – seemed largely disconnected from the situation in the Punjab province at the time. A million people were killed, and around 15 million were displaced and in a state of destitution, living in camps across the newly created borders and using makeshift stoves to cook with limited rations. Amidst the carnage, the women’s page in the Gazette continued to run articles about fashion trends, embroidery patterns and recipes.

Despite circumstances for the Gazette’s columnists being very different from those displaced, we can still find material traces of the political situation in the paper’s women’s page. Throughout the decade, the British colonial government had plundered the Indian colony’s resources of everything from wheat to sugar for its war efforts, eventually leading to a devastating famine across Bengal. Ten days after partition, the Gazette published a recipe for lime-juice barley that could serve as an alternative to nimboo pani or lemonade, which was no longer being served in cafes or at private homes ‘now that sugar is even more strictly rationed’. Another article by a writer called G L advocates for the use of honey as a replacement ‘when you find your stock [of sugar] is almost out, and ration day is far ahead’. Similarly, in the 14 September 1947 issue, N McF – possibly a British or Anglo-Indian writer – offered a recipe for coconut toffee made with shakar (jaggery powder) instead of sugar. It feels surreal to think of the elite complaining about a lack of sugar, given that ‘sugar barons’ is a term now casually used in Pakistan to refer to wealthy mill owners, who have an outsized influence on politics, the economy and chai.

What I found illuminating about reading the dispatches in the Gazette in particular is that women – even these women - were grappling with the larger questions of what their role would be in a new, free country. There was a spirit of make-do in the kitchen, and a cautious optimism about the way upper-class women’s roles beyond the home could change, too.

While in 1949, Shehla Shibli wrote that ‘Washing, cooking, and sewing will be done better if the housewife does each thing herself’, she soon offered an alternative vision, suggesting that a talented, intelligent woman will ‘be more valuable to the country and the nation if she employs the best of laundry-hands, the best of cooks … to deal with humdrum domesticity, and employs superior talent where its utility would be more worthwhile.’

By following the women’s page of the Gazette through the archives, we can see how, in Pakistan, society began to engage with the idea that for (some) women, a world should exist beyond how to feed a sugar-obsessed child as the country moved from survival to aspiration. And while for Pakistani women of the upper class, these fantasies did come true, the reality is that many – privileged or not – are still navigating the same roadblocks they did back then.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Pakistani women entered the urban workforce in cities like Karachi and Lahore, working as everything from newspaper writers and computer programmers to receptionists and glamorous flight attendants on Pakistan International Airlines. As the writer Noor Agha put it in Woman’s World magazine in 1967, it had not yet occurred to the Pakistani man that ‘the demure little thing at his beck and call is capable of turning into a vote-demanding, fire-breathing creature.’ Agha notes that, while at the time of partition, the idea of wives working was considered ‘preposterous’, husbands (from the privileged classes) were now someopen to letting women work in jobs like teaching, or to dabble in the arts or music.

As women’s employment changed, so did the conversations about food. The recipes featured in women’s publications began to stress quickness and convenience over the hours of labour associated with traditional recipes. Take the recipe for walnut fudge cake that appeared in the Urdu language Akhbar-e-Khawateen magazine in 1971, which mentions that ‘the best quality of this dish is that it does not require baking’ because many women would only have had access to a stovetop, not an oven. Or the ‘coffee orange’ – a combination of coffee, hot water and orange juice – which appeared in Woman’s World magazine in 1967 and would probably go viral on Instagram today. There are also useful tips for cooking and hosting – for example, a recipe (possibly an advertorial) for mango ice cream in Akhbar-e-Khawateen that cautions readers not to use a plastic or glass bowl to freeze their ice cream.

As women in Pakistan began to make time for themselves away from the kitchen, the culture of dining out expanded, and so some of the first documented criticism directed at the women whose lives had stopped revolving around the kitchen began to appear. In the introduction to Begum Bilquis Jehan Naseeruddin Khan’s 1970 cookbook Khush Zaiqa, Begum Tazeen Faridi wrote:

Women of an older generation didn’t have college or university degrees, or the experience of foreign travel. But they had foresight; and they had arrived in their marital homes with the secret of how to keep men happy. They knew that men light up if they get delicious food on time.

She added that now – and the snideness is apparent here – ‘people are too busy. Men are forced to go to restaurants and hotels to get something new to eat, as their wives don’t bother to put any effort into making delicious meals.’

Simultaneously, in the 1970s, the kitchen began to be documented in the popular, low-brow writing of digests (pocket-sized magazines a la Reader’s Digest) published in Urdu. Digests - like Khawateen Digest, Shu’aa and Pakeeza - feature everything from novellas and household tips to advice columns. With a readership of predominantly women, drawn from the lower and middle classes, these continue to be one of the few – maybe the only – thriving print industries in Pakistan.

The academic Javaria Farooqui refers to the concept of digests in Pakistan as ‘kitchen literature’. She argues that the kitchen is often a setting where lovers meet: hands hover while the heroine is cutting cucumbers, a bite of a paratha is snatched away by an aspiring lover, pots crash, the hero marvels about how he’s never had such amazing food in his life (a favourite trope is the making of tea). The kitchen is also where women read digests – it’s the space in the house they are expected to occupy, a space that is actually theirs and that won’t be intruded on by others (particularly men). The stories in these digests are a depiction of women’s lived experiences and beliefs, and the lines between writer and reader are often blurred. (Kiran Nazir Ahmed’s ethnographic study of digests describes an editor and writer of Pakeeza being inundated with phone calls from readers, who then took inspiration from them for her novellas.)

Today, one aspect that has changed is the focus on careers. Farooqui pointed me to Sumera Hameed’s Urdu novella Rah e Naward e Shauq, published in Khawateen Digest in September 2017. The story centres on Dina, the young daughter of a village caterer who wants to become a chef. Dina’s travails through cooking school in Lahore are beset with incredible challenges, class differences, backstabbers galore and more tragedies than one should bear in a lifetime. While studying in Lahore, she stays with her maternal aunt, and she is called on at all times to make food, even after her gruelling time at the cooking school. ‘They all stayed up until 3, 4 am, and wanted her to do the same’, Dina laments. ‘They could stay up and eat at all hours, but at the very least they could let her sleep for just four hours.’

This is a story of ambition, but that ambition is tempered with the reality that women in the fiction published in digests are expected to be homemakers, too. There is still the idea, as Farooqui put it, that ‘a woman should be ambitious – but she should come back home and cook food’.

In Pakistan today, the idealised female cook isn’t just the homemaker who can cook well. Now we’ve got the domestic goddess. Fashion influencer and domestic goddess. Friendly neighbour, just popping by to tell you how to make dal. The hostess with the impeccable house. There’s a dizzying montage: fresh produce, frying onions, a perfectly laden table, the perfect guests, the perfect selfies at the end of the night. The message is clear, regardless of the trope: building a community around food is still, very much, women’s work, and while much has changed, has it really?

This expectation to cook fresh, hot food for every meal governs women’s lives in Pakistan to devastating effect. The alleged motive behind not one, but several, murders of women in recent years has been ‘not preparing food on time’. Right-wingers were driven into apocalyptic rage in 2018 (and the years that followed) by a placard at a women’s march that simply proclaimed ‘khud khana garam karlo’ – ‘heat up your own food’. The culinary history of Pakistan cannot exclude this conversation.

