“I CAME FROM PEOPLE WHO HAD PRETTY LOW INCOMES, BUT THEY KNEW HOW TO COOK AND THEY KNEW HOW TO SHOP”

Interview: Ellie Costigan / Portrait: Orlando Gili

Sheila Dillon has worked on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme for more than 20 years. In that time, she has explored the best and worst of the food industry, both at home and abroad, and become one of the country’s most admired broadcasters and journalists. Her soft Lancastrian vowels have become part of the soundtrack to Sunday lunchtimes – and she’s been a regular at Borough Market since its inception.

Growing up in a Lancashire village, what were your formative experiences of food?

We had wonderful food. It’s more marginal now, but that area is still a fairly big producer of potatoes, asparagus, cabbages and so on, so a lot of the stuff we ate was from the region. I worked on the local farm, in the dairy and collecting eggs, so I knew about farming. My mum was a good cook, even though she worked full time from when I was four – she was a weaver in a cotton mill. She was a great food enthusiast. She and her friend Mrs Worrall would go mushrooming, we picked berries – it was all immense fun. People had gooseberries and blackcurrants and rhubarb in their gardens. I’m making it sound romantic – it wasn’t romantic, it was ordinary. I took good food for granted.

My dad, on the other hand, wasn’t remotely adventurous. I remember when the first Chinese restaurant opened in Preston and my mum and I went for lunch. We came back and told him we’d had rice. Rice? He could just about countenance it in a pudding, but rice with meat? Horrified.

When did you first develop an interest in the politics of food?

It wasn’t until much later. It’s one of the great oddities of my life: I was quite serious about food, so how can I have been so unaware for so long? We moved to New York from Edinburgh in 1977. I was working as a freelance journalist, mostly writing about women’s and feminist issues, when I had a baby. There’s a famous potato-growing area in Long Island and it turned out that a pesticide they put on the potatoes had seeped into the aquifer and people were getting sick, so they closed down the wells and were tanking water into these communities. I remember thinking, if it’s in the water, how much is in the potatoes? I’d been mashing potatoes to feed my son. That led me to the library, looking at pesticides. I was deeply shocked. I thought, who’s writing about this? And the answer was, not a lot of people. I got a job at a magazine called the Food Monitor – a wonderful magazine covering food politics and policy all over the world. It was a very, very good education. And that’s how I began.

How did you end up as the presenter of The Food Programme?

When I came back to the UK, I heard Derek Cooper on The Food Programme. I thought, god, this is good – this is where I need to work. I looked up the producer and I wrote to her. She was a bit dubious, but I came up with some ideas and ended up doing some freelance work for them. I applied for a job and didn’t get it, but amazingly, the woman who did get it dropped out, so they offered it to me instead. Isn’t it funny, the serendipity of life?

As someone who has lived in and reported from a wide range of countries, how do you think the British food system compares?

When I first got involved in The Food Programme, I couldn’t believe it – here we have Britain, a mixed farming economy, and rather than looking to France, Italy, Spain or Greece and saying, “People there aren’t obese, those cultures seem to have something right,” we instead follow the United States. The States has a disastrous food system. It’s disastrous for people’s health, disastrous for the environment. We started manipulating our food – lowering fat and all that rubbish. I found it almost incomprehensible: that our close relationship with America somehow led us into this disastrous copycat nonsense.

I think the European Union has a better model. We have been kept from our worst desires by the EU. It respects food quality and has a much better, stricter food safety system. It is in no way perfect, but it’s lightyears away from the American system. I go to the States a lot because my son, the baby that changed my life, lives there now and what I see is that if you are middle class, you can buy yourself into a decent food system. You needn’t take part, hardly, in the awfulness. It’s one law for the prosperous and one law for everybody else and I think that’s utterly horrible. It’s certainly a contradiction of everything The Food Programme’s about, which is based on the Derek Cooper – the Bollinger Bolshevik – idea of “Bolly for all”; the idea that good food is a democratic right.

How much has the food landscape changed in all your years of writing and broadcasting?

