Pen Vogler: Food history, culture, class, strawberries, sugar, industrialisation, eating habits | Podcast

Pen Vogler is a food historian. Her latest book is Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain (Link, Amazon).  Her previous books include work on food in the life and works of Dickens and Jane Austen - Dinner with Dickens: and Dinner with Mr Darcy.  Her Twitter.


In the podcast, Ben and Pen discuss various aspects of British culture and history we can learn from the British relationship with food. The discussion delves into several fascinating topics surrounding the transition from hunting-gathering societies to agricultural ones, the phenomenon of the commons and enclosures, the historical regulation of bread prices, and the impact of government intervention in food systems. The podcast also touches on the personal experiences of Pen in Czechoslovakia.



Throughout the conversation, the overarching theme was how food, from its production to its consumption, is deeply entwined with historical, cultural, and social factors, and how understanding these dynamics can offer insights into present-day food-related challenges and culture.



Here are some highlights:



Transition to Agriculture: The transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, known as the Neolithic Revolution around 4200 BC, was gradual. Although humans began farming, hunting aided by dogs continued. Interestingly, there seemed to be a decrease in fish consumption even among communities near water, which may be tied to a new identity as agriculturalists.



Strawberries: are they feminine and how have supermarkets made the strawberry market. The notion of strawberries being considered feminine was discussed, with a historical perspective of fruit consumption differing between genders. Supermarkets have popularized strawberries, making them a significant seasonal item.



Queuing and Supermarkets: The change from traditional queuing at shops to self-service in supermarkets was discussed. This shift was initially due to labor shortages post-World War and was supported by the government.



Sugar's Historical Significance: The historical transformation of sugar from a flavor enhancer to a replacement food was discussed. The early introduction of sugar into children’s diets, driven in part by companies like Nestle, and its long-term health implications were also highlighted.



Yorkshire Pudding and Meat Consumption: The tradition of Yorkshire pudding being used to fill up family members so the male head could consume more meat was discussed. This tradition reflects the historical gender and age hierarchies in food distribution within a family.



Fish and Class Distinction: The class distinction between consuming different types of fish, such as salmon being associated with aristocracy while carp being considered a working-class fish, was discussed. The historical roots of these distinctions date back hundreds of years, and are intertwined with the broader themes of commons, enclosure, and social status. The discussion explores how fishing evolved with societal changes, particularly during the industrial era.



Food Security and Import Dependency: The discussion touched on the UK's food security and its dependency on imports, which has fluctuated over centuries based on various social, economic, and political factors.



Industrialization and Food: The transition from a farming to an industrial nation impacted the UK's food self-sufficiency, and the conversation touched on how industrialization shaped food consumption and distribution.



Commons and Enclosures: The commons, shared land resources, were crucial for the livelihood of many. The enclosures, which involved fencing off common lands for private use, disrupted this system and forced many people into cities, contributing to the industrial revolution. This transition to urban living and the loss of common land rights had profound societal effects.



Historical Bread Regulation: The Assize of Bread, established around 1256, was a piece of legislation that controlled bread prices by adjusting loaf sizes based on grain prices, lasting nearly 600 years. It reflects an early form of government intervention in food pricing to ensure affordability, a topic that resurfaces in modern discussions, particularly post-pandemic.



Government Intervention in Food Systems: Reflecting on her time in Czechoslovakia, Pen notes the balance required between government intervention and market freedom in ensuring food security and diversity. Over-regulation can lead to limited dietary variety, as seen in Czechoslovakia, compared to neighboring Poland.




Historical Eating Habits: Pen sheds light on the eating habits of historical figures and mentions records from a reeve in the 11th century that detail the distribution of food items like cheese and beans to shepherds and slaves respectively. They discuss the perception of foraged food in history and how it was often seen as a last resort for those who couldn’t afford to buy food. The conversation transitions to how foods like nettles, which were once seen as food for the desperate, are now romanticized. The discussion around what Shakespeare and his crew might have eaten highlights how the lack of references to vegetables in historical texts leaves room for speculation.



Pen's Writing Process: Pen, working part-time at Penguin Books, allocates weekends and her sabbatical time for writing. Her process involves extensive research, particularly at the British Library, followed by drafting, editing, and structuring her findings into coherent chapters. 



Food Etiquette:  touch on traditional etiquette like the "posh" way of eating peas with a fork and how certain eating habits signify a person's social status.



Overrated/Underrated Foods: Pen and Ben briefly discuss the perceived value of certain foods like tripe, gin, goose, and herring, and how these perceptions have evolved over time.



Current and Future Projects: Pen mentions a potential project exploring religious festivals, fasting, and feasting, and how they tie into communal and physical health.



Advice for Aspiring Writers: Pen advises exploring non-fiction writing as a viable and fulfilling avenue, sharing how her accidental discovery of food history transformed her writing career.



Their conversation offers a rich tapestry of insights on how food, history, and culture are intricately woven together, and how exploring these connections can yield engaging narratives and a deeper understanding of societal norms and practices.

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Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Pen Vogler. Pen is a food historian and writer. Her previous work includes Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain, Dinner with Mr. Darcy, Dinner with Dickens, Tea with Jane Austen, and her latest work out in the UK in early November, 2023 is Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain. Pen, welcome.


Pen

Thank you so much.



Ben (00:00:27):

Let's start with strawberries. I have a trio of questions on strawberries. Is it feminine to eat strawberries? Why do we eat strawberries with cream? And do you think the British consider strawberries a very British fruit and maybe the most British fruit we have?



Pen (00:00:45):

Strawberries is such a good question to start with. So is it feminine to eat strawberries? This comes from a post I saw on Reddit when the young man said, "I love strawberries, but my dad keeps on telling me it's feminine." "It's girly," I think it was the word he used to eat strawberries. "Is it?" And so he was asking people for their opinion. And lots of people said, "Well, sure, it is slightly girly to eat strawberries, to eat fruit. And lots of people said, "That's completely nonsense." But I just found it really interesting that there was this perception that they were sort of feminine somehow. I think it fits into this broader discovery that kind of people who do lots of work on health and health diet and health in the community have this kind of underlying discovery that women eat more fruit than men. Nobody knows really why it is.



Is it because they like it more? Is it because they want to be healthy? There's a perception in some communities of men that fruit just isn't what you eat. And I found this fascinating. One of the other things that had really interested me about strawberries is how supermarkets have completely kind of owned them. They've come to have this massive strawberry season. And when you have strawberry season, you get newspaper articles saying, "Which are the best strawberries? Are they Sainsbury's or Little or Tesco?" which is ridiculous because strawberries are not made by supermarkets. Strawberries come-- their in El Santa or some kind of variety. But supermarkets have done this very clever job of kind of identifying themselves very closely with strawberries from them being quite a small kind of niche treat.



They now in summertime outsell bread, for example, sometimes. And I found those two pieces of information really interesting. I think that supermarkets, when they sort of emerged in this country in the 1950s, had to really sell themselves to women, had to really kind of say, "This is a new way of shopping." They had to explain how they worked because it wasn't obvious to everybody that you went into a supermarket, took a basket and helped yourself. Some people are outraged at that kind of DIY way of shopping. And I think strawberries and fruit were one of the ways that supermarkets began to kind of entice women shoppers. If you go into a supermarket now, fruit and veg always at the front; strawberries really close, you can see them. Whereas the meat, the stuff that women are not that keen on buying according to the various kind of consumer surveys, slightly more kind of tucked away in the back.



Ben (00:03:46):

Yeah. And that touches on a couple of things. So one is this idea that meat is manly. So sort of strawberries are the opposite. And how we've come to associate things like the season, and obviously we have tennis and Wimbledon and all of that. I wanted to pick up something on what you said about how it was kind of enticing women into the shop, as well as how varieties and things like that work. Because when I was reading that section, the way you described the pre-supermarket era, or when it was that, that you used to queue at places like your butcher and your green grocer. And then in rationing times-- and I had the sense maybe before, the queue became a kind of social construct.



So one is the conversations you had around the queue, particularly rationing, and then the intersection with class and who queues and how you queue and all of that. There is a sentiment that Britts talk about weather, we talk about tea, and we talk about queuing a lot much to kind of the laughter of a lot of other cultures. And it occurred to me that actually has deep roots about why we queue and how we queue and this entry into it. Is that how you read some of our queuing? And do you think part of that dismantling of the queue and getting them into supermarkets really wraps up into supermarkets and how they use strawberries?



Pen (00:05:10):

I think that's absolutely right. I mean, you could still queue in a supermarket, but the idea about supermarkets is that you don't queue. But I think yes, you are absolutely right. In the Second World War, for example, people had to be registered to get their coupons in a particular shop. And interestingly, most people were registered with a co-op. So the co-op was a huge part of people's social lives and kind of consumer lives at that time. But you'd have to queue particularly in rationing time. And as you say, people would-- There was a lovely-- in one of the kind of surveys-- an academic surveys, somebody quoted; this Scottish lady who said, "If it wasn't for the queue, I wouldn't get a laugh all week." Clearly that queue was a sort of social occasion for people, particularly for women.



You do see these pictures, don't you, in the first world war when there wasn't rationing and there was huge problems with kind of dearth of food. And they introduce rationing probably much too late. But you see enormous pictures of people queuing, and sometimes men with their overcoats. And again, in the second world war in the fifties, sometimes men, but predominantly women. So the queue does have that social sort of status. But it also, for some people, young women-- particularly women entered the labor market they felt they didn't have time to do it, totally understandably. And some women also found that kind of being served quite intrusive. They'd feel that the shop assistants would kind of know a bit too much about their business.



And one lady that I quote said, "If I bought something unusual, it would get to the ears of my mom. My mother would be saying, 'Why are you spending through the person who served them?'" You get a bit judged. And obviously, we are very judgy in this country. So I think the queue had an interesting positive and negative kind of social role for people. And then the supermarkets come along and then they just decide to sort of do away with it. One of the things that the supermarket came in-- Like I say, most people in the war were registered with the co-op. The co-ops were really big part of our community. After the war and during the war, there was a labor shortage.



So the supermarkets, all those kind of early shops had to figure out ways of getting people to serve themselves because they couldn't recruit staff. And to their surprise, they discovered they sold more and that was revolutionary. The government in the fifties in trying to kind of find ways of coping with this labor shortage actually sponsored Sainsbury's manager’s directors to go to America to figure out how this kind of self-serve thing happened. And they came back sort of full of ideas of what self-service looked like. And this idea that actually you would sell more was key to the idea of the kind of supermarket. Although in some it was supported by the government because of the labor problems, but in fact, it has produced this massive overconsumption problem in our society. It feeds into this problem where you have to buy two, get one free or whatever it is. There is probably in supermarkets too much food, and so much of it goes to waste. But that I think has its roots in that kind of like, "How do we sell more from the kind of 1940s and 1950s?"

Ben (00:09:09):

That's really fascinating because that's a part of social change, and it's happened and you can think of other sort of really big social change movements like the end of slavery or women's votes and things. But if you think about the systemic problems what we have now, for instance; obesity or nutrition or potentially overeating or food waste, it would seem that we might need to have social change potentially the other way or in different ways. And it does happen. The roots of how understanding that happen are really fascinating. The other symbol that the strawberry struck me is-- and you mentioned it-- is that we have El Santa, people would even know that as a variety.



But if you go back in time when you think of all sorts of fruit and veg varieties-- we called them heritage and heirloom. They had shorter seasons, they had different properties. So if you are doing mass agriculture, you want everything to ripen at the same time in a certain sort of way. Whereas if you are doing it in a home garden, you would want it to ripen sort of slowly over the season so you can pick some. And our obsession with strawberries means that we have fewer varieties, which you can get almost year round of a certain kind of thing; very red, very sweet, I guess as well. And that seems to have been almost, I guess not quite an accident because it's intentional, but kind of giving consumers what they seem to want; sweetness and it all the way round, driven by that. And I think that seemed to be another symbol that I got from the strawberry, that although it's this symbol, it has all of these downsides with it. I'm interested in whether you think that is and to what extent that we might have to try and nudge away from that.



Pen (00:10:52):

I mean, having British grown strawberries through-- you don't actually get them British grains throughout the year. They're the sort of months where they just won't grow because of our climate. And so far, for example, no British grown strawberry has quite managed to crack the Valentine's Day market. So all those kind of Valentine's strawberries are flown in from Morocco or Egypt or whatever. I think that process that you just described, sort of underscores two things. One is how incredibly powerful the supermarkets have become. So they've adopted the strawberry as their fruit, and that means they've gone to the strawberry growers and said, "Okay, I want the impossible." Because as you were saying, different strawberries had different qualities. They might ripen early, they might ripen late, they might be sweet, they might be juicy, they might be long lasting. They might have a particular taste, they might be quite robust, able to sort of cope with travel.



But until fairly recently, you couldn't really get strawberries with all those things. And the supermarkets said sets the story goes, "That's what we want. We want you to just crack the strawberry code, do the impossible." And amazingly, they sort of more or less have. And so-- in Britain I'm talking about-- we now have strawberries probably sort of eight, nine months of the year, and then we fly them in when we don't have them. But going back, that's obviously an unusual thing. The strawberry-- a lot of fruit was very, very sort of... It was a special treat. It was quite elite. It was always very associated with Wimbledon. That association has been going on since the 19th century, just because Wimbledon happened at the time that the strawberry season was kind of at its peak.



And although the strawberry season now is much, much longer, we've kept that association, which is great, which is nice. And people have news items about how many tons of strawberries they're eating at Wimbledon, and it's massive. But that kind of deliberate sort of growing of the strawberry to try and sort of keep pace with the consumer has quite a long history. Initially, the French were the masters or the mistresses of it; mostly actually the masters. And they managed to get what we now think was a modern strawberry by getting the Chilean strawberry, which was quite sweet, and the European or kind of the wild strawberry that was kind of much tinier and sort of bring them together in what's now kind of the modern strawberry cult of ours which tastes quite kind of pineapple and really, really delicious. That I think was interrupted in France by the French Revolution, picked up again by British strawberry growers. And the French are kind enough to call the British the kind of masters of the strawberry growing or whatever it is. So there was a very sort of strong British pride in these kind of new cultivars that they've managed to make.



Ben (00:14:18):

I guess some people though would argue that that's just been a great thing. You get it all in one and consumers like it and they just eat lots of it. But I think one of your points is that perhaps the more subtle problems with that lack of diversity within that and what it represents in the food system has more pitfalls than people might expect.



Pen (00:14:40):

I think it falls into sort of a couple of different camps. It falls into the sustainability camp; this idea that we are pushing our soil and our earth to produce and produce and produce strawberries, crops, any kind of food. And also then flying them. The idea of flying strawberries from Egypt is a little bit crazy, but that's now the world economy, isn't it? Egypt or Kenya or whatever, Morocco depends on that for their income. But it also fits into this idea of sort of security, I suppose. We haven't been at war since the Second World War on British soil. And in the First World War and the Second World War, we discovered that we had huge problems with national food insecurity.



We imported so much food. Because we were an industrializing nation, we switched our attention from growing food to growing industrial stuff; to making cutlery or fabrics or machines or whatever it was from the 19th century. We've moved our attention away from producing food. And it meant that we were very vulnerable in times of kind of food dearth, particularly when it was kind of international. We've seen this again. We saw this in the pandemic. We've seen this in the kind of post Brexit kind of wobble about when you have suddenly introduce new legislation and restrictions and forms and things that you got to fill in. And we've seen that our shelves empty much more quickly than we expect them to; much more quickly than Europe has done. So one of the questions that our government should be thinking about-- and probably doesn't very much, is how food secure are we. That question of how much you import food is very much part of the kind of green transition. It's very important and it's one that our governments are not terribly good at dealing with, but they should be. Also, it's the job of the government to defend the country, and that boringly includes to feed the country.



Ben (00:17:03):

Yeah.



Pen (00:17:03):

And that's something that kind of has got a bit lost.



Ben (00:17:06):

And is symbolized by the challenges of the strawberry. I think if I remember the stats correctly and around about 1950, having come out of that, 60 to 70% of food was grown in the UK for the UK after going to that. And now it's down to maybe 20 to 30%. So it has dropped; something like that.



Pen (00:17:26):

I think now we probably import about half.



Ben (00:17:29):

Okay.



Pen (00:17:29):

It depends on where you get your stats from. Before the First World War, it was higher, it was about 60%, and there was a definite decision between the wars to try and do something about that. There was this understanding in the thirties particularly that British agriculture was on its needs and it needed support. And things like the Milk Marketing Board come out of that acknowledgement that actually maybe it is the government's role to not let farmers go completely to the wall because maybe we do need to feed our kids with milk and cheese, and we do need in agricultural to feed the whole of us. And since the kind of second half of the 20th century, it varies around 50%.



Ben (00:18:18):

Well, that's quite a good segue for me into thinking about sugar. So that's another element. And perhaps I'm quite lucky coming from the Chinese diaspora, Malaysia and Singapore roots. We really don't have puddings. It's not part of what we eat. Maybe we'd actually have a little bit of fresh fruit at the end of the meal. But our family never really had them. If we had puddings or dessert, they were very, what I consider English; those kind of puddings and that which are always really sweet. And even in Asian food today, we have sugar within dishes, and we think about the four flavors and balancing them. But apart from kind of small niches, we don't really. So I thought that was quite interesting and that history of sugar that I was reading in your book also intertwined with the way that fruits earlier were kind of considered a little bit evil or like be aware of them.



Pen (00:19:15):

Yes.



Ben (00:19:16):

So this is this whole, "Should you let your children eat fruit?" And then this resurgence of sugar and how it has been used through history. Were you surprised when you were researching into that? And what do you think has maybe been most misunderstood or what's understood about how sugar has been used through history, particularly within the British food history?

Pen (00:19:39):

Yes. It's such a good question. It's interesting because I was in Hong Kong in June, and we went to have tea in a Hong Kong tea house. I love afternoon tea. It's a thing. I kind of love cake and I love sugar in its place. But I was really delighted that the dim sum that comes with the tea in the tea house is all savory. It may be a tiny bit of sweetness, like you'd use spice for sweetness, and that's very much how we used to use sugar in British cuisine as a sort of flavor enhancer. I say British cuisine-- nobody ever thought that the Britts had a cuisine, but you know. So in the medieval, in the Tudor period right up to the 18th century, sugar was something that you used in the sort of, rather as you do salt as a flavor enhancer.



And then increasingly as our colonial ambitions grew up, we recognized that we could exploit the Caribbean. We could have the kind of sugar plantations and all the horrors and the slavery and the kind of iniquities that that involved. And sugar sort of-- I think two things happened with it. Those kind of sugar plantations had a very strong hold on the kind of British government at the time. So the idea was that they had to be supported. They have to give a free and ready market for their produce of sugar to Britain. So it was a kind of government strategy as it were. And very early on, it was a strategy that was involved actually in the triangular slave trade. I mean, the brother of Charles II started this disgusting thing called the Royal African Company that had ships going through kind of the slave triangle and all that kind of idea of sugars just sort of booming onto the British market which starts from about the 17th century.



So in a way, the market was sort of forced in Britain. It was kind of created because it was convenient. It was politically convenient. But at the same time, later, you have industrialization. You have poor people who are not growing their own food and sugar becomes a sort of replacement food. It becomes a kind of replacement energy. It's kind of instant hit. Quite often, kids would be given sugar with jam. The strawberries that we were talking about, most kids would sort of taste the strawberry not as a strawberry, but as a kind of layer of cheap, red sugar essentially; sugar paste with a bit of sort of flavor in it. And it came in treacle or golden syrup or whatever. It was often a kind of replacement for food that there were these heartbreaking little interviews with kids by Henry Mayhew who interviews very kind of poor people in London, in the 1840s. And this girl says, "I have bread and jam for breakfast, bread and jam for lunch, bread and jam for tea. What I would really like is some meat. I have a taste of meat once every few months, once a year or something." That's what she wanted. Whereas now we sort of-- We've come to think of sugar as a sort of permanent treat rather than that replacement. So I think that's sort of definite.