Ignorance about how women’s labour makes a household function still extends to most food content. Women cook, men tell stories. And yet people love to make fun of blogs that include stories before their recipes – not taking into account that recipe developers (who often give their work away for free) and women passing down recipes have got one thing right: when they include the story of how a dish was cooked in their home, it constitutes a little piece of how Pakistani cuisines came together. I can only hope that in seventy-odd years from now, someone will read about the murder meal Ativan-laced aloo mattar somewhere – in a dusty digest they dig out of a kitchen, or in a blog where, hopefully, there will be a story before the recipe.

Note: The Civil and Military Gazette articles referenced are from the British Newspaper Archive (britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk); images digitised by the British Library Board.

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Saba Imtiaz (sabaimtiaz.com) is an author and researcher living in the Netherlands. She writes about culture, food, and urban life, and her work has appeared in the Guardian, Saveur, and Roads and Kingdoms. She is the co-author of Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Scandal (societygirlbook.com), a true-crime investigation and social history of the mysterious death of a poet in Pakistan in 1970. She is currently working on a novel, and blogs.

Shehzil Malik is a Pakistani artist and illustrator who focuses on human rights, feminism and stories from the Global South. She raises issues around justice through illustration, street art, publications and the internet. She is currently based in Berlin.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. This month is the 200th anniversary of the death of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French writer, gourmand and polymath who invented modern food writing. To mark it, we’re publishing a special long read by Ruby Tandoh on Brillat-Savarin, his work and his life, and why his writing remains important today.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, is still available. You can order a copy below.

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Just before lunchtime one October day in 1790, a man walked into a bar. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin had left his home a couple of days before and travelled with his favourite horse northward through the Jura in east France. He had offended some revolutionaries, followers of Robespierre and Marat – he could be a little pompous. So he was on his way to the small town of Dole, where he was to meet a government representative to ask for a letter of safe conduct. They were the worst years of the French Revolution, but it was also game season, and this was wine country. Either he’d be sent to the scaffold, or he would not. First, he would dine.

And so, at lunchtime, Brillat-Savarin walked into the bar – well, a small provincial inn – and saw a spit threaded with tiny French quails. There were corn crakes, too, famed for the delicacy of their livers. Someone had laid a round of toast under the dripping birds. And the hare – the smell of it ‘would be enough incense for a cathedral’. You can imagine how he felt when the innkeeper told him that it all belonged to some lawyers celebrating an inheritance case, but that monsieur could, if he pleased, have some mutton and bouilli. Brillat-Savarin hated broth; he would later devote many words to this. He insisted on joining the strangers, and they, impressed by the audacity, let Brillat-Savarin sit with them. To the game they added truffled chicken fricassée, set creams, fruits and cheese. They drank and sang: he ad libbed a song about good company and feeling blessed and got a round of applause. When he went to Dole that evening, the government representative’s wife, Mme Prot – a pretty but emotionally neglected music lover with whom he spent the evening flirting – agreed to put in a good word.

The note did what Brillat-Savarin needed it to do. It is how he lived to publish the story of the visit to the inn, in an essay of crystalline and somewhat self-flattering detail, in The Physiology of Taste. Today, anybody who knows of Brillat-Savarin knows him for this book, which was published in December 1825, a couple of months before his death. It is a catholic collection of aphorisms, essays and meditations on the nature of eating and, as things happen, the most influential non-recipe book ever written about food. It has been in print in France almost continuously for the last two hundred years, and has been available in English since 1854. Generations of food writers have built upon and disputed Brillat-Savarin’s work. For decades after The Physiology of Taste’s publication, literary types deferred to his judgement, the nineteenth-century version of ‘Well of course Nigel says…’ M.F.K. Fisher’s translation of the book – with its quibbling, with its digressionary footnotes and fond tellings-off – reads as a love letter to the man (she even goes so far as to say that he would have made a great husband, which shows how dazzled writers become in his presence). It would be impossible to enumerate Brillat-Savarin’s spawn: the food books and magazines, the essays and culinary memoirs, pieces of ostensible journalism and, today, across-the-dining-table podcasts. Saying that he influenced Western food writing doesn’t do it justice. He all but invented the genre. He is our Defoe.

Like many people, I knew Brillat-Savarin’s quotes before I knew who wrote them. If you have spent any time at all reading about food for fun, you will probably have come across one. Some of the teachings are so generic as to be useless (‘The Universe is nothing without the things that live in it, and everything that lives, eats’). Others have proven as indecipherable as the ancient glyphs (‘We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast’). But there is something about the Professor’s assuredness – it beguiles. Take: ‘A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.’ Or: ‘The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star.’ This one has been quoted so many times that it is practically the lorem ipsum of cookbook epigraphs, although Brillat-Savarin didn’t even come up with it. As generations of writers have done since, he stole it – in his case, from a judge he knew.

The most famous aphorism, perhaps the most over-quoted sentence in the history of food, is the fourth: ‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es’, or, ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.’ We have gradually perverted the original phrase to ‘You are what you eat’. I have done it myself, grasping towards something ontological about what eating does to us, turning it into a causal thing and totally missing that Brillat-Savarin’s original is dialogic. ‘Tell me what you eat.’ Half of Brillat-Savarin’s aphorisms are about dinner party etiquette – what to do about late-running guests, or the order in which to bring out drinks; they could have come from Martha Stewart. This is table talk.

We have taken Brillat-Savarin so very seriously that, the more we revere him, the less we really understand. In fact, it is gut-wrenching to think just how much bad food writing could have been averted if people had only read beyond the first two pages of his book. The real Brillat-Savarin lives in the couple of hundred meandering, heavily anecdotal pages that follow the aphorisms – the stories like the one in the inn, where you find him suddenly in the room, a tiresome but unignorable old uncle who can take a sharp left through a tale from his war stories and end up on the topic of a chicken he once ate. This is the good stuff. It is here, a shade over two hundred years ago, that Brillat-Savarin had a deceptively seismic idea, one that we’re still reckoning with today: that it might be as enjoyable to discuss food as to eat it.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born in 1755, the eldest son of wealthy parents, in the small cathedral town of Belley. The family passed the legal trade down through generations of first-born sons, locals said, the way that kings beget dauphins. He became a magistrate, then joined the National Constituent Assembly in 1789. From the papers he has left us, it seems his hope was for life in France to be – bar the adjustment of a few seasonings – as it always had been. He wrote against the division of his France into bureaucratic départments, the butchering of the patrie. He scoffed at the idea of trial by jury. He appears to have defended the death penalty with more verve than he represented his own clients, who found him boorish. He was tall. Balzac, who admired him, described him as the ‘drum major of the court of cassation’. He had his virtues, if he must say so himself. ‘Although I carry around with me a fairly prominent stomach, I still have well-formed lower legs, and calves as sinewy as the muscles of an Arabian steed.’

When he wasn’t working, Brillat-Savarin played violin. He researched pet topics like languages and the art of duels. Most of all, he dined. Bugey, the prefecture where you will find Belley, was famed for its food. ‘Crayfish, trout, and pike abound in our rivers,’ Belley local Lucien Tendret wrote in La Table au Pays de Brillat-Savarin. ‘There is a profusion of truffles, morels, and mushrooms in our woods.’ The locals had a right to brag. Have you ever had écrevisses, served under a sauce made of butter infused with crayfish tails and shells, and béchamel? You could get leverets in that country that Parisians could only dream of. The river Furens, M.F.K. Fisher later wrote, had rose-fleshed trout and pike ‘as white as ivory’. The signature dish of Brillat-Savarin’s mother, Claudine-Aurore, was a pillow of liver paté that they called oreiller de la Belle Aurore. This is the terroir that produced Brillat-Savarin.

