Lunch with the FT: Tristram Stuart
By William Leith
Published: December 23 2009 23:11 | Last updated: December 23 2009 23:11
Still, he’s not a genius of punctuality. But never mind. I sit alone at my table in Wahaca, which is the phonetic spelling of Oaxaca, an area of Mexico with a diverse cuisine. I’m in a huge, rambling basement full of loud Christmas lunchers, many wearing bright paper hats. The season of excess, I can see, is picking up speed. The menu is big – a flapping sheet of paper that looks like satellite TV listings. Masses of choice. Tender, marinated this and that, with a wide variety of salsa. Beef, chicken, fish, chorizo. I order a dark beer and an aged tequila, which is described as being “like a malt whisky”. It’s surprisingly delicate, and comes in a playfully chunky little glass.
When he arrives, Stuart, 32, looks exactly as you’d expect – a tall, handsome, unshaven saviour of the homeless and the hungry. But he also looks like a man who would not be afraid to rummage for food in supermarket dustbins. In fact, he has compiled a detailed chart on the subject, setting waste statistics against gross takings. Later, he will tell me that one of the things he has found most satisfying is compiling lists and charts of statistics concerning food waste. He may know more about the subject than any man on earth.
He takes off his duffel coat with its big toggles. Underneath he is wearing a white collarless shirt and a grey jumper. It’s the day after the Trafalgar Square event. He is exhausted but full of adrenalin. He picks up the menu. “The thing I like about this menu”, he says, “is that it doesn’t make a song and dance about being sustainable, but it takes it for granted. I’m not saying everything is perfect. But you can tell there’s an effort being made to source things in a sustainable way. It doesn’t say at the top a big thing about sustainable fishing. And it doesn’t say anything at all about the effort being made to recycle food waste. It’s just done. And that’s what you want – for these things almost to be taken for granted.” The chef at Wahaca is Thomasina Miers, who performed a cooking demonstration at Stuart’s Trafalgar Square event.
The waiter appears. This is one of those places where the waiter does a lot of smiling and explaining of the complexities of the menu. You can share things, or not; or have lots of little things, or a couple of big things. The plates are a funny shape, like little trays. There are sauces. “This one is mild citrus. This is smoky. And this is evil – believe me.”
Then he says to Stuart: “I think I saw you on the TV.”
“Yes,” Stuart says, “you know what happened yesterday? We fed 5,000 people for free in Trafalgar Square. We served 3,200 curries, three tons of free groceries, and I think half a ton of smoothies.” The figures are, he explains, estimated, partly by counting unused plates. Later, he revises the number of curries upwards to 3,500.
We look again at the menu. Stuart says, “Pollock, of course, is relatively sustainable.” I order the pollock. Stuart orders a burrito of seasonal vegetables with avocado salsa. His first book, The Bloodless Revolution (2006), was a history of vegetarianism, although he is not one himself. He lives on a farm in Sussex and shoots and eats squirrels. He also keeps pigs. He boils their heads, to eke out every bit of goodness. In fact, he is passionate about pigs, to the extent of dedicating Waste to his first sow – Gudrun.
“Do you mind sharing drinks?” he asks.
“Uh, no.”
“Well, let’s order an almond one and a hibiscus one.” He also orders a coffee with milk on the side. I order a double espresso.
Raising his voice to be heard above the festive atmosphere in the restaurant, Stuart tells me about the Trafalgar Square event. “We brought enough food to feed 5,000 people, and all that food would otherwise have been wasted. I spend most of my time making arguments and explanations for why it matters that we waste food, and what we can do about it. And yesterday I didn’t need to say anything. The food was there. People were queueing up and taking away bagfuls of free groceries. And when they got to the front of the line – it’s just a joyous sight – people were saying, ‘What’s wrong with this? Why was this going to be wasted?’ I didn’t need to say any more. Exactly.”
