For those of you who missed the chat with me and Lisa at Fallow, here it is…
Between the two of us there are quite a few years of cooking, teaching, growing food, changing things, getting things wrong, changing them again and generally trying to work out how food can work a bit better for people and planet. We covered quite a lot: the pressures hospitality is under, the price of food, fragile supply chains, what farmers and growers are up against, teaching kids to cook, community food projects, perennial veg and why I think we need to get much better at building strong local networks around food.
We also talked a lot about Cegin Hedyn and why the pay-what-you-can, no-questions-asked model has worked. There isn’t really a magic formula to it. It works because lots of people give their time, people donate when they can, we have an affordable space, we use local food and, probably most importantly, there is trust. The conversation kept coming back to food resilience, and how it is about much more than simply growing more food. Can we actually cook the food we grow? Do we know who is growing it? Can those growers make a living? Do we have places where people can cook and eat together? Can we share things? Do we know each other and trust each other? And will those local systems still be there when we actually really need them?
I also spoke a bit about what I’m trying to do next with The Warren. I came very close to selling the building and walking away from it all, but instead I’ve decided to give it one last experiment and see if there is another way of doing it. I don’t think the answer is simply reopening The Warren and trying to run the same restaurant again, so the building is being opened up to other people and other ideas: pop-ups, collaborations, events, community ideas, chefs and food people who might want to try something of their own. Over time I’d really like to see whether The Warren can become something much more community-run and perhaps, one day, community-owned. I don’t really know what that looks like yet. It might work. It might not. But quite a few of the best things I’ve been involved with have started without really knowing where they were going to end up.
Thanks Lisa for having the conversation with me, and thanks to everyone at Fallow who joined in, challenged things and threw their own thoughts into the mix. There is a massive amount to figure out when it comes to the future of food, but there is also loads we can just get on with doing together, locally, now.