The other thing about sugar that really did surprise me actually, is that the move to kind of say that sugar is a thing that kids should be eating, that happens really early on. There was a big kind of row with doctors in the 18th century between the ones who said, "It's natural for kids to eat or babies, infants to eat sugar. If you want to test its naturalness, then make a little water pap; flour and water, one with sugar and one without. And you'll see that your infant smacks its lips at the one, easily eat sugar." And of course now we know that if you introduce sugar into a child's diet very early on, they eat more and more of it and they taste it less and less. So they need more and more. It kind of works a bit like in that kind of drug sort of way and it feeds into problems of kind of ill health and dental cavities. It's now coming out that it's possibly bad for kids' attention and all the rest of it spans and all the rest of it. But that move to kind of say sugar is a natural thing for children rather than a small bit of kind of flavor enhancer, that's a move that happens early on. And then companies like Nestle pick up on that and start to kind of put sugar into their... So all those Victorian kind of baby foods all had sugar in. I don't know if they still do-- I should go and have a look actually. But they've probably got kind of sugar replacements; things that don't sound like sugar, but probably are sugar.



Ben (00:25:07):

I hadn't quite realized how early it was. And sugar has been a big symbol in this country because I remember reading about the sugar boycotts and it's really kind of one of the first fair trade. I do a lot of work within sustainable investment. So it's really interesting that that's a kind of boycott investment piece, which was probably quite a critical component in terms of the debates around slavery.



Pen (00:25:30):

Yes.



Ben (00:25:31):

Well, thinking about substitutes, I was also reading and it made sense, but I was initially surprised. So is it really true that Yorkshire pudding, which is this bread and batter, a component we have famously to roast beef, which is probably one of the things which is considered very British meal was really intended so that the male head of the house could simply eat more meat. So everyone got filled up on this bread batter thing, which now people really kind of like, but before was simply so that the man could eat more beef.




Pen (00:26:03):

It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I grew up in Yorkshire and I learned that in some history lesson. I was so shocked. I grew up in the seventies, eighties or something when we'd become much, much more child centered. It was such a shock to realize that children were so much lower down the pecking order in the kind of 19th century. And children in a lot of families, they might've been loved just as much as children today, but they were economic actors. Parents needed them to go out to work when they were 12, 14, 16, or even younger; depending on the time because obviously in the 19th century, they started to introduce education acts. So Yorkshire pudding starts to sort of emerge in the-- I mean, the recipe probably existed in some form for a long time, but recipes for it start to emerge in the 18th century. It does definitely have a reputation in Yorkshire as it can only be made in Yorkshire properly. If you go down south, they'll give you something rubbish. They'll give you battered pudding or something, which isn't the real thing.



Yorkshire, remember had energy, it had the coal fields. You could have a really bright sparkling coal fire. Your beef could be kind of whizzing round on a spit in front of a really hot fire. Get a Dutch oven or get a kind of tin, put your batter putting under the tin and all that heat will help it rise. So it does become associated with a kind of special occasion. There are fantastic records of people saying in families, "You start off, everybody would have a slice of Yorkshire pudding just to take the edge off their appetite." Then the man gets the most of the meat. We're talking about the 19th century here, early 20th century. Even if the man is not doing a kind of big, energetic industrial kind of job; if they're a clerk or work on a railway or something, they still have that status that they get the meat. That's going back to what we were saying earlier about fruit is for women, meat is for men. That idea has a very, very long roots in this country. And then the kids will get what's left. If it's meat like a rabbit or something, then the mom has to kind of police this divide. She has to kind of give the man the best bit of it, and she has to have something and she has to share out the rest with the kids.



I came across extraordinary stories of families who the man would be given something tasty for his tea. He'd be given like some kipper or some herring or an egg or something. And if he was feeling very indulgent towards his kids, he'd give them like the skin of the smoked fish, or he'd give them like the top of the egg or something for tea. And tea in Yorkshire is what we call dinner. It's the main meal you'd have at five or six or seven o'clock in the evening. So it's very interesting the way that children's status has changed over the centuries, but also how our perception of children's right to food has changed. And with status has come this idea that children have the right to eat what makes them happy. If it's perceived that they're happy by eating puddings or sweets or Coca-Cola, that's the job of the mom to make them happy. Whereas actually, as we know long term that is not going to promote kind of-- it might promote immediate happiness, but not long-term welfare.



Ben (00:30:03):

I was really interested in seeing those long-term roots. I mean, there was a couple of things I noted down. One was when the male head of the household went for his weekly meal out, that could be the meat free day at home. It's like, "Oh, great, we don't have to eat meat now." And that kind of echoed meat free days that we have. Actually, you referred to those education acts and how children became more aware of the rights and agency of children. And perhaps this effect going through that is now maybe children have too much rights and agency over how they like to eat. But that essentially the more progressive politicians or the progressive wings at that time actually pushed back the other way because they said, "Well, children need a right to work" because for poorer families, it was really necessary for children to go out. If they were going to be sort of stuck in school and not earning that it was going to be economic poverty and that whole idea. And then, "Well, if children like sweets like it is today, then maybe they should do. And what is the role of parenting or even the state to direct or influence-- influence that I found was really interesting. I hadn't really appreciated how deep some of these roots go. So my father-in-law is a coarse fisherman. Actually, he's gotten into the Guinness Book of World Records for his coarse fishing.



So been a fisherman for over years near Hanham and has talked about the rivers. So I understood a little bit about that and how he considers it and the commons. And I guess you would say it's a very working class pursuit, particularly how the fishermen there think about it. And the difference between fly, fishing and why salmon might be considered aristocratic. But I hadn't realized it goes back thousands of years really, or certainly hundreds rather than just sort of tens. And that divide is how we think about now where we might eat salmon and not really carp, although actually carps are great Asian fish and even is celebrated in places like Poland where it isn't here because it's considered essentially, I guess a poor person's fish or working class fish or a fish also of the commons where salmon is still-- you've got laws about it, you have fly fishing, and you have a state going all the way back to 10/66 and even previously. How do you view that roots of fish and that dichotomy today? I guess we're going to come onto in the enclosures as well, but there's part on your work on class and things. But it really seems to be very embedded in the food history we have today. I hadn't really appreciated how far back something simply like fish and whether you have freshwater fish or not, or salmon is so embedded in our history.




Pen (00:32:54):

Yeah, that really surprised me because this notion that the Britts don't really eat fish very much, I'd always thought that came from the reformation and that fish was considered sort of slightly poppish because it's what you have on Fridays instead of eating meat. But in actual fact, when I was writing this, I read some absolutely fascinating kind of archeological research and papers that say that the archeological records-- I just find archeologists extraordinary what they can do with kind of analysis; the way that they kind of look into the tiny, tiny bones or kind of look at the bones of something and they can figure out what that thing has eaten. But it seems that actually fish eating fell off a cliff with the Neolithic, and like you say, thousands of years ago.



So the Neolithic, probably around 4,200 BC about when this idea of farming. So the Neolithic; neo, obviously new lithic is the period when we start to farm rather than become hunter-gatherers. It's probably not an immediate thing. There's evidence that hunter-gatherers did use dogs to kind of round up wild animals in a kind of livestock kind of way. So it was probably a gradual transition. But what does happen is that we seem to just very quickly stop eating fish, not river fish. Even communities that are by rivers and communities that are by sea, it just drops or falls out of their diet. I'm imagining it's something to do with identity. I mean, we don't know. We need a time machine to really find out, but is it because we're going, "No, we are farming people, we are meat eating people. Therefore, we don't eat fish." And I think even that kind of non-fishiness-- and it's the same in Ireland, interestingly. It's the same in kind of northern parts in Scotland, northern parts of England across England. I wonder whether that kind of unfishiness from those thousands of years ago has stayed with us. And so we do embrace fishing as a sport. Fishing is very much a line to sport like your-- is it your granddad that does fishing?



Ben (00:35:24):

My father-in-law.



Pen (00:35:25):

Your father-in-law that does coarse fishing. And that kind of coarse fishing and fly fishing, that kind of difference. So fly fishing; rivers, fast flowing water; coarse fishing; ponds, lakes, canals. And that kind of emerged all probably again in the kind of industrial, the 19th century. Because before that, everybody ate carp. If you look at Isaac Walton, the complete angler, carp is one of the many fish that you expect to catch and eat. And carp has this reputation for being quite subtil; S-U-B-T-I-L and crafty, but delicious. Then we stop eating carp. Carp becomes the fish of ponds and canals; and ponds and canals are where the working classes go and fish because they're easier to access. You don't need to own the land around them. Trout and salmon is where you fish if you've got kind of status and land and all the rest of it.



So carp kind of falls out-- It's partly a class thing, but it's also governing the commons thing, which is something you mentioned, which I found completely fascinating. So all these anglers say, "Right, there is a limited amount of fish in these waters. We've got to introduce some rules, we can't just get rid of them. These are the rules and we're all going to pretty much adhere to them." And they do for decades and centuries. As an outsider, I'm not a fisher person, but for as an outsider, it appears to be very effective and work very well.



Ben (00:37:06):

They still adhere to the rules today. So obviously, you have fishing licenses and the like, but they manage that. And you mentioned something which does seem to be true. So you catch a carp and you'll put it back.



Pen (00:37:20):

Photograph yourself, obviously.



Ben (00:37:21):

Yeah, exactly. You take a photograph, so you put it back, and they are meant to get craftier. So some of the most famous carp have names.



Pen (00:37:28):

Yes.



Ben (00:37:28):

And you try and catch them for the 18th time because by the 18th time they've got all the other 17 tricks. They're not going to have that. And it becomes, "We know there's this carp which lives in this pond, but we haven't been able to catch him for a couple of years because he's wise to all our tricks now." So there was that.



Pen (00:37:46):

And they're huge.



Ben (00:37:47):

Yeah. And they get really big. But I hadn't appreciated that element of the commons and going back and how the laws sort of changed around 10/66 and where it was and the like. I guess this brings us to your really interesting writing around enclosures. And obviously we have this a little bit today, "What is common land and what is not?" But I hadn't really appreciated how-- You could argue it's one of the key defining moments of British society where you took-- I think you have this phrase where you take the kind of common land and the acorn and they get turned into bacon and pig and things like that. The commons were really how a whole strata of society would live. And that essentially, there was a kind of class history, power, all of that warfare which sort of happened. The enclosures happened and it completely changed our way of life and then really resonates to things today. I'd be interested in how you reflect on that and what are maybe the key things which still resonate today and what you found when you were looking about that which maybe either most surprised you or think most people should know about the history of enclosures.



Pen (00:38:58):

Yeah. The whole book started with this concept of the enclosures actually because when I was writing my last book on Scoff, I hadn't appreciated how dramatic the enclosures were for the kind of economy of many kind of rural people. The enclosures happened over a long period. The first were in Tudor times, the last was in the 1920s, I think. But the height of them was the kind of 19th, 18th century; beginning of the 19th century, but particularly 18th century. And they dovetail so closely with the move to the cities for industry. So what happens with the enclosures is land is nominally owned by a landowner. It might be the church, it might be a Lord, it might be the king. There were ancient rights to use it.



Sometimes they were written down and sometimes they were not. So sometimes they might go with a cottage. If you pay rent for this cottage, it also gives you the right to graze two cows, two pigs, and a sheep or geese or whatever. It becomes a huge point of argument in the 18th century about whether it's a good use of land. And the people who win are the people with the agency and the power who have the ability to enclose it because it goes along with this argument that the population is growing massively. We have a limited amount of land, we've got to improve it. And so in the 18th century, enclosures were synonymous with this idea. We have improvements. So people would talk about improvements, and what they meant was actually enclosure.



So they'd mean that huge amounts of land that were kind of-- they might look like fields or more land, and people would graze-- If you were a villager, you'd have access to it to graze a few sheep or cows or whatever it is. The landowner then comes along and says, "No, I'm sorry, you can't do that. I'm going to put a fence around it and I'm going to use it for probably sheep or cattle. I need it. Sorry, off you go." And it devastated a lot of people's economy. The central question of my book was that, "Okay, well, if landowners are doing that, are they taking responsibility for those devastated people so that it's their land, they have the right to do it?" But they are changing the domestic economy of hundreds of people. So how much responsibility are they taking for that?



The answer of course is various and the answer is generally not very much. That's why you have people leaving the lands going off to the cities where there's this growing industry. And one of the reasons we are an industrial country, the industrial revolution was so massive here. Was not just the kind of technological discoveries, it's because people were kind of flooding into the cities looking for work because they weren't able to support themselves on the land. One of the other things that grew out of it is the allotment movement. And I think it's extraordinary because if you go to France, or if you go to kind of Eastern Europe, you quite often see people have their own little small holdings. They might have a few cows and a few sheep and it's a kind of normal thing to do. That's quite unusual in Britain. And that becomes, it's because of this fight between farmers who want their laborers to be hungry for work; so hungry for work that they'll come and work for starvation wages. And if you give them big allotments, big small holdings, they're not going to come work for you for almost nothing because they'll grow their own food, they'll have their own meat, they'll have their own milk from their cow.



So the allotments became-- farmers would kind of grudgingly supply them, but they were always too small to really support people. And that was the same with the clearances in Scotland as well, what we now think of as the crofts which were deliberately sized so that you could just about support or semi-support yourself. But those, what had been peasants, people working on the land were forced into the cash economy. They had to go and work because the perception was that the nation needed bodies, cheap bodies to kind of be fed into the cash economy. It wasn't a moment in time, but it was an extraordinary change.




Ben (00:43:51):

Yeah, and I hadn't appreciated that that was probably one of the push factors in the industrial revolution. Obviously, there's a lot of other things going on in the moment and was maybe one of the small push factors which made essentially Britain industrialized first versus some others. Because people essentially going to the cities and yes, there's opportunity. But why were they looking for opportunity? It was partly because they were pushed out. The other element which I hadn't understood which was really interesting, and it was versus food historians versus economic historians was around bread. And one of the first-- Is it pronounced the assize of bread?



Pen (00:44:30):

I think it's the assize (sizes) of bread.



Ben (00:44:32):

Where essentially there was a kind of economic control. And economic historians have tried to study this, but I'm not sure the data has been good enough and then obviously the food historians look at it. I mean, what are the lessons you take away from that? And I guess there has been a little bit of debate on it; has resurfaced post pandemic as to whether we should have controls on food. Is there price gouging? Are there market limits? Because I guess the market argument is if there's a storm and you suddenly charge a thousand dollars for your ice shovel and then you go back, you'll never shop at that shop again because you feel you've been priced gouge. But actually, when you're thinking about food and things, it's a little bit more complicated than that and maybe the market won't work in such a way. Although we've seen it in the platforms where some of them decided not to list people who thought there was too much price gouging in terms of what we were doing. But yeah, anyway, on bread and history.



Pen (00:45:39):

Yeah. So I found the bread story really fascinating. So we'll do bread first and then price gouging as I think it's a slightly different subject. So the assize of bread were Britain's longest running pieces of food legislation. It starts in about 1256. Well, it's so long ago nobody can really be sure. And it's basically formalized shrink flation. So what happens is that assizes, if you've heard of the county Assizes, it's basically local courts. And the local courts get together with the landowners who are reducing the grain and maybe with somebody who represents the bakers. And they go, "Okay, how much does grain cost at the moment, whatever it is." That means that the price of bread will not change, the weight of it will. I was always very perplexed as a kind of reader of English literature why there was always this thing called the penny loaf. There was a penny loaf in Smallet, and there's a penny loaf in Dickens, and then there's a penny loaf a century later, and you think, "How does this happen?" Basically it's because the assizes of bread say, "You'll pay one penny for your loaf."



But it's just that as grain gets more expensive, the loaf gets smaller, and then when the price of grain drops again, the loaf gets bigger again. So this is the idea. And it was very effective because it meant that for the poor, they could be seen. It was a kind of piece of sort of interventionist legislation; so the poor could see that they were being looked after, that they could always afford something. But it was also very effective for landowners because actually, whereas it was necessary to have it because the cost of wheat might go up and down, it took attention away from them and onto the bakers because the bakers were the people who had to implement it. And that's what I found so fascinating. It seems like that's the first moment in British history I feel it's kind of where our sort of relationship to our supermarkets has grown from; this idea that the bakers, the retailers, those are the people who are very visibly going to kind of control this relationship.



They are going to decide what it is that they can afford to give you to eat. You're talking about these economic historians. There's lots of kind of hilarious tables with impossible to read kind of economic sort of algorithms about if this kind of bread weighed this much, then brown bread would weigh a bit more, and then a finer white red would weigh less. This is how it would all relate to each other. The tables were shared in the 13th century and there were mistakes in them. So it's not surprising that actually it was quite complicated, but it lasted. It lasted for nearly 600 years, extraordinarily, until there was a much more kind of pressure in the late 18th century on kind of urbanizing populations.



And there was a lot of food riots, particularly in the late 18th century. And it was seen not to be working. So it was abolished in London and then abolished later in the rest of the country in about 1836, I think. But coming to your point about price gouging, for me, I think our extraordinary relationship with our supermarkets starts there; starts in medieval England because we now look to our supermarkets to legislate about all kinds of things. In the pandemic, they decided on rationing who could buy how much pasta or whatever it was that was short. It was this summer, wasn't it? Or kind of earlier in the spring when there were problems about distribution, particular salads; fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. And all our kind of friends in Europe are going, "Ha ha ha, we can still get fresh tomatoes."



It's because our supermarkets have decided that they're going to have a contract with their suppliers where they pay a certain amount, and they're not going to deviate from that. And it means that if the cost of tomatoes goes up, the suppliers go, "Well, we're not going to supply you then because we'll get more from this German supermarket or this Spanish green grocer," for example. So that's why we had lack of kind of fresh fruit and veg on our shelves at that moment. But I think it's just an indicator of that kind of bigger position that those shops have got in our lives, and we feel it's normal for them to dic-- I wouldn't say dictate, but to kind of ration and to kind of make those kind of decisions about how to share food out in our lives.



Ben (00:50:50):

Well, that's a good segue maybe into a couple of elements in your own life or some other more fun questions. So I picked up that you spent some time in what was the then Czechoslovakia teaching and being laughed at for trying to suggest that Britain might have a little bit of a food culture.



Pen (00:51:12):

Yeah, they thought that was hilarious. They knew for a fact. We didn't.



Ben (00:51:16):

What did you learn from your time there? Do you think there's anything particularly misunderstood or, I guess this was just a little bit after the Berlin Wall came down which is in your anecdote. So a lot of that had changed. But maybe your thoughts on spending some time there and either reflections on food or what was maybe misunderstood or what you learned.



Pen (00:51:37):

Yeah. So two things about what's now the Czech Republic, but was then Czechoslovakia. So I lived in this little town called Liberates, which is just north of Prague. I was introduced to carp for the first time, I couldn't believe that carp was their kind of Christmas dish, but it was. I wasn't there for Christmas, but they shared it with me. Easter, I think we learned all about it. So that's the first time I understood that carp was eaten because it isn't any long-- I mean, it used to be eaten in Britain; just brought in as a kind of thing



Ben (00:52:12):

And a celebration dish, not only...

Pen (00:52:13):

As a celebration dish, yeah. But no longer. So that really fascinated me. But also, the Czech Republic, I was there from I think January to June, and there was very, very little fresh fruit and vegetables in the markets and in the shops. Lovely bread, very lovely cheese. The food they had was quite kind of solid. It was good. It was nice. Very good beer. I remember going to Poland and just seeing all this kind of fresh fruit and veg in the market in Poznan and thinking, "Oh my God, I haven't seen that for months." I don't know why Poland managed it and Czechoslovakia didn't. But this question I ask myself kind of about how much should government intervene in food. I think Czechoslovakia is probably an example of too much government intervention or it's the problem of kind of state planned agriculture when it isn't allowing entrepreneurs to go over to somewhere else and bring in kind of fresh food. So their diets probably suffered a little bit because of it. So I think that broadly governments have a role to play in our kind of food system-- and an important one. But I wouldn't give our food system over to a government. You can see how it works.



Ben (00:53:54):

It's where that balance is. And I think actually there's a lot of work, like you mentioned on the transition thing about food security. So there's one element of sustainability, but there is another element, particularly in Britain where we could be more food secure. And maybe the government might have a role in, I suppose they call it market shaping, where you shape your own domestic market, but don't necessarily control it, but you set the conditions for it.



Pen (00:54:19):

Yes.



