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

a month ago · 93 likes · 17 comments · Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, and Cormac Kehoe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits

Zanta Nkumane is a Swazi writer and journalist.

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

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Further Reading

• ‘Hospitality is Not Conditional’ by Sharanya Deepak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interviewer: What did you make?

Woman: I made aloo mattar.

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

Woman: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Credits

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

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

Credits

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

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

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Further Reading

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

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

• Francesca Wade on the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book

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

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

Buy Vittles Issue 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have our pudin and we eat it, too.

Credits

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

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

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits

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

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

The Vittles masthead can be viewed here.

Good morning and welcome back to Vittles! We have an unusual story for you as our first newsletter of the year - a very fun investigation by Rosella Dello Ioio into the proliferation of cafes with the word ‘Beano’ in their name across Kent.

Our second magazine, Bad Food, is available on our website and at our stockists, along with prints from our favourite illustrators and photographers. We are planning to hold some in-person events related to the magazine over the next few months, including some where you may be able to get the last few copies of the now sold-out Issue 1. In the meantime, we’ll be releasing a few special features from the mag soon, along with online only content from the Bad Food Extended Universe. Keep your eyes peeled!

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Issue 2

The first time I noticed a Beano cafe was in Westgate-on-Sea, a small town near Margate on the Kentish coast. It seemed unremarkable: an old-school cafe offering fry-ups alongside beige banquets, under the signage ‘The Best Beano Cafe & Restaurant’. But as I made my way down the high street, I soon passed the more modestly named ‘Beano Cafe’ and ‘Beano Kebab’ within a few doors of each other. All this in a town of under 8,000 people, with one pharmacy and no proper supermarket.

For those who didn’t grow up in the UK, The Beano is a comic that originated in Scotland. During the 1990s, its characters Dennis the Menace and Gnasher were as ubiquitous as Ronald McDonald. Back then, The Beano was circulating millions of copies per month. They were the halcyon days of magazines, when Smash Hits and Girl Talk filled the shelves. But that was all a long time ago, and these days you rarely see a copy of The Beano outside of a charity shop. Now it conjures hazy images of old-fashioned British boyishness, mischief and simpler times.

As the weeks went on, I couldn’t help but notice versions of the Beano cafe everywhere I went – from Ramsgate to Canterbury, Sheerness, Broadstairs, Folkestone and stretching as far as the London borderlands in Bexleyheath. Mr Beano Coffee Shop. The Beano. Beano’s Cafe. Beano Family Cafe. I counted fourteen variations in total, all located in Kent (or places which are at least spiritually Kent). Then there were the signs. Some with painted bold red and yellow highlights that echo the nineties comic, others with unrelated 3D lettering and chrome frontage.

My curiosity was piqued. What did a string of cafes have in common with a comic about a spiky-haired menace with roots 500 miles away in Dundee? Was it related at all? Or could it have something to do with the ‘Beano’ coach trips, named after the Scottish slang word for a celebration, which ferried day-trippers from London to the Kent coast in the 1950s and 60s (a concept immortalised in a 1989 episode of Only Fools and Horses, where Del Boy and Rodney go on a Beano to Margate)? Who was behind them? Was it a coincidence, or some kind of franchise? A Kent Live article from 2023 also highlighted the phenomenon and attempted to find the answer, but gave up somewhere between the bacon sandwich and builder’s tea. I decided to get to the bottom of it.

My investigation began at The Best Beano Cafe and Restaurant in Westgate-on-Sea, the first branch I had noticed. It’s one of the larger Beano outposts, with brown and butter yellow signage, a pink feature wall, a diner-style counter and an old black-and-white picture of Westgate-on-Sea, juxtaposed with an Uber Eats sign. It was here I met the Turkish-born owner Gencay Yilmaz and his daughters Dilber and Gizem, who were happy to chat.

We sat down in a red corner booth and they gave me the first insight into the history of Beano. The sisters told me that Gencay moved to Kent from Aksaray, a province in central Turkey, in 1998. The nineties were a time of deep economic and political trouble for Turkey, with high unemployment and soaring inflation. Men like Gencay arrived in the UK, Germany and Italy in search of better opportunities, at a time when immigration routes and work visas were easier. You could perfect a Full English and send some money home. It took five years for Dilber and her mother to join Gencay in Westgate-on-Sea. Gizem was born a year later.

However, Kent’s first Beano establishment wasn’t Best Beano, but the Beano Cafe a few doors down – a modest caff on Station Road, where Gencay first found work. There he learned the rituals of the trade: crispy bacon, runny yolks and strong tea. A few years later, when it was time for him to move on, he decided to start his own cafe, just down the street. He called it The Best Beano Cafe & Restaurant. ‘The cafe name never got trademarked, so anyone can open a Beano,’ Gizem told me. ‘We’re all from the same part of Turkey, in Aksaray. We know each other, but there’s no official business connection, and we’re not a franchise.’

‘Is it a competition?’ I asked Dilber, sensing some intra-Beano rivalry.

She smiled. ‘I suppose you could say that. My uncle in Margate likes a bit of competition. He called his place “The Best Beano Cafe”, too.’

Each new revelation seemed to reveal another, older incarnation of Beano Cafe, like a set of Beano Russian nesting dolls. With two new cafes to investigate, I took the one-minute walk from Best Beano to Beano Cafe, with its laminated Dennis the Menace menu, hoping to learn more from owner Zia Koksal. But he wasn’t keen to be interviewed. ‘My father came to the UK and started a cafe. End of story,’ he told me before returning to work.

On a second visit, Zia told me that if I wanted to know the full story I should go to Broadstairs to speak to his brother, Zafer. So I headed to Broadstairs, to (yep, you’ve guessed it) another Beano Cafe. It was here I met Zafer Koksal, who told me about the true origins of the Beano Cafe lineage. Beano didn’t start in Kent, but in London. ‘The first Beano Cafe was on Caledonian Road in King’s Cross,’ Zafer told me. ‘My father Mustafa opened it around 1991.’

Formerly a red-light district, Caledonian Road was an attractive spot to start a business in the early 1990s owing to its affordable rent, working-class community and transport links. The dilapidated coal yard (now Coal Drops Yard) had given way to an industrial area full of workers who needed substantial, no-nonsense meals on a budget. This was in the days before chains, when cafe culture was still the land of independents. At the time, Turkish fare had yet to hit the mainstream, and workers wanted bacon and eggs, not döner kebabs. The bar to entry was low, demand was high, and Mustafa found himself in the right place at the right time.

After a few years, Mustafa sold the London location to new owners, setting his sights on life by the coast. He moved to Kent at the turn of the millennium, where he opened the area’s first Beano Cafe in Westgate-on-Sea with his brother. From here, the Beano cafe expanded, with family and friends opening similar ventures. ‘The Beano in Margate, by the clock tower, is my brother-in-law,’ Zafer told me. ‘The Beano Cafe in Westgate [the original Kent Beano] is run by my brother Zia, and the one in Canterbury is my cousin. Business-wise, we’re all independent.’ Still, there are a couple of outliers with no connection whatsoever. ‘Some have sold the businesses and the new owners have kept the same names, so we don’t know all of them,’ Zafer explained. One such place is Happy Cafe & Family Restaurant in Cliftonville, which sports the signature black, red and yellow signage but has no official link to the others.

But why the name Beano, I ask? Zafer shrugs, ‘My father just really loved the comic.’

I was reluctant to accept that the answer could be this simple. I revisited my theory about the Beano coach trips, but on closer inspection, I found that they tended to depart from East London, not Caledonian Road. Besides, by the time Mustafa opened his cafe in 1991, Beano coach trips were already dying out.

Unfortunately, Mustafa has passed away, so I couldn’t ask him about his intentions for Beano directly. His picture is now etched onto the signage of Beano Cafe Westgate and features on some of the menus and staff uniforms – a reminder of his legacy. Other cafe owners I spoke to kept coming back to the comic as the main motivation for the name and signage. Sometimes, it seems, the simplest explanation is the right one.

Despite the lack of uniformity across the fourteen cafes, two commonalities I found in all the Beanos I visited were, firstly, a deep connection to the community, and also near-identical menus of hot and filling food, the majority of which would leave you with change from a tenner. The clientele are mostly locals, with some tourists in the summer. ‘We’ve had the same customers for over twenty-five years,’ Dilber tells me. ‘First we knew [the] mums and dads, then their kids, now their grandkids.’

I returned to Best Beano Cafe Westgate during a heatwave in the school holidays, and the place was packed with young and old, families, friends and tourists. I passed a group of stylish Gen-Zers hunting for a fry-up and was surprised to overhear one proclaiming, ‘We have to see if Beano has room before trying anywhere else.’

Beano caffs also seem to exist apart from other greasy spoons in the area, which have put a lot of focus into marketing themselves as sort-of museum pieces. Some regularly post reels advertising their latest breakfast innovation. The Dalby Cafe in Cliftonville, for example, has a mega breakfast challenge that has drawn the attention of influencers (infamously, Pete Doherty once took part in it). But the Beano cafes I visited seem to exist in a cultural vacuum, mostly without an active social media presence and unconcerned about appealing to FoodTokkers.

Margate in particular swells with the weight of small-plate restaurants and wine bars, but not everyone has the means or inclination to pay £13 for a plate of anchovies swimming in olive oil. Many want the familiarity of what they grew up with, the straightforwardness of a beef roast dinner with all the trimmings for £8.50, cooked by a person they know by sight, and who has memorised their order.

‘The people around here know us as Beano,’ Gencay tells me. ‘They see me at the cash and carry or out and about in the street, and they shout, “Hey Beano.”’

As an ageing population with a taste for British comfort food continues to decline, the Beano cafes have an uncertain future. Beyond the food, even the name of these establishments feels like an anachronism. The Beano magazine, which once circulated several million copies a year, now distributes around 40,000 per issue. More significantly, there’s the question of succession. These are family-run establishments. Who will succeed the owners?

‘The next generation don’t want to be running a cafe,’ Dilber says. ‘My dad came over in the 2000s and had to get a car, get a house, make a living. We have choices. We were born here.’ Gizem only works at the Beano during the summer holidays when she is on a break from university. Similarly, in Broadstairs, Zafer’s sons only help out at the weekends – one is training to be an electrician and the other is thinking about becoming a plumber. These cafes represent a moment in time, a bridge between old and new Britain, that may not survive another generation.

In Reform-controlled Kent, as in the rest of the country, there is currently a toxic narrative being peddled by the far-right, who want you to think that immigrants are ‘taking over British culture’. But here are Turkish families serving their local communities, maintaining traditional cafe culture for a predominantly English clientele. They’re keeping a slice of British history alive that might otherwise have vanished and become a betting shop.

In the end, the name Beano doesn’t really matter. These cafes could have been called anything. What lingers in the mind is their enduring ability to satisfy appetites, not aesthetics. Back at the original Beano Westgate branch, I order a jacket potato for £5.50 – less than a pint at most pubs. It arrives under a heap of butter and grated cheese, which is slowly melting from the heat of the potato. Perfectly crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Shredded iceberg, onion and half-moon tomatoes take up half of the plate, with a dollop of coleslaw for good measure. It takes me back to visiting cafes with my mum in Wales as a child and polishing off jacket potatoes in the same fashion (funnily enough, my order at Ocky White’s cafe in my hometown of Haverfordwest was also called ‘beano’). I look around at the tables filled with chatter from three generations of families, hear the familiar clink of cups and saucers and the hiss of the coffee machine. I lift my knife and fork, and tuck in.

