Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Imogen West-Knights traces the journey of food-waste in Lewisham, from bin collection to slurry ‘soup’ and conversion into biogas.

On Monday, we announced our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, all about how the internet and short-form video have reshaped food culture. The magazine includes everything from an exhaustively reported deep dive into the economics of food influencing, investigations into MFK Fisher’s role in popularising Japanese cuisine, to long reads on how Natoora came to be the dominant force shaping restaurant menus.

If you pre-order the issue before 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). Order the magazine here!

Subscribe now

I fancy an orange. It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’m in Tesco in South London. There they are, bright and jolly in their rows. I pick one up, check it for blemishes and put it in my basket. This orange came from Valencia. It was harvested on Tuesday and loaded into a refrigerated train that night. From there, it took about fifty hours to reach my local Tesco by rail and by truck, travelling a distance of at least 1,800km through the Pyrenees, the north of France and the Channel Tunnel to the UK. It arrived in Barking in the early hours of Friday morning and reached my Tesco just before the store opened. But I am not thinking about any of that. I’m not really thinking at all. I just want the orange, and so I buy it.

Friday evening gets away with me and I find the orange skulking in the bottom of my bag on Saturday afternoon. I don’t fancy it anymore. It goes in my fridge crisper drawer. It rolls to the back, and I forget about it until two weeks later when I am rummaging for some passable onions. Oh yeah, the orange. How long are oranges good for in the fridge? I’m not sure. It seems fine, less lively than it looked when I bought it, but still: probably edible. I peel it, zest spritzing into the air around my fingers, and eat.

Now I have orange peels. What could I do with these? I could turn them back into food by candying them. Add them into a simmering pot of marmalade. I could dry them and use them as fire starters. But let’s be honest, I’m not likely to do any of those things. So, I throw them in the bin.

This is how most British people eat and dispose of their food waste. In the UK, the majority of food waste goes in with the general rubbish and ends up in landfill in places like Essex, Airdrie and Falkirk. There, the process of its degradation contributes to global warming – in 2024, the House of Commons reported that ‘waste food and drink in the UK creates an estimated 18 million tonnes of CO2 each year’. The UK also exports its waste – generally plastics – to places like Indonesia and Malaysia, in what is sometimes called ‘waste imperialism’, but food waste tends to remain here. While big businesses like supermarkets are key players in producing food waste, it is households that produce the most, at 60%. The average household in the UK wastes about £1,000 worth of food every year.

Sometimes, the moment that food becomes waste is stark. The shock of a dropped ice cream. Other times it is more gradual, but no less final. Few of us are going to root a mango peel out of the compost bin so we can scrape off a last morsel of fruit. But other times, we have to use our discretion to make the call between food and ex-food. There’s the five-second rule, the three-second rule and best-before dates (which lead to a huge amount of food waste because they determine the hard cut-off by which you need to eat the food or throw it away). I’ve certainly had these conversations with friends. Do you eat a biscuit three seconds after it’s fallen on the floor? Do you chuck the milk out the day after it’s due to go bad, or do you give it a sniff and see whether it’s got another twenty-four hours?

Many who are interested in food know about the miles our produce travels before it reaches us, but fewer of us know what happens once we’re finished with it. As I put the orange peel in the little green bin that sits on my countertop, full of loamy teabags and unloved vegetable remnants, I wondered: What journey does my food take after I start considering it waste? Early one morning last October, I took the bus over to Lewisham, South London, to the rather drab-sounding Wearside Service Centre, to find out.

When I arrive at Wearside, an operational hub for the council consisting of a few two-storey buildings and bays for the rubbish trucks, I meet Mamadou, the refuse manager. He gives me a hi-vis vest and a lift so I can link up with a team of binmen doing their rounds nearby, in Ladywell. They’ve been collecting and recycling food waste since 2017 from kerbside properties, and the uptake here in Lewisham has been healthy, Mamadou tells me. (In the period of 2025–2026, Lewisham council collected more than 5,700 tonnes tonnes of food waste.) Across London, there has been a steady increase in the number of boroughs offering food waste recycling. Bexley were early adopters – they’ve been doing it since 2004 – and by 2020, there were twenty-four London boroughs offering the service. ‘The majority of residents are very, very keen on it, I can tell you. People are always [asking] questions about what happens to food waste’, Mamadou says as he drives.

What happens to it, in the first instance, is it gets picked up by people like Terry, Carla and Steve. This is the team I am joining today, and we find them making a quick pitstop for coffee and cigarettes, their truck parked up behind the railway line. I wouldn’t have said that waste removal was a job with glamour to it, but Carla is certainly bringing some. She started work at six this morning and is wearing a luxuriant pair of false eyelashes and pristine acrylic nails. Carla has been at Lewisham council as a loader for four months, and before that she worked for private-waste collection company Veolia. She likes the early starts, she said. Back at Veolia, the shifts meant she was often out on rounds when her son got home from school. This way, finishing at 2pm (or earlier if they’re fast), she gets to spend more time with him.

As I climb up into the cab of the truck, where there are three snug passenger seats, Steve warns me that ‘It’s very smelly, the food waste.’ It is, in that strong, sour way that anyone who has left their bins for a little too long will recognise. Terry, the truck’s driver – a man in his sixties from Essex – drives us to the next strip on the route (which takes them to approximately 5,000 properties per week in Ladywell). The team know this patch inside out. Terry parks the truck, and Steve and Carla jump out, grab a wheelie bin each and set off to collect the food. Carla opens one bin on a housing estate and shakes her head. Leaves. ‘We don’t take leaves, that’s garden waste’, she tells me. They have to be strict about what they do take: from a food management perspective, a leaf is distinct from a salad. There’s nothing unsightly today, but there can be. ‘People put all sorts of things in there. Nappies are the worst,’ Carla says.

We drive on and stop again, on a terraced street off the A20. Terry opens one food bin. The bin itself is spotlessly clean and the little green bag is tied up like a Christmas pudding. ‘See that, that’s beautiful,’ he says, and tosses it in the wheelie. But they’re not always like that, and the food is not always in the bag. Bin juice is, naturally, a problem, but it is early October and the team are spared from the worst potential contents of these little bins: maggots. In summertime, things are different. ‘Feel like I’ve become an expert in maggots. Come in all shapes and sizes’, Terry says, shuddering. As we drive around, people rush out of their houses with their bits and bobs, food waste or otherwise, to meet the team. A resident with a wine bottle comes up to Terry and hands it over. ‘Is that for me? It’s empty!’ Terry says, and they both laugh.

As we drive on, Terry tells me he used to be in financial services but decided to get out of that game after the 2008 crash and train as a heavy goods vehicle (HGV) driver, which is what the council now employs him to do, driving the waste truck. There’s always work for HGV drivers. He likes that there is this people-facing element to being a binman – meeting the residents, getting to know a neighbourhood. ‘It’s the satisfaction of a public service, keeping the streets free of vermin and rubbish,’ he says. I ask him whether collecting food waste has made him think differently about food, and he pauses for a moment. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘food is food. You gotta eat innit.’

On the day I visit them, the Wearside Lewisham waste team work at a rapid clip and there are no unforeseen complications, so at ten past ten in the morning, after a little over four smooth hours, Steve and Carla are done. After the collection, the others leave, and Terry and I set off on the next leg of the rubbish journey – to the waste centre in Dagenham, a fourteen-mile drive away. Here, he warns me, the smell will be more intense. The drive takes us through the new Blackwall Tunnel, past the IKEA in Greenwich and that great monument of giving something a second life, the O2 Arena. As we get further out of London proper, we are surrounded by a Hovis factory, Tate and Lyle, large hubs for Tesco and Co-op. Then, just a little further out, the waste facilities. In Dagenham, there are two side by side – ReFood and East London Biogas, the latter of which we are heading to with our haul.

East London Biogas, which opened in 2014 as the first anaerobic digestion plant inside the M25, buys food waste from Lewisham council, as well as other councils like Essex. The plant has been owned by a private company called Bio Capital since 2019. When they receive the waste, East London Biogas convert it into energy and fertiliser (rather than sending it to landfill, where it releases greenhouse gases as it rots). They do this via a process called anaerobic digestion, in which food waste is put into tanks and broken down by microorganisms. The site processes up to 70,000 tonnes of food waste every year. When I fancied my orange, it never occurred to me that the skin I would throw away had the potential to be turned into fuel.