Ben (00:54:19):

Maybe another fun one would be if you went back then to anytime, anywhere, who do you have for dinner and what do you eat? Because you've written all of these books from Jane Austen's Time and Dickens and the like just showing the really fascinating recipes they might have eaten and actually what it says about either class or the time. But maybe if you are going back anytime, anywhere, what are you eating and what are you having for dinner?





Pen (00:54:48):

Well, the offer of having dinner with either Dickens or Jane Austen is just too irresistible, really. It's such a good question. I'm a sort of snapper up of trifles kind of food story, and I don't focus on a particular period. So if you drop me in any period I would be absolutely fascinated to find out what people are eating and what they think about it. So if I was dropped into a sort of medieval village, for example, I have a fair idea of what the Lord is going to be eating and what he thinks about it because there are records. There's lots of visual records of 12th, 13th, 14th century sort of feasts Chausa and all the rest of it when we've had this kind of emerging sort of middle class we know about some of the things that they would eat. But what I would love to know is-- I go right back in my book to sort of early medieval. So it's a sort of what we call the Anglo-Saxon period when 10% of the people are slaves in Britain.



Ben (00:56:00):

We don't know what they ate.



Pen (00:56:02):

Well, we do actually probably know what they ate because there were records of the reeve, the guy who would look after an estate. There are some records-- there's one from Bath Abbey from the early 11th century-- before 1066, so before this massive kind of normal invasion where he says, "This is my job. I have to make sure that the shepherd gets some sheep milk and some cheese, and I have to make sure the slaves get some beans and all the rest of it. But I would love to know what people thought about it. So we have inklings of what people ate. And the other thing that I find totally fascinating is our relationship to foraged food because we have this idea now that everybody in the past foraged. It was just a natural, normal thing to do. But the records of it are really scant. And there seems to be a perception that people did not-- that you could forage for medicine and that was kind of okay. Or you could pick blackberries if you were a child. But the foraging food in the hedgerow was quite, or in the fields was quite shameful. It indicated you couldn't afford to eat it yourself. So that's one of the mysteries that if you offered me a time capsule, I would love to go back to a village-- any period actually-- and try and find out really what people thought about the food they were eating. Did they love it? Did they kind of hanker for something different? We know that they sometimes anchored for better bread, softer bread, whiter bread. What did they think about food that was out there?



Ben (00:57:45):

That's fascinating. And that puts into context your chapter on warts, those sort of Herby elements. And then also just this whole go back and forth on not what people think about nettles, like a nettles soup. But actually, we go back and there is this little bit of it. We have this romantic notion that, "Oh, you forage for these nettles and you get this soup." But actually at the time, it's like, "Well, nettles soup is only if you really couldn't afford to have anything else." It's the lowest of the low in order to eat.



Pen (00:58:13):

Well, you might have it and just not tell anybody. It's very, very hard to know.



Ben (00:58:18):

That'd be interesting. I think I would do a classic and I'd be really interested in Shakespeare's eating. Well, maybe he ate with his crew and company and things like that.



Pen (00:58:33):

I suspect meat, beer, bread.



Ben (00:58:35):

Yes.



Pen (00:58:35):

But how much veg because they don't talk about the veg. They probably had it-- probably quite a wide variety of veg.



Ben (00:58:42):

Was it different amongst the company of actors and all of that in that time. So I think that's quite interesting because food's quite an interesting part of his plays, which comes through. So I'd be interested in whether that was a thing. That's actually maybe quite a good segue into your own writing process or writing day. Do you have an element where you're doing a lot of this research? Like you say, you're kind of picking things and ideas. Do you tend to write sections by hand or in verse? How do you think about writing? Do you have a particular process or is it just come about organically over the years?



Pen (00:59:18):

Well, I work four days a week at Penguin Books actually. So my writing is quite concentrated into Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays for this book and then a sabbatical. So for my last book, I had a few months and this book I also had a few months-- six months. It's so little time. You have to really knuckle down and do it. And at the beginning of my sabbatical, I was thinking, "Oh, I'll go off and go on holiday and I'll see my family." And then I kind of started working I was thinking, "No, I just need to get my head down." So what I do is I do most of my research in the library, in the British Library which is amazing. It's such an incredible resource. It's incredible that it's free to use, so exciting. You can go in and take out a herbal of beautiful illustrations of strawberries or dandelions or something published in the 17th century, and you just have it and hold it, turn the pages. It's just so wonderful. So yes, I would kind of try and be quite efficient in my reading; read a lot, try and kind of. And then just keep a kind of magpie like. Pick out the things that were interesting, that kind of fit together.



Ben (01:00:42):

And then handwritten notes when you're reading them?



Pen (01:00:44):

No. I type notes and then I can kind of crosscheck what I'm looking for in my search notes. So then I'll have a little document that's probably going to end up being my chapter when I put in the things that I find unmissable interesting. And then the chapter sort of emerges from them.



Ben (01:01:05):

And then do you consider yourself more a historian then or more of a writer? Because I guess you are writing-- When I read it flows into what I guess people are saying as this narrative nonfiction-- a story comes out as opposed to just a collection of facts. There's argumentation and evidence within that. I would go so far to say there's some style-- You can have something which is sort of an encyclopedia, although actually, they have style as well. Tries to nudge towards the neutral, whereas a writer will have something to it. And obviously, I think you are writing nudges to something which has a style, also has a story. So are you conscious of that and do you consider that, or do you still consider yourself more from a historian route to sort of argument and the evidence part of things?




Pen (01:01:58):

I don't really think about it at the time, actually. I guess I think if I'm interested in it, then I hope other people will be interested in it. Some things I find really funny. I put things in if they amuse me or if I'm interested in them. And there were kind of a couple of chapters where I started writing them and I just wasn't interested enough. I started trying to write a chapter on sweet potato, and I just thought, "Do you know something? I just don't care enough."



Ben (01:02:29):

Easy to edit out that if you don't care about it.



Pen (01:02:32):

I'm sure sweet potatoes are really fascinating. I just didn't find the fascinating stuff about it. So I'm not terribly conscious of trying to do one thing or another. I just put it together and try-- I edit constantly.



Ben (01:02:48):

Okay. You edit as you go.



Pen (01:02:49):

I edit as I go. So I write something and then think, "It's too long, too long. Get rid, get rid, get rid" or kind of rephrase it, change it; sometimes move things around. I think particularly with this book, because I'm trying to pull in not just the story about different foods, but about the way people thought about them at the time or the way people were thinking about quite big subjects about economics or responsibility or whatever. So I'm trying to kind of pull in occasionally a bit of Adam Smith's or Edmund Burke or something a tiny bit but only as they relate to my argument. And so I'm very conscious that I need to try and explain that and explain why I feel it's relevant to Kippers, for example. So Adam Smith has this whole chapter at the End of Wealth of Nations on Herring, which I found totally fascinating. I thought, "I've got to put that in." But how do you weave it in because there's so many bits of that story to tell? So that's the hard bit for me is structuring the kind of the story and the thinking around it.




Ben (01:03:55):

That makes a lot of sense. And how important are your Yorkshire roots to how you are today? I mean, obviously you've been in London for a while now. There's a feeling of this kind of north south divide a little bit. But actually, when you travel around, it gets even sort of deeper than that. So Yorkshire people feel very Yorkshire. It's not just the north south element. Is that quite important to you or your writing?



Pen (01:04:24):

Not consciously, but I know it is because I know that I'm completely fascinated by anything that comes out of Yorkshire. Yorkshire has this kind of age old kind of rivalry as Lancashire as well. So I was conscious that I had to very deliberately kind of stop thinking about Lancashire as a Yorkshire person would, and try and think about Lancashire as a feud historian would. But yes, the north south divide and where that comes from, and whether that is natural or somehow imposed, somehow has that grown out of our kind of historic, which I think actually probably has o a degree that I find really fascinating. Yes, as you say, I kind of grew up in Leeds in Yorkshire, and Yorkshire was very much-- Yorkshire's a very sort of larger than life county. It's very kind of proud of itself. It's proud of its kind of food and it's northern roots and all the rest of it in the way that Scotland is.



So I really recognize that kind of idea that you get particularly in Scotland, and this is what Scottish food is. And if you translate that to places like Ireland where its food story has been much more kind of beaten around by kind of the Anglo-Irish kind of settlers. And Ireland's sort of peasant food, I suppose, was really kind of erased as much as possible by sort of colonial actions. So I find that kind of regional, I think possibly because I come from this kind of quite proud county. I find those regional differences really fascinating.



Ben (01:06:17):

Okay. That's quite a good segue into-- I have a bits of fun section has only come to mind around food and what you may think of it and how we do it. So easier by question, how do you put peas on your fork?



Pen (01:06:36):

I love this. I have a chat in scoff on peas and I don't even know if I'd really realize that the "posh" way to eat any food is to squash it on the back of your fork.

Ben (01:06:51):

Yeah. The fork's held the other way round. I say the other way round if people sort of thinking, you put it on maybe a bit of a mash and put your peas on.



Pen (01:07:00):

Yeah, exactly. No, I don't do that to be honest with you because I love peas so much, I couldn't bear just to have three peas and to eat three peas at once. I want a whole kind of fork full of them.



Ben (01:07:14):

Sure. And then the meal towards the evening, should we think about, I guess there's tea; high tea, dinner, supper. What should we call that meal?



Pen (01:07:26):

We should call it whatever we want to call it. I think this is the thing. People say to me, "Should you put cream or jam first on your scon or should you put milk or tea first in your tea cup?" I think you should do-- in terms of those foods, you should experiment, see what you like the taste of and do that. I love the fact that people call meals different things. I love the fact that in Yorkshire, people have tea and maybe supper, whereas in London, they might have dinner. I think regional differences are really fun, really important, but also actually really precious because anything that links you to your family and your community and kind of your place in the world is important. You said this is a fun fact and I'm going back to the kind of the serious point about my book. But really one of the things that emerged from me is that one of the problems of our kind of globalized food system is that we've ceased to look after our kind of community customs. So anything that kind of unites a family, or a community, or a nation, or a county or whatever, I think is valuable. I think any good food is valuable in doing that.



Ben (01:09:03):

Going back to it which actually links all the way back to our strawberry; the variety of the different things whether that's regional, local, and how you did it, rather than having one strawberry to rule them all would be interesting.




Pen (01:09:13):

Yes, the lord of the strawberry.



Ben (01:09:17):

I guess the last one on that is how should we or how do you eat or drink-- maybe eat or drink soup. I was with someone the other day and they spoon their soup-- well, I consider it backwards. And then some people who spoon it forward. Then actually in the Asian diaspora often we won't be given a spoon because we'll drink it from the bowl, which makes a lot more sense also for the kind of soups that we have, although you have these sticker soups or whatever. But yeah, spoon backwards, forwards. And obviously, the kind of answer is we don't care. But how did different spooning soups come about?



Pen (01:09:58):

Oh my goodness. I think anything like pushing your peas on the back of the fork, spooning backwards, as you say, any of those elements or kind of etiquette about food are an indication that I'm eating this slowly because I'm not starving. It's placing yourself in the status of somebody with leisure and plenty of food who has time to do all these things, who doesn't have their tea at five o'clock because they've come in from the field starving, who eats their supper or their dinner at eight or nine o'clock because they have the leisure to have afternoon tea at three or four o'clock. All these things are a kind of deliberate separation of the body and the body is need for fuel from the thing that we're eating.



Ben (01:10:54):

The upper classes do it or the ones who are very wealthy and then the middle classes follow.



Pen (01:10:58):

Everybody else copies, yes.



Ben (01:10:59):

Actually, it was the same in our history of theater. So in fact, you could go back. So Shakespeare's Globe, you had the Groundlings, very noisy, it was all very mixed, and you actually often were to talk through performances and that. Then those with wealth and power didn't want to be associated with it. So they drew the audiences differently. You had to be quiet at performances. You started to segregate how you go to theater. So a very classic process there. Great. Okay. Final few sets of questions then. We might do a little bit of overrated or underrated. So I'll give you like a word or a thing and you can either make some comment or say whether it's overrated or underrated or some commentary about what it is. So I'm going to start with tripe. I guess we could think about awful in general. But tripe, do you think is overrated or underrated?



Pen (01:11:54):

Well, tripe has a whole history behind it of how it used to be. We would now probably say overrated because tripe was kind of posh and fish and chips, for example. I'm going to reserve judgment, I'm going to reserve the right to...



Ben (01:12:10):

That's fair enough.



Pen (01:12:12):

Because there are tripe lovers and that's great, I would say.



Ben (01:12:16):

I think my personal view is now that is a little bit underrated.



Pen (01:12:21):

Yes, I'm sure you're right.



Ben (01:12:22):

And it's underrated for me because-- So I'm trying to eat less meat, but meat has been a really big part of how I've grown up in food culture. But I've taken the view that it's really only just both respectful and sustainable to appreciate everything about an animal. So if you have tripe which can be done really well, then the fact that we waste so much of it, I don't think is a good idea because it has really cultural connotations. There's no nutritional reason why we shouldn't eat some of these things. So obviously it swings and roundabouts and things, but for me, although I know it probably just has to be cooked quite well. So another one on this is gin. Do you think gin might be overrated, underrated, or any commentary on its history?



Pen (01:13:14):

So gin is fascinating because for a long time gin was very underrated because it had this kind of scurrilous past. It was kind of mother's ruin. It was the thing that women would drink instead of looking after their children. They had the gin craze of the 18th century supposedly. The government kind of put a lid on the gin craze partially by legislation, and the government said, "Right, okay, we're going to get rid of-- Nobody can distill gin in their front rooms any longer. You've got to have a proper still and a proper license to do it." So gin suddenly became much harder to get access to. And for a long time, it kind of found tonic. It kind of became a sort of colonials drink. But it was pretty underrated. Then we've recently had a kind of gin renaissance. Gin makers have challenged HMRC and said, "Give us a license." And HMRC have said, "Oh, okay, we'll give you a license." So now you have lots of gin. I suspect gin-- maybe we've had peaked gin.



Ben (01:14:30):

Yeah.



Pen (01:14:30):

And as soon as you see drinks getting sweet-- if you have very sweet kind of...



Ben (01:14:39):

You've gone from gin and tonics to gin and all of these other sorts of cocktails and things.



Pen (01:14:43):

If you get gin and sort of very sweet cocktails with lots of kind of very sweet kind of kiwi fruit and strawberry kind of flavors, I think that is an indication for fashion that we've had peak whatever it is, and fashion will go and move on to whiskey or something that's kind of a bit more macho or bold or harder or something.



Ben (01:15:02):

Yeah. I hadn't thought about it that way. I'm not sure what I've own feel about gin, but I kind of think some bits of alcohol have now got definitely overrated like alcohol pops. Alcohol pops are just not a very good idea on that. But anyway, overrated or underrated on a couple of other things. Goose?



Pen (01:15:21):

Oh, goose is-- In Stuffed, I talk about the enclosures through the kind of prism of the goose because apparently our common lands were just flocks and flocks and flocks of thousands of goose and everybody would own one. Goose was the meat that most people could afford at Christmas. You'd save up and you'd have your Christmas goose. I don't think it's underrated now. I just think it has been wiped off the table by turkey, for example. And it would be nice to see it come back again.



Ben (01:15:59):

Yeah. Well, I think turkey's definitely overrated and goose underrated, although that's also with Asian food as well. But also that's fact that you cannot really-- I guess turkeys have it to a certain degree, but you can't really fast grow geese.



Pen (01:16:16):

No.



Ben (01:16:16):

And so as part of that as being part of the slow movement, and therefore essentially being forced seasonal because of that and then all of those connotations.



Pen (01:16:27):

If you go into a supermarket, you might well be able to buy a jar of goose grease for your roast potatoes and very delicious they will be too. But it's very unlikely you'd be able to buy a goose at Christmas.



Ben (01:16:40):

And actually I guess that goose fat might've been from the Christmas before anyway because it lasts for a very long time.



Pen (01:16:45):

It does lasts for a long time, yeah.



Ben (01:16:46):

So I'm not even sure where it would come from. Okay. And one more on this which you sort of mentioned briefly. Maybe it'd be the history rather than overrated and underrated, but you could do so as well, is herring.



Pen (01:17:00):

Oh, totally underrated. That's an easy one. So herring has this massive role in our history and we've just sort of turned our back on it. Particularly in Scotland, the Scottish clearances were done for herring. All these people were pushed off the land and told to go and fish go on. "There's all this herring out there. Just go and make-- like I was saying before, become part of the cash economy. Fish, earn your living." So people had tough lives following the herring shoals as either fishermen or the girls were the herring girls on land. And they'd follow them all the way down the east coast from Scotland, down to Cresta, down to Great Yamas. Live in huts, gut the fish and pickle them and salt them and all the rest of it.



Herring has been an enormous part of our life. In the seventies we'd overfished, we had to stop fishing it for a while, let the stocks build up again. But if you look at Holland for example, it has its herring feasts and it has sort of special days when they celebrate them. And we have herrings in the form of kippers, particularly a very British way of eating herring. We've just kind of forgotten about it. And I think that oily fish-- Anybody who's kind of writing about food and health at the moment will say oily fish is really good for you. It's good for all kinds of your bones. I'm not a medic, but it's a very useful part of the diet and I think we've let it just go.



Ben (01:18:42):

Sure. I was in Copenhagen earlier this year and I was just in a restaurant and asked them, "What's your special dish or what's the dish I should most try?" And no doubt, first one to get, "We have this form of open herring that you should try and we're very proud of." And they did it in a certain way so definitely with that.



Pen (01:19:03):

Yeah.



Ben (01:19:04):

Great. Okay, last couple of questions. One is are you working on any particular current projects or are you excited about anything? Obviously, you'll probably be talking about your book quite a lot, but are you looking forward to another project or something already? Or what are you spending your time on?



Pen (01:19:20):

Well, the book flattened me so I'm going to recover a bit, talk about it a bit I hope. I have long wanted to write about our religious festivals and food, and what they mean, and why they're important, and how they bring communities together or not, and how they are the kind of one-- two sides of a coin; feasting and then fasting. We've kept the feasting, we've lost the fasting. And I'm really fascinated about how the fasting is also part of our communal health, but our physical health as well. And so it'll be something in that direction, not sure what.



Ben (01:20:07):

Interesting. And will you concentrate on British festivals? Because I guess with other cultures they've kept their fasting a little bit more. Obviously we have towards Easter and Ash Wednesday and the like within that. But then if I think of South Asian and all of these other type of festivals and the interlink with food is quite interesting. Some of them actually, I think of the Jainism. Some of those are essentially vegetable festivals as well. They're not necessarily surrounded around meat. So you're interested in all or will you concentrate because of the British roots on Britain, or probably yet to decide yet?



Pen (01:20:47):

I think yet to decide, because what you've just said is really interesting. I think this is probably-- We learn a lot in Britain from other countries. We've learned a huge amount from immigrant cuisines and the way that people have kind of opened restaurants to us from Chinese or Indian cuisines and all the rest of it. That has kind of flatten or rather our instincts to be very hierarchical to things. And yes, we should definitely. I think there's so much we can learn from other cultures. At the moment, for example, this is a statistic that medics talk about in terms of ultra-processed food, is that our consumption of something like 60% of our calories comes from ultra-processed food, very high. In Portugal, apparently 10%. So clearly other cultures are able to kind of keep ultra-processed food-- food that is becoming obviously bad for our health-- keep it at Bay. And I'm really interested in how food cultures are resilient in that sense.



Ben (01:21:57):

And also what we absorb or not sort of like this idea of British curry obviously wasn't around 500 years ago and how we acquired that. Well, that's a really fascinating project. And then the last question would be, do you have any life advice for listeners either about being historian or being a writer or anything to do with food, and you think back about your own path that you'd like to share with anyone?



Pen (01:22:27):

I mean, I sort of fell into being a food historian sort of by accident. I'd always loved writing. I thought I wanted to write fiction. If my advice is anything-- and I'm not going to tell somebody how to run their life. But don't assume that fiction is the only way of writing, I think is what I learned. When I was working for the British Museum press, the publishing bit for the British Museum and I discovered that they published books on food history and it was like falling in love. I'd never knew that it was even a subject-- and this is 20 years ago or more. So finding that kind of subject that just feels so right to me was really transformational. And then thinking, "Well, maybe there is more to this writing lark than just writing novels."