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Credits

Rosella Dello Ioio is a Welsh writer based in Kent. She’s interested in food culture and its eccentricities, and is currently working on her first novel.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today is the official publication day of Issue 2 of our print magazine! Copies have been arriving over the weekend and will hopefully reach everyone in the UK this week. If you’ve received it, please let us know what you’ve been enjoying!

You can still buy Issue 2 - titled ‘Bad Food’ - on our website here, along with prints from our favourite illustrators and photographers.

Issue 2 will also start to hit shops this week – you can find a full list of stockists around the world here. If you are a shop or restaurant and wish to stock Issue 2, then please get in touch with us, or our distributor Antenne Books at maxine@antennebooks.com or mia@antennebooks.com.

On to today’s piece: an essay by Gan Chin Lin on picnics held by migrant domestic workers or MDWs in Singapore, reflecting on the value of eating together for working class migrants across the world.

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It’s a hot, windless Sunday at Dhoby Ghaut Green, a strip-sized urban park in Singapore. We are gathered at a birthday picnic: in the middle, a cake is perched on a twelve-pack of Carlsberg, sunlight dancing off chocolate mirror glaze. A ‘Happy Birthday’ techno remix throbs loudly from a wireless speaker in the background, against the pulse of budots and boombox pop from distant neighbouring parties. ‘Put here’, directs Jenny – whose birthday it is – as she leans to reposition a large plastic Tupperware filled to the brim with bicol express (Filipino pork and coconut stew). On the picnic mat, other ladies grandly arrange a prodigious spread, with lechon manok (roast chicken) and bangus (whole grilled milkfish) at its heart. There is also pinakbet, with pink shrimp bobbing amidst green beans and squash, alongside moringa-dappled ginitaang, kare-kare, and mounds of flossy pancit bihon.

‘Make a wish!’ Jenny’s friends cheer, as she brings her clasped hands to her chin: eyes closed, leaning over the cake. After she cuts it, the ladies snatch spoonfuls, ready to eat, exchanging compliments about the dishes cooked for their picnic today.

The ladies who fill this green are migrant domestic workers (MDWs), serving as live-in helpers at their employers’ homes across Singapore. Their duties, often starting at the crack of dawn and running from Monday to Saturday, include cooking, grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, errand-running, childcare, eldercare, pet care and more. In 2013 a regulation was instated by the Singaporean government, entitling live-in domestic workers to one rest day a week. This day (typically designated as Sunday) is when the ladies convene for picnics, to eat together outdoors. However, this rest day is habitually infringed upon by agencies or employers, with many MDWs pressured into ‘no rest day’ contracts. (The power imbalance between employers and workers makes it difficult for MDWs to take warranted time off, despite the fact that in 2022, they were granted a mandatory monthly day of rest that cannot be compensated away.)

But every Sunday that they can, the ladies seek out places which are accessible and free to enter, such as Dhoby Ghaut Green. Their venues also include trees near roads and canals, for shade and soft grass, as well as pedestrian walkways and spaces beneath flyovers and highway overpasses. Often, their gatherings take place near shopping centres, like Peninsula Plaza and Lucky Plaza (community hubs for Burmese and Filipino workers respectively); or near churches, so the ladies can travel there straight after Sunday morning services.

To citizens, expats and tourists, Singapore’s Botanic Gardens and Chinese Garden are more stately locations for leisurely outdoor meals; however, the MDWs I speak to tell me that they are unwelcome at these spaces. Security staff come over and disperse their circles, claiming that their groups are too large, or that eating and drinking is not permitted in places like park pavilions. This makes public spaces like Dhoby Ghaut Green crucial – but even there, MDWs are subject them to unfettered racial and class-based discrimination. Forum letters complain about cramped sidewalks filled with workers, citing hygiene, movement difficulties and that ‘tourists in the vicinity [will] get a bad impression of Singapore’. There are accounts of citizens stopping to berate and threaten picnicking groups, kicking over their food or chasing them away. There have also been tragedies: in 2020, a car rammed into a picnicking group set up on a pavement near Lucky Plaza, killing two Filipino ladies, Ms Abigail Danao Leste and Ms Arlyn Picar Nucos.

To describe a gathering such as the one held for Jenny’s birthday, I instinctively turned to the word ‘picnic’, but Evelyn – a Filipino domestic worker from San Fernando, La Union, who has worked in Singapore for over twenty years – tells me that this term is seldom invoked by MDWs themselves. For a Singaporean citizen, ‘picnic’ denotes the intentional nature of dining outdoors, seeking leisure al fresco, but for MDWs, it’s less a matter of choice. ‘There are those who don’t have their own room and sleep in children’s rooms, living rooms. Some don’t even have a partition to separate [their space],’ Evelyn says. ‘So on Sundays, where is there to rest at home? Sometimes they just come to lie down on mats and sleep.’

Across Singapore, food establishments function as hubs of urban sociability. Locals often spend languid afternoons hopping between restaurants and cafes across the island. But this is not the case for all those living in Singapore. For MDWs: their pay of around US$480 (SGD$645) a month – far below the minimum wages set by their home countries – is inadequate for cafe hopping. Workers also spend the first few months of their job in a state of downward mobility, paying migration fees back to companies, friends and family – even loan-sharks. Even after that, dependents back home receive the majority of their earnings.

Also, for MDWs, days off are not entirely their own. Evelyn says that one condition of her Sundays off is that she can only cook once the [employer] family has risen, so the odours and noise do not disturb their sleep. Another condition is that she ‘must return before 9pm, so the barking of the family dog does not wake them’ (other peers have to return by 5 or 6pm sharp). Even though this is her day, her time is dependent on and controlled by the strictures of her employer’s household.

Other domestic rhythms – including, and especially eating – are also out of her control, Evelyn says. She reassures me that she is treated well by her employer: telling me that radically adjusting personal eating habits is simply part of the everyday reality for a MDW. Within the house, her employer keeps an inventorial watch over what can be cooked and eaten. For starches, they eat wholemeal pasta, or potatoes, and on rare occasion, brown rice. ‘If I eat white rice in the house, the children will say,“I also want! I also want!”’ – she mimics their clamouring – ‘so I cannot.’

Ayu, another MDW who has been in Singapore for over a decade, explains that ingredients like belacan and bagoong – forms of fermented fish central to Southeast Asian cuisines – are forbidden from being used in cooking or for consumption within the space of her employer’s household. Even though fermented fish paste is widely used in canonical Singaporean dishes, the employers’ aversions to their use bely the cultural and racial hierarchies that exist within and outside domestic spaces in Singapore. The picnics, therefore, become a way to exercise the ladies’ own culinary lexicon: Evelyn tells me that the gatherings are structured as ‘meriendas’ – the Filipino term for light mid-afternoon meals, and food is prepared for a gathering intended to last a couple of hours. While ‘merienda’ is a Tagalog term, the picnicking groups contain women of all ethnicities, where the ladies bring forth flavours of home.

The culinary intimacy in sharing favourite dishes at gatherings also brings the ladies closer, making new friends from all kinds of different backgrounds. Jenelyn Alegonero Leyble – artist and author of 7 Years of Roar, based on her experience as a Singaporean domestic worker – tells me that she wakes up early to make her famous biko from scratch on Sundays, painstakingly frying fresh coconut milk until it caramelises into latik. ‘That’s my favourite to make and to eat, and all my friends love it, too.’

As Jenelyn and others express, the act of cooking for friends is a different flavour of work to their monied labour. They are rewarded with compliments, appreciation, and the excitement of sharing the personal memories tied to each dish (instead of fielding complaints or critique from employers). It is a process of learning about their peers, and vice versa: an exercise of the accommodation, empathy and dedication inherent in building long-term friendships.

Jenelyn has also learned new recipes. She tells me proudly about her trademark lemper ayam, taught to her by a friend – the distinctly Indonesian dish is one for which she’s now known. She came to love rendang, made the Minangkabau way, where meat or vegetables are slow-braised in coconut milk and spices until sumptuously tender. And, though the Indonesian ladies poke fun at their Filipino friends, who cannot take the level of heat in their traditional recipes, ‘they make it less spicy for us’, Jenelyn notes, beaming. When I talk to Evelyn, I ask about her favourite dishes to bring and eat at picnics. ‘Adobo, to bring ,’ she responds. ‘To eat? White rice’.

Currently, the Singaporean government does not set a food allowance for employers to spend on MDWs, but the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) specifies that employers must provide three free, adequate meals for domestic workers each day, appending a suggestive meal plan for a worker with ‘moderate’ activity. Somberly, Evelyn notes that despite these MOM circulars, many community members are not well fed; instead, they live off restricted quantities and varieties of food. At gatherings, she has had to encourage many to bravely initiate conversations with their employers, and to cite the ministry’s rules verbatim. But the inherent power imbalance, and the threat of repatriation, is an obstacle. ‘They’re scared of being sent home jobless, without money,’ she says.

For years, local NGO Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME) has reported on how food is used as a tool of control by employers, where workers are restricted ‘not to the point of starvation, but are [still] not adequately nourished … leaving them constantly hungry’. This irony is grotesque. The ladies spend most of their lives feeding their employer families, learning and cooking dishes – from local cuisines and also Singaporean favourites – while at the same time, they are heavily deprived of nutrition, nourishment and pleasure for themselves.

Leong Man Wei, who helms Sayur Story – a ground-up initiative for and by MDWs – tells me that fruits hold a special place with the community. Members are frequently told by their employers that they are not ‘deserving’ of the fruits they must cut and prepare for employer families, or are mistakenly accused of eating fruit that someone has bought. Fruits are expensive, is the rationale given for this hostility. Not allowed to consume fruits they would commonly prepare and grow back at home, some members buy their ‘own’ fruits with their own money. On days off, they share these fruits, encouraging one another to have their fill.

Sayur Story understands the needs of MDWs, and also, the fullness of their desires. Man Wei collaborates with members of the migrant community to hold activities and conversations around ethnobotany, food and culture – like tours to farms and nature parks, and composting, fermentation, or cooking events. ‘It’s less about creating a new space, [more about] affirming MDWs in their sense of self within Singaporean society – reminding locals that shared spaces belong to everyone,’ Man Wei says.

In this environment, for all ladies – and especially those who live under distressing conditions – the commensal gatherings and sharing of food become a form of essential weekly aid, against the limitations of domestic strictures. At the picnics, the community pools advice for one another: like warning against borrowing from loan-sharks and navigating contractual obligations, plus how to avoid falling foul of employers in disputes. But often, they just need to talk, Evelyn says. ‘They release their feelings and burst into tears; and tell me they feel better after talking – but sometimes they don’t even take my advice!’ Only when they have eaten well, do the women feel safe and strong enough to unpack difficult topics. At these picnics, eating together is the first step to accessing other intangible and emotional forms of renewal and care.

Walter Levy, author of The Picnic: A History, notes that outdoor meals are distinct from quotidian eating because of their literal and figurative displacement, away from the mundane. For the MDWs, these picnics are sites of rest, yet actively maintained by individual and communal efforts. Repeated gatherings are enabled through ties that, as Tan Chee-Beng describes in Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast, are ‘the highest expression of friendship’ which cultivate ‘a moral relationship of solidarity’ over time.