As Terry had warned, the smell of food waste begins as we get closer to East London Biogas. Eggs, sulfur, farmyard. On arrival, he drives us over a weight bridge that measures how much waste in the truck today: 4.4 tonnes. ‘Not bad’, he says. We head into a huge hangar space which contains three dumping bays and reverse into one of them. There are hills of rotting food in here, light grey and speckled with the more intact detritus. Scraps of Sainsbury’s bags swim in the slurry. A whole melon sits looking lost on the ground. Waste workers are knee-deep in the stuff, moving it around with shovels. An orange peel peeks out at me, slicked with indeterminate mulch. Beside us, large as a house, is a vat where the food waste is turned into what the company genuinely call a ‘soup’.

To begin the process of anaerobic digestion, bulldozers scoop the food waste up into the vat. Here it gets pre-treated to remove the plastics, diluted with water and heated to 70°C for one hour to kill all pathogens in the food. Then it goes into an enclosed, oxygen-free tank where it is broken down by microorganisms and begins to emit a low-carbon biogas, which is then transformed into green energy. Recycling six teabags in this manner produces enough energy to boil the kettle for the next cup, they say. Then the material that is left over – biofertilizer, as it is called – is supplied to agricultural companies and farmers local to this plant, so they can grow more food.

Today, the parent company, Bio Capital – which is in turn owned by British developer Equitix – has eight such plants around the UK, and as of late 2025 there are 750 biogas plants all over the country. The proliferation of privately owned anaerobic digestion plants is largely thanks to government incentives like the Green Gas Support Scheme, which was introduced in 2021.

But anaerobic digestion isn’t the only useful thing that can be done with food waste. Eleanor Barnett, in her richly informative book Leftovers, writes that up until the nineteenth century, it was common practice in England for food waste to be fed to pigs, who roamed town streets scarfing down piles of food left outside people’s doors. Feeding food waste to pigs was banned in 2001 due to foot and mouth disease, but some have argued that a version of the pig solution is one that ought to be brought back, like the (no longer active) campaign group ‘The Pig Idea’. There is also a more labour-intensive but valuable process whereby specific kinds of food waste can be mined for useful chemicals and compounds. Waste coffee grounds, for instance, can have caffeine as well as chemicals that create the coffee aroma extracted, which could then be used in the production of instant coffee.

Still, it is biogas that is considered among the best possible uses for food that is no longer fit for human consumption, Paul Hellier, an expert in sustainable energy at UCL, tells me when we speak on the phone in early May. Even though biogas isn’t a perfect product (‘There’s the issue of there being impurities like hydrogen sulfide once the biogas is produced – which smells like rotten eggs and does not providing energy when it burns’), overall, he says, ‘it’s viewed as a very useful resource.’

We can also do more to intercept food from supermarkets and restaurants before it makes the transition into being considered waste at all. This is the model of companies like Oddbox, which rescues aesthetically imperfect but edible food from being thrown out by supermarkets, or Too Good To Go, which matches hungry customers up with businesses that have excess food at the end of the day.

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), an environmental action NGO, visualises the food waste hierarchy as an inverted triangle. At the bottom tip of the triangle is sending food to landfill, the absolute worst, most wasteful final destination for a food product. Near the top, there is redistribution to people who need it. ‘Ultimately, the objective is: if we can halve food waste, [we] will be able to make more of the food that we’re growing,’ Rosemary Brotchie, who works at WRAP, tells me, ‘and improve food security, not just for individuals, but also for the UK as a whole.’

How can we waste less? In an ideal world, food is produced, it reaches you, you eat it in its entirety, you turn the food into energy and, well, flush the resulting waste. But that is only how it goes some sixty-odd per cent of the time – in the Western world, at least. In 2011, a report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization acknowledged that it lacked household waste data from outside Europe and North America; it estimated that around one-third of food produced globally was lost or wasted. People famously do not think about the journey an orange, say, makes across the continent – or even across the world – before it gets to them, nor do they appreciate the energy that was expended in the process.

As of March this year, it is now mandatory for all councils across the country recycle food waste. This is part of the UK’s commitment to a UN Sustainable Development Goal to halve food waste by 2030. We could certainly be doing more to recycle our household food waste in this country. South Korea, for instance, has a ‘pay-as-you-throw’ system that charges depending on how much food waste is generated; this has led to more than 95% of its food being recycled. While all councils will now be required to offer the option to recycle food, it remains to be seen whether people will step up and take advantage of this. While it can be easy to feel powerless in the face of cost-of-living and environmental challenges, Rosemary believes that waste is an area where the individual consumer can and should make a difference, keeping food out of landfill and money in their wallets. ‘If you’re seeing the quantity of what you’re wasting, there are opportunities there for us all to stop and think, “Well, did I have to waste that?”, she says.

After dropping off our load at East London Biogas, Terry and I set off back to the depot in Lewisham. Terry explains that they’re at a tipping point: the work that the team does each day is sufficient to deal with Lewisham’s current food waste recycling output, but if everyone suddenly started recycling at once, there would be too much waste to process and the system would break.

When I bid goodbye to Terry, I sit down at the bus stop. There, in a pavement groove, sits a dusty Haribo sour cherry. I think about the packet it must have come from, the sugar-coated fingers that fumbled it at the last moment and let it fall to the ground. Where this food item that came within touching distance of being eaten will end up next is anyone’s guess. But I’m going home for a shower, and to use up some of the leftovers in my fridge.

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Credits

Imogen West-Knights is a journalist, novelist and video game writer based in London.

Wunmi Onibudo is a photographer based in London whose work reflects human stories and modern culture. You can find her at www.wunmio.com or on her Instagram at @wunmio.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Marwan Kaabour, Melek Erdal, Issariya Morgan, Sumaiya Mustafa, Trà My Hickin, Barsha Mallik and Yemisí Aríbisálà introduce untranslatable words from their languages that reflect cultures of food outside the English-speaking world.

On Monday, we announced our third print issue, ‘The Influencers’, all about how the internet and short-form video have reshaped food culture. The magazine includes everything from an exhaustively reported deep dive into the economics of food influencing, to investigations into the hidden history of MFK Fisher’s role in popularising Japanese cuisine, to long reads on how Natoora came to be the dominant force shaping restaurant menus.

If you pre-order the issue before 27 July, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details). You can order your copy here!

Buy Issue 3

Finally, although we are no longer accepting pitches for personal essays or memoir, we are extending the pitching window for reported features, investigations and long reads until this Sunday, 5 July. Further details are available here. A note: we are looking for ideas outside the usual genre of a food-story, and rather pitches have a strong sense of storyline and criticality about eating, cooking and purchasing food.

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For me – like many others – English is the language of work and writing, but not the language of feeling, or life. I live in Hindustani (the Hindi–Urdu hybrid that is one of Delhi’s languages), surrounded by my family’s Tamil, and my neighbourhood’s other languages (Punjabi, Haryanvi, Nepali). When I write, I still struggle to bring the entirety of my life into the English language. No matter how hard I try, something always gets missed in translation – especially when it comes to expressions of eating and cooking. This is too much that goes on here that English simply cannot hold.

Take ‘khayali pulao’ (پلاؤ خیالی ; खयाली पुलाव्)), which translates from Urdu and Hindi as ‘pulao of the imagination’. It refers to an activity akin to daydreaming – expectations that can amount to fiction, anticipation that can have the weight of fantasy. The closest equivalent in English is perhaps ‘building castles in the sky’, but that phrase feels – to my South Asian ears at least – too judgemental or instructive. It doesn’t capture the pleasure of possibility that ‘khayali pulao’ invokes.

Every language around the world is strewn with similarly untranslatable phrases. So, we asked seven writers to write about their favourite food-related idioms in their primary languages, from Arabic to Tamil, Yoruba to Thai.

Sharanya Deepak

Arabic: زنخة (Zankha)

Closest translation: ‘The strong smell of eggs, chicken or fish left on a pan’

by Marwan Kaabour

Zankha is used to refer to a wildly unpleasant odour – discerning noses can pick it up on plates, bowls, glasses or cookware which have been used to cook eggs, chicken or fish and not properly cleaned. It’s a deep, embedded smell that tickles your nose in all the wrong ways and, once detected, is impossible to ignore. It seems like Levantine Arabs (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine) are the only people to recognise and detect zankha immediately. It’s not a subtle thing, but an olfactory slap to the nostrils: enough to turn your stomach upside down and make you gag. I personally think that eggs are the main culprit. Whenever I make them, I have to scrub and clean the plates twice – otherwise, zankha. My absolute nightmare is when someone cooks eggs and throws everything in the dishwasher without pre-cleaning or rinsing. You hear that beep signalling the end of the wash cycle, you open the dishwasher door and out comes the steam that should signal cleanliness, but instead you get smothered in zankha steam.