Ben (01:23:21):

Great. Well that sounds like excellent advice. So I will once again highlight-- and for those who are on the video, Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain, which will be out in November in the UK. I highly recommend it. And thank you very much.



Pen (01:23:38):

Thank you so much. It was such an interesting conversation. Thank you.



Ben (01:23:41):

Great.





Fuchsia Dunlop: Chinese Cuisine, Culture, History, Philosophy, knife skills, texture and mouthfeel | Podcast

Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has spent much of the last two decades exploring China and its food.

In her latest book, Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Her Instagram is here.


In this podcast episode, Fuchsia joins host Ben to dive deep into the history, culture and techniques behind Chinese cuisine. From the ancient origins of steaming to the finer points of knife skills and texture, Fuchsia provides fascinating insights into what makes Chinese food so unique.  We talk about our origin food dishes:


“there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chilli and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food”


Fuchsia debunks common myths and misperceptions about Chinese food in the West, from the idea that it's unhealthy to the notion that exotic ingredients are eaten only out of poverty. She traces how historical circumstances led Chinese cuisine to be seen as cheap and lowbrow in the West compared to French or Japanese food.

Delving into the cultural exchange around food, Fuchsia offers a nuanced take on debates over cultural appropriation and argues that an openness to different cultures can be "life enhancing." She shares colorful anecdotes from her research and travel in China that bring dishes like Pomelo Pith and Shanghainese "Western food" to life.

We chat about:

  • Steaming and its importance as a cooking technique.

  • The importance of bland food, and how my mother needs to eat rice regularly

  • How to understand mouthfeel and the joy of texture in Chinese cuisine

  • Knife skills and the skills of the wok

  • Fuchsia’s writing process 

On mouthfeel and texture:

“if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting.”

Listen in the player above or on your favourite podcast player.

PODCAST INFO

Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Fuchsia Dunlop. Fuchsia has a new book out, Invitation to a Banquet. Fuchsia is one of the most extraordinary writers on Chinese cuisine and culture I know. You'll understand more about Chinese culture from her book than I think almost any other book on China. Welcome.


Fuchsia (00:00:18):

Hi. Very good to be here.


Ben (00:00:21):

So what would be your origin food story or recipe, the dish that explains a part of the story of your life? I'll tell you mine first so you can have a little think. So for me, it's probably chicken rice, or it's sometimes called Hainanese chicken rice. The dish was probably adapted from a poached chicken dish in Hainan, a kind of wenchang chicken because in Hainan at the time, they didn't have what we think of as chicken rice. And the immigrant diaspora from a hundred over years ago went to Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Singapore, where my parents come from. My father is from Malaysia, my mom is from Singapore, and they met in London. Now, this is the dish we now cook as chicken rice and it has traveled. We still use poached chicken, although we can do it with steamed chickens as well.


My mother, particularly when we started eating the dish really likes to use a corn-fed chicken, so it's a different kind of chicken adapted to how we are today. It appeals to us because there's kind of no food wasted, you have the nose to tell aspects. You have a wonderful broth as well as the rice and the chicken. We'd eat with growing up probably almost once a week on a kind of Sunday as often a substitute for the traditional Sunday roast. So that was kind of our way of being in London and having a connection to where we're from. So what would your origin food dish be?


Fuchsia (00:01:51):

Well, can it be a Chinese origin dish?



Ben (00:01:53):

Yeah.


Fuchsia (00:01:55):

I've been interested in food since I was born practically and I've been very keen on cooking since I was a child. But there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chili and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food


Ben (00:03:19):

That reflects on a couple of things in your book and actually a lot of your work. So one is the kind of vegetable heavy nature of actually a lot of Chinese cuisine because there's a lot of people who think of the banquets and maybe the roast meats which came from Cantonese cooking over here, but actually a lot of it is vegetable heavy. The other thing I guess is that you tend not to eat a single dish in isolation. You'll always have a comparison dish like some sort of rice or noodles or something like that. So when you eat your dish, what would you pair it with? Are you generally vegetable heavy in terms of how you're thinking about food?


Fuchsia (00:04:01):

Well, yes, that dish you would always have with something else and rice. So because it's a vegetable, you'd probably have something with protein in it. So maybe some tofu or some chicken; maybe something like you could have dry fried chicken could be quite nice, a different sort of texture and a different sort of heat, and plain steamed rice. But yeah, that's another thing. There are many slightly weird and crazy western stereotypes about Chinese food. The most baffling of all is this idea that Chinese food is unhealthy. Of course this derived from the fact that for most westerners for a very long time, Chinese food was kind of take away food. It was tremendously popular, but mainly fried, deep fried, stir fried; not very many vegetables or soups.


Actually, as I'm sure you know very well, there is no other culture probably that puts as much emphasis on the link between diet and health; the inseparable link between diet and health as the Chinese. This has been going on for 2000 years and more. So yes, one thing that I'm always terribly keen to emphasize in my writing is that Chinese food is not only delicious, but it's really feel good food. If you know how to cook simple home dishes and how to assemble a menu, it's both satisfying to the senses and really balanced, and that's what it's all about. So yes, like everyone these days, I'm very aware of the terrible environmental disaster that we are facing and the need to eat much less meat and dairy foods and try to put the emphasis on vegetables. I think that Chinese cuisine is just a treasure house of inspirations for anybody who's looking to reduce the amount of meat in their diet. And certainly with me, I can't really live without vegetables. I crave the simple blanched or stir fried leafy greens that are part of almost every Chinese meal. I actually feel quite uncomfortable if a day or two goes by without having lots of vegetables.


Ben (00:06:28):

Well, my mom feels really uncomfortable if she goes a few days without eating rice. And actually, that's quite true of a lot of my family back in Asia. Also the link of health and diet, my mom has slowly persuaded me over the years or over this link. She would always say, "You've got to eat such and such a food. You are too hot, you are too cold." And I'm like, "Having grown in the western side tradition, that's kind of rubbish." And now particularly when I have a cold or something like that, my mom's congee rice porridge, soupy rice type of dishes-- It's like, "Oh, that is exactly what I crave and I feel better." The other element, I guess, when I explain to a lot my friends who grew up here riffing on a couple of your earlier things is, soupy rice is often very bland. It doesn't have to be, you can have toppings. But this blandness as a contrast is really important. So like having rice at the end of the meals as well as your vegetables. That's something they don't quite get.


Then the other thing is often-- I guess the translation is mouthfeel; a kind of texture. So my mom and I like knuckles and bones and we have all of these kind of gloopy bits and often some dishes, the joy isn't in the flavor. It might be kind of very bland to certain palates, but the joy is kind of in the mouthfeel and that combination I still find is something that isn't so well understood. Did it take you a while to appreciate that? I guess a lot of the recipes when you look at them in the original talk about mouthfeel or the kind of mouthfeel that you should be expecting in a recipe.

Fuchsia (00:08:03):

Yeah, it certainly took me a long time because I think like most westerners, I grew up with a relatively limited range of textures in my food. So crisp and soft and crunchy. But not slithery and bouncy and with a high grapple factor, as my father always says; the sort of very intricate parts like chicken's feet and so on. So I was brought up to be very polite and to eat everything that I was given. So when I went to China, I did that. I would eat out with Chinese friends and there would be goose intestines for the hot pot or tripe and so on. For a long time, probably few years, I would eat these things politely but without really any pleasure. And I would just kind of think, "What's the point?"


Then I don't know what happened. I guess it was just through exposure and through eating with lots of enthusiastic Chinese people. But I have come to really appreciate this extra dimension of gastronomy and I love it. I just found that I was ordering slithery things myself and now I think the texture and the-- I mean, I think Chinese palates really appreciate complexity of texture. So things that are very soft, but then a little bit crunchy, or a very soft lion's head meatball with crispy water chestnut in it, or a goose intestine which is so smooth and slippery and then it's a bit resistant to the bite in the end. So I now really enjoy these kind of playful, flirtatious, unexpected contrasting textures. I do think that for foreigners, if you want to really appreciate Chinese food, this incredible cuisine, you don't have to appreciate texture because there are so many other delicious dishes that don't require it.


But if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting. So it's kind of a fun, slightly unexpected, uncomfortable subject. But I found that I've had quite a lot of messages from readers who have said that after reading the chapter in the previous book about Shark's Fin and Sichuan and Pepper, about texture and mouthfeel that something kind of clicked. For the first time, they actually kind of realized that you could eat certain ingredients mainly for the pleasure of texture, like jellyfish. I mean, it has no flavor.


So once you've kind of opened your mind merely to the possibility, then you can start to sort of play with it. I've done some events, I've done some talks where I've taken along a whole load of pig's ear strips or dog's tongues and talked about texture, then got everyone to taste them. It's just a really interesting experience for most westerners because it is just trying to eat these things with a different mindset; to put away all your prejudices and the deeply ingrained idea that there's no point in eating them because there's no meat. And just try to explore the texture in a sensory way, and people find it really fun.


Ben (00:11:49):

Yeah. It struck me there was a couple of things there on reading your previous work and this one, and one was the history of it. So even within British food, I guess it was a nose to tell eating, but you would've eaten these textural foods more often, although more highly flavored. I wonder whether it's something to do with the stories you are told around it; the kind of almost cultural value that you are also eating at it, or like you say, your mind is open to it. I remember reading-- I never tasted it-- but Heston Blumenthal, who's a famous British chef who does kind of some molecular gastro meat type recipes as well. He kind of did a deconstructed fish and chips where he sprayed the smell of salt because there's an adage within British food that it always tastes better at the seaside.


I think a lot of that is to do with the experience and the stories that you had and things that you're growing up. And I wonder with texture whether it's the same. So when you're open to the story and you've heard the really long tradition about why we would be interested in texture and you are attuned to it, it kind of opens up another form of appreciation for it which if you don't have that story or the way that sits in that. One of the great things I found in reading your book is just the long history of so many of the stories about where the techniques come from, where the recipes come from. And some of them are sort of newer stories, they don't always stretch back 2000 years. They might stretch back earlier. I was wondering how conscious you are about when you eat something about its history and its food and how much that is part of the pleasure that people get.


Fuchsia (00:13:29):

I think it is part of the pleasure. Specifically, so many Chinese dishes have little stories about them and legends, about emperors and scholars and servants and how the dish was invented. Some of them are clearly just made up for fun, they're not really historical. But they still are part of the character of a dish. More importantly, yes, I think it is. Like Mrs. Song's fish soup, fish stew-- Song’s [ ] — which is the one of the dishes that I write about in the book. That is a dish that goes back to the 12th or 13th century to the Song Dynasty. There's written mention of it in historic records and it's rather a fantastic feeling that there's this kind of continuity.


But I think more than anything, for me it is just sort of recognizing that this is a very great gastronomic culture in which food has been thought about and written about and considered in all kinds of ways for more than 2000 years. I mean, in early Chinese literature, you get these mouthwatering descriptions of food. This goes on through history and food was something that was worthy of consideration and literature. Also, of course it was the basis of health and ritual. I think once you understand that about China, then it completely blows out of the water this kind of another silly western stereotype that in some ways it's a poverty cuisine. There's this traditional Western assumption that the reason you would eat a dog's tongue is because you are desperately poor.


But things like you dog's feet are banquet delicacies. Yes, poor Chinese peasants would eat things in times of famine and they would eat wild plants, and like all farmers everywhere, they would try and make the most of an animal they killed. But rich and powerful people wanted to eat interesting, exotic, unexpected delicacies for fun. There's this amazing description of a banquet in the 18th century, which I've mentioned several times in Zhangzhou, and one of the dishes served was a bear's paw surrounded by the tongues of crucian carp. This is a really extravagant dish.


Ben (00:16:11):

I think that's one of the things I got through the book. And I wonder whether the mouthfeel texture element as part of that is this thread of I guess, rarity or also the skill of something that you have to cook. So you look at this and go, "Oh, what can we do with this to make it really great to eat, even if it seems like a slightly strange ingredient?" There's one story which was in your book which a friend had recounted to you, which actually I remember because it was a recounted to me when I was a child. So I think it's probably one of those made up stories. But it was the idea of wanting to eat fish cheeks and fish head. So it was presented to me and they were like, "Wow, we are going to give you the best part of the fish and we’ll serve it as you are an honoured guest because you come back to visit us."


They told me the story about how in the olden days-- I don't know when this was-- you'd have highway robbers of some sort. And if they were to kidnap you, they would actually serve you a fish. If you went for the head or the cheek and you disregarded everything else, you were probably a keeper and it was worth ransoming you. If you went for the fins and around that, you might've been more middle class; you might've been worth keeping or not depending on that. If you went just for the body, there's like well, actually you would just return to the street; have a nice fish and that's it. There was something about the rarity of the cheek, but also it had this lovely sort of soft silky texture as well as being somewhat rare.


So there's kind of this intersection about rarity and exotic, which perhaps I think has been taken a little bit too far. But at least within history it seemed to be intertwined with those stories. Then as a five or six year old being told of these stories gives it a sort of glow, and later on when we're out there it's like, "Oh yeah, you want the whole of this prawn head." Give the little body to one of your western friends, they won't appreciate it. My mom has an actual phrase of-- I think it literally translates as, "They do not know how to eat. So you might as well do that.” I wonder how you feel about that intertwine with the exotic or the techniques that you use and where that is today.


Fuchsia (00:18:28):

What do you mean?


Ben (00:18:29):

Well, I guess that it's part of the appreciation of some of these kind of rare things. It's the stories that we've been told and that within perhaps within Western cuisine, we don't have quite the same emphasis on this sort of rarity or the stories about how this food has come about.


Fuchsia (00:18:49):

Yeah. So I would say that China is a culture that expands the possibilities of the pleasure of eating in all directions. So part of that is through using a whole very complex raft of culinary techniques to transform ingredients into many different textures, colors, this sort of thing. It's also in diversity of ingredients. That's one of the things about China; that it has a huge range of terroirs of geography with different produce. So you have this extraordinary biodiversity, an immense choice of ingredients from tropical rainforests in the South, Siberian forests and deserts in the north. There are so many different things you can eat. And coupled with this intellectual appreciation of the thrill of eating and of the element of surprise and of using food to honor people.


So if you are having a special Chinese dinner, you want to have dishes that will make people go, "Wow," which will excite them and thrill them. This might be some very hyper seasonal ingredient. Maybe it's the new bamboo shoots of the season which are just perfect. Maybe it's some kind of fish that is only around for a couple of months a year, but also exotica, unusual things. So that might be, as you just mentioned, like the cheek of a fish. I mentioned in the book this incredible dish made with multitudes of fish cheeks which I was presented with once. To a certain extent, this is present in western gastronomy. So we have rare and precious things like caviar which was always something very expensive and exotic. Smoked salmon used to be until it was cheap sort of farm stuff.


I think particularly in the West, you have that sort of association actually with wines. So like a rare vintage wine has that kind of cachet. But in China, food has that place. And I think also in China, there's a long history going back to the Song Dynasty, at least of dishes that pretend to be something they're not. So there's a famous Sichuanese banquet dish jidouhua, which is chicken tofu. So you get presented at a banquet with what looks like a cheap street snack, like just silk and tofu in the way that it's made in. But actually, it's a laboriously made kind of curd made from pureed chicken's breast, which is a luxurious ingredient in a fine banquet stalk made from chicken and ham. So it's like a sort of edible joke; a witticism. So that's also part of the thrill.


Then of course, you have the negative aspect which is eating endangered animals. So things like shark's fins and bear's paws, which in the past, fair enough. There weren't that many people who could eat them and they were very rare. But now with this global crisis of biodiversity, we shouldn't go on eating things like this. Some of them are illegal now. There's a Chinese wildlife law which is supposed to ban poaching wild animals, but some of them are perfectly legal like shark’s fins. Unfortunately, China is a real center of wildlife trafficking of rare animal parts for tables and for medicine, for prescriptions.


I'm always very keen to emphasize firstly that this is a very elite minority thing. The vast majority of Chinese people never eat illegal exotica and probably don't eat shark's fin; most of them never in their whole lives. So it's kind of minority thing. Also, I think it's really important to get in proportion. We have many problems with what we eat. Like many European chefs serve eel, which is critically endangered Japanese bluefin tuna. I think that the Chinese have received more opprobrium for eating shark’s fins than these other categories. I think that we should all be facing up to our crimes against the environment. Not to mention actually, the beef industry and its connection with deforestation in the Amazon and terrible pollution and overfishing all over the world. So I think that it's a human problem and not just a Chinese problem. But having said that, I think that this kind of conscious desire to eat rare and illegal things for kicks is the unattractive side of Chinese gastronomy. And I hope that people will-- I've written in the book there are so many other things to eat in China which are exciting, exotic for other reasons. You really don't have to eat these things anymore.



Ben (00:24:06):

Yeah, I agree. I think exotic food is now definitely overrated, and I certainly don't eat anything like shark's fin anymore. But also actually, I don't eat foie gras. Like you say, I try and avoid eel. I'm not sort of dogmatic about it in the sense that if it's served to me already, it's like, "Well, if it's going to go in the bin, then that's even more of a waste.” But certainly, it's a sort of ordering of it. I wanted to pick up on your comment because there's a lot of it in the book on cooking techniques. One of the ones which I'm always astounded that a lot of my western friends have basically never done is steaming. 


This was in university, and I remember passing by with a friend at a market and there was some really beautiful fish. They said, "Oh, I wouldn't know what to do with that." I say, "Oh, that's fine. We'll take it back and we'll steam it. Just couple of chopsticks as a kind of trivet and a plate with some water and we'll be away." They were astounded. It takes about 10 minutes and the whole thing was done, yet most of my friends have essentially never steamed a fish. They might've steamed some vegetables maybe in a microwave, but none of the steaming techniques. I find it's also a very easy technique as well as a quick technique for a lot of foods. I hadn't understood the history of it until reading the book. So I was interested in maybe how you came across steaming and what you think about steaming as a technique today and its history in Chinese cuisine, and what westerners should think about what's the first foods that maybe they should attempt to steam?


Fuchsia (00:25:38):

Yeah. Well, I suppose I find it really fascinating. I remember when I went to the Banpo Museum near Xi'an, which is a Neolithic settlement museum, and this was years ago. I was astounded to find-- among the artifacts in the museum was a pottery steamer from the Neolithic age. So actually, steaming is the most ancient of the really distinctively Chinese cooking methods. Everyone thinks of stir frying in a wok, but that came much later. So the Chinese, like everyone, as soon as they invented pottery, they were boiling, but they were also steaming. No one else was doing this to the extent or at all of the Chinese. One example that someone pointed out to me is Moroccan steam couscous, but that's basically just couscous. In China, you can steam everything.


You can steam a fish, a soup, your staple grains, your noodles. In Shanxi, they steam their oat noodles. You can steam anything really. It's a hugely versatile method. It feels very fresh and healthy. With some things like a fish as you mentioned, a perfect way. You cook it until it's just done and its flesh is still so juicy and kind of lively. You can also steam things for many hours. Like in Sichuan, they have these wonderful dishes where you marinate meat and spices and chili bean paste, and you coat them in crumbs of rice and you steam them, and it has this wonderful sort of comforting texture. I think one thing that's very interesting in China is that nobody really has ovens.


So in China, you went from the very archaic cooking methods with open fires and standing pots in open fires and hanging them over fires to enclosing the fire in a sort of kitchen range with their mouths in the side or the back for putting the fuel in. And then larger openings in the top where you would put your wok and your steamer. There was no oven. I was really surprised when I started researching Chinese food. No one had an oven in their house. Nowadays, western baking is a bit trendy with urbanites and people have some fitted kitchens and stuff. But basically, the oven is not part of a traditional Chinese kitchen. You don't even have an oven in most restaurants. Until recently, you roasted and baked things, you went to specialists. So you might go to a particular bakery or the people making roast ducks and barbecue meat, they would have ovens. If you wanted to eat roasted things, you bought them in from these kind of specialists. 


So I think in many ways, steaming takes the place of the oven in Chinese culture. It's a very economical method. So traditionally, you could do something like you could boil a stew and then steam your grain on the top. So you'd be using only one lot of fuel. It was like a kind of one pot meal, but a two story pot. So I think it's a cooking method that's-- I mean, in the West, when people do steam food, it tends to be as a sort of very consciously, healthy minimalist option. It's not really about gastronomy. But in China, it's also about creating amazing flavors. The interesting thing is also that it's so basic. Of course you can have a nice tower of bamboo steamers, but you don't need a steamer. You can just put a little trivet in your wok and then put a plate on it and put a lid on it, and you have a steamer. Or you can even lay a couple of wooden chopsticks across the base of the wok and balance a plate on that. So you can sort of steam with anything. I suppose back to texture again, that westerners don't terribly like the texture-- Like if you steam a fish, the skin is sort of soft and slippery.