Residing in employers’ homes all over Singapore, it often takes over an hour for MDWs to travel to and from picnics, making for an incredibly expensive journey. Besides, off days are not always breezy, especially with the erratic monsoons and extreme heat that result from climate change. Outdoor gatherings often mean that the ladies face prolonged exposure to temperatures exceeding 30°C (36.3°C being the highest, in 2024). One day, I meet with Jenelyn and others during a monsoon surge over Singapore: incessant rain has caused flash floods, displacing entire communities in neighbouring Johor, Malaysia. The ladies shrug at the extreme weather, unconcerned: meteorological whims must be endured, against the inflexibility of one day per week. ‘Sometimes we bring a plastic sheet to hide under! Then we eat like this, under the rain’ – Jenelyn hovers her arms above her head in a Franken-pose, laughing.

One might assume that rest naturally infers stillness, but Evelyn explains that the health of the community is dependent on activity. ‘Every meeting, we will set an agenda. For example, someone who learns hand embroidery says that they want to teach it to everyone – OK! We all learn together! Or we will talk about our goals for ourselves, what we want to improve … everyone prepares to discuss.’ In groups, over meals, the ladies hold one another accountable on the progress of personal hopes and dreams. ‘The food is not the main focus,’ Evelyn points out, ‘but it is the glue that binds our meeting.’

All ladies agree unequivocally that they would appreciate clear communication from the Singaporean government about which spaces are available for them to gather, without authorities being called: better still, they would like spaces to be opened up just one day per week for them to commune. But these crucial weekly outdoor gatherings grant them access to a sense of dwelling, through deep community with one another.

Over the course of two months, I sit with the ladies every Sunday, through rain and shine. We make friendship bracelets, celebrate their graduations from courses on financial literacy and self-betterment, share food and drink while sitting on hems of gingham, canvas, tarpaulin. Through their generosity, I experience flavours, textures and lives that are intimately connected to my own. As home cooks, we find common ground swapping recipes, the similarities revealing how our cuisines and our lives are cousins, yoked by interconnected roots.

Ayu’s favourite picnic has prevailed in her memory for ten years, since the day it was held on Pulau Ubin – an offshore island to the northeast of Singapore, accessible by ferry. The outing was special, being the rare coincidence of everyone’s day off (back then, some of Ayu’s friends were still working with a monthly rest day, instead of the current weekly convention). The ladies finally met one another in the peace of a sunny beach, away from the mainland, a solid distance from the grind of live-in labour. They carried dishes that they’d painstakingly prepared with one another in mind, such as kering tempe; and eggs in sambal. ‘We each brought something [representative of our home] … from East Java, West Java … All the different home foods’.

Ayu enthusiastically recalls each dish eaten together, every one an emissary for their villages, a jigsaw of home away from home. She smiles at the recollection, eyes flickering shut. ‘I remember each one till this day.’

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Editor’s Note: ‘Ladies’ is the suggested term set by the MDW community, for locals to refer to them beyond their status as ‘migrant workers’ or ‘helpers’. This word is used in a different way than it is in Britain.

Credits

Gan Chin Lin is a Singaporean writer and recipe developer. She writes about domestic labour, alternative baking and Singaporean heritage foods through a regenerative lens. Her work focuses on the organic, ongoing conversation between heritage, nature, and navigating food futures. You can find her on Instagram at @tumblinbumblincrumblincookie.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.

Good morning and welcome to the Vittles Christmas Gift Guide 2025! Before you go on to read, you could always do right by the ones you love and get them a gift subscription that will provide access to the entire Vittles back catalogue. It is possible to time it so it arrives exactly on Christmas Day.

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Vittles Magazine and Prints!

For the first time ever, you can also gift Vittles in a physical, printed format. What says Christmas more than a beautifully illustrated magazine comprising 150+ pages about the strange, perplexing and terrible aspects of food? If you pre-order a copy before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the announcement here for details).

For the festive season, we’ve also added new prints by Sing Yun Lee and Wendy Huynh to our print shop. Head to Vittles Prints to see the selection, which also includes all our Issue 1 prints, restaurant photos from Michaël Protin, and the beautiful map of Soho by Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby.

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Contributors

Jonathan Nunn – JN; Rebecca May Johnson – RMJ; Dan Biddulph - DB; Adam Coghlan – AC; Sing Yun Lee – SYL; Tania Sanchez – TS; Niloufar Haidari – NH; Kelly Pochyba – KP; Emefa Ansah – EA; Karl McDonald – KM; Joel Golby – JG; Simran Hans – SH; Lily Kelting – LK; Feroz Gajia – FG; Kenneth Lam – KL; Rukmini Iyer – RI; Ella Bucknall – EB; Beatrice Barr – BB; Riana Austin – RA; Odhran O’Donoghue – OOD

This year we asked contributors to Issue 2, along with our mentees, to suggest entries for the gift guide. Naturally, we received a lot of suggestions based around the subject of Bad Food, which we start with:

Bad or Beautiful

Fried Egg Beret
Sometimes when I’m out wandering the urban tundra that is the London Borough of Waltham Forest in the biting frosts of pre-Christmas November, I find myself musing over my lifelong reverence for the glorious fried egg. Then, I wonder whether there is any synergy that the world has failed to spot: enter the Fried Egg Beret. DB

Chinese Pee Pee Doll
A small, hollow ceramic figurine, often called a tea pet, that squirts water when hot water or tea is poured on its head. It is typically made of unglazed clay, and is used to indicate water temperature for brewing tea, with some believing it could have been an early thermometer. A weird and playful object to whack out during otherwise formal tea ceremonies. I like to squirt guests with the pee doll and get them to open their mouths. Available online, in Chinese supermarkets and in Chinatown. KL

Egg Mayonnaise T-Shirt
In spite of the intense and passionate love I harbour for Café Deco, mayonnaise is a bad food in my book due to my phobia of cold, wobbly sauces. So, I have never tried their iconic egg mayonnaise, but wearing Luke Edward Hall’s elegant and charming rendition of it on a t-shirt or tote bag would be the best way for a condiment coward such as me to consume it. SYL

Banana-Shaped Banana Hand Cream
This banana-shaped banana hand cream is a crowd-pleasing joy. Dinky enough to fit in your handbag, it smells like banana bread and is inherently silly. RA

Lavender Syrup
Anyone who knows me personally has to deal with me going on about the time I lived in LA and all the iced lavender honey lattes I drank there. These are still nearly impossible to find in London, but I have been able to (almost) recreate the experience with this delicious natural syrup from a farm in Wales. I also like to add it to a cup of milky earl grey for a twist on a London fog or use it in sparkling mocktails. If I’m feeling particularly ridiculous – which is what Christmas is all about, after all – I will add a little drop to some champagne. NH

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Recently we announced Issue 2 of our print magazine on the theme of Bad Food which is selling quickly. The issue features more than 150 pages of all-new features, interviews, essays and restaurant content. You can read more about the contributors and content here. If you pre-order the magazine before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid subscribers. Pre-order now!

Today we have an essay by Georgina Voss about the proliferation of AI images of food and what this means for how food is documented – and our appetites.

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The first image was in the window of a Subway on Bethnal Green Road: a high-res photo of two bread rolls overstuffed with meat and cheese, raisins studded through the dough, one roll cheerfully attempting to mount the other. The accompanying text identified the buns as ‘HOT CROSS CHEESY BACON BUN TOASTIES’. This was back in April. I was running late to meet friends, but the poster stopped me in my tracks. It had the energy of AI slop, but was in the actual window of an actual fast-food outlet. I took a photo. A week later, a second image presented itself in a McDonald’s in Southwark: a poster depicting a bright ocean of swirling cream, dotted with glossy green and white cuboids. The text described the dish as a ‘Minecraft McFlurry’. I took another photo and went on my way.

AI-generated images have their tells – strange light sources, repeating textures, disjointed gravities, an abiding aesthetic of the basic – but I found it impossible to determine if the pictures on these posters had been created with cameras or if they were computationally synthesised. The flat lighting and neat curves of the McFlurry had the weightless feel of something churned out by an AI engine; the raisins in the toastie could easily have been summoned with a text prompt. The longer I looked at the photos, the less sure I was about what I was looking at.

This uncertainty bothered me: I’d been hunting for AI-generated photos (so-called ‘synthetic images’) of food in the wild for several weeks. The internet is awash with fake snacks – pizza-flavoured KitKats; KitKat-topped pizzas – and I was curious about whether any of the swarms of digital images filling my phone existed away from a screen. AI-generated images are a patch of damp on the wall: annoying, spreading, and causing structural damage to the infrastructures through which they move. As ‘slop’, they are well-named, implying some gross weirdness, a viscous pool of stinking liquid seeping through social media. But I hadn’t banked on the stone-cold weirdness of seeing an image which had the hallmarks of synthetic generation selling something empirically real.

There are darker fears about AI images. If, and when, the technology becomes capable of creating truly photorealistic pictures, it will precipitate an epistemic breakdown of reality; unable to determine what is real and what is not, we will fail to know the world for what it is. To which a food photographer might say: Hold my McFlurry. While photography is commonly seen as a faithful depiction of the real, it has always been a nod and a wink to the relationship between representation and reality, and food photography delivers this uncertainty backwards and in high heels. This is a craft that transforms blobs of dense mineral oil into droplets of water on the surface of fruit, an industry in which photographers and stylists work their stagecraft to get the most captivating performance from a salad that desperately wants to wilt under the hot lights.

So, what happens if the food photographer and their arts are switched out for the chemical rush of the synthetic image? If it’s all illusion, then how does this shape how we look at food?

Consider two photos of eggs. The first is shot in 1910 by Wladimir Schohin, who used fragile autochrome techniques to create a delicately coloured photo of a soft-boiled egg, its yolk thickened into a deep amber. The second was created in 1940 by Nickolas Muray, using the three-colour carbro process to capture eggs cooked in peppers, the image brightly saturated, the yolks a lurid yellow. Is either of these photos more realistic than the other? What does an egg even look like, anyhow? Media scholar Rob Horning argues that things which look ‘real’ in photography are so because they meet our collective, cultural understanding of the way we expect those things to appear. An egg, therefore, looks like what everyone thinks it looks like.

From 1935, Nickolas Muray worked for McCall’s, the widely read American lifestyle magazine. His editorial photos show bountiful vibrant spreads – plump burgers topped with red circles of sauce next to pink radishes hasselbacked into stripy bumblebees. McCall’s’ large readership put the ‘mass’ into mass understanding of what food looked like in America. Muray’s images helped to shape a new visual language – bright, plentiful, dramatic, something which the viewer might want to lick.

Contemporary AI image technologies rely on these cultural forces that create collective belief. Their first principle is greed: a mass extraction, scraping and stealing of hundreds upon thousands of existing pictures. Text is attached to each image, describing what it shows (‘Egg’). Everything is poured into a computational Juicero, then squished. A machine learning model (MLM) then scans the description and numbers to feel out the relationships between the two – this is what an egg looks like? – and, eventually, statistically synthesises a new picture out of the data gloop using only a text prompt. But the synthetic image it produces can feel off, strange, like sand in the mouth. When I plug the prompt ‘Man eating cheeseburger’ into the DeepAI engine, it generates something unsettling. The burger exists in its own gravitational field and, though the cheese is molten and the man tightly grips the bun, the grease does not transfer to his fingers.