I have had countless conversations with Arab friends to try and find the most accurate translation: rancid, eggy, funk, stench. But none truly encapsulate zankha’s repulsive essence. I have also done numerous tests with my non-Arab friends to try and help them understand zankha. I once shoved a plate under my flatmate’s nose, encouraging her to smell it, but all I got was a confused look. Another time, I was at a restaurant with five friends, and the table itself seemed soaked in zankha. I tried to stay civil and not say anything, but alas, it got to me. I had the waiters clear the table and have it cleaned (with soap!), and only then was I able to get back to my meal. You might call me crazy, I call it zankha.

Bengali: ভাতঘুম (Bhatghum)

Closest translation: ‘A nap after eating rice’

by Barsha Mallik

Imagine a hot summer’s day, where the humidity is so heavy it lulls you into drowsiness. Add to that a plate of rice with the usual side dishes, like dal, fish curry, some sort of shak vaji or shobji vaji (sautéed greens or vegetables), and what follows is almost inevitable: a nap lasting for a few hours. In Bengal, the word used to describe this is bhatghum. It’s both an activity and a long-standing cultural practice. You could call it a siesta or a food coma, but bhatghum is far more specific. Here in Bengal, bhat (rice) is like air – you ‘inhale’ it every day – so it makes sense that there’s a word for the sleep rice summons.

This word captures the eternal nature of the Bengali people – bhat and ghum, rice and sleep. We can’t live without our rice, and we certainly don’t mind our laziness. All Bengalis have a relationship with bhatghum, whether or not they actually nap. Though bhatghum can strike at any hour, it belongs most naturally to the afternoon. When I was growing up, my grandma used to say, ‘Bhatghum ar chor akloge aye’, meaning ‘Bhatghum and thieves come in pairs’, referring to the unproven theory that afternoons here see more theft simply because everyone is lost in their rice slumber. Growing up, my father was adamant about bhatgum being a healthy practice. Every afternoon, he insisted we sleep; I rebelled, choosing my favourite TV show over his rules. But now, as an adult, my body leans toward bhatghum almost instinctively. Even on rice-less days, afternoons tug at me for a nap.

A friend of mine likes to complain that, despite our collective devotion to bhatghum, we still don’t have anything like wǔshuì in Chinese schools or the midday nap breaks of some Japanese offices. For a culture that has a name for the rice-induced nap, we are surprisingly stingy about permitting it institutionally. Sometimes I take a slow walk through sun-dappled snoozing alleys in Dhaka. A warm afternoon in a neighbourhood deep in bhatghum carries its own kind of calm.

Vietnamese: Nhậu

Closest translation: ‘Eating and drinking for no particular purpose’

by Trà My Hickin

I’ve asked many people how to translate the Vietnamese word ‘nhậu,’ and my favourite answer is ‘eating and drinking for no particular purpose’. It’s a term deeply embedded in Vietnamese culture: to nhậu you must have good company, good food and drink and a lot of time on your hands. Nhậu is not a celebration of any occasion, even the end of the week. The only reason to nhậu is because somebody has asked. This doesn’t result in a fancy meal, but one eaten (usually) on the roadside. All dishes are shared, served extra salty so they can be washed down with beer. Crucially, nhậu is the act of slowly nibbling and drinking over hours of conversation. No one is in a rush.

When I return to Vietnam, I bring with me my hasty Londoner’s mindset, trying to cram in plans with relatives and friends. Nobody listens to me, and I find myself nhậu-ing with some friends, family and occasionally a few randomers. Nhậu is both a verb and a noun, the noun enshrining that nhậu is a part of the culture. One day, I was showing friends around Hanoi when I bumped into my uncle, who was skiving off work on a random Tuesday. ‘What are you doing here at 3pm?’ I asked, and he replied ‘nhậu’, which also implied, I’m being cultured or I’m keeping up a time-honoured tradition.

Living far away from loved ones, you’d think that marking up time to visit everyone would make sense. But in Vietnam, time has its own logic; plans are unspoken and spontaneous but somehow work out in the end. Meetings blur into one another, people drift in and out, and suddenly you’ve seen everyone you meant to. Being present for these rituals of banality is how you make the most of time here. When nhậu is in session, time slows down and folds in on itself. It feels like you’ve been there forever. In these moments, time belongs to everyone again.

Tamil: கப்பல் (Kappal)

Closest translation: ‘Ship’, but used to mean ‘gluttony’

by Sumaiyya Mustafa

In Tamil, the word ‘kappal’ means ship, but in the coastal dialect that I speak, it doubles up to mean ‘gluttony’. Until the 1970s in my hometown (a southern port in Tamil Nadu called Kayalpatnam), most men, or at least one man per family, were traders who worked in other port towns, especially in Sri Lanka. To the people of Kayalpatnam, there is nothing as familiar as the largeness of a ship, and so anyone whose appetite is vast is called a kappal. I often call my six-year-old daughter ‘French fries kappal’ – a ship of French fries – because of how many she can eat in one sitting. The sea and its objects are an inseparable occurrence in the daily language of Kayalpatnam. While other Tamil communities use words like ‘sothu mootai’ (meaning ‘sack of rice’) to express gluttony, in Kayalpatnam it is kappal – the ship.

Last month, my grandmother told me about a person named Kappal, who died as an old man in the 1980s. When she mentioned his ability to eat one full sahan (a large round plate of Dutch Boerenbont that is used for communal eating in the community during wedding feasts and other family functions, and which feeds three or four people) of rice, mutton curry and dal, the character began to feel perfectly apocryphal. The day I learned of this man who earned his nickname, I was a happy person. I felt myself a participant of a culture, as a practitioner of culinary vocabularies. Besides the knowledge of methods and measurements, these lexicons carry vestiges of a community or a family’s past. Even a Tamil speaker outside of this dialect would require a good measure of guidance to understand the metaphor.

Thai: ข้าวใหม่ปลามัน (Kao mai pla maan)

Closest translation: ‘They go together like fresh rice and oily fish’

by Issariya Morgan

Food and romance are old friends. They enliven our senses, keep us lingering at the table late into the night. Speaking about romance in the language of food is as common in Thailand as anywhere else. And here, it seems, the simple things are best. Take the expression ‘kao mai pla maan’, which means ‘fresh rice and oily fish’. Describing ‘a very good thing’, this phrase is often used in the context of a new relationship – those tender beginnings when everything feels alive with possibility. Recently, at a gathering with my family in Bangkok, we read my cousin’s Tarot cards, which foretold the arrival of the Two of Cups. The image showed two lovers sharing a glass of wine. When she was asked what it meant, my aunt exclaimed, ‘Kao mai pla maan!’ Fresh rice and oily fish!

That is the spirit of the phrase – as sweet as a comforting meal, its significance instantly understood by all. But not all idioms are so straightforward. In Thailand, definitions can vary wildly depending on who you ask. Another of my favourite romantic idioms is ‘kanom jiin pasom nam ya’ – literally ‘white noodles and curry sauce’. I learned this from my mother, and understood it to mean ‘two people who are made for each other’. But when the phrase came up during the Tarot reading, it caused a cheerful commotion. Laughing, my cousin told me it meant ‘two people sneaking off to have sex’. Same same but different. I suppose that’s the joy – and trouble – of untranslatable phrases.

Turkish: Yeme de yaninda yat

Closest translation: ‘Don’t eat it, sleep next to it’

by Melek Erdal

‘Yeme de yaninda yat’ is a phrase describing a dish so good it could be promoted from something inanimate to something you’d potentially take out on a date. A meal that deserves your attention, to be listened to. A dish so beautiful it should not be disturbed with hands or mouths but rather observed and perhaps displayed in a gallery – much like Alan Titchmarsh’s red cashmere jumper, held in a glass cabinet in the Garden Museum. It is a phrase I have never heard my mother say; it is entirely my father’s way of speaking. My mother, who does the majority of the cooking in our family home, would never try to sell us a meal. The root of her cooking was, and is, duty, and a quiet joy in doing this well. For my father, the novelty of cooking made it a performance – to entertain and rally up support and joy. If for any reason he cooked, the meal would arrive at the table and be sold as the most delicious thing ever made. Here it is, come look at this – ‘yeme de yaninda yat’ – have you ever eaten anything more delicious? He would remind me of those people in Istanbul that stand outside restaurants to convince passersby to come in.