Ben (00:30:03):

Which I love.


Fuchsia (00:30:05):

Yeah, exactly. If you steam a chicken as well, the skin is sort of floppy. Westerners I found don't particularly like this texture at first. People like things to be crisp up. But I can't think of any better way really to cook a fish.

Ben (00:30:22):

And does it have an origin story within Chinese culture as some, "God came down and gave steam in the same way that sort of fire has it." It's a little bit more complicated, is it?


Fuchsia (00:30:33):

I think it was the Yellow Emperor. I did write in the book. I think the Yellow Emperor certainly taught people how to cook cereals and I think he taught them both how to make jook congee and to steam the grains as well. Then there's a very famous poem in the Book of Songs; this really archaic collection of folk songs. I can't remember the name of the pen, but it describes Lord Millet because millet was the original kind of sacred grain before rice. People in the North where Chinese culture sort of coalesced were eating millet. There's this description of how Lord Millet taught people how to grow the grain and to steam it.


Ben (00:31:19):

And actually, mentioning of the soup brings to mind-- So when my father would always go out, when we would eat, he would always order a soup at a Chinese meal. I kind of never really appreciated why. It would just happen and sometimes it was just a very light broth type thing. Even with kind of almost one plate meals, you have something to wash down the meal. But it wasn't really actually until reading your work did I have a full appreciation of that, nor it's history, nor that actually sheer variety-- I mean, I guess you get this with all Chinese cuisines that when you look into it, the sheer variety is kind of mind boggling. But yeah, I'd be interested in how you think about soups today. Are they as important as they've ever been in Chinese cuisine, and what is it maybe that here in the west we haven't appreciated about the soup part of the meal?


Fuchsia (00:32:10):

Yeah. Well, in China, there are two kinds of soup, really; two broad categories; gong and tongue. The gong is like a stew soup. So it's where you have a pot full of liquid and you have lots of food usually cut into slivers floating around in it. This is a very interesting dish because it's really the original Chinese dish to go with your rice, and it was a sacred dish. It was offered in sacrifice to the gods. This gong, this soupy stew was used as a metaphor for the art of government. So ancient writers and philosophers talked about creating harmonious flavors in the gong using seasonings. And what they were really talking about was the art of government and balancing different interests. So this gong soup just has this incredible significance and it goes back to the sort of dawn of Chinese civilization.

Then the tongue is usually a lighter broth in which bits of food float. In these kind of soups, often the actual ingredients are less important than the liquid. I think a particular example is the Cantonese soups. So the Cantonese are brilliant at making these tonic soups with meat or poultry and different herbs and vegetables tailored often to the season. With these soups, you basically just eat the broth. You strain it off and it's all full of the chi, the life force, the nourishment of the ingredients. You might eat the ingredients, but they're quite exhausted, they're not tasty. The point is the liquid. I think that soup is an absolutely integral part of almost every Chinese meal. The equivalent of our English phrase, "Meat and two veg" as a sort of example of what a meal is. In China, [Chinese] which means four dishes and a soup. To a Chinese palate, you need a soup because it refreshes the palate. It's just part of the comfort of the meal.  So a meal without soup is a bit dry, it's a bit incomplete. 


So different parts of China, the soup maybe had first like Cantonese often have it first. In Sichuan, you have it last. Sometimes you can just have it on the side of the meal. But Chinese people really need soup in a way that westerners don't. So it's quite interesting. If you go to a dumpling restaurant in Beijing, so you can have your boiled jiaozi dumplings with your dip of soy sauce, chilies, whatever. But they usually have a big samovar full of meon pong, which is like the noodle cooking water because most people want to have a sort of broth with their meal. This is something that Westerners completely don't get.


I think it's probably because firstly, soups are not essential to a Western meal. The soups that we favor tend to be thicker blended soups, so they're more full-bodied. Many Cantonese restaurants in London-- not so much now-- they used to always have these wonderful wei tang, the soup of the day; these tonic soups I was talking about. Westerners would never order them. They would always order the crab and sweet corn soup. I wonder whether people think westerners think, "They're just not good value. It's just like water, it's just liquid. What's the point? It's somehow not satisfying." But it's a different sort of satisfaction. It's the satisfaction of comfort and of rinsing the palate and so on. And certainly since my own palate became kind of sinusized, I really love soup and I often make soup. If I'm making dandan noodles for example, I often have a bowl full of the noodle broth because the dandan is very spicy and very dry. Then you have this little broth with it and it's just comforting.


Ben (00:36:28):

Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, you had a passage in the book where you make kind of such a soup for your Chinese friends and they really appreciate it. I remember once going through a lot of effort to making a kind of soup like that for some of my western friends, and they really didn't get it. They thought the rest of the meal is-- And actually, I spent more time on the soup and actually probably more money than anything else. I had once I think, an Italian consummate type thing which was the closest that I'd had it where the soup was the star, but it was certainly not the same way. I wonder with that in restaurants here in London, we have a slightly similar issue with vegetables.


So you might have a really beautiful Chinese broccoli, a kailan or a thing. It's almost expensive, or it is as expensive as the meat dish because it's treated, it's cooked as well-- if not better, and it's considered sort of equal importance. Yet I know a lot of my friends are kind of like, "Why is that one so much more expensive? Let's just order another roast meat dish. Why not?" I said, "Well, that's not going to give you what you would just want to eat. Just meat and maybe a bit of your rice." So there's kind of that interesting thing, and I think it's perhaps similar with the soup. You don't feel you get value or maybe your mind is not attuned to the same way of it.


I think about the vegetables as a segue also. I hadn't fully understood until I read your book, some of the, I guess what I'd call the culture wars involved with this. I'm thinking about knife skills and the small slither food that you often get in Chinese cooking. I hadn't appreciated that. I could see how back in the day there was a sort of propaganda about, "You're not getting value for money. You don't understand what you're eating. This is just small food and they're trying to cheat you,” in that kind of propaganda war without realizing, "Well, if you're going to eat with chopsticks, the beauty of knife skills, how they evenly cooked." I remember sort of thinking, "Oh, I'm just going to really speed through. My knife skills are only average." It was like, "Oh, this is really much harder to cook and much less satisfactory. I now know why they all do it within that." So I was just interested in that what you feel about that kind of cultural part of it and the understanding maybe wrapping in the knife skills and that misunderstanding and how much of it, I guess was an almost not quite purposeful cultural war, but some of that. I guess some of that we have a legacy of that today. There's some things we have that are referred to sort of the cheap food where we had with MSG, vegetables and all of that. It seems to be maybe an ongoing kind of cultural exchange type of thing going on.


Fuchsia (00:39:15):

Yeah. Well, I think just to pick up on your point about vegetables. I think if you order vegetables in an English restaurant for example, they're usually these tiny apologetic little dishes on the side. But as you said, like a Chinese dish of vegetables, it's a proper dish. It's quite a lot of it and it's part of the balance of a meal. I think that's one thing I'm always keen to talk about. Again, this thing about Chinese food being about health and balance. That a Chinese meal is not really complete if you only have this sort of sexy, tasty, exciting dishes. You always need the neutral, the pale, the understated to balance them and to make a nice meal and to make you feel good afterwards because that's the point of eating as well as pleasure. It's sad really that people don't appreciate this dimension.


But again, I think it's about information and education because once you understand the purpose of it, then it becomes very important. The thing about food being cut in small pieces. So the Chinese largely have the habit of cutting food into small pieces for about 2000 years since the Han Dynasty. For that reason, all the cutting is in the kitchen. So the kitchen was a place where you had violence and knives and slaughter and chopping. And at table, it was very civilized. You didn't have clashing metal, you had your nice delicate chopsticks, and you would eat food that was already cut for consumption, or it was soft enough to be picked up with chopsticks. The habit of eating food cut into small pieces and the habit of eating with chopsticks have grown up together. Obviously, they're completely connected because you can't really eat a lamb with chopsticks very easily. I mean, it's better to have it cut up in small pieces.


When I was doing research for this book-- So I was reading some of the early accounts by Europeans of their first encounters with Chinese food, and a lot of them would say things like, "All the food was cut into very small pieces and I had no idea what I was eating." And they didn't because you see a sliver of something, "What is it? Is it chicken? Is it pork? What is it?" So it just struck me that, as you say, it kind of fed into all kinds of western suspicions about Chinese food because there was this idea that the Chinese, who as we know are very adventurous eaters and eat lots of exciting ingredients, that they were eating all this terrifying exotica and that if you went for a meal in San Francisco's Chinatown, maybe they would serve you rat or snake and you wouldn't know it because they would chop it up.


So there was this kind of on one hand, a great affection for Chinese food and all these chop suey and those early dishes. But also this kind of suspicion of the Chinese as being very other, very different eating habits. And I think the fact that the food was not recognizable like an English roast chicken played into people’s anxieties about it. Of course, nobody would give you a snake if you were paying for chicken because snake is much more expensive. I think also just in terms of character, that in the West, having great hunks of meat and roast turkeys and all bits of beef is seen as very macho and manly. So it's the bloke cooking on a barbecue or the male head of the household carving up a large chunk of meat at the table.


So by contrast, maybe Chinese food looks a bit kind of effeminate when it's all very delicate and cut up. But from a Chinese point of view, actually, it's rather different because eating great hunks of meat was things that the uncivilized barbarians beyond the Great Wall did. To be Chinese was to eat food that had been transformed by cooking, by knife skills into something that was very civilized and elegant. So the hulk hulking great roast actually seems a bit kind of archaic to Chinese eyes. So it's not that either is right or wrong, but I think it's really interesting to just consider how perceptions are different and how these enabled and encouraged prejudice.


Ben (00:43:49):

You have that phrase in your book [ ]  which I guess roughly translates as simple and monotonous.


Fuchsia (00:43:56):

Oh yeah. So many Chinese people will dismiss the cooking of the entire Western world as [Chinese], very monotonous, very simple. It's like almost a catchphrase. So many Chinese people will just say, "Oh, you just eat hamburgers and sandwiches, don't you?" It's obviously hilarious for me because I know that also lots of westerners think that Chinese people just eat chicken's feet, whatever it is.


Ben (00:44:22):

You talk about the sort of blending of ingredients and all of this. One of the most extraordinary stories you recount-- and I hadn't realized this was a thing-- was around Pomelo Pith. Did you know about this from a while back? How did that story raise, and what's so great about Pomelo pith? You kind of think, "Okay, well that's an ingredient which goes straight in the bin," but actually not.


Fuchsia (00:44:45):

Yeah. So pomelo-- I know lots of British people don't seem to even know what it is, but it's like a huge kind of citrus fruit with a slightly bitter taste. So the Cantonese-- I think only the Cantonese they use the pith, the white cottony pretty tasteless pith of this fruit, which is very thick to make a dish. The first time I had it was with a Cantonese friend of mine, Rose, who I actually wrote a whole chapter about in my previous book. She took me to a restaurant. We had this completely delicious dish and it was these kind of domes of something lovely and soft and mashy and a gorgeous sort of really opulent gravy scattered with shrimp eggs. It was so delicious. It turned out it was pomelo pith. It's a real Cantonese thing. [Chinese], that's Mandarin pronunciation by the way. So what they do is they peel or burn off the thin, shiny outer layer of the fruit. They breed special pomelos which don't have much actual fruit. Then the pith is tasteless, it's a bit bitter. So they soak it for several days, they change the water. It's a long process. Then they cook it in a fabulous broth made with meat and seafood for hours. And eventually, you get this very tasty and satisfying dish.


What is so fascinating for me about this is how the Chinese are so creative with cooking. It's this very analytical approach. I wrote about this in the book that I think that in most cultures, people will ask themselves the question, "Is this edible? Is this food edible? Is this sort of thing edible?" And for the Chinese, I think the question is slightly different. It's like, "How can I make this edible? What is this plant or this animal part? What does it have going for it and what's wrong with it? Can we bring out these qualities and modify or suppress the deficiencies?" This is what they do. 


So you have all these ingredients like pomelo pith, which is so unpromising. Everyone else just puts it in the bin. Yet, with a bit of imagination and technique, you have a fantastic dish. I find this so inspiring and I think everyone should look to the Chinese for creativity partly because it's fun and it's dazzling and it's delicious. But also it's so resourceful, and at a time when we are feeling all these environmental constraints and we have to eat more creatively. Some chefs in the west are trying to think of ways to eat insects and so on. The Chinese are way ahead. There are so many ingredients. But not just that, just this creative approach to making delicious things out of anything.


Ben (00:48:09):

Yeah. One of the principles or ideas I got from reading your book is that you kind of approach all ingredients like that so you can have something which more or less seems perfect; so don't do that much with it to bring out its essence. So you have something like pomelo pith, which you're going to have to do a lot with and with that idea that we're going to get the most of what we have. Actually, all of those sets of techniques come through from something where you likely get the sort of soul or the essence of the food because that's where it is, to something where you have to cook it, source it, technique over and over to really get the most of it. I found that the way you described that and put in your writing was really wonderful.


Then I picked up, which I'd heard earlier as well, the famed Catalan Spanish chef, Ferran Adria, which is probably considered one of the best Western chefs over the last few decades. His comments about how he thought that actually Mao was one of the most influential figures in food history because of how he sent so many chefs or so many people to work in the fields and how that changed Chinese cuisine, at least in the more modern era. So I was kind of interested in how you thought that perhaps Mao was an influence and maybe how Chinese cuisine in the last 50, 10 or 20 years has sort of developed post that era.


Fuchsia (00:49:35):

The thing is that the Chinese were pioneers of so many things that are now extremely interesting or crazies in the West. So things like the obsession with terroir, with the origin of ingredients, with seasons-- 2000 years in China, making imitation meat foods out of plants goes back to the 10th century in China, at least. Your restaurants go back six centuries before Paris. There was a sort of sophisticated restaurant scene in Hangzhou in the Jiangnan region. So China is this absolute treasure house of gastronomical thinking, ideas about health, cooking techniques. It's tragically neglected in the west. This is, I think largely for historical reasons because China was pretty much turning itself upside down. It was closed, so a lot of the 20th century there was this big period when China was turning in on itself and wars and revolutions and invasions and Cultural Revolution, and emerging at the end of it being a sort of quite secluded nation, quite poor, et cetera.


So for that reason, I think it's just people-- as Ferran Adria said so memorably. It's just that the outside world has just not really been aware of what China has to offer. And it's still the case that Chinese-- I mean, I think it's changing, frankly. But it's still the case that Chinese food by and large is immensely popular all over the world, but it's mostly seen as quite cheap and lowbrow and not terribly healthy. I think most people or a lot of people would understand why you would perhaps sometimes spend a lot of money on Japanese food or Spanish food or French food, but they don't really see Chinese cuisine as being a sort of big, hitting serious cuisine, which is completely mad. I think this is just historical reasons. It is actually partly what motivates me to write because considering how interesting the subject is, it's not been very much reflected in western food writing. There are some very good books, but there's not many compared with the scale of the country and the cuisine.


Ben (00:52:14):

Yes. I was reading I think something you'd written earlier about how hard it was to get your first book published because there wasn't that much interest from standard publishers. It's like, "Oh, why would we want a book on that?" Which kind of reflects it. I had a question in from a listener which could have riff on that, which is again, around all of this cultural appreciation, cultural appropriation dialogue which is happening in the media. One of my comments is particularly around food, there has always been this exchange. So the chili pepper started off in the Americas and food has always traveled, is this way of cultural dialogue. It's a little bit why my origin dish is where it is. My mom's dish travels wherever my mom is, so it's always my mom's cooking wherever she is. That's the sort of a unique thing I think around food.


It's also interesting it's kind of reflected a little bit in how laws have been developed in the sense that, rightly or wrongly you can have copyright for stories and films and you have patents for ideas and technology. But recipes have actually always been considered something which is kind of like a public good. We exchange it because it's always changing because as often you can't really say, "Well, where is that whole source thing from where a recipe comes about?" A little bit like chicken rice. It kind of developed across a lot of people at a lot of time because of that. So within that and where some of this dialogue has gone, do you have any thoughts about how we can best understand cultural exchange particularly around food and some of the dialogue around appreciation versus appropriation?


Fuchsia (00:53:58):

Well, the first thing to say is that basically all food is fusion food. Human beings have been exchanging ingredients and techniques and ideas for ages.


Ben (00:54:12):

Thousands of years.


Fuchsia (00:54:12):

In China, the food of North China, so many ingredients. To mention just a couple like sheep meat and wheat and flour milling technology, which is basically the basis of Northern Chinese food, and big garlic all came in along the Silk Road from the western lands in ancient times. In more modern times, the chili-- you can't imagine Sichuanese food without the chili. So it's all fusion. And I think that exchange and adaptation is a kind of human inevitability. But the whole debate about cultural appropriation is very much about-- I think most people don't really think that you shouldn't make a dish from another culture. It's about treating other cultures with respect, and it's about having fair representation in the media, in the restaurant industry.


So this is why it has struck such a raw nerve, this unfairness. Like, "Why do you only have white people writing about everything in the media?" There were all these controversies in New York about-- There was one restaurant that was opened by someone who was not Chinese, doing a Chinese restaurant and saying that it was going to be healthy Chinese food, and implying that ordinary Chinese food was not very healthy. So I mean, that was just offensive to Chinese people, understandably. So I think that the issues raised by the whole furore about cultural appropriation are very legitimate, and I think that societies are going some way to address this. You're definitely seeing greater diversity in the cookbooks published and in the food writing world, for example.


But I think for most people the solution to this is not that you should only stay in your own lane. Of course, it doesn't really make any sense anyway because just for example, with Chinese food, it's like you could say, "Well, you have to be Chinese to write about Chinese food." But then is it okay if you are a Cantonese British writing about Sichuan food? Then how would you write a book about the whole of Chinese food because you can't do it. I think also the whole notion of who owns culture and what is authentic, once you start examining it under a microscope, it's really complicated. So I think it's about honest discussion of fairness and respect really.


Ben (00:56:57):

One of my favorite chapters was actually the one where-- I think we've commented on it. But when I go back to Asia, a lot of Asians are quite dismissive about the whole of western food as it is, vice versa. But the Shanghainese restaurant which does its own versions of things like Russian soup and that I hadn't appreciated that was such a long history of it, which actually makes complete sense when you think about it. Is that a restaurant you go back to much in Shanghai? Would you like to tell a little bit of its story?


Fuchsia (00:57:28):

…It was originally a German restaurant, and da which means big. Big cuisine was the word at the time late 19th, early 20th century for Western food. So it's called the DeDa Western food restaurant. It's in Shanghai and I can't remember exactly when it was founded. But I think it was just before 1900 or something. It was founded by a German at a time when Shanghai was full of foreigners and it was these foreign concessions and so on; very international. The really interesting thing about it is that it kind of survived the Cultural Revolution. And very early on, it was taken over by a Chinese businessman.


If you go there now, of course all the staffs are Chinese and you have Chinese chefs in the kitchen who specialize in Western food. It serves this really interestingly curated Chinese menu of Western food. So the signature dishes are like you mentioned, the louson tongue which sounds like Russian soup. It's the local version of borscht which is made with cabbage and potato and beef and not beetroot, which they don't really have there. Then they also do things like a kind of local version of a schnitzel, but made with pork not veal, and served with la jangyo which means hot soy sauce, but which is a local version of Worcester sauce. Then there's a sort of crab dish which is a crab in a cheesy creamy sauce in the crab shell, but it's made with a freshwater Chinese crab.


Anyway, I went there just out of curiosity and I thought it was going to be serving horrendously bastardized so-called western food. Actually, it was really charming. It was full of Shanghainese families. It's a real institution. It goes back more than a hundred years and it's part of Shanghai needs culture, these old dishes. The whole menu, you'd never find that menu in a real restaurant in the west because this is western food on Chinese terms curated by Chinese people really. But the food is nicely cooked, it's fresh. So I went there expecting just to be curiosity and it was rather charming, so I have been back. It was funny because I've talked to customers there and they see it as part of their heritage.