Yet even when strange, the cheeseburger is still knowable. When instructed to generate pictures of foodstuffs not widely represented in mainstream Western visual culture, however, the machine struggles: DeepAI translates ‘mapo tofu’ into thin tomato broth with carrot chunks, and ‘injera’ as dry cat food. Artists have addressed these biases; the collective Dimension Plus, for example, are working to enhance AI’s sensitivities about, and accuracy in representing, Taiwanese culture by feeding MLMs a curated mass of data about ti-hoeh-koé (blood cake). But beyond individual interventions, the main image generators continue to guzzle bricks of dominant culture and regurgitate them through their own didactic logics.

I’d initially assumed that if synthetic images of food existed off-screen, I would find them in places which sold MLM-knowable food: small cafes or burger joints with limited turnover, where it might be cheaper and easier to write a prompt than pay a photographer. But their presence continued to elude me. I started to feel foolish about my failed investigations: why would a cafe generate new AI pictures when a burger remains a burger? As summer approached, local eateries in South-East London stuck with their existing portfolio of stock images, sun-bleached photocopies and experimental Photoshop. These pictures weren’t always realistic – some appeared to have come out of a printer running low on cyan ink. But then again, as a customer, realism is not what I look for in photos of food. If I walked into a Subway and bought a Hot Cross Toastie, I know that my order would arrive smaller, flatter and sloppier than what’s on the poster, and still I would eat it.

The question was: when it came to really selling food, were AI images falling short?

The prime directive of commercial food photography is to make its subject appear tasty: as food photographer Patricia Niven tells me, ‘The magic is when it all comes together and you look at [the picture] and say, “Oh, that’s delicious!”’. Food marketer Melissa Cogo-Read is more direct about the aim of food photography: ‘It’s meant to make you feel really fucking hungry.’ There are some obvious visual tropes for producing a literal gut reaction – soft bread torn apart; obscenely juicy peaches. Working a shoot involves a collective of photographers, stylists, chefs and art directors who marshal their skills, coaxing food into the limelight.

Yet commercial food photography doesn’t necessarily allow for serendipity. In the UK, food advertising is tightly regulated, meaning that a shoot is defined as much by legal standards as creative vision – buns measured and meat weighed, the photography team working to a strict brief defined by an industry whose cultural power defines what food looks like and what looks like food.

On set, the creative team must commune directly with the food, bringing their understanding of both the appearance of a dish and how it behaves. Photographers and stylists know that, in reality, delicious food can look rough. Say you want to do a photoshoot for roast chicken. Chicken loses water as it roasts, becoming smaller, its skin shrivelling. To bring the feeling of hunger back and help maintain plumpness, stylists have been known to serve up a chicken half-cooked or even raw, its pink skin buffed to a glow with Marmite, soy sauce or (under lax regulatory standards) shoe polish.

Some foods are easier to manipulate than others. Easy enough to transform mashed potato into ice cream for camera, but far more difficult to beautifully photograph a simple egg, whose delicate, uneven shell makes it difficult to capture. Cooked, a runny yolk extends the challenge. ‘The food lives,’ art director Geneviève Larocque tells me; to shoot it ‘you have to be really fast but at the same time really slow. You’re waiting for the food – if you cut an egg and the yolk comes out, you have to shoot right away.’

If photographers are replaced by an MLM which has been instructed in the ways of the flesh, things go sideways. Plug in a prompt for ‘Delicious roast chicken’, and the system will retch up a raw, round bird, glistening in a pool of fake tan and digital schmaltz. AI hype-mongers treat the technology that produces this culinary kayfabe as a marvellous gain – a sack of spangles that, even if a little shaky, should be marvelled at (while simultaneously steering our eye away from that which the technology aims to replace).

As I looked at artificial pictures of roast chickens, I thought about David Cronenberg’s film The Fly – using physical special effects instead of CGI, it tells the story of scientist Seth, who, after a failed teleportation experiment, transforms horribly into an insect. Early in the film, Seth cooks a teleported steak for his lover, Victoria. After she spits it out, describing the flavour as ‘synthetic’, Seth realises:

The computer is giving us its interpretation of a steak. It’s translating it for us. It’s rethinking rather than reproducing it. And something’s getting lost in translation – the flesh … I haven’t taught the computer to be made crazy by the flesh, the poetry of the steak.

The MLMs which run through the computers that are here, now, don’t give a shit about the poetry of the steak, nor the work and skills that construct deliciousness: not the lighting experiments conducted by Cogo-Read’s team to encourage a tray of sugar-dusted croissants to bloom, nor the time food photographer Uyen Luu had to polish, by hand, five kilos of coffee beans after the client spotted one that was dull. Though AI image influencers boast of incantations of nostalgia warmth, editorial shadows and ultra-crisp texture to construct perfect pictures, the resulting images are flattened objects summoned from databases crammed with stolen photos. To me, the flavourless nature of synthetic images comes from the fact that, in order to make them anywhere near believable, one must discard that combination of skills and serendipity, telling the system loudly and slowly, ‘EGG. BROWN SHELL. SOFT YOLK. NOSTALGIC.’

Yet it is also true that in corporate photoshoots creativity is already subsumed, as artistic intent is whittled down and flattened by committee. The process that creates pictures in these settings is structurally closer to the way that AI images are generated. With this in mind, my confusion about the origins of the McFlurry and Hot Cross Toasty made more sense. None of the photographers I spoke to for this piece had used AI in client work, but everyone was aware of its lurking presence, and of the damage it could cause when clients begin to switch out art workers for proprietary software.

In her essay ‘The Photo Does Not Exist’, media scholar Avery Slater describes how a photograph of a shiny surface might contain a tiny reflection of the photographer. But a similar image made with generative AI also shows a reflection. ‘The generator has learned there will be something vague localised at the center of the shiny lenses,’ Slater writes, ‘but [in an AI image] that photographer is not opposite the subject. There is no subject: no one took its picture.’ When it comes to AI images, the system patches together an approximation of all those who came before, their craft and labour mulched down into a cold library of dead-eyed prompts, while offstage some poor sod with the job title ‘hunger engineer’ must now remind the machine that melted cheese causes stains.

Summer arrived and, finally, unhappily, AI images of food began to bloom in the wild, their tells lurid and unmistakeable. I regretted ever wishing for their presence. In a cafe in Mile End, a taped-up poster of biryani in which star anise morphs into a chicken leg. In a Brockley fast-food joint, a parade of glowing burgers, the jalapeño slices on the ‘Super Charger’ too evenly spaced on cheese triangles, making them look like an Elizabethan ruff. In neither venue did the workers know where the pictures had come from. ‘Printed off the internet?’ one member of staff offered cautiously.

Every image forces a reading, but reading images is slippery. Luu tells me how menus in Asia often have cut-out photos laminated onto them to showcase the dish. Luu’s mum and her friends ignore the aesthetic of the pictures – lighting, staging – and instead view them through their own experience as people who have prepared and eaten similar dishes. ‘It’s underdone’, they say when they look at the photographs on the menu. ‘It’s got too much pepper.’ AI photos sever this relationship. They say ‘Fuck you’ to what the body knows, what it may have learned over time. ‘You want to imagine what this tastes like? Fuck you’, says AI.

In reality, there is no perfect photo of food. The thread that links professional food photographers’ craft and the fantastically deranged photos of roast dinners outside my local caff – where different stock images of plates, condiments and sliced beef are all frankensteined together onto laminate – is that the creators of each are somewhat free of a system which places technical limits how an image can be made. Maybe, off-screen, AI food pictures can be humbled when they are forced to exist within the physical infrastructure of hospitality: faded paper, sauce splashes, even sitting alongside actual photos of actual food. Synthetic images are dangerous when they become the stock image, setting the terms for what a good photo of food looks like – an immaculate image of a hovering burger, forever fixed in aspic.

Down in Greenwich, a Nepalese food stall has a picture of a family gathered around a table of momos, the dumplings impossibly neatly stacked, everyone smiling with the shark grin of the machine. ‘My manager made it,’ the server tells me with a slight eye-roll. What do customers think? ‘The children love it,’ he says, ‘they come and point: “Ay ay ay! ChatGPT ChatGPT!”’

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Credits

Georgina Voss is a writer and artist, whose work explores the presence and politics of large-scale technology and heavy industry. She is author of Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World (Verso). Her work has been exhibited and performed at institutions including transmediale, STUK, TAC Eindhoven, Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, and the Design Museum. Georgina was co-founder and director of the creative studios Strange Telemetry and Supra System Studios. She lives in London with a handsome cat.

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.

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In the summer of 1954, a beleaguered editor at the American publisher Harper & Brothers wearily drafted a telegram to the attorney general in Washington. He had been waiting months for Alice B. Toklas – the elderly widow of the writer and art collector Gertrude Stein – to send in the final pages of her well-overdue cookbook. Now, among the recipes that had finally arrived, was one that threatened to land the publisher in trouble. Its title was ‘Haschich Fudge’, and its ingredients included fruit, nuts, spices and Cannabis sativa. ‘This is the food of Paradise,’ proclaimed the accompanying text. ‘Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extension of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected.’ The attorney general, amused, replied that it was illegal to buy, sell, grow or indeed cook with marijuana leaves – but not to write about them. Erring on the safe side, the editor quietly cut the recipe from the manuscript. But his British counterpart let it through. When newspapers started to comment, delightedly, on the incongruous inclusion (some claiming it must offer a clue to Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde writing style), Toklas insisted she was not to blame: the recipe had been supplied to her by an artist friend, Brion Gysin, and she had no idea of the Latin name for marijuana. Friends told her no one would believe her innocence: she had pulled ‘the best publicity stunt of the year’. Her cookbook quickly became a bestseller, and the notoriety of her ‘hash brownies’ made Toklas an unlikely icon of 1960s counterculture (see the 1968 film I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, in which Peter Sellers stars as a lawyer who becomes a hippie after trying her recipe).

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book remains a touchstone for personal, genre-bending food writing, built around a ‘mingling of recipe and reminiscence’, in Toklas’s words. Today, her name adorns celebrated restaurants, from Toklas in London to Alice B. in Palm Springs, and her work has been praised by cooks including James Beard, Alice Waters and M.F.K. Fisher (who described the cookbook as a ‘minor masterpiece’). But Toklas always insisted she was baffled by the book’s success, playing down the achievement with characteristic self-deprecation: ‘As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing.’

Yet The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is, in many ways, an audacious literary experiment and an innovative form of autobiography. Toklas shot to international fame in 1933 after the publication of the bestselling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein adopted her partner’s voice to tell, from a cunning distance, the story of her own life – as a tastemaker who discovered Picasso and Matisse; the host of a starry salon who taught Hemingway and Fitzgerald how to write; and above all as a writer of genius, cruelly neglected by her contemporaries but destined for future recognition, once tastes had caught up. The real Toklas shunned the limelight as determinedly as Stein craved it. Since arriving in Paris from California in 1907, she had devoted herself to Stein – typing up her handwritten texts, screening visitors to the apartment, managing the household budgets, even setting up her own publishing house to print Stein’s books when no commercial publisher would touch them. At their regular open houses, she tended to remain silent while Stein confidently held court. After Stein’s death in 1946, friends encouraged Toklas to write her own memoir at last – but Toklas always refused. To position herself as the protagonist in her own life story felt, to her, impossible. But what she could write, Toklas finally conceded, was a cookbook ‘full of memories’, based on her extensive collection of recipes gathered from over forty years in France.

