Anna Jones: Food as Connection
Image credit: The Guardian
Last year, we hosted an All Day Communion with lots of wonderful guest speakers. We had some of these talks transcribed and published in our first ever newspaper, which celebrated one whole year of Communion. 100% of the proceeds from the paper go to Papyrus UK, a charity that works hard to prevent young suicide in the UK. You can buy the paper here, and listen to all of our previous guest talks here.
We know that watching videos and buying publications isn’t always accessible to everyone, so we thought we’d put the transcribed talks up on the blog too. We hope you enjoy them.
Anna, my relationship with you started before we met. A Modern Way To Eat came out, and all of a sudden I wasn't allowed to eat meat and it was really irritating if I'm honest. I knew it was the right thing to do but I just grew up as one of those people, if meat is not at the centre then then that's not a proper meal. Lots of people have got this really nice sort of shaded way of eating now where the plate is all about putting vegetables at the center and then a little bit of animal on the side. You're vegetarian, right? Tell me about yourself, Anna.
I'm the mother of a little boy, Dylan. I'm a cook and I am vegetarian, so I try and put vegetables at the centre of people's plates. I use that phrase a bit more than saying vegetarian; I think veggie or veganism has sort of transcended itself a little bit in the last few years, but when I first started writing about vegetarian food, the word vegetarian got quite a lot of people twitchy and annoyed. The sort of hemp trouser, brightly painted cafes situation which I personally love, but I know is not something that lots of people associate with joy and generosity when it comes to food. Initially I started off cooking with Jamie Oliver. I actually was part of the 15 programme he did years ago, which was just an absolutely wild ride. It was when he was sort of ascending to a national hero, I guess. I spent quite a lot of time working with him; helping him do recipe development, make the food look nice and working on his social campaigns. I spent a lot of time visiting school kitchens around the country, people might remember that mad Irish dinner lady called Nora Sands? If anyone watched, we spent a lot of time trying to persuade her that apples were preferable to turkey twizzlers. Working with Jamie gave me this brilliant, rounded, all encompassing view of cooking recipes but also made me view food as a great connector and as a force for change. I think that working for him for seven years set me on the path I’m on now.
Did you grow up cooking?
I did yeah. My Mum doesn't really like cooking, and I think that's why I like it. Quite often passions come from something that is passed down from our parents or is shown to us, but for me it was the lack of. I think that sparked passion for me. It's not like my Mum is a terrible cook. We were always well nourished. We always had that sugar free jam from Holland & Barrett… My Mom did cook, even though she didn't really love cooking and she wasn't really interested in it. She furnished me with all the materials, she bought me a million books, she empowered me to cook dinner for my family from a really young age. I just got really into it. I'd be inside making lemon mousse and frosting grapes and doing very strange things for a 9 year old child…. I realised that when I brought a plate of something to the table, everyone kind of connected, and that’s what kept me going initially.
Was that part of an almost nurturing role, that helped form your identity? Was that a part of it? How do you see yourself?
Definitely. It gave me confidence I think. I was quite a shy little kid - I wouldn't have been able to walk into a room and introduce myself or do a dance. I wasn't that confident little kid, so cooking gave me something physical to do. I think it definitely built my confidence. It set me up with a sense of self, with something to fall back on that wasn't school, that wasn't sport. That’s what I love about cooking, it is so universal. Most people like talking about food. Most of us understand the connection food brings.
It’s interesting, these days we define ourselves as a foodie or by what we eat rather than by what we think. I know that those two things are related increasingly. That whole kind of like self - identity is really important and I guess in your family there was that gap when no one was fulfilling that role and you just jumped straight into it.
I think so. I had the most brilliant childhood and I feel so grateful that my Mum and Dad have been the most fantastic parents but definitely, it allowed me to find my role in the family and that of course it's like just a little microcosm for finding your role in the world. That's how we work out where we are I guess. I'm definitely a caregiver, someone who looks after people, and I think cooking helped me establish that was my role and what I wanted to do. It helped me find a way to live the rest of my life.
So when you were cooking, what were you listening to, Anna?
I had terrible taste in music when I was young. My first album was Kylie Minogue one, remember the one with the hat? I think I was quite a girly girl and I’ve been getting progressively less girly ever since.
I think I was quite a girly boy at that age. If that's such a thing. I quite enjoyed all that kind of like early 80s makeup. So what did you study at school?
I studied all sorts. I didn't do home economics which is quite hilarious. I chose to skip that and do something else, mainly because I had a rubbish teacher and it's all about the teacher isn't it? I did a lot of drama and then I went onto University to study economics which clearly has nothing to do with anything I do now. It was economics and philosophy, so I did a lot of studying around the third world debt crisis then actually went to work at the Jubilee 2000 campaign for a while. I was working under a brilliant woman called Ann Pettifor, who now runs the new economics forum, she's one of my life heroines. I thought that was what I was going to go into. I wanted to go into the World Bank or the IMF.
I used to work with them many moons ago, what they do is really groundbreaking, but look, the word eco in economics and ecology comes from the Greek words oikos, which means home. So actually you weren't too far away, economics it’s just keeping our collective houses in order. Part of that is the flow of resources in, and part of that is food. When we look at the amount of food we harvest and the amount that we eat, a third is lost between harvest and shop, and a third is wasted between shopping and home. When you compare those two - 51% of all food grown, never makes the intended target ecologically. It’s crazy financially and it’s doubly crazy when it’s animal agriculture because of the significantly high carbon footprint. Do you ever get involved in the sustainability debate?