Ben (01:00:20):

They see it as really authentic?


Fuchsia (01:00:22):

Yes. And it's not the only one. There's another one called the Red House in the former French concession, which does things like french onion soup with a bit of toast with melted cheese on top. Instead of snails in garlic butter, they have local clams in garlic butter, but served in that sort of pan. For me, it's just really interesting as an example of how cultural appropriation works both ways.


Ben (01:00:48):

Great. Well, last few questions. One is, if you were to open a restaurant in London, you had a magic wand, what sort of restaurant it would be? I thought about this and I think if I could magic it, I would do those Buddhist temple restaurants. So I was taken to one or two when I was growing up which do these amazing essentially tofu dishes, but they're all so-called fake meats or whatever. I remember being presented one which was just like, "Well, this is a roast duck." And I thought, "This is just not going to be good, but I'm just going to eat it because I've been taken there." It was amazing. So it’s something which is sort of skilled and quite fun and I think would go down well in the London scene. It’s not understood that this whole fake food thing has been going on for a couple of thousand years in a really high class way, or maybe somehow seasonal British Chinese or that. But what restaurant would you transplant if you could with a magic wand?


Fuchsia (01:01:50):

Well, it would be something along the lines of the Dragon Well Manor in Hangzhou, which I wrote about in the book. But basically I would need a magic wand because what I would need is a sort of Chinese farm in London with a bamboo grove and ponds where I could grow water bamboo and water chestnuts and have fresh water, fish and shrimp and rice fields. I'm getting carried away here. But the point of it would be to do really fine Chinese food made with the best ingredients because this is another of these weird things; that people don't associate Chinese food-- people in the west-- with fine ingredients. It's again, this thing about it being cheap. It's really unusual to find Chinese restaurants serving free range meat or organic vegetables or forage foods or all the things that are quite normal in Western restaurants. It's such a misperception because as we've sort of already touched on this, the Chinese gourmets have been obsessed with the quality of their ingredients forever, really. Good Chinese cooking starts with good ingredients. So my restaurant would be really showcasing this; that Chinese food is the best food made with the best ingredients and not only cooking skills, but it makes you feel wonderful and it's in tune with the seasons and the cosmos and everything like that.


Ben (01:03:15):

Great. So now if your game, we'll do a short section of underrated, overrated, or you can sort of pass and we can neutral. So I'd do like one word or phrase or idea, and you can give a quick comment about whether you think it might be underrated or overrated. So the first one, I guess an easy one is milk.


Fuchsia (01:03:36):

Well, overrated. Personally, I just don't like milk. I absolutely love cheese and butter and everything like that. The reason I'm saying that is because it's not the be all and end all. Of course, you draw your attention to the wonderful world of soy milk and tofu which is a far more sustainable alternative.


Ben (01:03:58):

I should have specified cow's milk over soy milk, but yes. Cake?

Fuchsia (01:04:05):

Kind of hard to answer.


I mean, I don't know how cake really is rated to be honest. I would say that cake is very delightful, but it's not the be all and end all. But I don't know that anyone would say that it was.


Ben (01:04:22):

Well, I guess one comment would be most of Chinese cuisine probably doesn't have a big cake tradition, although my mom would partly disagree because of all of the quays and the things you get in Malaysian, Singaporean food. But obviously in Western cuisine it's very much like. So maybe correctly weighted. How about alcohol? But maybe we could go wine?


Fuchsia (01:04:48):

Wine, well, I would say overrated just because I'm far more interested in food than alcohol. I don't drink. I love the tasting and exploring different wines and whiskeys and things, but I just don't drink very much. So I can quite happily go for a long time without alcohol. Definitely food is more important.


Ben (01:05:05):

Yeah, I've been drinking less and less and I think I really don't like-- you actually talk about it in the food that a lot of Chinese celebrations have all of this huge drinking culture bit of it. Then by about round three, you can't remember any of the food anyway, which seems a real shame with a lot of that. Then sea cucumber overrated, underrated?




Fuchsia (01:05:29):

Well, in the West, underrated. I love it. It's one of these weird exotic texture foods as far as westerners are concerned. It doesn't have any taste, but it has this voluptuous sort of wobbly texture and it's a bit sort of sticky and soft and a bit crisp, and it's quite wonderful.


Ben (01:05:51):

Great. Then last one in the series, durian?


Fuchsia (01:05:56):

In the West, underrated. I just find it completely thrilling. I really adore stinky, smelly cheeses in the state of advanced dishevelment and durian is a bit like that really. It's sort of a smell that really gets onto your skin and is a little bit disturbing and a bit delicious at the same time.


Ben (01:06:16):

Yeah, I love it. I've loved it from early and that's one of the things it's like, "Oh, are you're going to like it? Are you not going to like it?" I even like the smell. I remember I was laughed at because as a child I described it as a perfume, which most people don't think. But there was that just complex aromas which came from it which I really enjoyed. So last couple of questions. This is, I guess most focused on your writing and your research. I was interested to know what your sort of writing process or even writing day is because it's obviously to my mind, deeply researched. Obviously you've had lived experience going to places, talking to chefs, doing the cooking, and being trained. Yet, at least to my mind, your prose is very stylish, it's also very clear. Food writing's quite hard to come across; the sort of joy or deliciousness and texture of all of that. It comes across on the level of the sentence-- your sentences are really super great. So I was kind of interested in how you kind of write. Do you think a lot about structure or form or does it happen? Do you come across sort of you take a lot of notes and it all gels together. Is there anything you'd like to share about your writing process?


Fuchsia (01:07:33):

Well, I think it's a little chaotic to be frank. But the one thing that I really do religiously is I take a lot of notes. All my Chinese friends get used to this eccentricity and find it quite funny. But I write everything down because this is material, and in my books there are often passages, particularly descriptions. So if you write a description of a place when you are in it, like what it smells like, what it sounds like and what it tastes like, then it's going to have an immediacy that is quite hard to recapture. So the more I write down in the field, in the moment, the more I thank myself later. Although obviously it's all very rough cut. But quite a lot of phrases and thoughts and even paragraphs will end up in the finished books from this kind of field work.


And then I suppose that with writing, it's not a terribly conscious thing. But I think I have a real sense of what it sounds like and when it works and when it doesn't work. It's a question of repeating sentences again and again until they sound right. Sometimes it's very easy and it really flows and sometimes it's a nightmare and it's, "I want to give up." Then with the structure as well, I found this a real challenge because having done several cookbooks-- Cookbooks structurally are relatively easy because I think that a fairly conventional structure works well. So you have chapters on different sorts of food and you have head notes. The only long bit of writing is the introduction really. But this kind of book it's like, "It can be anything. So how on earth are you going to structure this huge flood of ideas and thoughts?" It's a bit scary at first because you've agreed to write this book and you don't really know how it's going to work out.


But again, it's just a question of applying yourself and sometimes taking a break and doing something else. I don't understand how it works. It's like an instinct for sort of knowing when something feels right, when it's getting boring, when the argument is incoherent. Then also, I'm lucky to have a good editor. So with this book, the one chapter that I had such a lot to say, which is the one about eating exotica and endangered species. I really wanted to get the tone right which is to kind of be very frank and honest and fair and balanced in the way I wrote it. My editor thought it was a bit chaotic at first. So I went away and had to put a lot more work into redoing it. But I wouldn't say there's some rational elements, but a lot of it is just sort of-- It's like just recognizing when and when the proportion is right


Ben (01:10:34):

Just practice. I'm guessing you write your notes by hand because you probably do some characters as well as English in your notes or you have that turned to like tapping on a phone or an iPad or things?


Fuchsia (01:10:46):

No, very much paper, because as you say, I have to write notes in both English and Chinese. I can't be specific about things unless I write them in Chinese, like the names of ingredients and dishes and people's names and all that sort of stuff. And also sometimes they do drawings and diagrams.

Ben (01:11:05):

And I guess there's a dialect they might have to say, "Well, and these are the characters." And it's like a whole new technique specific to that regional things. So they've got almost their own language around it.


Fuchsia (01:11:14):

Yeah. And also other people write in my books too. So sometimes someone will explain something-- I remember once a man in a tea shop in Chengdu wrote a whole page about different street snacks in Chengdu. Also, the great thing about a notebook is that it has no value. It's like if I had everything on an iPad, it's something someone might nick. But a scruffy notepad covered in oil is not very appealing.


Ben (01:11:41):

Got a huge amount of intangible value. The structure of your book I think really flows as well because you've got the chapters, but you've got the kind of meta-chapters above. But you're saying that actually that structure probably came sort of midway through the process. You didn't think, "Oh, I can do sort of history. We can start with fire and grain and we go and we have a section of techniques, and we end on meta-philosophy of food ideas." It's sort of like, "Oh, we had these essays” and then through that process you can see this would be a pleasing structure for it to work.


Fuchsia (01:12:14):

Yeah. So I did have some conception that the-- I can't remember when, but I think quite early on. Probably when I did the proposal I did have the idea that it was going to be about a dish, and with each dish, a theme. But then I think sometimes some chapters clearly had to be standalone chapters, others sometimes divided off into two chapters or made into one. It sort of evolved as I went along and the final structure just happened at the end really. It was a whole process of rearranging and there were one or two that could have gone in different places, but it just has to have a sort of harmony to it. It just has to fit and not feel labored. It has to just feel inevitable.




Ben (01:13:02):

And is there a kind of missing essay or chapter which you thought, "Oh, this would be quite good, but doesn't quite fit?" Are there lots of things which didn't make the cut for some future work?


Fuchsia (01:13:11):

Actually, I think I got everything I wanted in this one. Of course I'm going to write many more books. But this one ended up feeling just about the right sort of, "I did manage to put in what I wanted to say."


Ben (01:13:30):

Excellent. And when you write, are you a morning person, evening person? Does it matter? Are you short bursts one to three hours, or can you write the whole day? Or is it kind of chaotic in the sense that it kind of just depends?


Fuchsia (01:13:44):

I just don't know. So in general, I'm on better form in the morning. But I also find it really hard getting down to work. The whole thing about writing, and I think many writers find this, is that it's elusive. It's not something that you completely control. So you can put the time in, but sometimes you will write well and easily and sometimes you can just see what's wrong with the structure of a chapter. Sometimes you can't. You can spend hours just banging your head against a brick wall. I think one just has to accept that it's something a bit mysterious. You have to put the time in. I think with my earlier books-- with almost all of them, I had major crises when I just wanted to give up and I thought, "I can't do this." With my previous, with my memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, I got so despairing about it that I nearly deleted the whole thing and all the backups and handed back the advance because I thought I couldn't do it. But by now, I know that when I have these moments of despair that somehow you just find a way through the woods and it's just by having it in your mind. Sometimes taking a break, doing something different. In my experience, it's just a work in process. But it is a bit scary because you have this expectation you're going to finish a book and then sometimes you don't know how you're going to do it.




Ben (01:15:15):

Yeah, exactly. Playwrights have a couple of techniques which we talk about which are cousin to those. So one is whenever you've written the first draft or whatever draft, one rule is you just delete the first 10 pages because it takes you a while to get in and just don't worry about it. You can always come back to it, but just don't worry. Just delete them and then get onto your next draft. Some people do throw away whole drafts and then write another draft, but then refer to it. But it's this whole idea that you are going to have a panic, it isn't going to work. But actually it's okay because whatever you do, you started getting things and it will be there and it will be better. That's a kind of other thing.


There's one which went is that there's a sort of adage within some playwrights that it is kind of somewhat painful to write depending on how you write and where you come from. So there is this bit of like actually you do lock yourself away and you get it out and you don't worry too much because you need to get yourself into business where you force yourself to write where it comes out. Not everyone's like that, obviously, within that. But there is that some things because there is this fear and because you get these difficult patches that you have to push through, but it will be okay. That's what we tell ourselves.


Fuchsia (01:16:27):

Yes. I'm much happier when I'm around people and doing things in a team. I don't really like this whole thing about being alone at a desk writing, but then you have to do it. So then when you have a big deadline and you have to just lock yourself away, it's pretty ghastly.


Ben (01:16:47):

Yeah. Well, actually that's why some more latest theater work has been more collaborative partly because writing alone is not for everyone. Great. So final kind of question; two part question. What are your current projects and things that you're working on? I know there's going to be a book tour starting soon. Second half of the year you have your food tours which I think are ongoing. But are there any other projects? Then the sort of segue from that is, do you have any advice for people? I guess this can be broad advice about how to live your life. It could be advice about eating Chinese food or being a writer. So current projects and any life advice or eating advice you'd like to share?



Fuchsia (01:17:30):

Well, current projects. So this book, I'll be doing things around this book for a while. But then I will have to start the next one. I just have several concurrent-- I mean, the next one will be a cookbook. But I tend to have lots of things on the go and they will bear fruit at different times. I'm collecting material for other books that may not come to light of day very quickly.


Ben (01:17:53):

Are you going to tackle all of the great major Chinese cuisines and then as many as the regional ones as you can get through? So there's at least 117 plus books that you could write?


Fuchsia (01:18:04):

Well, this is a lifelong project because it's endlessly interesting and there are all these different angles. And also because I enjoy actually the narrative writing as well. This has reminded me there's so much I'd like to say with that. So I'm definitely not doing some kind of routine box ticking exercise. I want to really have a connection to a place or a subject and feel really involved and make friends there and have a kind of personal involvement before I write a book. I don't want to just rush in and do something token.


Life advice, I would never really think I'm a good person to give life advice. But I suppose the thing that I find so rewarding is just when you open yourself up to another culture and you really step outside your own point of view, it's tremendously illuminating and life enhancing because of course, I have not only been learning about Chinese food and culture all these years. I have also been learning that there are other ways of looking at my own culture. There's not just one way of looking at the world. There's not one point of view that's valid. I think this is incredibly important to sort of see that many things are relative-- not everything. So I think that, that is a very interesting consequence of-- So I would encourage people to be open to new experiences and to rethinking their own assumptions about everything too.


Ben (01:20:00):

Okay. Well, with that, thank you very much. The book, Invitation to a Banquet should be out in the UK at the very end of August, and then in the US, a few weeks later.



Fuchsia (01:20:12):

In November, actually.


Ben (01:20:12):

Okay, a little while later. You can catch Fuchsia maybe on some book tour in the second of the year, into next year. So look out for that. I highly recommend the book.


Fuchsia (01:20:25):

Thank you. Lovely talking to you.


Ben (01:20:27):

Thank you very much.


Sustainability Podcast: Arts Council, Mya-Rose Craig, Ellie Harrison and Benjamin Yeoh

Artists, Activists on Climate and enviroment. In this episode, join Mya-Rose Craig, Ellie Harrison and Benjamin Yeoh as they explore what is the connection between art and climate change and how can the storytelling skills of individual artists drive structural change at a corporate level.

Featuring:
• Mya-Rose Craig - ornithologist, environmentalist, diversity activist as well as an author, speaker and broadcaster
• Ellie Harrison - artist, activist & author
• Benjamin Yeoh – playwright, investor and podcast host

Summary (via AI):

Here is a summary of the key points from the conversation:

- This is a podcast discussing environmental responsibility in the arts and culture sector. The three guests are Mya-Rose, Ben, and Ellie.

- They discuss what environmental responsibility means to them personally. Mya-Rose talks about campaigning and raising awareness, as well as encouraging local environmental action like rewilding. Ben discusses leading by example but also influencing systems change. Ellie tries to live modestly and thinks about the impact of her actions.

- When asked how they embed environmental ideas in their work, Mya-Rose talks about engaging youth from underrepresented backgrounds with nature. Ben discusses incorporating climate themes in his theatre work and engaging with companies on sustainability in his investment work. Ellie campaigns on public transport issues and divestment.

- They discuss different forms of environmental action from large protests to local community projects. Mya-Rose advocates bigger changes like ethical banking as well as local rewilding. Ben focuses on influencing senior leaders.

- On why the cultural sector should take action, they agree it should lead by example and reflect these issues since they affect everyone's lives.

- They debate how to best communicate to affect change. Mya-Rose discusses effective social media activism. Ben focuses on influencing leaders. Ellie uses humor and music in her art and activism.

- For actions people can take today, they suggest political engagement, ethical purchasing/investment, storytelling, and getting involved locally.

- When asked what support would help cultural organizations, they suggest identifying environmental impacts, getting guidance to address them, and funding for climate-related art projects.

- For art that affected change, they cite nature documentaries, conceptual art exposing pollution/hypocrisy, and films spotlighting funding by polluting industries.

Transcript

Presenter: Hello and welcome to the IP Pod from the Arts Council which set out to unpack and illustrate the fundamental ideas that underpin the four investment principles. Today we’re looking at the subject of environmental responsibility. What is the connection between art and climate change and how can the storytelling skills of individual artists drive structural change at a corporate level. Before we get into it more deeply with our specialist panel we’ve asked a couple of people from the arts world to weigh in on what environmental responsibility means for them.


On a base level as a human being I guess it means carrying out our lives causing as little negative impact as possible - at minimum, even better actively trying to leave the world better than we found it both in our personal and work lives. I guess from an arts perspective we should realise the power the arts and culture has to influence and inspire behaviour change in large amounts of people and so we’ve got a responsibly to use that as a force for good and positive action but we’ve also got a responsibility to work with other industries to make sure what we’re doing is authentic and grounded in science.


Aileen Ging: The one thing artists should be in terms of thinking about or doing with sustainability is promoting the idea collective action for systematic change. For too long we’ve put emphasis on individuals actions around reusing, recycling, remaking and of course there’s a place for that but actually the change really is to send the message that we can only do so much. This is not about individual action, this is about collective action, facing up to corporations, to governments, holding them accountable to the extractive practices that don’t respect that the earth has limitations and moving away from the growth mindset. We don’t have to get bigger and bigger and this is really important actually for funders such as the Arts Council England is to send this message as well themselves. In the end it’s all intertwined, whether we’re talking about social and climate justice, the root causes are the same. It’s a mentality that thinks you can do more for less and that is extractive and that’s the bottom line.


Presenter:  That was Aileen Ging, sustainable operations lead for the Wild Rumpus Arts Organisation and Alia Alzougbi, cultural strategist, storyteller and facilitator. Now, to explore the subject further we’ve gathered together three people with unique perspectives but a shared understanding of the issue at hand. We’ve given them a pile of envelopes containing prompts and questions and the result is a conversation that is both urgent and ultimately empowering. The first of our guests is Mya-Rose Craig, sometimes known as Bird Girl who at 21 represents a new generation of artist activists all deeply invested in the future of the natural world. Mya-Rose has already turned her childhood passion for ornithology into an inspirational career and she recently published her memoir, also titled Bird Girl. Next up you’ll hear from Glasgow based Ellie Harrison who’s playful and politically engaged work takes many forms from installations to events and music. Within the diversity of her practice, Ellie has also discovered the value of hyper focus on local issues, namely public transport, via her British Rail campaign. Finally we have invaluable input from British Chinese playwright and theatre world renaissance man Benjamin Yeoh. As well as writing and directing his own plays, Benjamin sits on the board of theatre companies and develops sustainable development strategies for major international organisations in the arts and elsewhere. It’s Benjamin’s voice that you’ll hear first.


Benjamin: Great so let’s see what question number one holds for us. We have what does being responsible for our environment mean to you?


Mya-Rose: Everyone’s looking at me! I don’t know I feel like I interpret it differently because I do a lot of environmental campaigning and I feel like part of for me being responsible for nature and the environment is sort of campaigning and going out and raising awareness and telling people that there are problems and issues! But I think I also increasingly have also engaged with things on a much smaller more local level so like my charity that I run is a very grassroots project so we’re literally working with kids from the local area. I’m talking a lot to them about how they can do re-wilding in their garden or their local park and I think working to create a population who are engaged with nature and who care about nature and environmental issues is such an important first step. I don’t know, what about you guys?


Ellie: For me it means trying to tread as lightly as I can on the world, to live as modestly as I can, to produce the smallest amount of carbon that I can like just thinking about the consequences of my actions I suppose and that is difficult to do that on a daily basis. But I think that’s where I start from and trying to remain mindful of that through everything I do.