Some things have improved. We do now have a quality food system; this idea of a ‘foodie culture’. For the Food and Farming Awards, we get thousands of nominations. There’s a bakery in Barrow-in-Furness, a town with one of the highest rates of drug-related death in the UK – but it has this fantastic, affordable bakery. I was judging the food producer category with Andy Oliver, and just looking at bakeries, there were about 150 to 200 entries – and not every good bakery in Britain was nominated. We were going: “Yes, sourdough; yes, school visits; yes, local – and what else do you have to offer?” Ten years ago, how many great bakers were there in Britain? And all of them were concentrated in London, Edinburgh, Devon. Now, having a good bakery is becoming more ordinary.

On the other hand, you’ve got the giant food corporations conglomerating to be even bigger. As Michael Pollan pointed out in one of his books, we say that poor people need cheap food, but we have a system that doesn’t pay people enough, which is why we require it. Supermarkets and other food companies employ people on minimum wage, and then those people require universal credit to supplement their income because they’re paid so little. We pay for that out of our tax budget. What I take heart from is that these issues are more widely understood now. When I came to The Food Programme, this sort of thing was the province of very few specialists. Organic food was seen as muck and magic. It takes a long time to turn things around, but it is being talked about. The forces against change, though, are huge and powerful and have big PR budgets.

What do you think is the biggest issue we’ll be facing over the coming decade?

It’s difficult to say. Things are all tied up. What we’re facing at the minute is health problems that are immensely costly, both in terms of people’s lives and economically – it’s the consequence of eating a highly processed diet, and that’s spreading globally. We made a programme in Mexico a few years ago, covering the World Trade Organisation meeting, and we went to see the director of public health. The North America Free Trade Agreement had been signed a few years earlier and one of the many things that changed as a result of that was, it became a free market for the beverage producers – Coca Cola, Pepsi, all the rest. They’d done this massive marketing campaign in rural Mexico and consumption of sweetened beverages had gone up dramatically. What the chart behind his desk showed was that deaths from diabetes and stroke had rocketed, in line with the increased consumption of these things. Many people in the food industries say the intensive system of mass production has brought cheap food to everyone; it’s brought disease and death as well.

In Britain people often say, “Well, it’s alright for you, you’re middle class” – certainly I have become middle class, but I didn’t start out that way. I came from people who had pretty low incomes, but they knew how to cook and they knew how to shop. They ate well and took pleasure in food. What frustrates me is, we look at France and say, this food is wonderful – these long stews made with cheap cuts. Well, what’s that but poor food? Why in one culture is it greatly lauded as marvellous, romantic and lovely, but if we say cooking that kind of thing would be good to learn here, it’s somehow degrading?

Are there any experiences you’ve had with The Food Programme that have particularly inspired you?

There are things that really opened my eyes. I once followed a farmer around Ethiopia. We went to this part of the Great Rift Valley – the area that had terrible famines. I saw – and I hope people listening did too – that one of the causes of these terrible famines were the hybrid crops that had been pushed onto these farmers by development experts. These varieties needed quite a lot of water, so when you had a series of droughts, you got famine. The soil was completely denatured. But from the bottom up, they had been rebuilding the farming system. They’d gone back to rotation and created big plots of three layers of crops – papaya, coffee, vegetables – whose root systems go down to different levels, so you can grow all three in the same space. Some were cash crops, some they used to feed themselves.

To see people in circumstances we could barely imagine – they’ve watched their children die – having to rebuild a system, you see how stupid conventional opinions often are. You have to think for yourself – for the food system as in life. When food becomes a business, margins are what counts, rather than feeding people.

You started out writing about women’s issues. How have you been treated, as a woman working in food?

I’ve been incredibly lucky. Certainly Radio 4 has always been very supportive of The Food Programme – although generally in news and current affairs, food is treated as a soft subject; it’s seen as feminine. If you’re a woman working in food, that’s a double whammy. There are people who still think The Food Programme is about making cakes. Sometimes on news and current affairs programmes, I’ll listen to someone talking not very knowledgeably about something to do with food and the environment or economics, and it hasn’t occurred to them to call up The Food Programme and say, “What do you know about this?” There has been, I think, a slight contempt for food as a subject and there is a sexism about that.