This month, I read the phrase out to my friend Zoe while on a train to Worthing to record The Kitchen Cabinet. ‘Ah, the British equivalent to this could be “snog, marry and avoid”’, she said. This got us thinking about foods we would ‘snog, marry and avoid’ if they were people. ‘I can’t think of any foods I would avoid’, I said to Zoe. ‘Start with a person you would want to avoid and think what food they would be’, she suggested. This helped. I thought about how much I dislike people who speak over me or are long-winded. This would definitely be truffle – overpowering, lingering longer than it should. Also, why is it everywhere? Who gave it the right? I would snog chicken skin and fat. Every encounter is a state of bliss, but it’s not sustainable long-term for health reasons. I would enter a polygamous marriage with a lemon, onions and pul biber – I couldn’t live without them, and we’d all actually always get on. I would have said bread, but we are in the midst of a divorce. For now, we’ve grown apart.

Yoruba: Mo jẹun, Mo yó, Mo ri mọto, Mo yà!

No translation, but the phrase says: ‘I ate, I was full to the brim, I saw a car coming and I moved out of its way!’

by Yemisí Aríbisálà

The songs I remember being chorused around the dining table and during meals in my childhood had all kinds of tropes. They were usually sung to distract the baby, to make her eat: they sometimes eulogised the matriarch who’d cooked the food, or they were a silly radio jingle for Choco Milo or Maggi cubes. The songs kept those begi-begi toddlers (begging for your chicken or fish) gainfully employed while you ate. You made them croon for morsels, promising them something at the end, then you tuned them out and ate fast. The songs had one thing in common – they were all nonsense verse, or bordering on nonsensical. They were impulsive, mad, peppered and boiled well with inebriation, the delightful, and – I warn ahead – near impossible to translate into English. The words always made us laugh, like a joke that could never lose its charm. Take this one, for example:

Mo jẹun,

Mo yó,

Mo ri mọto,

Mo yà!

It says, literally, I ate, I was full to the brim, I saw a car coming and I moved out of its way! There are many such songs (Yoruba language is made up of the tonal marks do re mi, so you are singing whether you like it or not…), and this particular one is being insidiously philosophical, too, but also doing the work of the best prayer, acknowledging those who are hungry and mad with hunger, enough to despair and stand in front of a moving car. The songs were a contrast to the stiff, uninspired ‘grace’ it seemed every single Nigerian child was taught to sing before meals in primary school. This one gives thanks for the encouragement that a good meal provides to try again, to embrace this difficult life. The song reminds us not to forget those who are hungry in a world with so much food. It does this brilliantly, while making us laugh. I have to say that we are all now too cool, too self-conscious, too urbane to sing thanksgiving for a meal.

Credits

Marwan Kaabour is an independent graphic designer, visual artist and writer from Beirut. Marwan’s debut book, The Queer Arab Glossary, was published by Saqi Books in 2024.

Melek Erdal is an Alevi Kurdish writer, cook and multidisciplinary storyteller. She was Fortnum and Mason Cookery Writer of the Year in 2024 and the Jane Grigson Trust Award recipient 2026 for her upcoming book Xwê, Salt (due to be published in 2027).

Yemisí Aríbisálà is the author of Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds (Cassava Republic Press, 2016) and In The Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life (Daunt, 2020).

Sumaiya Mustafa is a writer based in India. She writes on tastes, cultures, and films.

Issariya Morgan is a British-Thai writer who grew up in West Wales. Formerly the editor of Berry Bros & Rudd’s No.3 magazine, her background lies in wines, spirits and food. Alongside freelance writing, she maintains a ceramic art practice.

Barsha Mallik is a Bangladesh-born writer and artist based in Dhaka. She often explores heirloom recipes, culture, womanhood, healing, and the natural world through her work.

Trà My Hickin is a writer based in London and editor at Translator Magazine.

Ibrahim Rayintakath is an illustrator and art director based in his coastal hometown of Ponnani, India. His editorial work, which explores themes of culture, politics and mental health, has appeared in various outlets like the New Yorker, the New York Times and NBC.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

A Eulogy from the Editor

Food writing is dead. We had a decent run of it – an unbroken 201 years from the publication of Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste in 1825 (to which our front cover attests). But nothing lasts forever. Over the past few years, short-form video has become mass media’s dominant format. Food culture is now being moulded by a new generation, who do not have to rely on the gatekeepers of legacy media to reach their audience: young cooking influencers who use montage and jump cuts to sell a dizzying array of recipes; enterprising YouTubers who put together travel content and dispatches in the exploratory spirit of Bourdain; restaurant influencers who have supplanted the critic with the art of kayfabe, performing ludicrous characters to grab our attention. This transition has contributed to the homogenisation of food media into a series of tics and formats that please the algorithm, and yet it has also allowed people shut out of food writing to speak about their culture on their own terms. The content they produce is chaotic, tasteless, infuriating, diabolical, unpoliced and, sometimes, brilliant. The age of the influencer is upon us: you can love it or hate it, but either way, you have to take it seriously.

This issue, which we made instead of going to therapy, is our attempt to do just that. It uses the new figure of ‘The Influencer’ as a jumping-off point to talk more broadly about who has had the power to influence food culture, and how this is changing.

Our lead essay – an investigation by Stephen Buranyi into the economics of restaurant influencing – is the biggest piece we’ve ever published. Over the past six months, Stephen has spoken to more than fifty influencers, chefs, restaurateurs, PR professionals and other industry players to find out where influencers came from, how they gained such power in the industry, and how the business of influencing works day to day. What Stephen has uncovered is not the usual narrative that pits influencers against traditional journalism; instead, he tells a more complex story, one in which influencers, journalists and restaurants are embedded in a system that obscures when we’re being advertised to. Over the course of the investigation, it becomes clear that this is really a story about old and new forms of advertising, a proxy war being fought between the real powerbrokers of food media: PRs and the social media platforms themselves. If you want to learn how it all works, how much people are charging, and why Eating with Tod isn’t picking up our calls, then this essay is worth the price of admission alone.

We’re also honoured to be publishing two major pieces of food history writing in this issue. In the first – a story we’ve wanted to tell for almost a decade since we first heard about it – Vaughn Tan unearths the secret influence that the food writer MFK Fisher had over the mass popularisation of Japanese food, and specifically how documents in her archive prove that she orchestrated a behind-the-scenes PR campaign to change American food culture. In the second, Ozoz Sokoh has spent many months in the cookbook archive to write the definitive essay on the history of Jollof rice in Nigeria, and how (and why) the recipe has changed over the past century.

Across Issue 3, you’ll find stories about the people – and systems – that shape the way we eat, often in hidden or clandestine ways. Hester van Hensbergen has written the long read on the wholesaler Natoora that we’ve all been waiting for, tracking how, over the past two decades, it has risen to become the most influential player in the London restaurant world. Ariel Saramandi reports from Mauritius about how climate change has influenced the crops that people can eat. Yanyu Sun looks at the Chinese app Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and how it is creating a new canon of London restaurants – from Ecuadorean offal soups to Bulgarian barbecue – based on ‘the Chinese stomach’. Lily Kelting talks to trend forecasters from around the world about predicting the future of food, while Adam Almeida maps out the impact of private equity on the British dining scene.

One of the big themes of the magazine is how online food culture is creating new genres of influencer. Hussein Kesvani writes about halal food influencers and how Muslim consumers have become some of the most important drivers of food culture in Britain today. Claire Ratinon interrogates the ‘back to the land’ influencers who have made their names advocating for a rural lifestyle, but who rarely divulge the reality of what it costs. Barclay Bram delves into the world of so-called microinfluencers and how, ultimately, the entire food media world runs on comps. We also asked six of our favourite writers across the world to write about influencer culture in their own country, which reveals that, despite a globalised media system, influencers can still remain local.

If that’s not enough, we’ve also put together a panel of experts to determine the most influential British restaurants from the last seventy-five years and how each one has changed the way we eat out, for better or worse. In a landmark interview, we speak to cookery writer Nigel Slater and photographer Jonathan Lovekin on food photography and their twenty-eight-year working partnership, which has transformed how we look at food. We sit down with the influencer Rob Martinez and Anthony Bourdain’s collaborator Helen Cho about the similarities (and differences) between food TV and Instagram reels. Calum Jacobs writes movingly about how our parents can inform the ways in which we cook, and his failed attempts to cook the food of his heritage. And in an eerie piece of fiction, author Rebecca Perry retells a familiar fairy tale about how hunger can drive people to make the most desperate of decisions. Plus there’s adverts from Mam Sham, diagrams, maps, cartoons, gravestones and more!

Influencers are here to stay. Food has a sensuality attuned to the virtues of short-form video, and because of our reliance on the phone screen, online food content has the capacity to reach millions of people, including those who don’t usually consume food media. With this magazine, we wanted to acknowledge that, but also make a case for what food writing can do when it’s given a bit of room to stretch its legs. By the time you reach the end of the issue, we hope you’ll agree that the reports of food writing’s death have been greatly exaggerated – not least by us.