The cookbook is a fascinating recasting of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Though the books’ titles – ironically – bear only Toklas’s name, both reveal two lives, two subjects, each impossible to conceive of without the other. Across thirteen themed chapters (‘Dishes for Artists’, ‘Treasures’, ‘“Beautiful Soup”’), Toklas presents snapshots of her life with Stein through the stories of meals they shared – spreads devised at home, signature recipes gathered from friends and food cooked for them on their travels – interspersed with idiosyncratic words of wisdom: ‘What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander but is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen’; ‘To cook as the French do one must respect the quality and flavour of the ingredients. Exaggeration is not admissible.’ Brisk recipes are prefaced by glittering anecdotes: a fish chargrilled outside, on an open fire, while bulls and flamingos roamed; hot chocolate, ladled from copper cauldrons by Red Cross nuns, during a stint driving ambulances around France as volunteers in the First World War; exploring the French countryside and perusing Michelin Guides in pursuit of the ‘gastronomic bulls-eye’ of a really good meal; a seven-month tour of America in 1934, eating steaks, soft-shell crab and ‘ineffable ice creams’ while Stein delivered lectures to packed-out houses.

If a traditional autobiography narrates the adventures of a singular self, here life is pointedly presented as a collaborative enterprise: Toklas reveals herself indirectly through the gradual unfolding of preferences discovered, friends made, senses awakened. The voice that emerges through the cookbook is wry, curious and quietly authoritative, as she moves subtly between firm instructions and sensual memories. Toklas’s recipes tend to come from other people: chefs, friends, her and Stein’s own household employees, old cookbooks. Yet the pages are peppered with intriguing personal recommendations, as though she’s letting the reader into a secret or subtly guiding them towards her own tastes: her love of garlic and basil, her approval of the French ‘national prejudice’ for butter, an occasional clipped declaration that a certain dish is ‘exquisite’. If she was known to the world primarily through Stein’s witty approximation of her voice, the cookbook reintroduces Toklas as herself.

The idea of Toklas writing a cookbook had been a long-standing fantasy between her and Stein. A shared love of food was central to their relationship from the start, and the cookbook is, in many ways, a love letter to Stein, a subtle celebration of their queer domestic routines. Toklas describes how she first became indispensable to the household by making American dishes for Stein, who was homesick, in the tiny kitchen at 27 rue de Fleurus: cornbread, apple pie, fricasseed chicken, Thanksgiving turkey. Emboldened by some successes, she grew ‘experimental and adventurous’ and started to cater dinner parties for the artist friends whose paintings adorned Stein’s walls. One memorable dish was a poached bass for Picasso, decorated with mayonnaise and tomato paste, hard-boiled eggs, shaved truffles and a smattering of green herbs (the artist – whose dietary requirements often tested Toklas’s ingenuity – commented that the colours were more suitable to Matisse). As Toklas and Stein’s relationship developed, the pleasures of eating – often linked with sex – began to suffuse Stein’s writing, a coded homage to Toklas’s growing centrality to her life and work. During a period in Spain in 1912, Stein wrote one of her greatest texts, Tender Buttons, a raucous celebration of language, rendering objects in her immediate surroundings strange – almost Cubist – in an attempt to capture their essence without straightforward description. One section, entitled ‘Food’, presents an array of ingredients for aesthetic dissection. ‘Boom in boom in, butter,’ writes Stein; ‘Celery tastes tastes where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.’ Toklas, meanwhile, was busy researching varieties of gazpacho. Her cookbook presents recipes from Malaga, Seville, Cordoba and Segovia, offered like edible counterparts to Stein’s literary concoction, combining their complementary domestic arts into one shared and loving practice.

Some elements of Toklas’s cookbook are more disquieting. One chapter, titled ‘Murder in the Kitchen’, pays homage to Stein’s well-documented love of detective novels: in it, Toklas smothers pigeons and stabs carp, the connoisseur suddenly transformed into a bloodthirsty assassin who pauses only for a brief cigarette before stuffing her victim with chestnuts. Elsewhere, Toklas places these ‘sacrifices of the innocents’ in the context of a discussion of food in wartime, a peril which looms over the whole of the cookbook. It was during the occupation of France between 1940 and 1944, she explains, that she became fascinated by reading cookbooks, dreaming of ‘food there was no possibility of realising’ as a way to block out the ‘black cloud’ of persecution around them. It’s the closest Toklas comes to acknowledging her and Stein’s vulnerability as Jewish lesbians in occupied France, their safety contingent on the goodwill of neighbours and, possibly, on Stein’s long-standing friendship with a high-ranking Vichy official (whose protection – if offered – would nonetheless not have sufficed once the whole country was under Nazi control). Toklas is a deliberately elusive narrator: the spectres of antisemitism and homophobia are evoked through deceptively simple anecdotes about devising menus in restricted markets and servants departing, appalled by the household’s ‘French ways’.

Though Toklas selects her produce with an exacting eye and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of techniques, seasonings and flavours, relatively few of the meals in the book were cooked by her own hand. One chapter is devoted to recipes from a succession of domestic employees hired (with varying levels of success) at the rue de Fleurus, who carried out the bulk of labour in the kitchen. Stein and Toklas find their servants by turns intriguing and infuriating: the most rounded character in the book is Trac, the would-be restaurateur from ‘French Indo-China’ whom Toklas taught to make desserts. She portrays their mutual delight in one another as a simple fact; Monique Truong’s brilliant novel The Book of Salt, narrated by a Vietnamese cook working at the rue de Fleurus, offers a deeper analysis of the impact of colonialism for immigrant workers in mid-century Paris, and casts a sardonic eye over Stein and Toklas’s racialised assumptions.

The household was entirely organised around Stein’s art. Toklas moved daily between her position as manager to the servants who prepared most of the meals (she retained control over the menus, and the selection of produce at the market) and her roles as dutiful secretary, cheerleader and lover to the genius at work. All these roles tended to the invisible, ephemeral: Toklas always insisted her achievement lay in creating the conditions under which Stein could produce the writing both women fervently believed would change the course of literary history. Yet all Stein’s writing – just like Toklas’s cookbook – is testament to their domestic collaboration, a complex, intimate bustle built on an absolute and shared commitment to each other, to the life they made together and to the significance of that work. Toklas devoted her life to feeding and nourishing her partner – both figuratively, by encouraging Stein at her lowest ebbs, and literally, through her meals. Food – when she did cook – was a realm in which Toklas could both serve and create, a domestic art which allowed her to retain the subordinate position she seems to have preferred, yet which also enabled her to forge her own creative path. Toklas continually reminds her readers that the cookbook should not be considered a work of literature – yet, at the same time, she makes a firm case for cooking’s status as a mode of self-expression on a par with painting or writing. The cookbook is full of shapes and colours – of food designed for and by artists – and presented with an eye to high drama: food, here, is art, is history, is language, replete with hidden meanings and subtle codes.

All of this means that attempting to actually cook from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book can be a risky endeavour. One ‘strange and exquisite’ recipe, acquired by bribing the cook of a prominent surgeon, calls for a week spent injecting a leg of mutton with a marinade of orange juice and cognac through a surgical syringe, while another for sloe gin requires seven years’ infusion. Some are plain bizarre, like the ‘aspic salad’ made by suspending vegetables in a chilled solution of gelatine and Heinz tomato soup, or the whole cold cauliflower with giant prawns tucked between its florets. In June, at a special dinner at Toklas restaurant to mark the publication of a new biography of Stein I had written, Alex Jackson created a Provencal feast from recipes in the book. His menu began with Toklas’s speciality, ‘mushroom sandwiches’, alongside Oysters Rockefeller (served on a bed of sand, as it was in a New Orleans restaurant where Toklas discovered the dish) and ‘Eggplant a la Provençale’: a plump, fried aubergine slice topped, exactly per Toklas’s instructions, with a dab of tomato sauce, the thinnest slice of lemon, and a single black olive wrapped in an anchovy. Then there was a seabass slathered in green sauce (cress, chervil and tarragon) and surrounded by splodges of pink purée (potato, cream and beetroot), followed by chicken served with mashed potatoes and fresh peas. The grand finale was Mâcon cake, a three-tiered buttercream extravaganza, layers infused with kirsch, mocha and pistachio. The original cake was the house speciality of a small hotel in the southeast of France, which Stein and Toklas happened to pass on their way to visit Picasso on the Côte d’Azur. To eat it now is, for a moment, to be transported to a rural French inn in the 1920s, and to be cast into the company of a visionary couple to whom food was art.

Credits

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting (2020) and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (2025).

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.

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At Vittles, we often think about how to write responsibly about small, immigrant-run restaurants in London – not solely as an asset to their communities, or as a treat for consumers, but as a universal benefit to the city. This is why we’ve taken a strong interest in the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, which has used these types of restaurants to communicate the candidate’s policies for the city and celebrate what is joyful about living there.

As New Yorkers go to the polls, with Mamdani a strong favourite to win, we think it is worth analysing how the campaign’s unusual focus on small restaurants has worked, its potential pitfalls and what leftist candidates in other cities like London can learn from it. In today’s newsletter, a rare dispatch from America, Apoorva Tadepalli has talked to halal vendors, community organisers, historians and restaurant owners to find out more about their support for Mamdani’s campaign and how these restaurants may have played a crucial part in determining the next mayor of New York.

In June 2025, Gyro King, a popular halal chain across Brooklyn and Manhattan, organised a picnic to celebrate Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic primary for the mayoral race. Zakarya Khan, the chain’s owner, worked with Mamdani to serve 500 free meals of halal chicken and rice in Prospect Park. He spent around $2000 on those meals, but that didn’t bother him. ‘The message was to tell the public that people are happy,’ he told me over the phone recently. ‘That small businesses are happy, and immigrants, minorities [in the city] are happy … [about] seeing someone who is one of us, win.’ Khan has owned Gyro King for twenty-five years and has lived in New York City for nearly thirty. He first met Mamdani in March 2020, when the candidate joined his food pantry to help hand out meals. ‘Food has always been a part of all activism and political activity. And it is central to all of [Zohran’s] events’, he said.

As publications like the New York Times and the New Republic have noted, restaurants and food carts have been the site of much of Mamdani’s campaigning over the course of the year. He is often eating in videos – whether it’s lamb over rice while filming halal cart vendors, a burrito on the subway after fasting for fourteen hours, or a plate of biryani with his hands during an interview (this last one has provoked outlandish, racist backlash across social media, with users on X saying that ‘Civilised people in America don’t eat like this’ and ‘My dogs are cleaner and more civilised’). In September, he discussed policy with Bernie Sanders over Indian food in a tiny, modest Midtown restaurant, while, more recently, New Yorker editor David Remnick asked Mamdani to recommend his go-to restaurants (‘lamb adana laffa at Zyara’). In return, these establishments have embraced Mamdani; Ayat, a Palestinian restaurant based in Bushwick, has been offering free meals to canvassers, while Little Flower cafe in Astoria worked with Mamdani to host the thousands of supporters who participated in his viral scavenger hunt across the city in August.