This is a very broad brush, but until recently a lot of the most successful chefs have been macho guys – big, tough, angry, four-letter-words, a lot of posturing, as though that overcomes the fact they’re somehow involved in this dainty little profession. There’s still this gap between that and what is considered ‘women’s work’. But women in this industry are – and need to be – getting together. And I think that’s very important.

Has your involvement in policy and politics had an effect on the pleasure you get from food?

I love food. Sometimes I eat rubbish, but mostly I don’t. If you can cook, and I can, why wouldn’t you make lovely food? It’s not a hardship to buy and eat nice ingredients. I’ve always eaten good food – by that I mean ‘proper’ food: hot pots and things. Last night we had this silly thing my husband who doesn’t cook much makes. He calls it ‘Roman cauliflower’ – I don’t know where he got it from. You parboil a cauliflower and then you drain it, fry it in olive oil with a lot of garlic and some tomato paste and then you put parmesan or cheddar on at the end. It’s great! You sit there and think, this is really good. It’s just a cauliflower.

What do you think is the role of food markets?

I think food markets are utterly key. I was there at the beginning of Borough Market. I remember taking my mother one November and it was raining and cold. There were hardly any customers because the weather was so filthy, and I remember thinking, these people have real fortitude. The conventional wisdom was that out-of-town supermarkets were the future and markets were old fashioned and dead and of no advantage to the consumer. But suddenly people were fed up. There was no fun in it. And what you saw when you walked around Borough and the other markets that began to revive – because people were given energy by the success of Borough – was people smiling. People were happy.

Borough Market was profoundly important, because it showed people what could be done; that there was an outlet for small farmers and producers, that there was a desire to buy that kind of food. It showed the possibility for regeneration through food. We take it for granted now, but it is so important.

“THE FIRST PINT HAD THE FLAVOUR PROFILE OF A CORPSE-STREWN ENGLISH CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELD. THE SECOND WAS OKAY”

Years ago, when I lived in Bristol, some of my friends rented a flat above a tiny backstreet cider pub, which became our second home. The house cider was an extraordinary thing: murky, acrid and utterly lethal. Drinking it was like jumping into an ice-cold sea: shockingly unpleasant at first, with a fair bit of liquid needing to be ploughed through before the shivers subsided and immersion became bearable. The first pint had the flavour profile of a corpse-strewn English Civil War battlefield. The second was okay. The third was ambrosia.

Enquiries as to the cider’s strength would be met with a one-word answer: “Depends.” The effects were more psychedelic than alcoholic. No sane person could drink more than three (and if they did, their sanity wouldn’t fully survive the experience). At £1 a pint, you’d stagger out filled with mayhem and pork scratchings, still with change from a fiver. On reflection, they can’t have been paying any alcohol duties. On further reflection, it may not have officially been a pub.

It felt weird when, a few years later, I moved to London and cider suddenly became fashionable. Cider here was something that tasted less of decomposition and more of ice cubes, bubbles and advertising. Cider drinking was a lifestyle statement rather than a problem. Confused, I committed myself to beer instead. Now, The Cider House has started to win me back round.

Made in the village of Burley in the New Forest, these are real ciders, with body and soul – a world away from the sweet, insipid fizz of mass-produced brands. They taste of apples, and not just any apples: identifiable cultivars from the stall’s own farm and a couple of other traditional orchards. They vary significantly from style to style, and minutely from batch to batch. And, unlike those of my past, they definitely weren’t brewed in a black plastic bin out the back.

“THE HEADLINE EVENT INVOLVED COMPETITORS RACING WITH 12 WICKER BASKETS STACKED PRECARIOUSLY ON THEIR HEADS”

Every year on Shrove Tuesday, Borough Market plays host to a pancake race – frenetic, eccentric fun, but hardly an athletic event of any great note. There was a time, though, when this great London institution was responsible for putting on grand sporting occasions, none of which involved hot batter.

For many years, the Borough Market Sports – an annual sports day for Market porters held at the Herne Hill Athletic Grounds – was an event with significant public profile, drawing crowds in their thousands. Its foundations were laid in 1904, when a cricket match was arranged with the Market’s fruiterers on one team and its salesmen on the other. According to one report, “the fruiterers beat the salesmen in hollow fashion”, but a good time was nonetheless had by all. The next year the workers gathered for a more general sports day, which quickly established itself as a highly anticipated annual event.