Benjamin: I have two hats or two ways of looking at that. I suppose on is my theatre making hat and another is my investment hat which have both got slightly different theories of change. So one is that personal leadership, try and know your own footprint a little bit, talk about local things, talk about what people can really do and when you think about theatre making and think about how you’re going to produce this show, are there sensible things you can do which probably 10 or 20 years you probably wouldn’t do, like why are you making your props new when you could do something which is maybe more circular? Then there is the systems impact which has been increasingly part of my work, whether in investment or in theatre making and I think in theatre making it’s often both of you who are really involved in this and it’s the stories that we tell ourselves and what are artists uniquely able to do? Well they can live their life in a sustainable fashion but they can tell the stories which change us and I guess when I was younger I was maybe a little bit more like oh you know what do movements do? What do protest movements do and things and actually as I’ve got older you can think back to suffragettes or anti slavery movements and things and you get to modern days and actually those movements have been very catalytical and those are the stories we tell ourselves. And actually it’s the same in the investment world about nudging the system or nudging the companies and so for me there’s an individual threat which is important and it’s important to live your life how you want and to show others but then actually you may not be able to do that where you are but you could still be nudging across the stories and the systems and so when it comes to making or producing it but it also might be the stories you choose to tell and things like that. So now when people ask me I think well those two bits and depending on where you are and how you’re thinking about it it might nudge to one or the other.


Ellie: Different levels of engagement from the personal to I guess more systemic change.


Benjamin: Exactly. And I think it’s partly as I’ve got a bit older as well I’ve met more young people who have got this climate anxiety and they feel like am I doing enough or I’m not doing enough or there’s nothing I can do and I feel like this for a lot of problems and challenges that humans have, the individual can only do so much right? It’s the systems and things but you can do something towards it, you don’t have to feel helpless and you can see that through an individual lens and that’s fine and that’s also fine as well because you might just be selling stories or performing or inspiring in some other way. They’re both valid mechanisms and we probably need more of both of them and you can’t do 100% of either all the time and you don’t need to get too down about it. 


Mya-Rose: I do think there’s such a split, I do see there’s two groups of people that I know and one side is the people who do very deeply feel all the environmental issues going on and are very anxious and I know lots of people who would feel incredibly guilty if they drive a car one day instead of cycling and stuff like that, down to the minutiae of their day to day activity and then on the other side of things of people who literally do not think about their environmental footprint, aren’t doing all the little things we think we need to do and I think both - obviously to different extents but both of those things are very unhelpful and I know people who do not care and I think actually creating a handful of very decisive very helpful things is much better than making people feel incredibly guilty about the nuances of their lifestyle and so for me I advocate a lot the bigger things so like switching bank or looking into where your money’s being invested and stuff like that or sort of looking into where your pension fund is being invested because so many of those are involved in fossil fuels and things where it is individual action and individual change but it’s also tackling what is a genuine systemic issue as well. 


Ellie: I think it’s fine to feel that anxiety but to use it as a force for good, to challenge it into those wider systemic campaigns. I think that’s what I do and I think you have to - for me definitely it feels important to try to live my values to a certain extent because otherwise the other activity that I’m doing I don’t feel I can do that with any integrity if I’m not trying to keep my own house in order as well but I definitely agree the two channels are important and interact and that they drive each other forward.


Benjamin: And they definitely amplify. The way you live your life makes your message stronger, I do think that. That’s one of the things that is so impressive about Greta and a lot of activists like you guys really, the way you live your life and talk about it I think amplifies the message that you have. If you’re able to do that and that’s part of it I think that’s really great. Who’s got number two? 


Ellie: Okay. We’re onto question number two. Let’s see what we’ve got. How do you embed ideas of responsibility within your practice/work?


Benjamin: So I’ll take the two hats briefly on theatre making and then on investment work and I’ve sat on the non-exec level for a variety of theatre companies, currently Improbable, previously Coney and Talawa and over that time environmental issues have grown and part of that is stories in the work that you want to make so that’s tilted and actually it’s tilted also to thinking about young people and other aspects, you can call it diversity and things like that, a lot of that is intersectionality within this, you can’t tackle one or the other so that’s shaped the kind of work we make but also at the board level when you’re thinking about strategy and these things, other thoughts have come in. So net zero commitments and what does it mean to be net zero and that’s how you’re making your work, should we make it this way, should we be travelling so much, are there other ways of making our work which is more circular or things like that and I think both of those elements over the years has come out and then in my personal practice I do a series of what we call now performance lectures and that’s definitely been really low-fi in terms of the materials and resources that I use and one of the reasons for that has been thinking of this and one of the topics I talk about has been around climate and another is about death and health and some of that intersectionality. In investment world that’s actually got quite complicated as well but a lot of that is to do with are company’s thinking about net zero, are they prepared and planned and then a lot of my world is around companies who may be in open good faith, so you might not be talking about the most difficult actors, let’s put that to one side for a moment, and engaging with them because a lot of the real world change happens from convincing management or teams or companies who often have a lot of other stakeholders or employees or their customers wanting them to do that as well and engaging for them to go on a more sustainable path and that is also intersectional with how they might be treating their employees, how they might be thinking about diversity and inclusion, what countries they’re working on. So a lot of this is under the rubric of environmental social governance or sustainability and it’s quite complicated but one of the primary drivers there we are using is engagement because actually at the end of the day a lot of the person in the street, the lady in the pub owns an investment through their pension or through the government or through something and ultimately people are the owners of companies or businesses or they are the owners of investments and even if it’s via your work place like Arts Council, you might have a pension through that and actually through that you have that thing. So ultimately companies are beholden to those owners who are us and so nudging them down that pathway is quite an important part of what it means as well as perhaps the innovation front so trying to create the tools and things that we don’t have yet already.


Mya-Rose: I think it’s in the sphere of environmental campaigning, responsibility is quite a weird thing because I spend a lot of time in youth climate change circles and it’s essentially a big group of people trying to solve an issue who had very little to do with creating it and yet there is this big sense of responsibility in terms of if not us then who? I have people asking me a lot what gives you hope? Are you optimistic, are you pessimistic? And I feel like for me it’s not really about that, it is this sense of we must try and do what we can to try and make things better and I think especially there’s been such an increase in conversations around intersectionality in terms of environmentalism and so I think increasingly you’re seeing people from the west and from countries like the UK sort of feeling that essentially the west is very responsible for climate change and yet it’s countries in the global south like Bangladesh where my family’s from that are currently experiencing the brunt of current environmental collapse and so it’s almost taking responsibility for our colonial legacy and trying to do what we can to help those people and help those countries. But I guess on a much smaller level in terms of my charity work we’re working with a lot of kids from black and Asian backgrounds, we’re working with a lot of kids from communities who are struggling quite a lot and like one of the reasons I set up the charity in the first place was partially because as someone who is not white and spent a lot of time growing up in the countryside I want to share that with kids, I wanted them to be able to enjoy the outdoors but I was also deeply aware of just how important it is to spend time in nature and the environment. I’d see first hand the importance of mental health and wellbeing in particular and it was during this period that I set it up that the NHS started doing green prescribing and things like that. So it was also this feeling of helping kids to get outside from the communities who statistically are disproportionately struggling with mental illness the most and yeah I think that side of things isn’t discussed as much but for me on a personal level I feel like that’s incredibly important.


Ellie: It is difficult to answer without talking about some of the activities that I’m involved in because I think as an artist I definitely went on a journey where when I started to realise about 15 years ago the extent of the climate crisis that I didn’t necessarily want to be investing all of my time in art anymore and I wanted to be channelling that energy into getting involved in campaigning so I specifically started campaigning for better public transport because I saw that as a big barrier for enabling people to make more sustainable travel choices when our public transport system is so expensive and dysfunctional. So I started to invest a lot of time in that and I think in terms of taking responsibility that was central to that really, it was identifying the problem but then taking steps to actually try and address that problem and solve the problem and the problem hasn’t been solved yet! But I’m continuing and the campaigning is expanding and it’s not just about public transport as well, you’re talking about pensions funds because I have a pension through the university where I work which is USS it’s the biggest in terms of its value so I’ve been involved in the divestment campaign for that as well and I think it’s that thing again of asking the questions, realising where the problems are and then taking responsibility by actually trying to get involved in trying to address them and that hasn’t been solved yet either but I’m continuing with the campaign and I think that I used to see the campaigning and my art practice as quite separate but I’m trying to find ways to kind of synthesise those two elements a bit more so you can use more creative tactics in campaigning, let the two disciplines learn from each other as well.


Mya-Rose: Question three: what does taking environmental action look like? Who want to go first?


Ellie: I think it’s actually really interesting Mya-Rose Rose to hear more about your work because it’s completely driven from the same place but we’re tackling completely different issues, both equally important in a way and I think it’s probably something in our personalities that have taken us to these different places and I think that yeah there’s definitely something in my personality that’s taken me down this passion for public transport and the characters I’ve met along the way and I think acquiring knowledge as I’ve been going has been an important part of that as well but I think that can be a problem in a way as well because I’ve become almost a bit too specialised in this area whereas before I think I had a much broader perspective around what needed to be done but it’s got more specialised the longer I’ve been doing it I think.


Mya-Rose: I think that makes sense though. You need people to be doing individual issues because if you have hundreds of people just going we want change and not saying what that change looks like that’s obviously not super helpful. I definitely think for me my idea of what activism is and what activism looks like has definitely shifted over the years. I think when I was younger I really liked all the big protests - which I still do attend - but sort of people going out and going out into the streets and telling our leaders that things need to change now and going to Downing Street and all of that kind of stuff, that felt like that was what was true activism to me versus I think actually I think as I get older I think that still has an incredibly important role but I actually think more community based action is incredibly important. Sometimes more important in terms of actually form the ground up building things that are better and that can literally be as simple as in my rural community the public transport system changing so people can actually not use their cars in the countryside, just things like that that make a difference and so I think maybe because I spend a lot of time working with young people as well who aren’t old enough to vote and get involved in local politics and that kinds of stuff, it’s thinking of ways that people can take action because I think doing stuff, especially physically doing stuff is so important in terms of fighting the disenfranchisement and eco-anxiety and all that kinds of stuff and so I’m literally very young kids I’m telling them to go out litter picking in the local community or my charity we do lots of tree planting events and things like that and for very young kids doing something with their hands genuinely helps so much in terms of the stress they feel at the state of the world and re-wilding or guerrilla gardening or all that kind of stuff. Thinking on a more local level is increasingly something attractive to me. Obviously now the big national campaigns continue in the background but I think we need both.


Benjamin: I agree. I think for me personally I’m really fortunate to meet quite a lot of influential people within their fields and for them it’s essentially influencing them. Perhaps if I think about theatre work, investment stakeholders and the board, non-exec type of stuff - at least in theatre work for me it’s a little bit about having those stories I referred to earlier. There’s a kind of term for it, a narrative plenitude and it’s also diverse voices and elements like that and it’s really apparent that given the scale of the challenge why are there so few climate stories, very broadly defined, and then when you think about climate stories of the global south and stories from these marginalised voices and part of the problem is when you’re not hearing that then that doesn’t weigh in. So a lot of my work around that is by trying to think about raising those stories up either through my own individual work or through the work I’m trying to support with others to do. Some of that is about then taking it to groups who might not otherwise hear it. So it was designed, I’ve done it in a couple little theatres but I took it to Aeon which is one of the biggest investment consultant insurers around, I took it to PWC, I’ve taken it to community churches, so to reach other groups, marginalised groups maybe but also other groups who might want to hear it to do that type of influence. And then in the investment world one of the other things is when you’re meeting with senior leaders who might be open but haven’t perhaps paid as much attention to this as you might have thought is making the argument to them. So part of that is just a good faith argument about why you should consider this and then one of the other steps that we do is link it to their actual stakeholders. So for instance in companies as I was saying they ultimately serve customers, employees and shareholders but actually shareholders are all of us sitting in this room, they are the people in the streets and so you have an onus to do somewhat what they are directing you to do and so this is where a lot of that comes through and closing that loop and influencing that at that level is quite important in terms of what action means for me. In a lot of organisations like this you have got this board at the top whether it’s in the charity space or in company space and they’re often three to twelve or three to fifteen people setting the strategic direction for the whole of that organisation. Say if there’s 12 if you can convince 8 of them this is a direction to go in so say they have no net zero commitment and you get them to say okay we should have a net zero commitment from the words it then starts, then the management team has got to think about what that means, set a strategy and do it. So part of my time is spent with people who sit on boards or when I meet boards or things like that saying you haven’t got a net zero, why is that? Is it something your stakeholders would want? Often the answer is yes and then maybe you should set that in place. So influencing a relatively small amount of people can actually often get quite a lot of change within that within the context because everything else around it is also pushing in that direction. In some of the podcasts I do I mix a lot of sustainability thinking with other arts thinking or maybe economic thinking. So for instance I had Chris Stark who is the chief executive of the UK Climate Change Committee talking about what UK climate policy needs to do and things like that to try and get this broad reach of actually there are things we know and there are things we know we can do and there is a gap from that and part of that gap is that if more people know them and influence those around them who might be more senior or not then that influence spreads like I guess my analogy’s always that stone in a pond and the ripple and some of that is just the conversations and stories that I have and increasingly over the later years more of those stories are broadly defined are amongst that. In some ways it’s also stories you don’t necessarily need to be… The cutting edge is a climate story, it’s actually just currently all stories are somehow climate related in many ways right, and is bringing some of those elements out in the same way that now in theatre it’s really common to have mobile phones on a stage or referenced because everyone has one right? It’s a part of things. 20 years ago it would have been really weird and now it’s not. I find it’s really weird how so many normal stories don’t have a thread of climate in it given that the thread of climate is in all these conversations. So if you just nudge those stories to reflect our own lived experience a little bit more you suddenly see that reflected in what we see and across all of those things. Alright question four, let’s see what we’ve got. We have: Why is it important for the cultural sector to take environmental action?


Ellie: Just to answer quickly I think it comes down to leading by example. I think we’ve got no choice but to take action because we do have a high profile in terms of influencing culture across society and if we’re not leading by example and again trying to get our own house in order then how can we expect anybody else to so I think it’s vital.


Mya-Rose: I also think it touched like what you were just saying about environmental issues being a thread that’s running through everyone’s lives now, I think one of the roles of the cultural sector is to reflect people’s lives and the things that are going on in the world and I suppose be a representation of that and a cultural influence in terms of that and so I think if anything it feels incredibly bizarre. It feels often like environmental issues are being dodged around or avoided and things like that maybe because it feels like it’s a bit of a downer maybe but the sector has such an important unique role in terms of communication in the way it reaches out to people and we can talk about the politics of it or the economics of it but at the end of the day the social cultural influence is probably the most important one in terms of the general public. 


Benjamin: Yeah I agree. I think if you look back in history and you look at these really big moments when humans have decided to do something, we decide laws. Laws are kind of meaningless to other creatures except that we impact them. Those laws and stories are things that humans tell each other and we believe them to be true because we’ve collectively made that belief. 200, 300 years ago we kind of collectively believed that slavery was okay but we changed the narrative of that because we came to realise that it was not and then you have women’s rights, you have disability rights, you have all of these things which really only came about through the power of culture. Now there are a lot of other elements needed to that but without that cultural change you are not going to get any of those so I think it’s uniquely the stories that we tell ourselves. As you’ve been saying what we reflect to one another - when we tell ourselves powerful new stories… We could even call them myths in the sense that humans have made these up, they’re not necessarily like physical laws of gravity that humans do to one another and when we believe these new stories which are better stories for us and for the world then change comes about and we get positive change and throughout history there are always segments which for lots of complicated reasons you never get 100% agreement between humans on anything but once you get a kind of change it flips over and now no one thinks slavery is a good thing, the vast majority are into women’s rights, disability rights, minority rights and things like that and that simply wasn’t true, even up to 100 years ago. Even 50 years ago where some of that… That’s not to deemphasise the huge battles and challenges still ahead in a lot of these things, still women’s rights and disability rights and all of those but it’s also that we’ve come some way and I would argue we’ve only come as far as we have because of the power of the cultural sector and the stories we tell ourselves, the art that we make, the activism we do, the lives that we lead in all of those aspects and if the cultural sector does not step up and play its part then I would contend that we won’t solve this challenge. I also think it’s potentially doable but isn’t doable without new stories, better stories, stories which reflect us. 


Ellie: Question five, let’s see what’s in the envelope. How do you/we best communicate to affect change? 


Benjamin: Oh… Well if I think of the individual way that I’m doing it part of it is actually with podcasts and story telling and weaving those stories which reflect us. I think that’s quite important and then actually I think it is those on the more individual basis, the things I’ve been alluding to. So when you meet more senior people in positions of influence and you make it real for them you can actually influence and affect that change and often it does come from a personal interaction. It’s someone who’s had a conversation or someone who’s listened to a podcast, someone who’s seen a piece of art, who’s gone on a protest, who’s been to an event, so it’s sometimes through that individual moment that you spark a lot of this systems change.


Mya-Rose: I feel like being an activist and a campaigner, so much of the job is communicating and I’ve heard someone refer to it as being a form of storytelling before which I absolutely agree with because you’re basically at all times figuring out the best way to package an issue to make people understand and to make people care. I spend a lot of time in the realm of social media and stuff like that which has its pros and cons but I think in some ways one of the things I find incredibly difficult is taking very complicated nuanced issues and packaging it down into like an instagram post or a blog post or a series of tweets, stuff like that. But, although I don’t think it’s the best way to be teaching people about these issues, I also think the power of social media is so unrivalled. I think the state of environmentalism and climate change campaigning today is absolutely due to social media and the influence of young people in particular and so I sort of carry on doing that sort of stuff. I think it basically boils down to everything I’m doing all the time. I always try and weave in stuff about all the things we have going on in the world in terms of the environment whether that’s climate change or biodiversity loss or species going extinct and things like that and that could be anything from radio or TV stuff to even like my book that came out last year Bird Girl like it’s not about climate change but the thread of climate change is running through it because it is something that is present in my life, especially as someone who loves nature. My way of communicating is slowly trying to drill into people’s heads that the stuff is all going on.


Benjamin: Maybe there’s no best way but Ellie?


Ellie: I think as I was saying earlier I’ve tried different tactics whether I’m working as an artist or an activist. I think with my art work humour has always been an important element of it that I’ve wanted my art work to be accessible  on lots of different levels and to contain quite important political messages but there’s something to hook your audience in before they get hit with that. So I talked a bit about trying to synthesise my art and activism together a bit more over the last few years and I’ve specifically done that by creating a musical about bus regulation - Bus Regulation The Musical - which is touring three different cities, Glasgow Manchester and Liverpool in collaboration with local public transport campaigns and that’s been a really good success because it’s been really appealing to lots of different age groups. Behind the music and the rollerskating there is an important history about how our public transport policy has changed over the last 60 years and how that’s left us with a really fragmented and expensive system as a lack of regulation over the bus network and giving solutions so the final  act is kind of looking into the future and projecting a vision of the future where public transport works seamlessly and the buses are all perfectly coordinated. It’s very upbeat and I think that’s really important as well because people can leave feeling inspired that change is possible and being connected to a local campaign where they can channel that.


Benjamin: Sounds like roller-skates are the key!


Ellie: Yeah the rollerskating is fun!


Mya-Rose: Yeah, I do think we need more stuff like that though because obviously I’m more in sort of the traditional campaigning sphere and it is all very traditional still. So much of the communication is literally almost the Attenborough style of voice to camera like we need you now to sign this petition to do that and do that and I feel like people are bombarded with things that are going on all the time and sort of going like this desperate plea and I think actually we do need more hope and we do need more optimism and I do think there has been a shift away from this already but sort of the trend of just constantly telling people we’re all doomed and it’s all terrible, turns out it doesn’t work very well and it just makes people feel miserable rather than ready to create change.


Ellie: I’m an optimistic person, I think that motivates me and I think just reflecting about what you were saying about the young people that you work with and the litter picking and stuff and how that can be really good for wellbeing and creating a sense that you can actually see change unfolding in front of your very eyes because you’re picking up the litter and you’re recycling it or disposing of it and then it’s no longer there so I think just being able to see that tangible change can also create hope and drive people forward to think that change is possible.


Benjamin: Let’s see what’s in six.


Mya-Rose: Number six, yeah. What’s an action that we can all take today?