I do, yeah. My next book, which comes out in March 2021 - it was meant to come out in September 2020 but with this strange wild time we've been living through, we had to delay it because we want to get printed sustainably with sustainable paper and sustainable ink, which meant it had to be done in Europe. Anyway, my next book (One Pot, Pan, Planet - out now) is trying to bring the conversation around sustainability and vegetarian and vegan food together a bit. because I know there are you know I enjoy reading books about sustainability. I know a lot of people want to do the right thing, to do something to help, but they don't want to pick up a 400 page book on sustainability. I've tried to leave some advice and some information in between the recipes. It's about having that information and being able to shop and cook with that in mind. This will be my 4th book, and with the rest of the book I’ve written, I've been quite gentle with the way I've talked about vegetarian food and what I have asked of people. That was very intentional, because I wanted people to be driven by the deliciousness of the food first. And then 300 pages in, I wanted them to realise that there's not been any meat or fish in the book. But with this book, I feel like it's different. I feel the urgency. I feel the need for change has accelerated, or our awareness of it has accelerated, to a point where I'm doing something that's actually a bit uncomfortable for me. I’m standing a bit more on a soapbox and saying, these are the facts and this is what I think is a way of making some efforts to solve them.
Does that scare you?
It does. Absolutely. The underlying principle of my being is to be a people pleaser, to be someone who is there to help and provide. The worst thing for me is to offend someone or ask something of someone that they don’t feel comfortable with. So it definitely is an uncomfortable place for me, but somewhere I’m learning more and more so sit, and stand up.
It's really important too. If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. There's so much misinformation about the environmental impact of food and packaging. It's really easy to criticise people who eat a lot of soy, and say you're destroying the rainforest. Almost 80% of soy crops are grown for animal feed so it's way more complex than lots of people would think. So Anna, working with Jamie must have been really really exciting. He is a really interesting guy. How did you leave a job like that?
I was there for seven years and I think it took me about four years to work up to leaving the job. It was literally my dream job at the time, but I just knew I had something more to give. I had made the jump to being vegetarian and there weren’t really any cook books out there at the time that were speaking to me. I remember people saying to me, “What are you doing?” Even my Dad was like, “Are you sure this is a good shout?” My parents have been very supportive and let me take risks all my life, so that was a difficult one. I think it was actually my husband who gave me the confidence to do it. He was my safety net for doing it.
Having someone like that is important for many reasons. We’ve got some great questions here. The first one is, how do we keep momentum heading to keep that change going? And secondly, what is it you're feeling positive about the future of food?
I think this has actually been a really amazing time for food and a really amazing time for cooking. I think people are learning to respect and honour food and waste less. In the first lockdown I was making things out of old carrot peelings, and in my normal life I don't do that. I think we're all gonna come out of this as different cooks, as better cooks and I hope with a more respectful view of food for the magical, life giving stuff it is. How could you have explained, some five years ago, that people would be holding a bag of flour in such high regard? It was the same as getting your first PlayStation when you were younger, the bag of flour turned into that in the first lockdown. I just really hope that we can hold onto that complete preciousness of these ingredients, and I hope it gives us a bit more of a connection with the farmers who grow our food, with how our food is grown. And also the Black Lives Matter movement - for way too long the food industry has been dominated white middle class people. I hold my hands up and say I absolutely am part of that. I think the fact that it’s being called out, the fact that it’s being written about a lot, the fact that a lot of different cultures and cuisines are being held up and put on a pedestal, I think is amazing. It is only going to enrich our culinary situation and landscape and I’m really excited about that.
That was a really great answer. Ok next question, for someone who needs a great veggie cookbook to start with, what would you recommend?
I think that the best one, if you want something really easy, is my second book which is called A Modern Way To Cook. All of the recipes are grouped by time, so 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes etc. With most of my books I try and keep things as simple as I possibly can because I'm a reasonably impatient cook. Everyone thinks I spend like 6 or 7 hours in the kitchen and I do when I'm cooking for work and testing recipes, but when I get home I have exactly the same pressures as anyone else. I want dinner on the table in 30 minutes.
Your first book is our go to - A Modern Way To Eat. It has no spine because it’s so well loved. Do you envision yourself ever working with schools and within education again?
I do actually. That's something I've just started doing a bit in the last couple of months. I'm having a bit of a holiday from my Guardian column, on which I love writing, but for me as someone who feels a bit like they're late with their homework every month, it takes up a lot of headspace. I’ve been working with my friend Hannah Cameron, who is a Mum, who realised about three weeks ago when she took her little boy back to school that the government had cancelled the school fruit and veg scheme. It’s a scheme which gives a free piece of fruit to every kid between four and seven years old, and they cancelled it during lockdown without telling anyone. So I'm working with Hannah and a few of the school food campaigning charities to try and get that back up again. I'm actually going to post on my Instagram about it later with some details of how you can help.
That’s amazing. Ok another question, so even though food and farming and waste will always be critical to lots of us. Some of us working in food are finding that it feels a little trivial to be posting about food or cooking while the world is on fire with social justice concerns. How are you addressing that?
That’s a brilliant question and one I have been asking myself so much. At the very beginning of lockdown when everything felt very tense and tenuous, it felt weird to me to be posting recipes. And equally after George Floyd's death and the movement that followed, that felt distasteful actually, to be posting about food. I actually took a couple of weeks off from posting anything apart from the learning that I was doing and the things I was engaging in at the time. But I do feel that food has a way of being able to change people’s minds; both by nourishing our bodies and minds and setting ourselves up on a basic physical energetic level to then go out into the world, but also I feel that it's an incredible force for change. I'm happy to be political, I'm happy to say it like it is, but I want to now use my platform to raise up other voices and to talk about food in a completely different way. I’m just at the beginning of the journey of working out how I do that.
Anna’s latest book, One, is out now. Find out more on Anna’s Instagram below.