Food has often been used in political campaigning to help candidates appear more authentic, but this focus on small, immigrant-run restaurants during the Mamdani campaign is unprecedented within American politics. Before the 2020 presidential election in the US, Eater observed that ‘the optics of what politicians eat, and how they eat it, have never been more carefully considered.’ For Mamdani, however, eating – and living – in a joyful and collective way is more than a political posture; it is inextricable from the social and political values of cohabitating in New York (which is all the more significant, given that his primary opponents are well known for their hatred of the city). His campaign shifts the focus away from relatability and towards how policy can support the small businesses that keep those values alive.

In January, Mamdani released his popular ‘halalflation’ video, highlighting the difficulties street food cart vendors face as they try to make a profit when their permits are withheld due to city bureaucracy. Halal has a specific meaning within Islam, but in New York it’s also often used as a shorthand for quick, accessible and affordable meals. In the video, Mamdani speaks to halal cart vendors near City Hall, the seat of the city’s legislative and administrative functions. The video focuses on how these vendors are paying exorbitant rates to sell their food – between $17,000 and $22,000 to a permit owner (‘a random guy,’ one of them clarifies) – for a licence that could be bought from the city for around $400. Because of this debt, they say, they have had to raise their prices from $8 to $10 for a plate of lamb or chicken over rice.

With ‘halalflation,’ Mamdani ‘invented his own term to convey his love for these places,’ Asad Dandia, a public historian of Muslim New York told me, ‘but with [the video] food in itself becomes an anchor for a wider conversation about affordability, equity and accessibility.’ In the video, Mamdani highlights four bills sitting with the City Council that could help more vendors get their permits directly and on quicker timelines from the government, promising that ‘if I was mayor, I’d be working with City Hall from day one to make halal eight bucks again.’

Mamdani often points out how governance affects small businesses and food establishments: in a video titled ‘Small Business, Big Priority’ which was released earlier this year, he promised to appoint a ‘Mom and Pop Czar’ to protect delis, bodegas and other small businesses by lightening regulations, fast-tracking applications, and cutting fines by 50 per cent. A few days ago, he won an endorsement from the United Bodegas of America, in which he holds up an egg, cheese and jalapeño roll (the ‘Zohran special’).

Khan believes that if Mamdani was in office, he would hire professionals that would support small businesses. Currently, business owners like him routinely meet with the Department of Small Business Services, the city bureau that is supposed to help new businesses get off the ground and help existing ones get loans and licences. But ‘we don’t have a proper channel to access the small business services,’ Khan says, ‘even though the department has a budget of millions of dollars every year.’ To combat this, Mamdani has proposed cutting small business fees, speeding up the licencing process, and helping entrepreneurs navigate the bureaucracy that prevents many immigrants from setting up shop.

It is perhaps unusual for a leftist candidate in the Western world to have such a strong focus on small businesses – ‘business-first’ is usually the domain of Republicans. Yet in his campaign, Mamdani has been careful to speak for the workers as well as the business owners, and appreciates that these two roles often overlap. Jagpreet Singh, the political director of DRUM Beats – a working-class coalition of South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans, and also one of the first organisations to endorse Mamdani for mayor – told me that many DRUM Beats members ‘work in these restaurants [that Zohran visits]’, ‘deal[ing] with harassment and wage underpayment. These are places of celebration and joy. But they are also places that end up exploiting our communities – and I think Zohran understands the complexity of that.’

Singh also points out that Mamdani has a nuanced appreciation of entrepreneurship that is centred equally on the social and economic aspects of business. Many young white socialists in New York are suspicious of enterprise and capital on an ideological level, but Mamdani’s socialism stems ‘not from ideology’ as Singh says, but from an appreciation of lived experience ‘within our communities’. The evening of our interview, Singh invited me to Jackson Heights, one of the most culturally and economically diverse neighbourhoods in the world, where Mamdani handed out Diwali sweets to everyone.

Whether in New York or London, food establishments are crucial to big-city life for so many reasons. They serve as either a break from, or a bolster for routine, forcing us to interact with other people at a time when avoiding human contact has become normalised (consider the advertisements for the delivery app Seamless that were once ubiquitous on the New York subway, boasting the chance to eat meals with zero human contact). As streets in global capitals are homogenised by billionaire-owned chains and private equity, Mamdani highlights that small-food businesses add an unquantifiable joy to the experience of living in a dense, fast-paced city. These are the places which offer experiences that momentarily elevate life in New York from survival to enjoyment.

Even though he would be the first Muslim mayor of New York, and often refers back to his Ugandan, Indian and South Asian heritage, Mamdani isn’t running on something as empty as ‘diversity’. Unlike Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign in 2024, his campaign ties the multiculturalism of New York’s immigrant communities to the universally appealing goal of affordability. ‘I will be a mayor who’s ready to speak at any time to lower the cost of living … that’s the partnership I want to build [with] Washington’, Mamdani said in a recent interview. As New York gentrifies, it becomes harder to eat well and even harder to keep the city fed. In the end, how affordable a city is, determines how it eats.

At Kabab King, a halal restaurant in Jackson Heights, you will often spot taxi drivers who are finishing up late-night shifts. Sometimes they come from as far as Philadelphia or New Jersey to drink tea and chat about their passengers. From 1997 until 2019 , Kabab King was open twenty-four hours a day – and on any given day, you can hear several languages being spoken, and see various social and political gatherings or family outings. On Sundays, it’s home to the Jackson Heights Community Church, which holds its service on the top floor of the restaurant. ‘It’s community spaces like these where the people who keep the city running convene,’ Dandia says. ‘This is where they find rest between work and home.’

Mamdani has been eating at Kabab King since he was in high school, and later he rented out the top floor of the restaurant to film the music video for his song ‘Nani’, which features Madhur Jaffrey). When I went there for dinner a few weeks ago, I overheard a woman tell her friends that she had also been going there since she was a little girl. To me, this resonated with what Mamdani meant when he said to his opponent Andrew Cuomo that ‘This is a city to be loved, not a city to be feared.’

Kabab King is a successful medium-sized business that doesn’t rely on Mamdani’s policies to function. In fact, the target audience of Mamdani’s small business proposals might even be new businesses that compete with Kabab King. And yet this didn’t stop the restaurant from creating a viral TikTok that featured Mamdani shortly before the Democratic primary in June, encouraging people to vote. If more businesses come up in Jackson Heights, the manager Shahrukh Ali tells me, ‘in the end, that still benefits us’. They have worked with neighbouring restaurants in the past, holding events in each other’s spaces when needed. ‘We are in the business of catering,’ Ali added, ‘not just food. We’re here to cater to our people. I see that in Zohran Mamdani as well.’

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Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer based in Queens, New York.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today we have a long-read by Ben Jacob and Sasha Patel about how the British bakery chain Gail’s relies on young Gujarati migrants, driven to migration to drive its expansionist vision. In this piece, the writers investigate connections to India’s ‘Gujarat Model’ and the precarious working conditions that underpin the bakery’s success.

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They arrive in fours, fanning out along the counter. On the right, a well-heeled older woman leans over the pastry display, extending a finger towards the sourdough stacked against the wall. To her right, an elderly man buys a £5.60 jar of strawberry jam. It’s the weekend, but he’s wearing a full suit: white flannel trousers, blue shirt and grey blazer, topped by a white Panama hat. At the end of the counter, a Deliveroo driver waits, holding out his phone screen to show the order number, barely moving in his thick winter jacket. A man in a red apron emerges from the back of the building, with a tray of sandwiches and pastries. He hands it to someone behind the counter and disappears. The customers embody the narrow diversity of London’s monied class. The workers – the baristas, the baker and the Deliveroo rider – are almost all South Asian. Many come from a single Indian state: Gujarat.

This is a west London branch of Gail’s bakery on a Saturday morning. Two decades on from the opening of its first shop, the bakery chain has become synonymous with England’s rapidly gentrifying urban landscape – particularly in London and its commuter belt, where the majority of its 170 or so branches can be found. Its steeply priced pastries and sleek, white-and-red branding denote a modest affluence, measured by a simple barometer: who can afford a £5 loaf of bread? The food itself is not hugely different from what you find in many other cafe chains. It is the feeling, and not the flavour, of quality that appears to be the most essential Gail’s ingredient. But lurking behind the upmarket veneer of coffee and slickly artisanal cafes is a darker story of corporate expansion, deteriorating labour conditions and precarious migration. One that leads thousands of miles from the company’s heartland in the south-east of England to a private equity firm in Boston, and today, extends to Gujarat.

The origin of Gail’s and the Bain takeover

Yael Mejia was already the founder of a wholesale bakery and a high-end London deli when she met Ran Avidan in 2003. Avidan had arrived in the UK from Israel a few years earlier to work as a consultant at McKinsey, while Mejia was born in north London, but moved as a child to Tel Aviv, before returning to London in the late 1970s to work in the city’s hospitality industry. Together with one of Avidan’s colleagues, Mejia and Avidan set out to expand the bakery business and branch out into retail. What they came up with would combine 21st-century, just-in-time production with an endlessly replicable, faux-artisanal facade.

In 2005, the first Gail’s – using the Anglicised version of Mejia’s first name – opened on Hampstead High Street. Expansion was baked into the blueprint from the beginning: in Mejia’s words, the idea was for a shop ‘multipliable to infinity’. Bread and pastries were mass-produced from a warehouse in Hendon, alongside doughs that could be finished off in small bakeries in carefully selected neighbourhood locations. For the next decade and a half, the brand grew steadily, concentrating its cafes in affluent areas of north and west London, a strategy upheld by hospitality investor – and outspoken Covid sceptic – Luke Johnson, whose private equity firm bought out Mejia and Avidan in 2011.

By the end of the 2010s, Gail’s had more than 60 branches across London and the south-east, and almost £130m in annual revenue. It was enough, in 2021, to entice the Boston-based private equity firm Bain Capital to buy a majority share in Gail’s and the wholesale bakery, in a deal worth £200m. (A veteran of the private equity boom of the 1980s, Bain exemplifies the industry’s ultra-aggressive model, which uses borrowed funds to acquire companies and drastically cut costs before selling them on at a profit a few years later.) Earlier this month, Bain was reported to have put in a bid to buy Costa Coffee, the second-largest coffee chain in the world, valued at £2bn. Soon after the takeover, Gail’s imposed a new system of accounting and incentives to drive growth.

Staff interviewed for this article described how, under this model, profit margins for each branch were measured by calculating the amount spent on wages, and on food ‘bought’ from the company warehouses, and deducting it from the total sales made. If store managers exceeded their monthly target, they were given bonuses. Since there was very little that those managers could do to increase sales – as in other large food chains, Gail’s’ marketing is done at the corporate level – their primary method of boosting profits was to drive down labour costs.

The result was a systematic programme of hour-cutting, in which each shop operates with as few employees as possible. Staff told us that if business was quiet, managers would ask workers to go home. (Gail’s workers are paid only for the hours they spend in the shop.) When contacted for comment, Gail’s stated that their company policy gives employees two weeks’ advance notice of their shift rota, but we found multiple employees who reported regularly receiving less work than was written into their contracts. In an email, Sarah Woolley, the head of Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) explained that Gail’s deploys a clause stipulating an average number of hours over multiple weeks, rather than a fixed amount every week. ‘One of our members was awarded a [significant] number of hours in back pay as they had not been receiving their contractual hours’, she said.