I say I heard people talking about it on the radio. They loved the food – and the idea. “Did they? Did they? Brilliant! I watched it unfold. I was overwhelmed. The thing that I completely failed to anticipate was ... the magic. I couldn’t see the end of the queue. They were queueing right around Trafalgar Square. In the snow. They would get to the end of the queue, and get this plate of delicious curry, and bread. Their faces just changed colour.”
We discuss Waste, which is shocking, and also quite straightforward. In the book he explains, using figures extrapolated from a “protracted examination” of 2,000 household bins by the Waste and Resources Action Programme, how we produce too much food. We chuck a lot of it away uneaten. The bread and grain products we throw away in this country every year would help 26m people to avoid starvation – we dump 2.6bn slices of bread every year. And also 484m unopened yoghurts. And 1.6bn apples. In all, we throw away more than 30 per cent of the food we buy.
Why? Because, as Stuart points out in Waste, human beings have always loved excess. “Surplus has been the foundation for human success for 10,000 years.” A tribe with too much food increases in size, and also in strength. Human beings have always believed that having too much is better than the frightening alternative of not having enough.
This also seems true of today’s food economy. Stuart says, “Let’s completely hypothetically say you have an article of food, cost price 50p, retail price £1. It becomes financially much more attractive to overstock, and lose the cost price, than understock and lose...”
“The sale?”
“Yes. The sale. Now, that’s a tightrope that any supplier of any product would have to tread. Something that is less excusable is when they overstock beyond the requirement to avoid the risk of missing out on sales. In other words, they fill the shelves in order to create the image of abundance. Because that is what customers expect. They’ve been led to expect this. In fact, it’s a recent phenomenon. Bare shelves in supermarkets were a common sight in the 1980s. But now, food is not being put on a shelf just to feed people but to create a display...”
I nod.
“...a display of cornucopian abundance. Um, I’m just wondering whether that was a tautology. I think it probably was.”
Our food arrives. The pollock is wrapped in tinfoil, and comes with spicy vegetables – peppers and onions. Pollock is a dense white-fleshed fish, rather like cod, but not as over-fished. Stuart has written about the vast amount of waste perpetrated by the global fishing industry. In trying to catch fish that are attractive to wholesalers, trawlers must catch vast numbers of fish that are not so attractive, but which die anyway, and are then thrown back unused.
Stuart is getting stuck into his food. “I’m a big fan of street food,” he says. “And that’s what this is. I like that – what’s the word? – colloquial food culture. Whenever I go to any part of the world, one of my windows on to the culture is to just go out and eat whatever is put forward by whoever is on the street. And to completely disregard the warnings of getting hepatitis in Kazakhstan from eating horse tripe stuffed with horse meat in railway stations made by locals in their own kitchens and brought out when they know the train from Moscow is about to go through...”
Stuart grew up in Sussex, in the Ashdown Forest. There were rocky times in his family life – his parents got divorced, and his father, Simon, was ill for a time with kidney disease. There were two older brothers. For a time, when his father was ill, Stuart went to boarding school in Sevenoaks, which he didn’t like. Or at least, when I ask him if he liked it, he remains silent, and then says something like it was good to get home, back to the Ashdown Forest.
For a time, when he was in his teens, he lived with his father. “The heyday was when I lived with my dad. It was just him and me. And I bought pigs. I bought Gudrun.” Keeping pigs taught Stuart about food waste. He collected canteen scraps from his school, and soon joined a network of farmers and shopkeepers who would give him potatoes and cauliflower leaves and tomatoes for his pigs. The pigs “had lovely, long bacon-backs” – the meat, he says, was great. When the pigs ate tomatoes, the seeds would pass through them, and Stuart got a field full of tomato plants. Then he made chutney.
“I had my pigs and my father had this fantastic vegetable garden and I got chickens,” says Stuart. “We were trying to be organic and self-sufficient. Not in a self-conscious way. It was just a wonderful, wonderful time.” Stuart’s father had been a progressive schoolteacher. “When he came into the classroom, the first thing he would do was tell all the children to rearrange the desks into a circle.”