In 1908 it took place in Herne Hill and by 1911 it had moved to Crystal Palace. Unfortunately, just as the sports day was becoming a regular fixture in the calendar, the First World War began and the event was seemingly consigned to history.

One of its main organisers of the sports day had been William Blackman, a fruit and veg trader and secretary of the Borough Market trustees. In the late 1920s, Blackman began toying with the idea of reviving the tradition, no doubt encouraged by young porters in family firms who were sick of hearing their dads’ endless tales of athletic glory. He set about raising funds and inspiring publicity for a Borough Market Sports revival, scheduled to take place in September 1930, by writing piles of letters to newspapers, businesses and celebrities.

Blackman’s hard work paid off when, on 27th June 1930, a letter was sent from the Hollywood offices of Charlie Chaplin, whose impoverished childhood had been spent on the streets of Southwark. Chaplin’s manager announced that yes, the actor would love to contribute to the sports day and so enclosed a cheque for £20. A famous name has always been PR gold, and with probably the most famous man in the world on board, Borough Market Sports suddenly became a matter of genuine national interest.

The headline event – partly because it was such a brutal test of strength, speed and balance and partly because it was the one that Chaplin’s prize money supported each year – was the half-bushel basket carrying handicap, which was open to all-comers and involved competitors racing around the stadium with 12 wicker baskets, each weighing almost 2kg, stacked precariously on their heads.

In 1930, this was rendered particularly tough by strong winds – a comic scene captured on the day by a Pathé News crew. “I can’t tell you ‘ow ‘appy I am to win this event for the Borough Market chaps,” the bashful-looking winner tells the reporter at the end, clearly shattered by his exertions. From the back of the crowd of jostling porters, all wearing flat caps and big suits, a voice shouts out: “Now give ‘im a pint!”

A similar event involved the carrying of 10-bushel baskets. Also fiercely contested, from 1933 onwards, was the inter-market relay race, in which the champion athletes of other London markets sought to spoil Borough’s big day. Many of the events were open only to staff of Borough Market and South London Fruiterers – as well as conventional cycling and running events, these included the obstacle race, sack race, band race, boot race, tilting the basket and novelty cycle race.

In 1933, Chaplin’s contribution included “two valuable prizes” for a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition. According to the South London Press: “Borough Market has among its porters a number of clever amateur actors, and they were practising ‘making up’ behind piles of potato sacks to impersonate the famous film star.”

Although 10 entries were received, only five cane-wielding little tramps turned up on the day. “One would not think numbering bashfulness among the traits of a Borough Market porter,” wrote the Daily Telegraph. Ever the joker, in 1935 the actor stipulated that, as a consolation prize, £2 10s of his contribution should be presented to the wife who had endured the misfortune of being married to an unsuccessful competitor for the longest time.

Some competitors found fame of sorts. A feature in the Evening Standard in 1938 included an interview with Alfred Hardy, 19, who worked on his father’s stall in the Market. As the winner of the half-bushel race, he had walked away with the Chaplin-sponsored prize of a suit, an overcoat and a gold watch. How did he train? asked the reporter. “Well, I gave up smoking for a month and practised carrying 18 baskets in short runs round the Market after work.”

Borough Market Sports raised thousands of pounds for charity. The main recipient was Guy’s Hospital, but many other charities and benevolent funds also benefitted. It is a crying shame, then, that the event came to such a sudden end.

The event scheduled for 6th September 1939 was set to be the biggest yet, with the BBC apparently preparing to broadcast highlights. The posters had been pasted up and a chunky 64-page programme had been printed. Then, on 1st September, German tanks poured across the Polish border and the battle for the half-bushel basket carrying cup was cancelled for a contest of a far more brutal nature.

“HESTON BLUMENTHAL’S MIND WAS BLOWN BY THE FACT THAT CLASSIC FRENCH TECHNIQUES WERE NOT GROUNDED IN TRUTH”

Interview: Ellie Costigan / Images: Anna Warnow

Harold McGee is a highly influential American author who writes mainly about the science of food and cooking. His seminal book, On Food and Cooking – a hefty, encyclopaedic compendium of “the science and lore of the kitchen” for the everyday cook – was first published in 1984. A significantly expanded and revised version, which was published in 2004, influenced a move towards a form of high end cookery grounded in food science, championed by the likes of Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller. Harold wrote a column, A Curious Cook, in the New York Times for five years. He is now a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

When did you first develop a fascination with the science of food?