Following the Bain takeover, pay lagged behind the UK’s rising cost of living. One employee who worked at Gail’s both before and after the Bain model came into effect told us that when she first joined the bakery, her salary had been £2 above minimum wage, with a £100 bonus at Christmas. By the time that she left, her pay was barely higher than the new minimum wage, and the Christmas bonus had been reduced to a £20 voucher, redeemable at partner companies whose products cost hundreds of pounds. (In its response to this article, Gail’s stated that it has always paid above minimum wage. At the time of writing, it was advertising jobs 4p per hour above the minimum hourly rate).

Since the takeover, Gail’s has more than doubled its number of branches – and its parent company has almost tripled its annual earnings – while staff in its cafes report ever-worsening working conditions and poor management. In July, a report by Novara alleged understaffing, overwork, union-busting and the use of CCTV to intimidate workers, which Gail’s denied. Even though these allegations are beginning to reach public consciousness, what is still missing from the story is how the company drives expansion through a reliance on recently-arrived migrant workers from South Asia.

Gail’s shifting demographics, and Modi’s Gujarat Model

Zahra, who is British-Asian, joined her local branch of Gail’s just after the Bain takeover, but before the new model was implemented. Back then, all of her colleagues were white. ‘The management was mostly Italian,’ she told us when we spoke in a London park during the summer. ‘There was a Spanish guy who was an actor, an English artist, and an English girl who’d taken a gap year before university.’ Most of these people only worked part-time, unlike Zahra. In these circumstances, employees were willing to look after colleagues on shift, and stand up to management when needed. All of this changed when Bain’s new model came into effect, Zahra said. Within a year of her starting, the shop had become increasingly understaffed, with fewer people doing more work. ‘It was physically debilitating, the sheer exhaustion of the job made you think about other people less’, she recalled.

Things were compounded, she added, when management told staff they could no longer drink water in front of customers – in other words, Zahra and her colleagues had to work eight hours without a glass of water, except for a single 20-minute break. In an email, Gail’s wrote that ‘employees have access to free food and drink from the bakery and are encouraged to take breaks when needed’, but Zahra’s claim of the break’s duration was echoed by other interviewees, and also in testimony from Gail’s employees online.

By 2023, the makeup of the company’s workforce was considerably changed. Brexit and Covid had arrived together, and many European employees who had gone home during the pandemic couldn’t return. Those who remained were increasingly unwilling to deal with the working conditions, and as the older employees left, ‘they started to bring in more brown people,’ Zahra told us. In its early days, Gail’s branches were clustered around west and central London, which remains the heart of its growing empire. While those branches cater to predominantly white neighbourhoods, they are also accessible for workers from areas in north-west London that have longstanding South-Asian communities – especially, in the last few years, young Gujarati migrants. Soon, Zahra added, ‘they realised that these people who came from India were super-hardworking, complained less, didn’t mind the long, shitty hours. They needed the money, and were willing to take the shit that others were not.’

To understand this shift, we need to understand Gujarat itself. In the UK, Gujarati speakers make up around half of the British Indian community, stemming from the 20th-century migration of relatively well-off Gujaratis from the state itself, and from its large East African diaspora. Yet the current entanglement of Britain and Gujarat owes less to this older migration than it does to events at the turn of the millennium. In 2002, a year after the catastrophic Bhuj earthquake killed more than 20,000 Gujaratis, the state witnessed a brutal anti-Muslim pogrom, resulting in the deaths of around 2,000 people. Investigations in the aftermath revealed the complicity of the state government, headed by Narendra Modi, now the prime minister of India. Banned from the US and the UK and shunned by foreign capital, Modi responded to the state’s isolation with the ‘Gujarat Model’, an economic strategy aimed at reviving investment through the deregulation of private business and devastating cuts to social spending.

Back then, the Gujarat Model was hailed by investors as a success story of economic revival, but realities on the ground told a different tale. Growth came without development, exacerbating economic inequality and deepening social divides. Systemic exclusion, already prevalent in Gujarati society, was ingrained in the state’s governance, with Muslims denied access to state schemes, jobs, tenders and subsidies. Gujarat’s labour market became increasingly casualised, with few jobs for Gujarat’s ever-growing numbers of university graduates, while what critics describe as ‘crony capitalism’ cemented the economic dominance of those with political connections to the ruling BJP. In 2025, the model continues: communal violence and other threats to Muslim livelihoods have become increasingly commonplace. Just last month, the Gujarat state government passed a controversial new law enabling 12-hour shifts and expanding night work in factories, designed to attract new investors.

Two decades of the Gujarat Model have seen a surge in emigration, particularly among financially precarious middle-class Hindus, who lack the security of wealth and mobility of the British middle classes. While most host countries do not record Indian immigration statistics by state, 2023 US government data showed Gujaratis making up more than 60% of asylum claims from undocumented Indians (Gujarat represents less than 5% of India’s total population). For many of them, migration is now less a matter of aspiration than survival, dominated by students and young workers willing to accept any job abroad.

Meanwhile, the loss of more than 200,000 overseas hospitality workers since Brexit in 2020 has pushed corporate chains – from bakeries to coffee shops to delivery platforms – to recruit from South Asia. Today, Indian workers make up over 4% of hospitality staff, and South Asians overall 16%, despite representing just 1.7% of the national workforce, evidence of a strategic and growing reliance by hospitality companies on this newer labour source. (Gail’s said via email that 11% of its total employees nationwide are from South Asian backgrounds, of whom 71% are Indian.) In cities including Leicester, Birmingham and London, it is now common to find recent arrivals from Gujarat serving in fast-food franchises or coffee shops, often on temporary visas tied to their employers. Hospitality in Britain has long relied on South Asian labour, but profound shifts in the British and Indian economies during the past decade have transformed migration to the UK.

Ramesh, the son of a middle-class family in Ahmedabad, has been working at Gail’s for two years. He arrived in the UK in early 2023 on a student visa, renting a room in West London from a Gujarati landlord, which he shared with two other men, each paying £330 a month. Through a community WhatsApp group, he secured a job at a small cafe nearby. It was just after finishing a shift that he noticed the nearby Gail’s. ‘I thought: “Oh wow, this is a beautiful cafe”,’ he recalled. A few days later, he went back to the Gail’s with a friend. The two of them were chatting to each other when the barista cut into their conversation in Gujarati, encouraging him to apply for a job.

His early impression of the cafe didn’t last long. Gail’s is ‘super hectic’, Ramesh said. Tasks appear hourly on an iPad, of which photographs have to be taken and uploaded to the company’s cloud system. In the kitchen, recipes are drummed into employee’s heads via instructional videos. Staff are under pressure to manage transactions as swiftly as possible. (As Novara reported earlier this year, every Gail’s store receives a ‘coffee efficiency’ report from head office, with any store that takes more than two minutes on over 30% of transactions highlighted in red.) And always, lurking on every shift, is the possibility of being sent home if business is slow and the branch isn’t making enough money. This all came as a shock to Ramesh when he started. ‘The management was so poor,’ he said. ‘Nobody was happy with their job, no one wanted to come to work.’

Sanjana started working at Gail’s in the winter of 2022, two weeks after arriving in London. Her experience has been no different to that of Ramesh. Despite Gail’s insistence that it always gives employees their rotas two weeks in advance, Sanjana told us that ‘there’s no schedule, no fixed hours for when I’m eating or sleeping.’ For a 5.30am shift, she wakes at 3am, and needs to sit down after eating, so she waits until the end of her shift before eating her first meal of the day. ‘It’s affecting my body’, she said.

From the Gail’s employees interviewed for this article, we learned that those who speak out about conditions are singled out, with hour-cutting used as punishment for people who stand up to management. (Gail’s denies that it cuts hours in response to what it calls ‘employment issues’.) Employees also told us that if someone calls in sick, they are told by management to come into work and prove it. According to Zahra, the paranoia is sharply racialised against South Asian employees. ‘They see Indians hanging out in groups and that makes them uncomfortable. If you’re smoking as a pair, or if you’re hanging out together, they freak out,’ she said, recalling if workers spoke in Gujarati on shift, they were told off by managers for being disrespectful, while Italian employees could easily speak their language in front of management. She added that white staff members would complain about Muslims fasting during Ramadan, while Ramesh mentioned that when one employee at his branch complained about the working conditions, the manager retaliated by refusing to give her the day off for Eid.

To most of its Gujarati workforce, Gail’s is little more than a stop-gap. But employment opportunities are tightly constrained for Indians in the UK. Prakash, a baker at Ramesh’s branch, has no intention of remaining at Gail’s, but he sees little hope of finding work beyond the food and hospitality sector, despite his training as a software engineer. His qualifications are rarely valued, people in Britain see Indians on a ‘very low level’, Prakash said. With the UK government now making it harder to employ people on student visas, international student workers and their families are being pushed into ever more precarious work, with little alternative. The result is a hospitality sector increasingly underpinned by the low-paid labour of a legally and financially insecure workforce. ‘I’m working here for now, to make a living,’ Ramesh says. ‘If I get something better, I’ll leave.’

‘A more sinister reality’

Gail’s growth since the Bain takeover has been dramatic. Capitalising on the post-pandemic spate of empty commercial sites, the chain has expanded beyond its base in wealthy areas of central London towards poorer neighbourhoods undergoing waves of gentrification and property speculation. Pushed on his company’s role in these transformations, Gail’s CEO Tom Molnar told The Grocer earlier this year, ‘We’re just a bakery, you know?’, and suggested that Gail’s’ expansionist vision was reviving the small-scale neighbourhood bakeries that have been ‘decimated’ in recent times. Not everyone agrees. Woolley told us that Gail’s ‘sees itself as a great employer. But the reality we have gathered from conversations [with employees] is that they don’t listen, [and] profit is put first.’

Gail’s management remains confident in the country’s appetite for even more of its branches. In the last couple of years, stores have opened in Bristol, the north-west of England and inside train stations, as well as London’s sprawling commuter belt. As of December 2024, its directors are targeting £300m in annual revenues, and believe that there’s scope for up to 500 stores in the UK – as many as the ubiquitous Pret. The company is adamant that the image on which its business has been built – affluence, exclusivity and craft – will not be undermined by its relentless drive to expand.

Since 2024, a backlash against the chain has been brewing, fuelled by communities fed up with the gentrification and asset-stripping of their high streets. But there is a more sinister reality unfolding in the shadow of a hostile nation-state. Britain today is caught between the desire for Indian trade and labour, and the naked racism of anti-immigrant sentiment. Just as companies are ever more willing to hire Indian workers to mask sluggish productivity and deteriorating working conditions, government policy continues to constrain migrants’ basic freedoms and economic security. As migrant hospitality workers are attacked in the streets and surveilled at work, the question arises: is this the world we want to live in, for the sake of little more than a £4.95 sourdough or a cinnamon bun on the way to work?

In recent months, Britain’s Labour government has cracked down on South Asian workers, conducting immigration raids against delivery drivers and working with gig platforms to identify and target asylum seekers (just last month, an Indian man was the first person to be deported under the UK’s new deportation treaty with France). For employers, there is little contradiction here. Hospitality businesses are often more than happy to work with authorities to monitor their own employees, while keeping them ever more dependent on precarious and casualised work.