Buy Issue 3

Buy Issue 3

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Like with Issue 1 (sold out), Ice Cream City (almost sold out) and Issue 2 (just about not sold out), this magazine is entirely self-published and funded only through user subscriptions (no adverts, no spon con). Pre-orders are vital for us. If you pre-order the magazine by 27 July the magazine will cost £18, down from the RRP of £20. Paid subscribers will get a further reduction to £16 – there’s a discount code after the paywall.

If you are a retailer and wish to stock Issue 3, then please email our distributor Antenne Books: mia@antennebooks.com.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today Sharanya Deepak writes about the disappearance of her appetite in the presence of romantic partners.

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I have never loved a man who welcomed my appetite. This thought formed one day at a restaurant in central London, where I was eating among people I had just met.

The group had erupted in familial havoc as soon as we sat down, as often happens when South Asians get together abroad. We were mostly new to one another, and on our walk to the restaurant, casual rivalries had already emerged, with people rallying for others to join their side. When we entered, I thought I felt the room shrink from our raucousness. Two tables of white people – probably real families – began to talk politely to one another, as if conducting conversation simply to compete with ours.

‘Dai! Everyone has ten minutes to order, no more!’ the group’s self-appointed patriarch announced from one side of the table. Another man flung his menu at me, tired of its ornate British manner. ‘Order something for me,’ he said, becoming my annoying older brother for the night. The man opposite me, in contrast, was patient, and ordered quickly after he read the menu, a bowl of noodles. He was hungry, I knew – I had heard him tell someone else he had worked all day, skipping lunch.

When our food arrived, dishes were passed round, the ownership of each one dissolving as they circled the table. I drank a beer slowly and, because I was sitting at a desolate corner, much of the food disappeared before it arrived on my side. This is when the man opposite me pushed his bowl to the centre of the table. When someone else’s spoon approached, he gently held up his own to obstruct it, as if telling them gently to wait until I had eaten. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he said, laughing, as I served myself some noodles and a few pieces of meat. ‘Take as much as you want, don’t take two helpings and put one back.’

Later, my friends listened patiently to this anecdote. ‘What kind of restaurant was it? Was it good?’ they asked, humouring me. My sister was more cutting. ‘Good man’, she said calmly in a voice note. ‘But why can’t you eat when you like someone?’ Before she pointed out this tendency, I had attributed my inability to eat that night to the chaos that premised our meal. ‘What’s your problem?’ she continued, and I could hear her fiddling with her pressure cooker, letting out steam. ‘Why can’t you eat when you have a crush?’

I once loved a man for so long that I sometimes referred to him as the ‘love of my life’. With stories of this man, friends were less accommodating. They would turn away when they heard me embellish him with fake qualities. After the first few years, my sister would accept no mention of him, marching from the room whenever he came up. One of my embellishments was that he had fed me well. ‘He always knew when I was hungry’, I would say. It was true that he was a good, occasionally great, cook, and sometimes made elaborate meals. But the narrative that he cooked for me as a routine aspect of our relationship twisted that fact into an insidious lie.

I loved watching him cook because I loved watching him do anything. He was a beautiful man, and we were often in remote places that rendered me dependent, more foreign in his country than I already was. Once, I followed him around ten supermarkets looking for a Bundt tin – he needed it to make a complicated Iranian cake. Another time I watched him shell broad beans for hours before eventually adding them to a large omelette (I modified and cooked this recipe after we finally grew apart). He had learned almost no recipes that connected him to the country in which he was raised; his loyalty was to the city of his birth – a beautiful, ancient metropolis that an American military had trampled and destroyed.

For a while after we stopped speaking, I held on to these visions of him preparing food. I considered them the ‘good bits’ of our relationship: there was the time he peeled the skins off peppers for hours to make an elaborate dip; the day he wordlessly shelled langoustines in a restaurant. With these recollections, I tried to erase the memory of the loneliness I felt on other days. I imbued his cooking with extra meaning, but in real life, it was a wavering, sporadic gesture; it did not have the reliable, routine quality of care. I buried the thoughts of the morning when I stayed hungry until he wanted to eat, afraid of starting an argument by turning on the stove. Or the times he left the flat for days without a word, when I wandered around the city looking for him, halving a sandwich in a paper bag so it would last me two mealtimes.

Our physical intimacy was also sporadic and dependent on his mood. If I broached this, even in conversation, he would make it clear that I was asking for something that was beyond him. The rule was this: hunger for more than the crumbs I was thrown would ruin our relationship. I learned to stop expressing my desire, observing myself as he positioned me in his choreography. Recently, I found texts on an old phone in which I begged for forgiveness after expressing longing, desperate texts sent while I waited for him to call me back. Depending on his mood, I was a main or side character: faithful or worthless, good or bad, desirable or not.

Sometimes I try to draw a direct line between the failure of my romantic relationships and the suppression of my appetite. I eat happily with friends, siblings and family, but the same appetite dissipates in the presence of romance. The fraught connection between my appetite and my sexuality can feel like something I’ve imposed on myself – or so I have been told. ‘Bahut sochti ho tum’, someone will say to me now and then, suggesting that these are knots of my own making, that these limits on my body are an effect of the analytical quality of my mind.

But it’s not just me. While it is true that I led a mostly happy childhood, raised by a squadron of friends and neighbours, I was also raised within the code of the land set to police women’s appetites.

Growing up, the news flashed with moustachioed uncles announcing that young women who ate Chinese food from roadside stalls were a dangerous, national liability. That women’s cravings for an outing, a snack, a cigarette were the cause of their being routinely snatched off roadsides – their full, fleetingly happy bodies discarded into street corners in the dark. When we were teenagers, we were forbidden by a friend’s parent from lingering at our chosen chaat stall in the neighbourhood. They said that men lurked there to follow us back. We disobeyed, but sprinted home after we finished eating, wiping our mouths clean as we ran. Twice, some men did chase us, but we were faster than they imagined, so they gave up, stopping midway to masturbate against a wall.

The atmosphere, even on regular days, was heavy with the fact that for women, punishment for initiating touch could be severe. Hunger, whether sexual or physical, seemed safest when it was retracted inside. Now, I often feel like I have no sexuality, as if my desire needs to remain shadowy, suggestive, without a body. And with no body, what do I feed it? How can it have an appetite?

As a child, I would watch my maternal grandmother spend hours in the kitchen, shaving coconuts, soaking tamarind, swatting away the trespassers that entered her domain. She cooked with a prowess cultivated in the dominant-caste culinary ethos, in which rigid and oppressive ideas of purity and exclusion are softened and disguised in recipes. Every mealtime, she would hover unsmilingly over my grandfather, serving his meals with military zeal, each morsel created to match his preferences. Where are yours? I remember thinking then. Now almost ninety, when she asks for store-bought falafel and hot stewed apples, I wonder when, amidst cooking for tens of people for all those hours, she ate what she liked.

My mother, meanwhile, refuses to cede control of her appetite. Hers is keen and jovial. I’m still not sure what she likes to eat best – she seems to enjoy everything with equal fervour – but I do know she likes to eat before anyone else. When there is a spread of food anywhere, she walks over to it, eyes glistening and gaze focused, sneaking to a corner with a full plate like a toddler out of earshot.

I did not witness my mother cooking long, elaborate meals when I was young. I would listen as she told us how she oversalted the food as a young bride, hoping that my father’s family would send her back to her sisters. As a teenager, I would grumble at how my tiffin boxes lacked the finesse of hot lunches made by ‘hardworking Indian mothers’. Sometimes I would be given leftover idlis with a smattering of chutney podi, but many times I would open my lunchbox to find two slices of buttered toast with a lone apple or an unpeeled boiled egg.

As an adult, though, I have stopped my demands for hot lunches, and my mother is pleased that I happily eat her cooking. She often makes thin, crispy dosas because she likes her flawless cast-iron pan. Some days, she texts me mysterious one-word menus out of context. ‘Lazzaniya’ appeared on my phone the other day, and I walked to her flat to pick up a cheesy Tupperware of zucchini, potatoes and carrots cooked down with dried red chillies and tomato puree – no pasta in sight. Whenever we share a meal now, I enjoy myself, borrowing her tendency for fun. She avenges me for prior complaints, anticipating my responses to our meals, mocking the lofty way I speak English. ‘Is it shee-sha-shoo? Is it oh so la-la-la?’ she says, doing a pesky jig around the table. ‘Is it like England? Is it like French? Is it like Japan?’