It was in the mid-1970s. At the time I was a graduate student in literature, writing a dissertation on John Keats and also teaching at the university, but it was clear already then that a teaching career was probably not going to materialise. I think it’s perpetually the case that more people want to teach literature than there are classes to teach. I tried for a few years to get a full time job and didn’t, so began to cast around for other possibilities. I had been, as an undergraduate, a science major and my mentors in literature said, “You know, that really distinguishes you, you ought to do something with that,” and so I began to think about it.

I had a friend who was a biochemist who, for fun, taught a one-off afternoon course on the thermodynamics of crystal formation, as applied to fudge making. It was a huge success. Everyone was able to eat their experiments and something about that resonated with me. I had other friends who enjoyed getting together to cook and eat food and drink inexpensive wine. At one of those dinners, a friend of mine had his wine glass knocked over. The tablecloth was white and someone said, “Throw salt on the stain. That’ll take care of it.” I thought, that’s interesting, I wonder why that is? The same friend who had his wine glass knocked over asked the group why it is that human beings have a limited tolerance for beans, why after a certain point they begin to give you… uncomfortable feelings. I thought, I wonder if there’s an answer to that question? I went to the science and agriculture section of the library and that’s where I discovered food science. I spent hours there. I found the answer to his question, and that’s what gave me the idea that writing about the science of food and cooking – not for professionals, but for people who are just interested – would be a project that I could do that no one else seemed to have done at the time. That’s what sparked On Food and Cooking.

Did you do much practical testing in the kitchen while writing the book?

I felt obliged to test out everything that I could test. Food science has for its whole history been involved mainly with industry, not with cooking, so many of the books ignored a lot of issues that are important to cooks. I had to extrapolate from the food science literature and try to interpret it to make sense of what happens in the kitchen. For those areas especially, I would spend time in the kitchen, making sure that I wasn’t leading myself astray. But that’s the part I really enjoy: there’s a piece to this story that’s missing, where am I going to find it? This, of course, was long before the internet, so it would also mean burrowing in old journals and following bibliographic leads to try to come up with the missing link – I love that stuff. The actual setting it down and making it clear, that’s not so much fun.

The second edition of On Food and Cooking, published 20 years later, is markedly different. Why is that?

The first edition came out in 1984 and it really was written just for enthusiasts. Then, after a decade or so of it being on the market, it was clear it was being used in culinary schools, because nothing quite like it existed – there were plenty of textbooks on food science for food scientists, but nothing for cooks. When I saw that, I began to think about the second edition in a much more formal and structured way: what is it that a professional in the kitchen should know about his or her materials and methods? And so the second edition came out very differently.

Had the appetite for this sort of book changed?

It was received completely differently. In the late seventies, early eighties, when I was writing On Food and Cooking the first time around, food was not a ‘thing’ in the States. There were no specialty coffee shops, olive oil was unknown in the American kitchen. We had our barbecue and wonderful American traditions and people enjoyed eating food, but it was not a very outward-looking approach. Then, somehow or other – I think it was a mixture of getting far enough away from the end of the second world war and, certainly in England, the end of rationing, as well as the arrival of jet aeroplanes, travel, tourism and television – all these things combined to make people see that food was way more interesting than they’d realised. Young Americans became interested in having restaurants. But they were not content to do a 10-year apprenticeship, starting with prepping potatoes. In the 1990s, I started to hear from young American cooks who had ambitions and would ask difficult questions of the mainly European-trained chefs, who would tell them, “Don’t ask questions, just do it,” or would make things up for the sake of coming up with an answer. So these young chefs would write to me with their questions. They were really the ones – these young, ambitious, impatient American chefs – who helped give my book some visibility.

You developed relationships with some very high-profile chefs. How did that come about?

Heston Blumenthal read the book and his mind was blown by the fact that classic French techniques such as ‘sealing in the juices’ of meat, for example, were not grounded in truth. The first contact I had from him was a long email about cooking beans. He had tried something 10 different ways but was uncertain about the results. It was clear from that initial email that his mind was firing on all cylinders, all the time.