In Gujarat, meanwhile, as the decimation of the economy persists and India descends into authoritarianism, emigration remains the horizon for many. Funding their costly visas and foreign university applications by mortgaging their possessions, young Gujaratis continue to risk loan sharks and fraudsters in the pursuit of their dreams abroad. ‘So many people [from back home] call me,’ Sanjana said, ‘asking how to get here, if the only way is the student visa, if there is any other way they can apply.’

At Gail’s, workers can be sponsored for skilled worker visas. This is Sanjana’s goal. But her target is constantly receding. When she started at the bakery, the salary threshold for a skilled worker visa was £26,200, less than the amount earned by a head baker or head barista at Gail’s. But this year, the government raised the threshold to £38,700, a salary which only managers can earn. Staying at Gail’s and hoping for a promotion is, for Sanjana, the only option. Like thousands of other workers in Britain’s ever-deepening hostile environment, her life is bound to her employer.

And so she remains, journeying in from the outer reaches of west London and counting down the hours to closing time, when the unsold bread will be taken down from the display counter, put in black bin bags and thrown out with the kitchen rubbish. Off shift, she will finally speak Gujarati with her colleagues, as they get on the bus for the long journey back to Wembley, Neasden, Harrow, Stonebridge. As questions begin to be asked about the company’s carefully cultivated image of quality and respectability, it is the workers at Gail’s who are caught between a resurgent far right both in Gujarat and Great Britain, and a decaying model of economic growth built on profit alone. For the unlucky, their alarms will ring seven hours later for the morning shift, and it will all begin again.

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Editor’s note: Before publishing this article, Vittles reached out to Gail’s for a response. A spokesperson wrote: ‘GAIL’s takes allegations of discrimination in the workplace extremely seriously and we are committed to ensuring our bakeries and business are free from prejudice or bias. We deeply value the diversity of our people, celebrating every individual’s heritage and language and fostering an inclusive culture that thrives on different experiences and skills. This is reflected in over 130 nationalities being part of GAIL’s breadheads community, reinforced through our diversity, equity and inclusion training policy, the unconscious bias training undertaken by all our hiring managers, and our award-winning career development programmes. Our employees make GAIL’s what it is, and we continually look for ways to support them, listening to concerns and engaging in meaningful dialogue.’

Some names have been changed to protect identity

Credits

Sasha Patel is a researcher, filmmaker, and artist based in London. You can find out more on her website here.

Ben Jacob writes about the politics of labour, technology and the environment, past and present. He is based between London and New Jersey, where he is a PhD student at Rutgers University in the Department of History. You can find out more about his work his work on his website here.

Kruttika Susarla is an illustrator and cartoonist from Andhra Pradesh, India. You can find her on Instagram.

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Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Eli Davies writes about building up a kitchen from scratch and cooking as a means to stake a claim on a new home when forced to move repeatedly by the vicissitudes of the rental market. Eli’s essay is part of our Cooking from Life strand – a series of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking.

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It is no small task to build up a kitchen from scratch. Where do you start? Plates, pans and cutlery first, surely. Then glasses and mugs, but how many? You’ll be living on your own, but you hope to entertain – maybe lavishly, copiously. And what about other utensils? A potato peeler? A whisk? A mixing bowl?

By the time I moved into my third Belfast home in 2022, I had amassed a nice collection of such equipment. This was the nicest place I’d rented in the city by some distance – comfortably furnished, with a well-fitted-out kitchen. I was particularly thrilled with the sturdy gas rings built into the counter: after years of grappling with shitty electric hobs atop cheap free-standing cookers, I could finally control the heat under my pans. But many things in the kitchen were too high for me – I couldn’t reach some of the shelves, or the cupboards set deep into the corner. So, to my collection of kitchenware, I added something that felt truly transformative: a small stepladder.

The stepladder changed everything. I felt like I’d spent my entire adult life asking taller people – generally men – to reach things for me, or else standing precariously on a chair that I was convinced would collapse any second. No more! Every time I unfolded this new kitchen accessory, I was stupidly proud of my minor act of domestic self-determination. Why had it taken me so long? I wondered.

Such small but profound moments have littered my home life since 2017 – the year that, in a fugue of grief, I abandoned nearly all my kitchen equipment to my ex-partner after we broke up and moved out of our flat in London. The kitchen contained ten years of accumulated items – many of which were rightfully mine – but at the time I couldn’t stomach bringing these things with me as I started my next chapter, whatever that would turn out to be. So, I began again.

My first proper post-break-up home was a small, terraced house in Belfast; I moved there in 2018, one year into my PhD, having spent the previous twelve months living on the north coast, licking my wounds, near my university in Coleraine. I was slightly overwhelmed by the prospect of living on my own for the first time, and it took me ages to make the house mine. For months I perched uncertainly at its edges, cultivating some parts, neglecting others. But I did gradually build up my kitchenware: cutlery, utensils and pans from Argos; a mint-green crockery set, coffee mugs and a griddle pan from Ikea; wine glasses and tumblers from charity shops; a beautiful tulip-shaped beer glass nicked from a local pub. Through these items, I could see tastes and habits of my own beginning to emerge: the small, yellow-patterned mug I liked to drink my coffee from, the tiny thrill of arranging the fruit in a big wooden bowl after the big shop. It was all deeply gratifying, and at the time I didn’t consider what it would feel like to have to take it all apart again.

When you constantly have to move, you also constantly have to make adaptations, to find ways to make different homes work for your body. Who knows how big the rooms will be, how the cupboards and drawers will feel, what size the fridge will be, what state the oven will be in? (In one Belfast house, I discovered a tray full of old, grey grease in the oven soon after I moved in and had to pester my landlord repeatedly to get it cleaned.) But having moved eight times in the past eight years, my priorities are now clear. I struggle with many aspects of domesticity, but in the kitchen, things make sense. This sense of ease has been built up over almost an entire lifetime of cooking: I made my first pasta sauce aged eleven, and since then I’ve gradually developed an almost bodily knowledge of what I need on hand to make something to eat: a good knife for garlic, the best pan for boiling water, and so on.

I’m conscious, though, that when you’re a serial renter at the whims and mercy of an over-inflated and unregulated rental market, this is not straightforward. When your body always stands poised to up sticks and move with little notice, why weigh yourself down with equipment? I remember this unanchored feeling when I first moved to Belfast, before I started to rebuild my kitchen. I would have crisps and cigarettes for dinner, not quite able to commit to the space, not knowing if I was allowed to. A friend of mine – another victim of housing precarity – shared a cautionary tale about the risks of getting ahead of yourself in a rented kitchen: about ten years ago, he treated himself to an expensive set of cooking pots, thinking that at some point in the not-too-distant future he’d have secured his ideal kitchen to use them in. Instead, he’s carted them around from rented flat to rented flat, the beautiful pots never quite fitting in with the spaces which aren’t his, which don’t fit with his way of living, and which serve to remind him of his lack of a stable home.

When I’m homemaking now, I return to the cooking skills I’ve acquired over my life to stake a claim on these new spaces – even when that claim turns out not to be very strong. I had to leave that first Belfast house after two and half years to make way for my landlords’ son. It was the end of 2020: Christmas had been cancelled and we were back in lockdown. As a solo New Year’s Eve treat, I decided to cook myself Nigel Slater’s ham and butter beans. I used my bright orange Le Creuset pot (one of the few items that I’d retained from my old life, and an object that has become a kind of totem of homebuilding for me now), cramming it with tomatoes, meat and beans. In the past I’d made this hearty one-pot dish to share, ladling out spoonfuls to people at the table, but that night I made it just for me. The huge gammon joint had come from Dunnes on Annadale Embankment, where I grabbed it because I couldn’t find anything smaller, feeling faintly ridiculous as I carried it to the till. On New Year’s Day I sat among the boxes and packing tape and ate leftover ham with poached eggs and bubble and squeak. On moving day, I wrapped what was left in foil and brought it with me to the new house. It became something of a bit when I told people about it afterwards: For New Year’s Eve, I cooked myself a whole ham!

The scale of that dinner was undoubtedly a bit absurd, but I think it reveals something about what building a home had become for me. My parents gave me that Le Creuset pot one Christmas in the mid-2000s, and it stands out as a shock of colour against chipped surfaces and limescale-encrusted draining boards in my memories of the dreary, cheaply fitted kitchens in my rented homes. It has functioned as a kind of through line or talisman – though, as I write, it sits in a Belfast storage unit, one of many items (including my beloved stepladder) that I’ve been separated from for two years now, as I try to find a stable place to live back in London. My heart aches for those objects! I feel adrift and disoriented without them.

So, how do I make a home in the absence of these objects? I don’t think I can, really. It’s hard, after years of movement and instability, to imagine what a home might feel like when it’s actually mine. I can think about the kitchen, though, with a list of – perhaps quite basic – demands. It will be clean and big enough to fit more than one person at a time, with space for my possessions – my cooking tongs and griddle pan and my stepladder. It will have a freezer not so iced up that it’s unusable, and a good oven with decent temperature control. And it will have a big pot of something cooking on the stove. I love those enormous deep metal pots you see in community kitchens and canteens, full of stews and soups – there’s something so hopeful and grounding about them. Maybe that’s what I’m reaching towards whenever I move into a new place and make a big pot of something hearty (whether it’s in my orange Le Creuset or something else). While it’s sitting on the hob, bubbling away, neither it nor I are going anywhere.

Lentil Stew

I guess Nigel Slater is my ‘big pot of food’ go-to, because this recipe – another favourite of mine – has been adapted over the years from his lentil and spinach pie recipe in Kitchen Diaries II. It’s a grounding recipe, perfect for claiming space in the kitchen, and works very well with a baked potato and/or sausages, or just served as a thick soup with a bit of bread and butter. This is an easy and forgiving recipe – you can use whatever ingredients you have to hand, and needn’t be overly concerned with exact quantities or cooking times. That said, here are some rough guidelines on how I make it.

Serves 4–6, technically, but I usually make it for myself and use it throughout the week in the various forms mentioned above
Time 1 hr

Ingredients

1–2 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, finely chopped
1–2 carrots, peeled if you can be bothered and finely chopped
1–2 celery sticks, finely chopped
1 thyme sprig
1 fresh bay leaf
150g green lentils, cooked according to packet instructions, cooking liquid saved
1.5L veg or chicken stock
1 garlic clove, thinly sliced
a dash of balsamic vinegar

Method

1. Heat the oil over a medium-low heat in a big heavy-based pot.

2. Add the onion, carrots and celery and cook for 5 or so mins, stirring regularly, until beginning to turn golden. Add the thyme and bay, and fry for another few mins.

3. Add the lentils and their cooking liquid and give them a quick stir, then add the stock and bring to the boil before reducing to a simmer and adding the garlic.

4. Part-cover with a lid, then leave to simmer for 45 mins or so (you can leave it simmering away longer if you want, but you might have to top up the liquid).

5. Just before serving, stir in a few drops of balsamic vinegar.

Credits

Eli Davies is a writer and researcher whose work has been published widely, including in the Guardian, Tribune and The Tangerine. She has a PhD from Ulster University on women, memory and domestic space during the Troubles and she co-edited Under My Thumb: Songs that Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, an anthology of women’s music writing (Repeater, 2017). Her book The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, Politics and Pleasure in the Single Woman’s Kitchen will be published by the Indigo Press in June 2026.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.