In late October 1790, with his letter of safe conduct, Brillat-Savarin returned to Belley. For a while he went back to his duties. They even made him mayor, but things weren’t the same. He belonged to a pre-revolutionary France and never truly got over its loss. In December of 1793, a couple of months after they beheaded Marie Antoinette, he fled eastward, crossing the border into Switzerland. It was during his years in exile that Brillat-Savarin collected many of his finest anecdotes. In Lausanne, there was the man who only ate twice a week; Brillat-Savarin invited him to dinner out of pity. Never again – ‘I shuddered to watch him gorge.’ He heard a story in Cologne about a Frenchman who grew rich by making salad dressings and carried a mahogany case of vinegars, truffles, anchovies, ketchup, oils and caviar. It’s a charm of Brillat-Savarin that he gives no preferential treatment to the things he saw himself.

Brillat-Savarin arrived in the United States in 1794 and spent two years in aimless peace. These were the years when he had his enlightenment: that there is much to be gained, even in the mundane things in life, by simply paying attention. In Hartford, Connecticut, he went out hunting and saw, for the first time in his life, virgin forest, ‘where the sound of an axe had never been heard’. The New World. When he finally shot a turkey, he sat with it for an age, just staring. In New York, he made note of where to get the best ice cream and who went there, and when, and what they bought. He must have been there for hours, watching the women with their ices. Hamstrung by his English, he talked less at the table and listened more.

This is just one of Brillat-Savarin’s many surprises – that it was away from France, far from the heartland, that he perfected his gastronomy. Before his exile, Brillat-Savarin had written a couple of political essays and some erotica (Brillat-Savarin scholars mourn the loss of these contes, which his inheritors destroyed). But he never wrote about food, and why would he? The feast was certain to be there tomorrow, and the day after that. Exile forbade his complacency. He made a science of noticing, then of recording and theorising every seemingly mundane meal. ‘I soon saw, as I considered every aspect of the pleasures of the table, that something better than a cook book should be written about them.’ Better than a cook book – we’re still dealing with the ramifications of this one rogue idea. It is the idea that thinking about food might be worth more, somehow, than simply making and eating it. That reading about food might be a pleasure in itself. It was around this time that he started writing The Physiology of Taste.

It is hard to imagine The Physiology of Taste being published today. If it feels as though Brillat-Savarin simply collected every digressionary thought he ever had about food and printed them, unedited, in a book, it is because this is what he did. Publishers turned it down, so he self-published for a readership of his friends. We should be thankful for this. It’s because nobody edited him that The Physiology of Taste is an accidental self-portrait. The prose bulges when he is intrigued, and slims to the barest sentences when he is bored. To say that it is idiosyncratic is shirking its full weirdness. There is a chapter about the end of the world, and others about sleepwalking and death. Brillat-Savarin gets the topic of restaurants out of the way in a few paragraphs, but gives many, many pages to the charms of women.

Brillat-Savarin loved women. In fact, it is difficult to think of anyone from the last two centuries of profoundly horny literary men who has loved them more. ‘I see every day such wenches,’ he wrote in his letters, ‘with marble-hard and snow-white breasts on which I gaze panting to kiss.’ His English grew ragged with excitement. ‘I am sure that the future time is big with good slaps.’ Of shooting lunches, he wrote: ‘At the appointed hour light carriages arrive and prancing steeds, bearing beautiful ladies, plumes and flowers. I have seen them spread out on the grass turkey in transparent jelly, home-made pâté, and salad ready for mixing. I have seen them dance light-footed around the camp fire.’ He fell in love with Herminie de Borose, his friend’s daughter, with chestnut hair and nymph-like carriage, whose feet were some of the shapeliest he ever saw. At some point he talked her into giving him her small black satin shoe, and kept it for the rest of his life. All of this went in the book.

It would be a mistake to see these as digressions. Brillat-Savarin was a philosopher of desire. To the five senses we already know, he added a sixth: horniness. No, really – ‘Let us grant to physical desire that sensual position which cannot be denied it.’ He theorised. Sight and sound help us know our place in the world, touch helps us manipulate the things that surround us. With smell and taste, we interrogate these things to learn if they are good. We eat. ‘And now a strange languor invades the body,’ he wrote. ‘A secret fire is aflame in his breast; he feels an urge to share his existence with another being.’

Of all the special interests that made it into his book, it was physiology that most excited Brillat-Savarin. It is the foundation of so many of his follies (one of the best things that ever happened to him was being mistaken for a medical doctor one time). He frittered his time away, doing things like coming up with a prototype of what we would now recognise as an Air Wick diffuser, and coming up with a name for it – the irrorator. (He often found the French language inadequate for the grandeur of his thoughts.) Brillat-Savarin was raised with the hubris of the Enlightenment – we have to give him the grace of remembering that. His age mate is Diderot’s Encyclopédie. He grew up with all that expansive humanist thought at just about the last point in Western history when people still believed that existence could be understood, even mastered, by individual, brilliant men. To the armchair essais of philosophers like Michel de Montaigne, he added rigour. ‘I needed to be doctor, chemist, physiologist, and even’ – not that he liked to dwell on it – ‘something of a scholar.’

He made a great many observations: ‘Some people are cantankerous as long as they are digesting: this is not the time either to propose new projects or to ask favors of them.’ Brillat-Savarin was one of the first writers to advocate for low-carb diets. He got a lot of his medical expertise from his godson, the surgeon Anthelme Richerand. It was from Richerand’s popular but critically denounced Nouveaux Élémens de Physiologie that Brillat-Savarin took many of his theories, some of them almost word for word. It’s extraordinary, in fact, just how Brillat-Savarin looked up to Richerand – a man twenty-four years his junior who was known for how, ‘with pathological envy and hatred, he pursued those, alive or dead, who, in his mind, obscured his fame.’ But Richerand never did turn on his greatest plagiarist. The two seem to have realised early that the second-rate scientist needs the first-rate writer, and vice versa, simpatico.

Few besides Brillat-Savarin write with such vivid precision about the body. The tongue ‘endowed as it is with a certain amount of muscular energy … serves to crush, revolve, compress and swallow.’ He explains how ‘the cheeks furnish saliva’.He is the only writer I have known to make a David Attenborough-style thriller of the act of chewing. ‘As soon as an esculent substance is introduced into the mouth, it is confiscated, gas and juice, beyond recall,’ he writes. ‘The lips cut off its retreat; the teeth seize and crush it; it is soaked with saliva; the tongue kneads it and turns it over; an intake of breath pushes it towards the gullet … and down it plunges. Not one particle, not one drop, not one atom has escaped the attention of the apparatus of taste.’ You can feel him quivering with the exertion of setting the record straight, 185 years after Descartes’ Meditations, trying to break down the idea that cognition is the most important thing we do as humans. Look at the lower senses, Brillat-Savarin said. This is where we find ourselves.

In 1800, Brillat-Savarin moved to Paris, where – except for summers in Belley – he would spend the rest of his life. It was there, in December 1825, that he anonymously self-published The Physiology of Taste. It was typical of him – a lifetime of sermonising, then he put it all in the name of ‘The Professor’. There always was a defensiveness about his love of food: his knowing pompousness, his alter-ego, as if preparing for the day when he would reveal it was a joke. If he was worried that his colleagues, serious men of the bench, would grouse about it, he was right. What kind of a world was this, they complained, in which judges could act like clowns? But in Paris society, The Physiology of Taste was an immediate success.