Last year, I fell briefly in love with a man whose appetite was constrained by an illness. Our meals – and words – were carefully curated, with each physical and emotional action performed in the tight mould of restriction. This was a drill I knew well, so I jumped into it mindlessly. When we saw one another, I remained alert, on duty, sharp and performative from the distance between us. Our meetings formed a dynamic so formal that I often called it a ‘courtship’. I felt the familiar sensation of undernourishment, of not knowing where I stood with this man.

Each time we met, I held on to small details that gave me a window into his personality: anecdotes he told me about his best friend, the clumsy way he parked his car. We mostly sat in bland cafes, drinking mugs of tea and eating scanty snacks. One time we ate an overpriced chocolate ganache and I discovered the only real thing I would ever know about him: he had a keen sweet tooth. If I had liked him more, I would have turned these details into something more than they were, used them to sanctify him in my mind. Instead, they remained inconsequential, and my appetite for both food and affection became something I recognised.

On the first day I decided to stop seeing him, I picked my sister up from a metro station in central Delhi. That morning, I had cooked him a picnic he didn’t eat. ‘Wait, what is this?’ he had asked, as if I were standing on my head, not rolling out a cotton sheet to eat on under a flowering fig tree during Delhi’s ever-diminishing springtime. I told my sister this story as we ate the leftovers of my picnic – apple juice from the mountains, kebab rolls and channey-ki-chaat – in the back seat of our car. She pushed most of the food towards me, her cheeks blown out in anger, but also because her mouth was full of seekh kebab.

On the second day I decided to stop seeing him, I ate a piece of expensive chocolate cake in a cafe in central Delhi, looking out at strolling families with shopping bags and rich teenagers taking selfies that showed off their diamond-studded bracelets.

On the third day, I took a cab to my friend’s studio in south Delhi, and we drank spiced rum and ate bits of toasted garlic naan on her balcony. I had just spent hours with this man, listening primly to his stories; I was giddy with this weekday indulgence with my friend, realising that this, and any of the pleasures I considered primary, were not things he would understand.

On the fourth day I decided to to stop seeing him, my little brother made me an oily bowl of noodles with leftover keema and scallions, which I ate while reclining on his bed. ‘I’ve been so hungry, dude’, I said to him as he nodded sagely, rolling us cigarettes on the floor where he sat.

While acting on my sexual and romantic agency still feels mythical and challenging, I have started to act when my appetite for food needs me to give it form. I have begun to order sugary beverages with meals at restaurants, a luxury I thought was meant for other, thinner people deserving of such addendums. I have begun to fry myself an egg now and then, styling it with whatever new condiments I may have – coarsely ground lemon-pepper from a market in north Goa; Henderson’s Relish bought from the Morrisons in Peckham when I needed a reason to stroll around the supermarket, quietly weeping about my limited time in the colonial capital, a city I constantly and tragically love. I now eat breakfast every day, a habit I picked up two years ago when I visited a friend in Tokyo. Aghast at how I skipped the first meal of the day, within minutes of me leaving my room, he would quietly guide me to his dining table and place a plate of grilled cheese and steamed fish in front of me.

When it came to that man I loved the longest, my relationship with his city was in stark contrast to the one I had with him. I shared a temperament with its sharp, fast-talking citizens. Like me, they valued neighbourhood loyalty and high-quality banter, and like me, they enjoyed hot meat slid into bread. Often abandoned by this man, I took refuge in his city. ‘Alright?’ I started to say, like everyone else around me, nodding at the local postman when I saw him. I began to look forward to other things – chatty elderly women on the bus, blue patches in cloudy skies.

Without him, I also began to eat my way across the city. I would stand in line at a bakery to buy small frosted cakes. I began to buy oysters in a local shop, where I would talk non-stop to the man who shucked them, even though I understood little of what he said. I ate breakfast and drank mugs of tea at an old cafe, reading the local newspaper slowly in imitation of the old men around me. Every day, my favourite among them told me that he was related to the actor Ewan McGregor, even though I assured him that I believed him from the start.

On days when I was homesick, I would look up a nearby ice cream shop run by young Pakistani men, reading the reviews – and the owners’ rebuttals – on their Google page. I began to visit it, eating brightly coloured cups of ice cream and scribbling in my notebook, listening to the boys who ran it argue behind me, waiting for the bickering and bravado from the review pages to teleport into the shop. On one of my last days in the city, I decided to order a sundae, eating it slowly at a table near the windows. As I started to leave, one of the boys stopped me. ‘Sister! You forgot something’, he said in Punjabi, and I shrugged to say no. He gestured that I move two steps back, as if on a childhood cricket pitch, cheering as I caught what he threw at me. He touched his fingers to his forehead in salaams to say well done, but also goodbye.

I left, and started on what would be one of the last walks I took through those streets. I walked a long, circular path past the places in the city that had fed me – a widely debated bakery with an overpriced sausage roll, a beloved falafel cart where I would order whatever everyone else was getting: ‘Halloumi wrap, spicy potato, garlic sauce, fries.’ As I walked, I unwrapped my gift to eat on the way back: two small barfis, a block of candied cherries and a Snickers bar wrapped in foil.

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Credits

Sharanya Deepak is a writer from and currently living in New Delhi, India. She is also an editor at Vittles Magazine. More of her work is on her website.

Lisa Carpagnano is an illustrator who lives and works in Rennes. Inspired by cinema and photography, she creates narrative compositions, mostly in colored pencil or felt-tip pen, that blur the line between fiction and documentary.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today Vijayta Lalwani writes about how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused a massive shortage of cooking gas, impacting the livelihoods and health of working Indians.

If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of Bad Food. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy.

Another quick thing: our friends at The North-Eastern have launched an important and beautiful magazine that is publishing art, reportage and analysis – a continuation of the decades-old tradition of Eelam Tamil transnational activism. ‘Ours is a magazine committed to the principle of Tamil self-determination, not as a closed or parochial idea, but as a universal right,’ write the magazine’s editors. Read more on their website, and subscribe to The North-Eastern here.

‘I get tears in my eyes while cooking,’ Anita Salunkhe tells me. It’s a May afternoon in Malwadi, a neighbourhood dotted with makeshift homes and auto-repair shops in Pune, Western India. Salunkhe and her family live in a one-room tin-walled structure in a small, informal settlement that is mostly populated by migrant construction workers.

When we meet, she is sitting under a tree, having just cooked for her family. The sun blazes above us. To cook, Salunkhe uses a chulha – a traditional firewood stove – which is situated outside her home. Such stoves are viewed nostalgically by the elite classes, for whom they recall a more traditional form of cooking, but the reality of relying on a chulha (as many Indian working-class migrants like Salunkhe do) is far from romantic. Salunkhe cannot cook indoors because the smoke builds up incessantly, choking her. Daytime temperatures soar above a blistering 40°C, so she tries to cook early in the morning or evening. She tells me that all her neighbours are in the same predicament. I counted at least nine other homes in the settlement with a chulha outside their entrance.

Until two months ago, Salunkhe cooked inside her house on a gas stove, using a liquified petroleum gas (LPG) cylinder. Salunkhe, like most of the urban working classes, does not have adequate paperwork to secure a gas connection (migrant workers usually have gas connections registered in their native village), so she would purchase the cylinders through the black market at inflated costs. But all this changed when the Strait of Hormuz closed after the US and Israeli strikes on Iran began in February; since then, energy supplies in India have been hugely disrupted. Around 60% of India’s LPG is imported – and almost 90% of that travels through the Strait. Even though India and Iran have long been strategic allies, the Indian government has neither condemned the US and Israeli bombings on Iran nor adopted a clear stance during the war.

In India, there are over 300 million registered users of LPG gas cylinders, which form the primary infrastructure for home and commercial cooking. Since March, the official price of domestic 14kg LPG cylinders – cylinders sold by sanctioned state-owned and private agencies to households and businesses with registered connections – has increased from Rs 850 to roughly Rs 950. But for families like Salunkhe’s, who purchase cylinders through informal markets, these escalations can be much higher. Salunkhe used to purchase one cylinder a month for Rs 1,200 – already substantially higher than the official price. Now the cost has skyrocketed to nearly Rs 4,000, which is completely unaffordable for her family (Salunkhe’s husband, a daily wage worker in a construction site, earns Rs 300 per day – if he is able to find work. The day we met, he returned empty-handed.) Their daughter usually eats at the nearby public school, which guarantees a midday meal for children, but it is closed for vacations. ‘We are eating much less now and my daughter keeps crying for food. If she is hungry, I give her some biscuits and tell her to be quiet,’ Salunkhe says.