There are two ways to get to a very high level of proficiency in cooking. One is just doing it a zillion times and in the course of doing that, you get so much practical experience. You do it a little bit differently each time, get a different result, and register what changed. You begin to understand things, but on a very different level to if you understand what something is made from and why it behaves a certain way in a particular circumstance. Once you have that understanding, you can then predict how an ingredient might behave if you treat it in a way you haven’t tried before, which might give you an interesting result.

This scientific approach to cooking was, as a movement, labelled ‘molecular gastronomy’. You have publicly taken umbrage with that label. What is it that you believe is misleading?

Cooks have always embraced many different approaches depending on the materials and resources available to them and what they were trying to do: feed people, impress people, amuse people. There have always been those elements, cross-culturally. While I was writing these books, there was this avant-garde movement in Spain which all of a sudden, in the space of a decade, burst into prominence on the international scene. The leader of that, Ferran Adrià, would come up with new menus constantly, always innovating, never wanting to repeat himself. A lot of his dishes at that time looked like science experiments and he talked openly about the use of food science. He was using ingredients and tools that had previously been used in industry but would have been heretical in a high-end kitchen. Food science of a certain kind, in the service of innovation, became important in the restaurant.

But to do that well, you really have to understand things in tremendous detail. The thing that Heston, Ferran, Thomas Keller and I were concerned about – and were compelled to make a public statement about – was that while young chefs should learn about the science of cooking, they also need to learn to cook. The term ‘molecular gastronomy’ became associated with an experimental approach to cooking, but missed the point that good cooking in restaurants requires a depth of practical knowledge and know-how. That foundation is really important, because if you only focus on novelty – which became the exciting, cool thing to do – and you don’t have that foundation, you’re going to make a lot of novelties that are horrific and give the whole field a bad name. That sort of approach doesn’t make a real contribution to the culture of the kitchen.

Industrialisation and globalisation have triggered enormous changes to the way we produce and consume food. What has been the impact of that?

I think what’s happened in food has happened with human culture in general: we’ve been going full steam ahead and not noticing what we’re leaving in our wake. Now, we’re finally waking up to the consequences. For example, we can’t dismiss concerns about the influence of animal agriculture on the climate by saying people are just trying to scare us. This is a real issue and one that needs to be addressed.

The founder of Impossible Foods, which makes plant-based meat substitutes, said that his mission is to put animal agriculture out of business totally. But I love meat and I respect the farmers in Scotland and France and many other places where animal agriculture has been an integral part of human culture, forever, so when I hear him say that, it bothers me. It seems to be so cold and unwilling to confront historical reality. On the other hand, I think what he’s doing is great because it gives us one more option to deal with a huge problem. We’re going to need dozens of approaches to begin to address these issues. It’s important that smart people, whether they work in Silicon Valley or anywhere else, are thinking about it and doing what they can. People should start out by recognising that they don’t have The Answer – capital T, capital A – and that the more people who are seriously engaged with the issue, the better.

Do you think the way that we now produce food has had an impact on food quality as well as the environment?

I think it’s difficult to generalise, because the effects are different on different things in different places. Rachel Laudan is a historian who happens to write about food. She wrote a book called Cuisine and Empire and she’s the closest thing we have to a voice of reason on these issues. Her book is about the history of cooking, from the earliest days to now, and the point she makes is that before industrialisation, food production meant a terrifically hard life for anyone involved. I think she makes a very compelling case that the industrialisation of food has been a boon for people who have lived in the last century or two, for that very reason – that it frees them from spending hours a day over a grindstone making flour. It’s very easy to say that the quality of food has declined, that the variety that we can enjoy has declined and that there are all these negatives, but there’s a huge counterargument about the quality of life, which has improved.

What will the future of food look like?

I’m not a prophet, so I really don’t know – except to say that it’s probably going to become yet more diverse and yet more self-conscious, and those are mostly good things. What strikes me is the fact that there are now dozens of people who were previously never involved in food who are looking at these problems and seeing what they can do to make a difference. They’re applying their skills to food, which I think is unprecedented. And that’s exciting.