It was a good time and place to be a gourmand. Some of the first modern restaurants were opened in the late eighteenth century; within a couple of decades, there was an entire Parisian dining scene. Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière was the original restaurant critic. Marie-Antoine Carême, one-time chef to Tsar Alexander I, codified French cuisine at a time when French wasn’t even a first language for most of its people and cooking tended to be regional. The lore was being written. There is no trace of the word ‘gastronomy’ in print until 1801, when it springs up in the satirical poem ‘La Gastronomie’ by Joseph Berchoux (it is one of those words – like gourmet, gourmand, gloutonnerie – that the French have invented at intervals to get at the social distinctions that fall under the unworkably broad umbrella of ‘eating’). The academic Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson notes that, at this time, ‘French cuisine became French not so much from the food eaten as through the texts written and then avidly read.’ A foodie, even now, isn’t someone who eats good food, but someone who talks about it.

The Physiology of Taste, with its subtitle Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, was dedicated to this entirely new social tribe – ‘the gastronomes of Paris’. ‘Gastronomy is the intelligent knowledge of whatever concerns man’s nourishment,’ Brillat-Savarin wrote. It belongs to physics and chemistry, to vintners and hunters, to cookery and business, to merchants and bakers. ‘It rules our whole life. It also concerns every state of society.’ When Brillat-Savarin ran tests comparing what happens when you mill coffee beans versus when the beans are pounded, he would segue into the origins of coffee cultivation, then explain the impact of caffeine on the brain. ‘Voltaire and Buffon drank a great deal of coffee,’ he notes. And look what it did for them: ‘Admirable clarity’, ‘enthusiastic harmony’, ‘extraordinary cerebral exultation’. Then, at the moment he might be about to overreach, he brings it back with an anecdote. He was so good. A few years later, Balzac, who wrote Brillat-Savarin’s posthumous entry in the Biographie Universelle, wrote his own essay about coffee. Read it. It makes Brillat-Savarin look like Dumas.

Of all the hats Brillat-Savarin wore – and he was, by his own reckoning, something of a polymath – it is his sociology that most astonishes. A beat-by-beat of the time that Talleyrand showed up to his own dinner five hours late. The time he went to the pub and was told there was no meat, even though there was clearly a leg of mutton on the spit. Individually, they are sketches in the Curb Your Enthusiasm vein. But taken together, they record the social life of France at a time of revolutionary change. In Paris, he saw that the new gourmands were not the old aristocracy, but bankers, writers and clergymen. There were whole classes of people for whom food discourse was suddenly a thing. You could take gastronomy seriously. You could dine with Napoléon. Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es. We always get this wrong, mix up our pronouns. It is: Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are. Not the tender, personal who – the who of memoir – but what. What are you, in this strange new world?

If anything is testament to Brillat-Savarin’s talent as a storyteller, it is that nobody, least of all the people who knew him personally, could believe he wrote The Physiology of Taste. ‘His book alone revealed the sharp and profound wit of his mind,’ one wrote. ‘His conversation betrayed nothing of it; it was even short, indifferent, and monotonous.’ People said he ate ‘copiously but badly’. Friends noticed his old-fashioned clothes – all those frills, right up to the jowls. They said he almost never invited anyone round to dinner, and even if he had, who would come? He was barely known outside of the circles of his cousin, the society belle Juliette Récamier. (This much may be true – he was in love with Récamier and even had a bust of her in his house.) But when he is mentioned in her letters it is only once, as ‘the magistrate’. Even those who truly liked him didn’t know what he was capable of. ‘For them,’ his friend Richerand wrote, ‘Brillat was just a nice man.’

Less than a month after The Physiology of Taste was published, Brillat-Savarin caught a cold at mass. On 2 February 1826, he died of pneumonia. He never got a chance to enjoy the book’s success, although that might not have been the worst of his losses. The autumn before he died he had been picking Côte-Grêle grapes down near Belley: ‘making my wine by a new method of my invention’. He was excited enough to write to his friends about it. ‘I think it will be just right in March.’ This is the thing in all Brillat-Savarin’s work that cannot be argued with: his joy; this ability, right until the very end, to encounter every food as if for the very first time. He believed that pleasure was worth writing about. It is this – rather than his more quotable philosophising – that we would do well to remember. He invented modern food writing by insisting that nothing meaningful can be said about food without also speaking about how it makes us feel.

Montaigne, the other of France’s great thinkers about feeling, said it too. ‘I hate that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our bodies are at table,’ he wrote. ‘I would have the mind take its place there, and sit.’ Montaigne was a couple of centuries ahead of his time – he lived in a France before restaurants, before the discourse got its legs. Writers needed Brillat-Savarin to remind them of this once they were ready to hear it. He has been reminding us of it ever since.

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Credits

Ruby Tandoh is a food and culture writer who has written about food, art, architecture and culture for Vittles, The New Yorker, The Baffler, Eater, Art Review, RA Magazine, Tate etc., The Guardian and more. Her new book, All Consuming, was released in September 2025.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Adriann Ramirez (aka Gay Nigella) explores the complicated feelings that arise every year when requests from corporations for Pride-themed bakes start to flood their inbox. (If you’re thinking, ‘But Pride is months away’, we’re publishing this piece now to coincide with LGBT+ History Month in the UK. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.)

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, is still available and is very queer, with contributions from Johanna Hedva, Morgan Page, Alim Kheraj, Lauren J Joseph and many more. You should order a copy.

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One Tuesday afternoon last June, one of the hottest days of the year, I set out on a mission: to try a slice of the Pride rainbow layer cake from Ikea. As the Head of Pastry at Fink’s in London and the self-proclaimed Gay Nigella, I felt it was my duty to try the cake professing its Pride credentials so loudly. It turned out that the only thing to feel pride about that day was Ikea’s new central London location at Oxford Circus – a dead twenty-five minutes from my door to theirs, which at least minimised the inconvenience of tasting six layers of artificially coloured vanilla sponge and buttercream. As suspected, the rainbow cake was unambiguously shit: dry, with a saccharine, cloying sweetness, lacking any real flavour or complexity. Flatpack Pride. In short: it was a fairly accurate reflection of contemporary mainstream Pride.

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In the run-up to Pride Month every May, a slew of requests from companies I’ve never heard of fill my inbox. They’re looking for menus, quotes and custom cakes – all of which, they’re adamant, must be explicitly Pride- and/or rainbow-themed. Some queries are sweeter than others. Last year, Fink’s got a very last-minute request from a major corporation to create a menu of Pride-themed desserts. I came up with a bespoke menu, including brioche doughnuts filled with Gariguette strawberry jam and vanilla crème légère, cupcakes with buttercream made with seasonal fruit, and layer cakes (which this very magazine considered notable enough to write about), signing off my email with a, ‘While none of the desserts are Pride-themed, many queers make them, which is PRIDE plenty!’ I never heard from them again.

‘You are an LGBTQ+ owned business, which we are supporting during Pride month.’ This is the exact wording of a request I received. Supporting during Pride Month. And come 1 July? Chopped! I have an internal debate about whether to dignify these requests with a response. Being outwardly anti-LGBTQ has become increasingly acceptable once again, and efforts to exclude trans people from public spaces are being increasingly institutionalised. Am I complicit in pinkwashing if I enable a company to hold a singular Pride lunch, then happily ignore us for the rest of the year? Am I cosigning the actions of corporations who have shown us, time and again, that, when it comes down to it, they don’t have our backs? While there is no straightforward answer to this, and no one monolithic approach (thank God – if there were, all queers working in food would be forced into making rainbow cakes), it does strike me that, for the mainstream, there is a right and wrong way to go about it.