In the immediate aftermath of the Strait of Hormuz’s closure, there was a surge in demand for cylinders, as well as supply-chain bottlenecks and a delay in deliveries. Visuals showed hundreds of Indians lining up through the day, with many waiting for hours outside gas agencies across the country. Railway stations and bus depots were crowded, as scores of migrant workers returned to their native homes after running out of gas and savings.

Even today, months after the crisis began, these effects persist. Affluent households remain unaffected and the middle classes find a solution, so the impact is felt most acutely by those working in informal sectors – nearly 90% of the population in India – who may not have registered gas connections. Last month, I discussed the LPG crisis with single working mothers, street vendors and small-eatery owners across India, all of whom are barely scraping by.

In Hadapsar, a neighbourhood filled with food-establishments, I stumbled across Shree Krishna Bhojnalay, a small, affordable eatery. While most of the other places had at least a few customers, Shree Krishna Bhojnalay was completely empty. A middle-aged man who had been taking a nap on a chair identified himself as the owner (he refused to give me his name). ‘We are not open. I am packing up and shutting this place down,’ he told me.

He had been running the eatery in the rented space for over a year, cooking everything himself. He was able to sustain it before the war began, but once the shortages hit, the gas-supply agency told him they did not have any cylinders to sell. In March, the Indian government redirected fuel supply away from businesses and industries to households which rely extensively on LPG (despite having previously reassured businesses that there would be no disruption for seventy days). As a result, the supply for commercial customers became erratic across India. In Bangalore, for example, the Hotels Association in Bangalore released a pleading notice, stating that ‘sudden stoppage of supply is a big blow to the hotel industry’.

The owner of Shree Krishna Bhojnalay was forced to turn to the informal market for his LPG, but the prices (at least Rs 3,500 for a 14kg cylinder, and in some places up to Rs 5,000) were totally unaffordable. He cut his menu offering down to only two items – a rice plate for Rs 80 (consisting of rice and sabzi or dal) and chapati bhaji for Rs 70 – so that he wouldn’t have to increase prices. He also told me that he tried cooking on a chulha, ‘but there was too much smoke and it drove my customers away’.

Shalini Sinha, the Asia strategic lead at Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), told me that ‘The LPG crisis is not an isolated crisis but the result of multiple overlapping crises: rising living costs – including food prices – and income losses caused by extreme heat.’ Street-food vendors, the backbone of India’s urban food economy, already operate with high precarity. ‘They cope by reducing nutritious food for themselves, and their dietary intake goes down, even as working hours and physical labour increase,’ Sinha added.

Sunil Suryavanshi is a vendor selling tarri poha, samosa and kachori at a bus station in Nagpur, 740 kilometres away from Pune. ‘We had to shut shop for two weeks because we were not able to get a cylinder for a whole month,’ he told me. Now he is back open, but he has had to increase the cost of his food from Rs 30 to Rs 40 per plate. He is using a chulha to cook, which turns his utensils black. Sangeeta Singh, who heads up the street food programme for the National Association of Street Vendors of India (NASVI), told me that laws on pollution mean street vendors often have to pay a bribe to municipal authorities when using coal or firewood. ‘There is a lot of harassment and eviction they are facing,’ Singh noted. And although ‘NASVI have tried [throughout the crisis] to provide induction stoves to vendors … but electricity agencies ask for a lot of paperwork, which many vendors do not have.’

Despite the government’s move to prioritise domestic gas supply, in many urban areas the interval between cylinder deliveries has increased from twenty-one to twenty-five days. And, for many households, the cylinders have taken weeks to arrive, even though they were paid for in advance. Pinki Devi, a forty-year-old mother of three in Delhi who earns Rs 8,000 monthly as a cleaner, told me over the phone that she paid for a cylinder on 23 May – it cost Rs 913 – but it didn’t arrive until 10 June. While she waited, she managed with a chulha, cooking at 4am before heading out for work; sometimes she used her neighbour’s cylinder to cook in the evening. The simple meal she cooks every day cannot be stored for later. ‘Everything spoils in this heat and I do not have a cooler or a fridge,’ she said.

In the initial days of the conflict, fears over LPG shortages sparked extreme hoarding of induction stoves and electric cookers, which were then sold on online platforms and through vendors at inflated prices. And while many hotels and food vendors – who have regularised electricity connections and an additional budget – bought inductions as a contingency measure, they remained out of reach for most.

Rajaram Veer, a vada pav seller in Mumbai, purchased an electric stove in April for a whopping Rs 20,000 after his agency stopped supplying commercial cylinders. However, the electric stove has increased his electricity bills by 20% because it heats slowly. Vada pav is a heat-intensive dish; it requires deep-frying, and Veer must heat the oil for at least twenty minutes before he can begin frying the potato vadas. ‘The taste is not the same. The vada is naram, not kadak [soft, but not crisp],’ he said. Despite rising costs, Veer has not yet increased his prices, currently selling his vada pavs for Rs 23 apiece.

Chai vendors cannot increase their prices, as their clientele is dependent on cheap, fast beverages and snacks. Siyaram Kumar Rai, who runs a small stall in Mumbai and sells each cup of his chai for Rs 5, has been using coal for the past two months. He now cooks the tea in his home and then packs it in a thermos flask to take to his stall. ‘Many customers have stopped coming to me because I cannot prepare the tea on the spot according to their preference,’ he tells me. Pramod Wakode, the founder of Tea Coffee Association, a non-profit working with over 10,000 tea vendors across India, said his association was helping sellers access electricity so they could start using induction stoves. In addition to the fuel shortages, the price rise of milk, loose tea and sugar has led to further strain on tea vendors, he told me.

All this might seem like a miniscule increase to someone in the Global North, given that one Indian rupee is less than one per cent of the British pound. But the price surge of a staple is a massive issue in India, as it affects the consumption ability of millions of middle- and lower-income households that run on tight monthly budgets. The gas crisis has evidently driven pushed more households, vendors and restaurants to the edge.

While the country’s working classes reel from new obstacles in everyday life, the government has not taken action, instead putting the onus on already financially insecure citizens. In 2016, the central government introduced a welfare scheme, aiming to provide LPG cylinders at a subsidised rate to women from low-income households; since the war, the number of gas refills has been reduced from the initial twelve times a year to just four. In May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to Indians to adopt a host of austerity measures – such as working from home, limiting travel abroad and buying less gold – in order to limit fuel usage and balance foreign reserves. In a separate appeal, he asked Indians to cut cooking oil consumption by 10% (edible oil imports have risen over the years, and the war has driven up importation costs even further).

Much of Indian cooking relies on oil from coconut, soybean, groundnut and mustard for frying, tempering and preserving food. Many vendors I spoke to said it was not feasible to cut down or switch to cheaper alternatives, even as cooking-oil prices have increased to nearly Rs 200 per litre since the war began. ‘Customers can tell the difference in the taste, so we cannot change the oil,’ Suryavanshi, who uses at least five litres of soybean oil daily to prepare the snacks he serves at his stall, told me.

Veer also uses soybean oil. He said he would rather purchase the same ingredients at a higher cost than opt for cheaper alternatives. Street vendors build their business with deep thought and high risks, and, even though the government believes the measures they introduce are minor, Rajaram reminds me that even a moment’s error can cost him his livelihood.

For many, food is the only form of respite in the face of severe economic adversity. Roma Devi, who earns a monthly salary of Rs 10,000 as a factory worker in Delhi, continues purchasing the same brand of mustard oil and using similar quantities in her cooking for her children. ‘How can we deceive our stomach?’ she said. I asked her about the Prime Minister’s proposed austerity measures: ‘We do not have the money to buy gold,’ she told me indignantly. ‘All poor people have is food to get by.’

Editor’s note: As of two days ago, the Strait of Hormuz is due to open as per new talks, but reports say that this does not guarantee an end to these problems, or that inflation will go down.

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Vijayta Lalwani is a writer and an award-winning journalist covering the impact of politics and polarisation on livelihoods.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today, Anonymous has written an essay about running the tea and biscuit table at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in London. If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – we highly recommend buying a copy. Ruby Tandoh’s guide to the ice cream of London is also still available for pre-order here (note: preorders are currently only available in the UK).

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One of the first things I noticed about AA was the biscuits. Meetings most often take place in the supplementary buildings of churches, and the biscuit offering felt identical to that of a charity coffee morning. Large, institutional stainless-steel kettles were in use, and a variety of familiar biscuits – chocolate digestives, Jaffa Cakes and so on – were arranged on 1970s crockery. At my first meeting I was asked whether I wanted tea or coffee, and when I requested the latter I was told that ‘The only instant part of recovery is the coffee.’