Benjamin: So I’m probably going to quote Chris Stark on this. He would essentially say one of the things you need to do is use your vote or use what you’re thinking about politics. He even went as far as to say I’m not telling you how to use it but if this is important to you then that is one of the levers that we use as a system - as we’ve reflected today when I talked to some of my peers I tend to say where are you spending a lot of money? One or two of the items you’re spending a lot of money on, you should think about whether that’s sustainable because very broadly the more money you’re spending on something probably the larger impact it has. So that’s things like are you on a green tariff because that’s probably thousands of pounds in terms of your energy bill or a few hundred or if you’re buying something like a washing machine which is going to be a big cost, you don’t have to do it across every item but where you’re spending something big you should think about it and actually as both of you alluded to that’s where you often come to investments because you might not think about it but that’s probably one of your largest if not the largest pocket of money you’re directing so there’s that. So one would be use your vote or think about how you’re doing that politically both local or big and then there’s thinking about spending your money and then the last one at least on the cultural one would be just the stories that you tell, so that’s what comes to mind.


Ellie: And do we mean we as in us three or our listeners? 


Benjamin: You could do either! I hedged my bets!


Ellie: Well I think we should stay in touch! I’m all about that about like keeping communities going and building on connections with people that you meet. What can we all do today? Just get involved in a local campaign, channel your anger, channel your anxiety into a positive direction. I’ve found it really inspiring over the last few years while I’ve been working more locally in Glasgow just getting to meet people through activism and building a sense of community and that’s vital for actually being successful. Get stuck in if you have the time. What about you?


Mya-Rose: I would really really agree about getting involved in community projects and things like that. There’s probably something that is a bit of a pet peeve of any listener that actually there’s probably a campaign, go and get involved whether that’s public transport or stuff to do with your kids or stuff to do with housing locally, people will be talking about it so go and find those people and I really want to reiterate that where we put our money is so so important. I do rail against the idea of these issues being very individualistic or that any one person can either save or destroy the planet, all of the above, but I do think lifestyle choices are the only ones that I’ll mention is meat which I won’t go on about too much but it is really really really bad for the environment and I’m not advocating for everyone to become vegan or whatever but just reducing consumption of things that are bad for the planet is really helpful. I think people think you have to be the perfect environmentalist and go from 100 to 0 and actually going from 100 to 50 or 40 or 30 also really helps. I know I also said it but I also really advocate for people going out and just doing something with their hands. If you have a garden plant up some native species or put out a bird feeder or it’s going to be getting warm so put out some water. I have a friend who’s very into hedgehogs so maybe cut a hedgehog hole in your fence so they can roam around or do guerrilla gardening in your local park. I’m just such a big believer that doing something physically with your hands is so important in terms of feeling hopeful for the future. 


Benjamin: So we have on this question what support would best help artists and cultural organisations meet their environmental responsibilities? That’s quite a tough one. What support would best help artists and cultural organisations meet their environmental responsibilities? Well I can go first having looked at this both as an artist and sitting on a board. Broadly speaking of how I’ve explained it is that you can make a statement like a net zero commitment and that’s kind of your easier first step but then you need a support to make it into action and so I think some of the things you can do is there are resources for smaller organisations to essentially do a kind of carbon footprint so they can see where they are having the most impact so they can look at maybe not doing all of it as Mya-Rose Rose was saying you don't have to go from 100 to 0 but let's see these are the two or three things and you might end up, it’s often in your building or heating or your transport or something like that and then when you have identified that then help for that element. So if it is transport well, can we do something that is going to help them take transport, help them rent a bicycle or shift our location or work so that you’re not having to use a car or you can use public transport and actually there is a couple of organisations which will help you do this, like Julie’s Bicycle and the like but then you will need a little bit of support to put policy in place, particularly if you’ve never thought about how are we going to do our transport, then something like heating where you’re not in control of the building which doesn’t have a heat pump or whatever and there a little bit of help would be like well can we organise something to convince the landlord to do this. Or maybe food waste or whatever it is is in your impact in that and you can just deal with the three and the top of your list. But identifying where you’ve got a gap and then some help to sort of say well how do we lower that gap? But then I do think there is a whole other element where there could be if you’re very interested in this some sort of funding nudge on if we want to have these stories that we want to tell maybe that’s a competition or prize because I think a lot of these are already out there, maybe they’re not getting to people that you want or the stories which are not heard but if you want to do that some overall nudge of that. You’ve got some big innovation, you’ve got earth shock prizes and climate prizes and things like that, I haven’t really heard of that many prizes for climate inspired art or performance art or a campaign or a campaign of art or theatre piece or dance or wherever it is. But essentially some sort of prize or something like that where you know you can go for something would also be an idea I would have.


Mya-Rose: That was so thorough! No I agree with everything you just said so strongly. I think also maybe a shift in how we tell environmental stories as well but maybe it’s more about distribution maybe I’m just not seeing the more interesting pieces of art and culture which are being created. I don’t know, but everything you just said I’m like yes!


Ellie: I think having got funding from Arts Council England last year and been through that process, I actually think that we’re kind of going in the right direction in terms of changing value systems in the arts so it’s less about international Biennale’s travelling around the world and how we measure success in an artist’s career or this person’s shown in this far flung place and that far flung place and all the rest of it so they must be very successful and I felt there is a real focus on thinking globally and acting locally. Funding more community projects, funding very inclusive projects of different age groups and backgrounds can get involved in and I think that is all really important because that is going to have a knock on impact on the environment as well. 


Mya-Rose: Final question: Can you think of a piece of art or culture that successfully created a shift in public perception? First one that comes to mind immediately for me is I guess the obvious one that is all the Attenborough stuff that he’s been doing the last few years which obviously that’s very very mainstream media but Blue Planet was a very big moment for the environmentalists because suddenly everyone was talking about plastic pollution and saving our oceans. I think the Wild Isles programme that’s coming out at the moment is going to have a big shift in terms of the conversation around biodiversity loss in the UK. I think in terms of engaging the everyday person in the street with these big issues going on in the world is so important that we do have these really big beautiful programmes talking about the struggling side of things as well.


Benjamin: Yeah I think having gone on about how there needs to be more climate stories they have started to appear in more recent years across all of our forms and I think that is - I know there’s a lot of individuals who have been affected by that and we must be aggregating to a wider audience. I have a slightly different story which rings in my head which just goes back a generation for again it’s a more intersectional fight but I think about this because when you think about oh does it need to be an event which changes everyone’s minds and sometimes you’re just changing one person’s mind. So there was a white Texan lawyer, many decades ago, who saw a gig that Louis Armstrong was playing and he heard that gig and he said I’ve seen genius in a black man and I think the most important thing now is to fight for the rights of black people and he became a key part - in fact the most important legal part of Martin Luther King Jr’s legal team which actually then gave rights to that and so in a way that whole system change happened - and obviously there was a lot of other bits to it - but it actually sparked from a piece of individual change in this one lawyer. So yes sometimes it’s a big thing which affects everything and sometimes it’s that one snowflake or avalanche. And you can’t really tell where it’s going to be. Maybe you stopped at the bus stop and you had that one conversation and it was that person or maybe you’re a school kid and you sit outside your parliament and you start a movement. So sometimes these small things lead to big things as well as all of that and I think that humanity is too complex and random and beautiful and stupid to exactly know. So actually you can get some of these sparks of change from all of it but it tends to have started from something that a human has done - either for good or for ill within that. That’s the story I think about from a moment of artistic genius to a whole minority rights movement.


Ellie: Brilliant. Can I give my example? I think as an old school conceptual artist I don’t know if you guys known Hans Hack, German artist? I’m very inspired by him. One piece in particular from the 70s is called Rhine Water Purification Plant which was based on his experience of looking at the Rhine river and how much pollution was in there and the affect that was having on the fish and lots of fish were being killed and so he brought some of the water into a gallery space with the fish in it. The fish died in the water but because that was visible, taken out of the context where it was happening on a massive scale and put under a spotlight of course people thought what he was doing was really unethical but he was just throwing a spotlight on what was happening on a massive scale in the world. I think that that was a really powerful piece of work that affected change but some of the other stuff he did after that around looking at funding of the arts in America and particularly about how the tobacco industry was funding lots of art galleries and he did a lot of work to expose the hypocrisy in that and affected change. It was quickly seen as quite taboo to accept funding from tobacco companies in the arts and that struggle goes on and I think all the campaigns around fossil fuel funding in the arts have been really inspiring and really successful - particularly the Liberate Tate campaign. And most recently I’d say the most inspiring thing I’ve seen is the film about Nan Goldin All the Beauty and the Bloodshed which is about her campaign against the Sacklers and all the funding that they have put into the arts over the last 30 years or so to legitimise the pharmaceutical companies and she was amazingly successful. I think that’s a lesson to anyone who’s got a high profile is use it for good. 


Benjamin: Cool. That’s really good to chat with you all.


Mya-Rose: A nice conversation.


Benjamin: Nice to chat.

ThenDoBetter Grant: Elspeth Wilson

I’ve award a grant to Elspeth Wilson. She writes:

For me, writing is a way of exploring and understanding the world around me and how myself and others move through it. I am interested in how we live in our bodies and how we make them homes, and also exploring joy from a marginalised perspectiive. For the past year, I’ve been exploring Scottish mythology in my poems – these were the stories I was brought up on and it’s been both joyful and revealing to return to them as an adult and see how creatively rich they are for expansion and retellings.

Recently, I’ve been increasingly drawn to the selkie mythology – the selkie is a seal who can turn into a human – and I plan to write a series of poems using this mythology as a jumping off point to explore neurodiversity. Then Do Better will help me focus on these poems – which I hope will become a new collection – through dedicated time to write. The grant will also help me develop a new method of working; exploring climate crisis and living in a traumatised body both at a personal level and a global one is crucial to my work and I will be developing a site-specific way of writing. Through visiting places associated with selkie mythology, I hope to bring the body and place into my writing in a very literal way.

The grant will also enable me to have some mentoring sessions with an experienced poet so that I can make sure the poems are the best they can be and develop my craft with guidance. I’m really keen to bring these poems to a wider audience through publication, and hope that the grant will enable me to have a solid first draft that I can edit myself before submitting to publishers.

Her website is here.

More info on the grant is here.

Lehman Trilogy review: gripping in places, but missing elements

“The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrive in America and found an investment firm/brokerage  through to the collapse of the company in 2008.”


As a playwright and equities market participant I should have made time to see Lehman Brothers earlier. I think logistics and its length had put me off. 


I’m glad I went. In part because I certainly feel there is room for more plays about financial markets. 


My arguments would be that financial markets as a human construct reflect much and enable much  of what human society does… the good, the bad,  the ugly; the sublime, the silly, the pointless and that markets are powered by people and people are all of that. 


Dramaturgically, it was insightful to observe that the vast amounts of expositional story telling - performed well written sharply - was often gripping to many. 


(Not all, as some were switched off; and not at all moments - perhaps the difficulty of the story). 


In many ways, the direct to audience story telling is a technique I use in both my latest shows - and stand up comedy uses it as its major technique - but I’ve sometimes been cautious as to how well it will hold. 


I’m now convinced that good writing and performance can hold it well. 


The live music provided emotional and dramatic counter point.  I found those aspects of the  theatre instructive.  (Although I have minor quibbles with some aspects of  the performative story telling; a little too much one note shouting in places; not enough use of the quiet). 


In terms of finance and economic history, or even the cultural history of persons then I  learned new things in the first act about immigration, Jewish culture, slavery, cotton and the civil war.  I could even draw some links even when there were not overt references. 


You’d still learn more from a history book if the time or on economic history by listening to my podcast with, for instance, Mark Koyama (!). 


These ideas weakened in act two and were very slim in the last act. 


The play tackles the financialization (money!)  of real goods (eg cotton!) with a passage about words which hints of the truth. 


The Lehman brothers trading in the words of cotton.  There is no cotton but the word cotton. There is no coffee but the word coffee. 


This abstraction is true and not true on many levels and I liked it.  Mathematics is a language that seems to describe properties of how we perceive the real world. Mathematics is not the real world. A contract on coffee is not coffee, but it represents how coffee will trade. 


Financial market contracts or the words between men - are a human language construct that allows the movement, trade and manufacture of real goods like cotton to be turned into shirts - which people can buy for a promise (a money note) - to wear to keep them warm or to signal their desirability. 


They are a language of trust. They are not - mostly - a description of the “real world”. 


But I bring my views to that. The play touched only lightly on what financialisation of goods might mean and how it comes about. 


That was even weaker in the third act suggesting that computer magic - buying numbers low and selling numbers high - was at the heart of trading - the universal language of computers.  


I think you could argue this - I would not buy this but there could be an element of truth that trading is this human construct - but the play did not - more stating it as the truth of what these financial players were doing. 


I was disappointed but heartened to find this lacuna - because it means there is still a play for me to write.


The other disappointment in particular into act 3 is the increasingly perfunctory treatment of the personality and characters. 


I think liberties with the timelines for dramatic effect would be reasonable. Robert - Bobby - Lehman died in 1969  and wasn’t dancing, right to the end of Lehman Bros.


The most famous dancing metaphor was given by Citigroup CEO/Chair, Chuck Prince around 2007. 


"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."


One small example on the characters:  


Pete Peterson was given one short main scene - one that was mean to represent an internal political battles. 


But Peterson went on into government and then on to found one of the biggest and most influential private equity firm in the world today.  He became a billionaire and a major billionaire philanthropist- in that other grand graduation. 


the strong links between finance and politics - foreshadowed by Herbert Lehman in the 1930s - and even before in the links of the civil war, north and south - New York - Alabama - 


were absent into Act 3 - 


If people think this is the modern day story of finance - with politics absent - then people are missing  a major piece of the stroy.


The play makes the arguments in Act 2 that banks were going to fail before the government would step in to help the stronger remaining banks to survive.  This was in 1929


This same echo happened in 2008 


Some of the players were the same - Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs -


Similarly the politicians involved - were surrounded by ex-finance people.  Look them up.


There would have been a very true and lovely ellipsis pattern to this history if it had been more fully explored. 


Dick Fuld and many of the 2008 players are still alive so perhaps that makes it harder.


Still for someone who had lived this history and see within it the echoes of a longer arc of history (and even echoes with  today's bank runs) it was unsatisfactory.

That said, much of the play is narrated in a gripping fashion and it does bring some character to a world which really does bring the money for the rest of the world to function.  So I think it’s recommended viewing. 

ThenDoBetter Grant Winner: Fan Shen

I’ve awarded a grant to Fan Shen. She writes:

Creation has always been my passion, my way to interact with the world around me and I have been writing ever since I could remember things. I grew up in China in an era when drastic changes were constantly happening with a widening gap between the rich and the poor. My working-class family background and my gender have made me one of the marginalized with less access to social resources and less visibility in society. But writing has helped me to find my voice, the voice of the marginalized.

 

At the age of 10, I was sexually assaulted. This trauma brought me years of depression and having been exposed to the very dark side of human reality and emotions at a very young age, I once again found my strength and resistance in creation. I taught myself to paint as a way to let out my anger and grief. Because of this, painting has since then become a way of expression and healing for me.

 

Creation through writing and painting has helped me to understand myself, and the world around me. At first, I wrote about my own experience and reflections, but gradually I started to write about human conditions, the shared human experiences of pain and love, convictions, darkness, and transcendence. I want to grasp the truth of our time, to reflect the reality of society and human conditions in it. I care specifically about how political powers invade private lives, and how private individuals make their daily resistance to the power.

 

Luckily, my creation has not just offered me self-healing, but also attracted external recognition of my creativity. I was admitted by the Royal College of Arts in the UK because of my painting. At the age of 18, I was awarded the national first prize in the New Concept Writing Competition, one of the most prominent writing competitions in China. As a result of this award, I was offered to choose to study at any top university in China. Quite fatefully, instead of choosing the highest-ranked comprehensive university, I made my choice for Shanghai Theatre Academy. I was expecting something that would channel my passion and light my life.

 

And I was right about my expectation. Theatre turns out to be the art format that is closest to my heart. I see theatre as the deep dialogue of souls, the most intensive and emotional format of story-telling and expression. Theatre reveals the most essential and painful issues of its time, and it attacks and embraces the audience in the most drastic way. In theatrical creations and performances, I can transcend myself from merely a victim, a survivor, one of the oppressed, to someone who has grasped her situation and the world around her, and more importantly, has the agency to change fate. There is somehow a redeeming nature in theatre that my mind resonates with.

 

During my undergraduate education, I read and watched theatre extensively. My undergraduate thesis was on Edward Albee’s theatre work where I discussed the reflection and critiques of theatre works of his time when people were pursuing social status and wealth at the cost of alienation and neglect of humanity. I am particularly in love with modernized theatre works, because they are much more decentralized, telling stories of the insignificant and depicting the absurdity of reality. Rooting deeply in the concerns for social problems, modernized theatres carry so much more power to make an impact on the audience. The boundary between the audience and the performers can be blurred, and theatre, therefore, becomes a resistant action toward social and economic injustice.

 

With this view about theatre, I found Lars Norén’s work particularly interesting because he made such a detailed observation of the everyday life of the impoverished. His take on living theatre and his focus on family and personal relationships created such powerful stories and emotions that I can truly relate to. I have also found a lot of inspiration from reading the works of Ingmar Bergman and Susan Sontag. Bergman has inspired me with his inexhaustible curiosity and compassion for humanity, whereas reading Sontag has helped me liberate myself from my past traumatic experiences. I feel that strength as a creator, and that I share that passion to create works that can truly connect with the audiences.

 

During and after my time at Shanghai Theatre Academy, I have actively taken many internships/projects in theatres and film companies where I have become experienced in taking many different roles in theatre creation. In collaborative projects, I work closely with the director to help decide on many factors for the play. I also work as a team player with other production staff and actors. Mostly, I would hold leading roles in collaborative creation projects, both as the playwright and as the dramaturgy. For example, in the original play *White-tailed Crow*, I wrote the script and also sorted out the themes, rhythms, cores, and expressions of the play from a critical and creative perspective. This award-winning play is currently being performed in Shanghai as I am writing this cover letter. I have had several solo productions and exhibitions as well.

 

On one hand, I seem to be a budding young creator in the local theatre scene, ready to devote myself to theatre creation, on the other hand, I do struggle a lot with the limitations in the world I live in. In my mind, theatre is about sincerity, actions, queries, and resistance. My background and experience have facilitated me to see from different perspectives on very complex situations, and I love to keep using theatre practice to interfere with social problems, being a voice of resistance. But the resistance has been so restricted by censorship in China. I have been longing for freedom in the creative environment for a long time. This is why I am preparing for the application of theatre master programme abroad. I really want to try to live and study in a performance art environment in the real world’s social, political and economic conditions.

 

I am very excited to receive the grant and have the chance to chat with professional theatre maker. I have made a play which will show on stage at Shanghai soon. It is a drama about human insecurity and existence. It is about an old lady, who leaves her previous life to build a new one in the middle of a desert, after she has made her move. The story gathers a group of people who are an intellectual, a peasant. a dumb girl who and some merchants who are angles. They are lost. At the end of the story, when death takes everyone, there are no concrete answers to whether these people are saved, but the audience can get that in listening the old woman has unwittingly saved these disturbed people.

 

It was because I had felt a great wave of unease and loss these years. There is no hope, no security, no way back for creators, yet theatre has always been rooted in my soul again, and I feel that what I actually want to do is to appeal the hope. I’m calling for a power to listen, to see, to understand others. I think that in the midst of the modern spiritual crisis, listening itself contains a great power. What I am calling for is also communication, listening, the substance of love.

 

Now, several of the plays I am working on are about:

-Pneumoconiosis workers in China;

-The voguing dance of underground transgender people and its power to create families;

-One of my previous novels, which is being censored, is about a woman who hangs herself for a pearl and benevolence.

-A work about secretly ill children, a group of children who committed suicide in the internet corner of the millennial, and another group of people who witnessed the suicide of children.

-A work about micro-society and political experimentation, the whole society is the inner externalization of a person in power, about an extremely mediocre person who is held up on the altar by the times, and his heart will provoke feedback in every corner of society.

With this said, I truly thanks to Mr.Yeoh, and I hope to complete those works and get in touch with theatre makers. Please feel free to contact me [BY: I will pass on any messages]