*

Last year, John Whaite – former Great British Bake Off golden boy, proprietor of Ruff Puff Bakehouse and Waitrose Weekend darling – shed his apron, along with a few more pieces of clothing and some brand deals, to pursue an OnlyFans career. (Note: the account had been up since 2022, but he went whole hog with the endeavour in the summer of 2025.) It was an audacious move. The intentional and overt sexualisation of his image was at odds with the sanitised versions of queerness that tend to populate UK media outlets, which still don’t like to acknowledge that deviant sexualities are generally premised on deviant sex (or, to put it another way, they like to separate the fudge maker from the fudge packer). Risking the loss of mainstream media and consumer support to create porn was at least somewhat subversive – and in my opinion, quite chic. What’s more, I’ve done my due diligence (I’m still wondering if I can expense this to Vittles as research) and, take it from me, the boy is blessed: think Tom of Finland meets Mr Kipling.

Unfortunately for John – and despite his significant gifts in this new career strand – it has been a tumultuous and very public journey. He went from giving interviews about his refusal to be censored (alongside photoshoots demonstrating this point) to dramatically U-turning. In September, he left OnlyFans completely, crediting his work at Ruff Puff with giving him ‘a true sense of purpose again’; a few weeks later, he announced that the real reason for his departure was steroid addiction (although he is now back on OnlyFans and has closed the bricks-and-mortar bakery).

While I haven’t dipped my toes in the waters of public exhibitionism via OnlyFans, John’s experiences have made me question how I fit into the greater landscape of food, commercial or otherwise. Am I, like John, only acceptable to the media and corporate powers that be when proffering commodified, acceptable versions of queerness that fit the narrative they want to put forward? In terms of my visibility as a queer chef, I don’t believe I have much choice in the matter of how I present myself – the last time I was mistaken for straight was when I was thirteen, and even at the time that was a shock. Now, rarely does a day go by where I’m not clocked for being the fag I am; I suppose the short shorts and long, painted nails are a dead giveaway. But for me, it’s important to be perceived as queer – it feels vital.

I was recently asked to be a guest chef on Sunday Brunch. I thought long and hard about what I was going to wear. I wanted to be authentic to myself and also let it be known on national television, to Barbara in Sheffield or Mickey in Shrewsbury, that I was queer (and unapologetic at that), but I didn’t want to wear something flashy and brightly coloured. I opted for a simple outfit: navy high-waisted trousers, a cropped white tee and a dark grey cardigan slung low on my shoulders, finished off with six-inch olive-green platform boots and terracotta blush on my cheeks – from Rhode, no less. The response to my outfit and appearance was largely positive, though someone on Twitter did ask what that bloke had on his feet. Fair play to him. Sunday Brunch did, however, send a list of things I wasn’t allowed to do, such as swearing, using innuendo or glamourising drinking, and while those things aren’t necessarily inherent to queerness, some of them do make it a whole lot more fun. I managed to fare well without breaking any rules, have a nice time and look hot while being the only queer among a group of lovely – but deeply heterosexual – guests and hosts. I was asked back. While it may not have been radically different from the queerness we’re used to seeing in the mainstream, it did make me feel that maybe there was space for someone like me.

*

At Fink’s, over 50% of staff company-wide are queer. On one level, managing our team is not dissimilar to a workplace with a majority of heterosexual chefs: there are arguments; people become close; there are romances and dalliances; close bonds are formed and broken; and really good food is created and cooked. That part is universal. However, to have the shared language that comes from being queer, with people you work with so intimately, is special. I was recently speaking to a newer colleague who told me that, in her two years working at a catering kitchen before joining Fink’s, she’d never once mentioned that she was gay. I found that shocking, but maybe it’s not.

Throughout my eleven years in the food industry, encompassing both front- and back-of-house roles, I’ve experienced a bevy of homophobic treatments. In service kitchens, the male chefs and kitchen porters made sexually suggestive jokes at my expense, groped me, and were outright homophobic. While this sometimes made me feel small and could be intimidating, I didn’t let it deter me. I learned to use my queerness as a weapon of its own. Firstly, I learned how to cook, and I learned how to do it better than them. My knowledge of ingredients and provenance, plus my unique relationships with suppliers and other great chefs in the field, gave me an upper hand – or, at the least, evened the playing field. Secondly, my wit got sharper. I stopped letting myself be made fun of, and I began to make their heterosexuality the butt of the joke. It confused some and made others back off. Sometimes it meant people didn’t take me as seriously in those spaces, but that was a price I was more than happy to pay.

My body, my clothing, my appearance, my humour, my sexuality, my work as a pastry chef. All of it is wrapped up in a messy package, tied with pink satin ribbon. Queerness, in its essence, is a bittersweet experience. I am shaped by the smoke that filled every corner of the room after offal was grilled over hot coals when I worked as a server at Black Axe Mangal, and by the delicacy of the petals that adorned the cakes when I worked as a personal assistant and sometimes-baker at Violet Cakes. My queerness is now in the juxtaposition of the bitter and the sweet that I bring to my baking and leadership at Fink’s. It is always difficult to choose to be the most authentic version of yourself: it can alienate you from family, friends or colleagues. There’s always something to lose, but when you realise the biggest risk is losing yourself, it’s important to take the chance. And finding your people is special and so affirming. My queerness is the sword by which I die, and also, it is what I use to defend myself, to cut out the niche I occupy as a pastry chef and human.

Compromising in this life – capitalist or otherwise – is currently necessary in whatever career you choose, so depending on the commission and how good the money is, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll help you out (although I do have my hard nos: J K Rowling and anyone who denies the genocide in Palestine can get fucked). I won’t fulfil your idea of what a queer baker should make for Pride, but I will use the best damn ingredients I can find, decorate it tastefully, make something you’ll actually want to eat and charge you appropriately for what it’s worth. Ultimately, I’ll give you what you want, but it’ll be on my terms. I defend the rights of queer people wanting to get their bag and take the money of people looking to pinkwash. I defend the right of John Whaite to show his ass off while also continuing to be a successful and talented pastry chef (famously, the two are not mutually exclusive – I mean, look at me).

I even defend those queer bakers who willingly choose to make shitty rainbow layer cakes because they like them! I’m optimistic that there’s space for all of us. I’m still wondering where exactly I fit into this system, but maybe I don’t need to have it all figured out. If I’ve learned anything in my decade of being in the industry, it’s that authenticity is what strikes the deepest chord with most people. The path less travelled is harder but often more rewarding, and you might even find a rainbow at the end of it – or a slice of rainbow layer cake. But please, do not ask me to make you one.

Credits

Adriann Ramirez is the Head of Pastry at Fink’s London and a multidisciplinary artist whose work expands across writing, performance, dance, filmmaking and food writing. Their debut book of poetry and photography titled, Hot Tears Through Velvet Rage, was published in 2021 by Polari Press.

Gabriel Mafféïs is a Paris-based freelance illustrator and comics artist. Through colorful, narrative images, he creates scenes where imagination and reality overlap, exploring themes of community, identity, and relationships.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Further Reading

• Hannah Levene on the role of food in lesbian feminist literature

• Waithera Sebatindira on the erotic and emancipatory potential of the Eucharist

• Francesca Wade on the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book

Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Stefan Williamson Fa writes about how Gibraltar’s cuisine is multifarious and evolving. despite the commonly reductive portrayal of the strait’s foods and people.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, is still available. You can order a copy below

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In June last year, almost ten years after the Brexit referendum, the UK and the EU finally agreed to resolve one of the last outstanding issues of post-Brexit relations: Gibraltar. Despite 96% of Gibraltarians voting to remain in the European Union, the territory – which shares a land border with Spain – was pulled from Europe. With Brexit long out of the media spotlight, news of the imminent treaty barely made headlines. For the 38,000 Gibraltarians on the Rock, however, it was deeply consequential, raising urgent questions about the future of food provisions, labour and identity.