I was initially bemused by the relish other attendees exhibited at the biscuit table; they debated the week’s offering and expounded the merits of Jammy Dodgers as opposed to Ginger Nuts. Fig rolls were met – unfairly, I thought – with horror. Prior to the more formal, and generally darker, sharing that happened inside the meetings themselves, the biscuit table was a conversational place. The kindness and care with which I was always offered a cup of tea and a biscuit surprised me too; I did not think I deserved kindness or a biscuit. I did not even think I liked biscuits.

Like many recovering addicts, I did not have a sweet tooth prior to sobriety – I was a crisps person – but suddenly, after giving up alcohol and drugs, I found that I needed sugar. I copied the other alcoholics and began to drink it in my tea – ironically, this felt illicit. I began to look forward to meetings, in no small part due to the biscuits; they were a pleasant and delicious thing which I was still allowed. I once watched a recovering addict who was trying to give up smoking light a cigarette – he held it up appreciatively and said, ‘The thing about one of these is it won’t make you wake up in a skip tomorrow morning.’ The same goes for a biscuit – I could just eat a Jaffa Cake and enjoy it and there would not be a vast and terrible consequence. That may sound extremely obvious and simple, but it was not. I began to imitate my fellow alcoholics and take a small stack of biscuits into each meeting; like them, I had poor impulse control and would finish the biscuits within the first five minutes.

One of AA’s many aphorisms is that ‘Service keeps you sober.’ Meetings run because people set out the chairs, organise the hiring of a space from a church or community hall and chair the meeting. These tasks are known as ‘service commitments.’ I was desperate to stay sober and obeyed every bumper-sticker suggestion I was given. At a monthly business meeting after my favourite AA group (imagine a parish council run by former wreckheads and you will get the idea), I learned that the meeting needed a new tea person; I put myself forward and was voted in. This is how I found myself in charge of serving the tea at a small evening meeting in Soho. The church in which the meeting takes place is a stone’s throw away from The French House, where I used to bartend, and the church’s bar – on which I served the tea directly – faced the bar where I used to serve wine to customers (but more often to myself).

I was unable to afford to buy nice biscuits. Every week I presented the alcoholics with knock-off rich teas and digestives from Lidl, and I felt terrible about it. Eventually someone told me that I was presenting the alcoholics with the sort of biscuit which the then Conservative government would deem they deserved. Still tender, I wept at my failure, not least because the criticism had come from two incredibly handsome men and I was worried that I would never find another boyfriend. I protested that I couldn’t afford to buy better biscuits, and they laughed at me and told me to get the money from the treasurer – I hadn’t realised there was one. The following week I had a budget of £15. I felt rich. I had to keep a receipt, which made me feel important and as though the other people in the supermarket would assume I had a job.

Perhaps my lack of other gainful employment explained the zeal with which I took to my tea commitment. I cleaned the church’s upstairs breakfast bar thoroughly before starting, I laid out the biscuits and sweets neatly on plates and in bowls, I designated a bowl for teabags and I decanted the sugar so that the church’s main supply wouldn’t become stained and contaminated by thrice-returning wet teaspoons – alcoholics frequently need at least two sugars. I became angry when the meeting just before mine invariably made the kitchen messy and encroached on my time when they tried to clean up, inexpertly, afterwards. The ineffective way they loaded the dishwasher enraged me.

Through trial and error, I discovered a formula for the biscuit selection: at least half should be chocolate; there should be one ‘posh’ or novelty chocolate biscuit, and the rest of the chocolate offering should be chocolate digestives or chocolate hobnobs. These should never be the dark chocolate kind – they do not provide enough instant gratification. There should always be a classic, like Jammy Dodgers or Ginger Nuts. Cheap biscuits, like I had learned, were frowned upon; Bourbons and custard creams were not considered worth staying sober for. Once, in an experimental mood, I bought Tangfastics. They were a great success, and the move to include fizzy sweets in the offering caught on across London.

The secret to good AA tea is the same as the secret to good bartending: you have the remember the regulars’ orders. There are people who, even now, I will see in Soho and recognise only as ‘Three cubes of ice’ or ‘145ml Côtes du Rhône’. The recovering alcoholics I was serving at AA were every bit as annoyingly specific about their orders as the regulars in the French. Some would insist on two teabags, while others had a fear of any caffeine. I would be told I had not left enough room for milk; I would be told I had left too much. I was asked for a slice of lemon in a cup, not a mug of Earl Grey. I would receive praise for the selection of herbal teas on offer, and I would be chastised for the lack of decaf options. One awful day the church’s kettle broke and, unbeknownst to me, the water was merely hot rather than boiling. An older man I did not know took a sip, looked to see if I was wearing a wedding ring, and told me that tea like that was why I was still single.

AA service commitments last for one year. After a year of making the tea, I had finished the twelve steps of recovery and begun to sponsor another woman. I passed my tea-making commitment on to her and she passed it on to my second sponsee. Both took the role as seriously as I had and it became a despotic ‘family’ tradition. Finally, after three years of unbroken control over the teas, the issue of succession reared its head. When two straight men I did not know took over, I was concerned. They started off strong: one, a former chef, bought Mulino Bianco biscuits, kept the blue roll handy and had a good sense of mise en place. In many cases – though it has not yet happened for me – recovery leads to great professional success. The former chef finished training to be a lawyer and so had to relinquish the tea service. I was happy for him, but worried that the remaining man would be unable to handle the tea alone. I was proved correct. A charming ageing skater, he made the sort of tea I was used to receiving from one of the Americans. He once asked if he really needed to buy milk. I disgraced myself in the next business meeting by speaking out of turn and protesting that we had suffered enough, the tea had gotten too bad and attendance was plummeting. Despite my blatant abuse of AA’s ultimately benevolent anarchist society, I was voted in as the tea person for a second term, three years after my first.

St Augustine once pleaded with God, famously saying, ‘Oh God, make me good, but not yet.’ I frequently plead to an ill-defined and murky ‘higher power’ (which I was told to believe in and which I do not interrogate too closely lest it collapse), ‘Oh God, make me good now.’ I mostly am good, but when it comes to making the tea at AA, I am cruel and controlling. I bark at the alcoholics who fail to clean the kitchen, I roll my eyes theatrically when I’m asked to list the herbal teas and I frequently want to strangle the nice old man who watches closely as I measure a half-teaspoon of instant into his cup. He is nervous because three years ago I gave him a coffee with my customary two. I once told him, nastily, that as his cocaine habit had failed to kill him, it was unlikely that my coffee would finish the job. The orders of the alcoholics I serve are undeniably specific and exacting, and yet, in my iron-clad grip on the meeting’s tea and biscuits, I am the most controlling of all. During the sharing portion of AA meetings, when those attending talk about their days and weeks and their recovery more generally, a recurring theme is that, while physical or chemical sobriety generally becomes easier with time, ‘emotional’ sobriety remains difficult. I have found this to be true, and yet while I am generally more or less emotionally sober outside of AA – a reliable and loving friend, the sort of person to relinquish a tube seat – inside it I remain a terror.

During my sobriety I have lived in house shares, squats, house-sits, and been a lodger; I have rarely had a kitchen where I can cook with ease and freedom. I treat the people with whom I share the AA kitchen in a manner that would be effective and acceptable in hospitality, but which is rude and hostile in a recovery context. In lieu of being able to host people comfortably at home, I make tea for alcoholics, and I do it horribly because it means too much to me. Similarly, the instability of freelance work and a long-term lack of sustainable employment mean that I have, on occasion, faced food insecurity. The only time I enter the supermarket without dread is when I buy the AA biscuits, when my sole concern is choosing what I think people will enjoy the most rather than considering what cheap thing will keep me full for the greatest length of time (generally porridge). While I have moved more times than I can remember in the last four years, I have found myself in the same kitchen week after week for the length of my sobriety. I forget that it is not really my kitchen at all – it is the church’s kitchen, it is God’s kitchen, and I desecrate it frequently.

*

In keeping with an AA tradition to remain anonymous in press and film, the writer of this piece has chosen to remain anonymous.

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Sing Yun Lee is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. You can find more of her work here.

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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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To donate to Sameer Project’s Eid Al Adha campaign here. Their other campaigns, including the Refat Al-Areer Camp, can be found here.

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.

*

‘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.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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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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If you haven’t picked one up already, we still have copies left of our second print issue, on the theme of ‘Bad Food’ – which focuses on the messy, unglamorous and chaotic aspects of food culture. You can read other pieces from the Bad Food Extended Universe here, but we highly recommend buying a copy.

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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.

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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.

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

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

4 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.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

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.

Issue 2 of our print magazine, on the theme of Bad Food, is still available. You should buy a copy to help us make another one.

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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