When Stuart left school, he went to work on a farm in rural France. “They were some of the last true peasants – a real inspiration to me,” he says. Next, he read English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he met Alice Albinia, whom he married in 2001. The moment he finished his finals, he dashed over to Kosovo “to do some humanitarian aid”. Then he joined Alice in India, where she was working for the Centre for Science and Environment. He worked there, too.
The burritos are pleasantly bland – the flatbread exterior soft and doughy. I wonder if I should try the sauce the waiter described as “evil” but decide against it. Stuart and Alice, who is also an author, have moved back to the Ashdown Forest. They have pigs, chickens, “and bees, which I’ve always wanted”. I ask him whether they plan on having any children. He ponders the question, eventually saying, “I think there’s a strong case, environmentally, for delayed reproduction.”
We swap drinks. I’ve had the almond one. Now I sip the hibiscus one, which is like Ribena but not so sweet. We talk global food production. About too much fertiliser being put into the soil, to increase yields. About forests being chopped down, to make way for fields of soya beans, so that we can feed cattle, so that we can eat beef. The fact that beef cattle are raised on maize and soya, says Stuart, “turns the entire rationale of the domestication of animals on its head. When humans first domesticated animals, it was to increase the net food supply – because domesticated animals were able to convert otherwise unusable resources into...”
“Calories?”
“Yes, calories. But also into other products. Like traction – pulling ploughs – milk, meat ... and heating! In northern climates, you kept your animals indoors. They were radiators. No, seriously! Those peasants in France that I lived with – you had your cow in your living room, literally with their heads sticking in your living room. No way were you going to allow all that wonderful heat to...”
The waiter appears again. Do I want anything else? I look at the menu for a while. My mind goes blank. Stuart says he’s full. But why don’t I have something? I point to a dish. It turns out to be beef tostada – cold, shredded beef on small tortillas, which are like crackers. A ball of cold beef on a cracker. Not bad, actually.
And as we eat, we talk waste, and more waste. Quite simply, the western world is producing too much food. We don’t understand how expensive this might eventually become. The soil will wear out. Or else we’ll chop all the trees down. Or else we’ll deplete the fish stocks. These things will happen, if we don’t change our ways. There’s a lot we can do. Write shopping lists to plan meals. Buy less. Use leftovers. Don’t peel vegetables. Eat less meat...
He looks at his phone. He is running behind schedule again. “It’s 2.40! My wife has been waiting for me outside! That’s fine. I was late. But I should at least tell her I’m here.” He talks on the phone for a minute. Then he puts on his duffel coat with the big toggles, and shakes my hand.
.......................
Wahaca
66 Chandos Place
London WC2
Beer x 2 £7.60
DJ Anejo (tequila) x 1 £4.50
Double espresso x 3 £5.25
Hibiscus Agua drink x 1 £1.30
Horchata almond drink x 1 £1.30
Vegetable burrito x 1 £6.00
Pollock x 1 £9.95
Beef tostada x 1 £3.85
Total £39.75
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Feeding the 5,000: ‘Food waste seems so irrational’
Hotel worker, London (originally from Egypt)
“We waste so much food where I work. Probably half is thrown away. It should be given to charity, because this amount of waste is unethical. I will definitely try to change my lifestyle now.”
Unemployed actuary, London
“My parents brought me up never to waste food, so I detest waste and try not to throw anything away. I’m unemployed at the moment so I have plenty of spare time for a free lunch.”
Theatre producer, Somerset
“I’m from the country so I’m used to wonky vegetables, and I’m sure the food will taste exactly the same as from the supermarkets. Food waste seems so irrational, so this event is an awesome idea.”
Retired, London
“Consumers have been pre-conditioned to expect their food to look perfect. If we adjusted our tastes, [supermarkets] like Tesco would flex their muscles a bit more to respond to the problem of food waste.”
Volunteer at Feed the 5,000, student, London
“I decided to volunteer today. I’m hoping it will encourage people to change the way they think about food.”
Sonia Krylova
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