One of the few outlets to cover the story was GB News, which offered brief, patronising interviews with local politicians. Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg accused Gibraltar of ‘wanting to have their cake and eat it,’ implying that if the strait’s people were truly British, they should reject any cooperation with the EU and Spain. Once again, a binary choice was imposed: British or Spanish, one or the other. This lens is familiar to anyone from Gibraltar. Even before I tell people where I am from, I can sense the confusion as they try to place my name, my appearance and my accent. When I explain that I was born in Gibraltar and that I only identify as being Gibraltarian – or Llanito, as we call ourselves – the inevitable follow-ups arrive: ‘Do you feel more British or Spanish?’ ‘Do you speak English or Spanish?’

These are simple questions with complicated answers. In a world that still expects national identities to be neat and legible, a not-quite-former colony in Europe creates confusion. Gibraltar is now officially a ‘British Overseas Territory’, yet we have our own ‘national’ football team, a tiny population and a mixed heritage that doesn’t fit easily into the categories with which outsiders are familiar. Explaining who we are often requires more context than most people expect – or have the patience – to hear.

The civilian population of Gibraltar has always been diverse, multilingual and multi-faith – far from an exclusive enclave of ‘expats’ from Britain. When I moved to the UK as a student over fifteen years ago, I was surprised by how often Gibraltar was described as ‘Britain in the sun’ – a phrase that didn’t resonate with my own upbringing. People I met who had visited Gibraltar on day trips from the Costa del Sol spoke of red phone boxes, custodian-helmeted police and fish and chips. To me, the helmets looked like sweat traps in summer, the phone boxes didn’t work and … fish and chips? I’d never even eaten them as a child.

While I did grow up eating fish, this took the form of bright yellow stews, grilled sardines and platters of fried seafood piled high with boquerones (anchovies), puntillitas (baby squid), cazón en adobo (marinated dogfish) and rosada (pink cusk-eel). There were chips, yes, but fried in olive oil, not served with battered cod. Yet in Gibraltar today, ‘fish and chips’ dominate the menus along Main Street (also known as Calle Real, the pedestrianised thoroughfare at the heart of Gibraltar). On my most recent visit, I counted no fewer than twenty-seven outlets offering fish and chips along the roughly kilometre-long stretch, catering to tourists seeking a taste of ‘Britain in the sun’.

The Google reviews for Roy’s Fish and Chips – one of the two fish and chips restaurants at Casemates Square in the northern end of Main Street – end up debating Britishness as well as flavour. One reviewer is surprised: ‘It’s a shock that I’ve had to come to Gibraltar to find the best British fish and chips,’ while another insists that ‘anyone British eating this will be disappointed’. There are even complaints about the linguistic performance of staff, with one reviewer lamenting, ‘the waiter couldn’t speak english and couldn’t understand our order. sad to see the standard this low for british style fish and chips.’ Further south, at Piccadilly Garden Bar, a street sign splits the difference, with one side proclaiming ‘Traditional Homemade Fish & Chips’ – complete with Union Jack – while the other advertises ‘Hay Callos’, the rich chickpea and tripe stew whose best-known version hails from Madrid. Outsiders may see Gibraltarian cuisine as they see the referendum – British or Spanish – but for locals, it’s a reminder of the reductive binaries we are constantly asked to navigate.

Perched at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, Gibraltar has long been a strategic fortress for its numerous rulers (Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Muslim dynasties and the Crown of Castile), controlling access to the Mediterranean. Britain seized Gibraltar in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, and it fully ceded in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. This fit squarely within Britain’s expanding maritime-imperial project: a chain of ports positioned to protect trade routes, project naval power and circulate goods for profit.

In the decades that followed, the civilian population became a patchwork of migrants from across the Western Mediterranean – Genoese, Maltese, Minorcans, Catalans, Andalusians, Portuguese, and Sephardic Jewish and Muslim merchants from North Africa, alongside a few British and Irish settlers. In the late nineteenth century, following the opening of the Suez Canal, Sindhi merchants from the Indian subcontinent established shops in Gibraltar, expanding their trade networks and adding yet another layer to the mix.

Spanish soon became the lingua franca of this fledgling community, while knowledge of the English language allowed some to act as intermediaries between civilians and the colonial authorities. In addition to trade, civilians provided essential labour in the dockyards and in service of the garrison, without which the British could not have fully benefitted from the port. At the same time, the need to survive pushed parts of the community toward informal and illicit economies, including smuggling goods such as coffee and tobacco into Spain.

This diverse population shaped Gibraltar’s cuisine, within the constraints of its foodscape. With little land for agriculture (due to the Rock’s size and colonial restrictions) and limited access to fresh produce, the burgeoning communities adapted recipes using ingredients from Spain, Morocco and the sea. Dishes now considered quintessentially Gibraltarian reflect this diversity: Genoese-inspired torta de acelgas, a garlicky chard and cheese pie in an olive-oil-based shortcrust pastry; menestra, a vegetable and pasta soup with the characteristic flavours of kohlrabi and basil; and rellenos of all sorts – courgettes, long green peppers, squid or anchovies, stuffed with a mix of egg, cheese, garlic, breadcrumbs and the signature hint of marjoram.

Rosto – slow-cooked beef in a tomato sauce, with carrots and penne pasta simmered in the sauce – is ubiquitous, though was never really my favourite. On the other hand, I loved rolitos, a dish said to have originated in Malta. These small rolls of thin beef slices encase a stuffing of chopped olives, boiled eggs, bacon or ham, all held together with a toothpick and braised in a sauce made from the usual refrito and white wine. However, it is so time-consuming to prepare that it wasn’t something we had often growing up.

The South Asian influence also remains. Some of Gibraltar’s first public eateries were opened by families from the subcontinent, and for decades the most popular sandwich in town has been the chicken tikka bollo (roll) from Ramsons, a Gibraltarian Sindhi-run supermarket that has sold spices and foodstuffs since 1975.

And then there is calentita, the descendant of farinata. A thin, oven-baked dish made from chickpea flour, olive oil and water, it is somewhere between a pancake and a flan – firm on the bottom, creamy in the middle and crisp on top. Once hawked on trays by street vendors, calentita is now celebrated as our ‘national dish’, with an annual food festival named in its honour – although the dish is hard to find in Gibraltar today. If you want to try calentita, the best option is across the Strait in Tangier, where it is still served as a street snack. Vendors slice portions according to the number of dirhams offered, slap them onto paper, and sprinkle with cumin if requested. Versions of the dish under different cognate names (kalinti in Morocco and karantika, calentica or garantita in Algeria) are found in other port cities along the North African coast, reflecting histories of migration and cultural connections across the Strait. Whenever I’m craving it myself, I head to Algerian cafes in London, where a slice of warm karantika tucked into a baguette with harissa brings a variation on a taste of home.

The baseline running through most Gibraltarians’ diets, however, is largely Andalusian, understandably given the history of intermarriage and the social porosity of the border with Spain. Like many others of my generation, I had a grandmother who was born in a rural village in Andalusia and migrated to Gibraltar in the 1930s, seeking work and survival while the civil war raged in Spain. Weekly lunches at my abuelos’ house included rotating potajes – hearty stews of legumes, lentils, chickpeas or beans, and vegetables with prized nuggets of chorizo and morcilla. Puchero – a deeply savoury chicken broth, flavoured with salted pork ribs, beef, chickpeas and vermicelli – was a winter staple, while cold gazpacho accompanied fried fish or yellow rice with chicken or pork in summer. My maternal grandmother, born in northern Morocco to a Gibraltarian mother of Genoese descent, added chicken, seven-vegetable couscous and harira to this eclectic diet.

Two events in the twentieth century profoundly reshaped Gibraltarian identity and foodways. In 1940, during World War II, the entire civilian population was evacuated so the British military could fortify Gibraltar and ward off a planned German invasion. Families were scattered to Jamaica, Madeira, London and Northern Ireland, where they were housed in hotels or evacuation camps. What was supposed to be temporary dragged on for nearly a decade. In London, Gibraltarians like my grandmother endured the Blitz of 1940–41, struggling with the language and facing severe food shortages caused by wartime rationing. The British government’s broader strategy – prioritising military needs while imposing austerity across the empire – meant that many were left in similarly vulnerable situations.

Finding familiar ingredients in their temporary homes was a constant struggle: olive oil was sold in pharmacies to treat earaches, while squid and cuttlefish were tossed to cats. When Gibraltarian citizens returned home, they had acquired new tastes through exposure to dishes like Irish stew, bread-and-butter pudding and shepherd’s pie, though all were quickly reworked at home to suit local ingredients and palates. I still remember the shock of eating shepherd’s pie in Britain for the first time – bland and joyless without the chopped boiled egg, pimentón and green olives that my mother and grandmother always snuck into the filling.

Then, in 1969, General Franco closed the land border with Spain, cutting Gibraltar off for more than thirteen years. Overnight, families found themselves divided: with loved ones just a few miles away but separated by a wire fence, they were able to wave but not to embrace them. For many, loyalty to Britain (however complicated that was) seemed far preferable to living under a fascist regime, leading us to reorient culturally – including modifications to our cuisine.

With Spain shut off, Morocco became the territory’s pantry. Ferries from Tangier brought not just crates of fruit and vegetables but also a steady stream of labourers who worked in the dockyards, hotels and construction sites. Many stayed on even after the frontier blockade was lifted, establishing families and opening small eateries, butcher shops and grocery stores that, over time, became fixtures of the local foodscape. These shops still line Gibraltar’s side streets, their displays of fresh fruit and vegetables offering a welcome contrast to the duty-free electronics and jewellers that cater to tourists and dominate the main thoroughfares.

Gibraltarians, and the food we eat, are products of these historical, geographical and political forces. We are the result of the British colonial presence in the region, yet we are not from the British Isles. With limited resources, under pressure and throughout constant change, we have playfully made the most of what has been available, reimagining familiar tastes and forging a distinctive hybrid culinary identity from what we could find.

One of the clearest legacies of Gibraltar’s historical sieges and upheavals is an enduring fondness for preserved and long-life foods. Alongside canned evaporated milk, export-only Vimto and Dutch Edam cheese (queso de bola, the red-waxed ‘ball cheese’), tinned corned beef has achieved near-mythic status. In the 2024 ‘Our Gibraltar’ art competition, the winning piece, ‘Always a Part of Us’ by local artist Derek Duarte, depicted a humble tin of Hereford Corned Beef. For Derek, the corned beef symbolised ‘the old Llanito days,’ when scarcity demanded creativity. Once a necessity, carne conbí still appears in croquettes, or fried with potatoes and cabbage on weeknight dinner tables. I sometimes think Gibraltar must have the highest per-capita consumption of corned beef in the world. Even after Brexit disrupted supply chains, towers of tins could still be found stacked in Morrisons (the chain’s only branch outside the UK, and its most profitable) or in Eroski, the Spanish supermarket that, uniquely, also carries Waitrose products.

So, if you are a day-tripper, step off Main Street and you’ll find glimpses through the cracks of the ‘Britain in the sun’ façade. At Tasty Bite, a family-run takeaway on Tuckey’s Lane (also known locally as Callejón del Jarro, or ‘Beer Mug Lane’), Francis Sene lays out trays of calentita, torta de acelgas, cuttlefish, chickpea and tripe stews, stuffed anchovies, corned beef croquettes, homemade sausage rolls, Cornish pasties and Spanish tortilla. ‘Soon we might lose all these dishes,’ Francis tells me. ‘Young people come because it tastes like their grandparents’ cooking, but they don’t know how to make it themselves.’ There’s a sense that this mix of foods that makes up our diet and reflects our history is slipping away, unsuited as it is to the pace of modern life – and certainly not the stuff of TikTok trends. When I ask Francis which dish he is most proud of, he doesn’t hesitate: pudin de pan, his version of a bread pudding. ‘Nobody makes it like this. I’ve tried bread-and-butter pudding in England, and it’s nothing like this. They don’t do it in Spain, either!’

The pudin – dense, cinnamon-scented bread soaked in milk and baked until set, with a few raisins in the mix – is a fitting metaphor for Gibraltar itself: not Spanish, not British, not purely Mediterranean, but something stubbornly in-between. Like our food, our identity isn’t a choice between Union Jack or Spanish flag, fish and chips or callos. It is hybrid, awkward, sometimes unglamorous but uniquely Gibraltarian. The world prefers neat categories, yet we live in the cracks, cooking and eating in that specific, liminal space. No matter the political divides or the pressure to choose, we continue to adapt, to cook and to eat outside neat categories, on our own terms.

We have our pudin and we eat it, too.

Credits

Stefan Williamson Fa is a Gibraltarian anthropologist based in London who researches and writes about sound/music, food, and religion.

Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and musician from Gibraltar. His practice is deeply entrenched in photography and graphic design with regular forays into other disciplines, drawing inspiration from often overlooked details of the everyday and the layered cultural heritage of Gibraltar. You can find his work at www.stefanoblanca.com and @stefanoblancasciacaluga on Instagram.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Before that, we’re excited to announce another event to celebrate the release of the Bad Food issue. On Wednesday 21 January, we will be holding a panel discussion featuring three of the UK’s leading cookery writers. Ixta Belfrage, Rukmini Iyer and Melek Erdal will be in conversation at Oxford House in Bethnal Green about the pressures they feel to represent authentic versions of their heritage and how they approach subverting those expectations. Tickets cost £10 and are available here. We’re also offering bundles enabling you to get a ticket for the event plus a discount copy of either Issue 2 (and some ultra-rare copies of Issue 1). Note: we are holding some tickets back for people with low income. If you would like to attend this event but are unable to afford the ticket price, please email vittlespitches@gmail.com.

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The mid-90s were a weird time to be a teenage boy who didn’t fit in with the burly braggadocio of lad culture. The masculinity I grew up with at my all-boys state school was narrow, focused around physical prowess (both in playground football and the rough and tumble of the corridors), always with a nasty edge. The surrounding culture – from Oasis to small-town violence, and even the 1995 Diet Coke ad in which women rush to their office window to watch a labourer strip off – valourised a certain type of man: tough, rugged, sure of their gender, heterosexual. I never felt like I fit that. At 6ft 1 and with a fairly broad frame, I could have worked out and been like them, but instead I looked to the skinny men in the bands I loved. I’d relished food as a kid, but as a teenager became obsessed with eating as little as possible, desperately trying to engineer a decent set of cheekbones. My religious upbringing meant that sex and indulgence in general had sinful connotations, too – in photos from the time, I am awkward and gaunt inside a big old-man overcoat.

Eventually, though, my appetite found a way through. During university holidays in the years just prior to the turn of the millennium, I spent every day working double shifts as a pot-washer in the local branch of a national pizza chain. In the tiny back kitchen I fed the Hobart dishwasher with dirty plates and fended off the ‘jokey’ advances of a waiter who’d hump my leg while whispering ‘Licking sucking fucking dick cunt’ in my ear. It was a boring yet stressful job that somehow converted my adolescent wariness of food into compulsive eating. Snatched morsels of food in that bright kitchen, glowing blue from the light that zapped flies, became an escape from the drudgery. Its urgent reward felt similar to booze, masturbation, drugs or sex.

I got off on the risk of being caught, of disobeying the self-control that I’d imposed on my body by trying to stay so thin. I was hungry for stimulation, for pleasure, for the physical potential of this particular sin. I’d pick olives and salami off congealing slices of pizza, and, if the chain’s celebrated balls of baked dough came back on a plate, chewy from an age out of the oven, I’d wipe them in what remained of the garlic butter and shove them into my mouth.

I had no name for this perverse eating habit back then, but it became codified a few years later when I got a job waiting tables at a Shoreditch kebab shop with delusions of grandeur. It was one of those restaurants that burns through seed capital from investors, hoping to establish itself as a chain. There was a concept, of course. ‘Do you know about the Silk Road?’ we had to ask as we seated the customers. If they didn’t, they looked back blankly; if they did, they looked back with embarrassment on our behalf. As we gestured at the hideous orange maps printed on the paper table settings, we explained that all the dishes came from along the ancient Silk Road, which stretched from what was to become China through the Middle East to the Mediterranean. The focus was very much on the Middle East – there were versions of kibbeh, pickled cucumber salad, various kebabs … and chips. Boring, frozen, British chips.

The fatal flaw of the restaurant’s concept was that anyone wanting the real thing could easily get the bus up the road to one of Dalston’s mangals. Instead, late-night crowds saw the place as a kebab shop that they could come to after pub closing hours, to keep drinking and have a lamb shish and chips. On weekend nights, they’d sometimes moon the restaurant before coming in – hairy, spotty white ovals smearing the glass.

It was a place to work at a certain time in your life, and a certain point in East London’s history. The waiting crew were all of a similar ilk – hopeful writers, filmmakers, musicians, doing the Silk Road spiel to pay the rent and resenting what should have been decent tips disappearing into ‘tronc’ to subsidise staff wages (this was the very early 2000s and, much as their restaurant concept was awful, our bosses were also pioneers of this particular scam). There were hopeful conversations about our futures, flirting and strange dates with customers that ended breathless against walls in Bethnal Green alleys. Post-work drinks in the bar downstairs always seemed to end with someone throwing up in the customer toilets before we went to pound out the pent-up energy of the shift on the dance floor of 333 or Plastic People.

Food was at the root of this solidarity. The staff meal was always a sparse handful of greying, almost-off meat, boiled up with onion in a battered steel pot. Given it was the sort of dish I could imagine being slopped into my wooden bowl while serving in some remote and godforsaken outpost many centuries ago, it was arguably the most Silk-Road-authentic food in the building. We were always hungry.

I quickly became friends with another waiter, who played bass in a band I liked. We’d stand at the pass, muttering together – sometimes about music, usually taking the piss out of the customers. On my second shift, as I waited for yet another order for a Med Lamb Shish w Chips, he rushed past with a pile of plates and furtively whispered, ‘Rat behind the cutlery.’ I followed. It was oddly like cruising. Crouching in the corner, chewing furiously, he held out half a duck spring roll. I scarfed it down in one bite.

From that moment each shift took on a new frisson, just as, during those weary teenage hours in the pizza restaurant, I found furtive pleasure in other people’s rejected food. I took to ratting like, well, a rat, and quickly became an expert in tactics and hierarchy. The duck roll was the ratter’s delight, closely followed by whole cubes of lamb shish and chicken wings. Chips, likely to have been fingered by the punters, were considered inferior and best ignored. There were a couple of unfortunate incidents when a ratted delicacy turned out to have been blasted by cleaning spray or even slightly chewed, but that was the chance we took for what could otherwise be an exquisite pleasure.

All this was a sackable offence, of course – the management knew what was going on, words were had, but we avoided getting caught rat-handed. The risk just made everything taste better, especially when my pal and I started upping the stakes. Ratting could be conducted aggressively, with anyone who allowed a plate to linger unfinished liable to find it whisked away. It extended to booze, the gulped dregs of bottles of wine making the hours pass in a mild buzz. Every morsel was a private victory against the rules and nonsense passed down from the owners, who would park their Range Rovers outside, unload swarms of children, and treat us with spectacular, patronising disdain, all while expecting perfect service.

I’ve not worked in a restaurant for years, but ratting is now a domestic and more wholesome joy. I pick the delicate scraps of meat off a chicken carcass after a long stock boil, combining them on a spoon with a few flakes of Maldon. Drunk when guests have gone, I run bread (and salt again) through the fat left in a roasting pan or skillet, evidenced the next day on stained clothes and slicked kitchen floor. After a meal, my fingers swipe through sauce and gravy or peck birdlike at grains of couscous dropped on the table.

Becoming a dad has meant clearing up after my toddler using my mouth rather than hands. Our old gas hob, now sadly replaced with the glass of an induction, was the finest hunting ground. I’d savour the intense umami of flame-dried onion. Black pudding and tiny fragments of bacon became airily crunchy, peas and sweetcorn potent little kernels of flavour. There is a risk, of course – I once ate a fly thinking it was crispy carbonised meat, and you never know if someone has deployed the kitchen spray or washing-up liquid and is waiting for it to soak in. But this never stops me, and ratting has never made me ill.

I wonder how many people reading this are secret ratters. Publicly admitting to my hob-gobbling usually smokes out at least one amid the more common cries of revulsion. The conformist and genteel British public might consider our rejection of what is considered polite behaviour when it comes to leftover food to be terrible manners, but I see it as a decadent reaction to our fussy, hygiene-obsessed age. Ratters hate seeing food wasted, and perhaps our secret pursuit is even good for our gut biome? Most of all, we have a true appreciation of eating and extracting all the flavour possible from our time on earth. I have long suspected that those with a ratting tendency may also be feral in other aspects of our lives, and probably hornier, even kinkier, than most.

Last weekend, hungry after a walk, I went for a roast at a riverside pub, quickly demolishing my shrinkflated portion of lamb shoulder and measly couple of spuds. Suddenly, a golden fire leapt from across the table – the setting sun glowed through the carefully abandoned skin from a portion of roast chicken. I yearned for its riches, and felt a pang of loss as the waiter cleared the plate away. I pictured it arriving in the kitchen, and hoped that the precious morsel didn’t end up in the bin, but instead found the jaws of a rat – one just like me.

Credits

Luke Turner writes primarily about culture, sexuality and masculinity. His first book, the Wainwright Prize shortlisted Out Of The Woods, was a memoir of queer identity set in London’s Epping Forest and a counter to simplistic ideas of the nature cure. His second, Men At War – Loving Lusting Fighting Remembering 1939–1945 explored sexuality during the war years and its cultural legacy today. He is co-founder of music and culture website The Quietus.

Antoine Cossé is a French illustrator and cartoonist living in London. He regularly contributes to The New York Times and The New Yorker, and his graphic novels are published internationally.

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