The heart of the matter

“INTERVIEWS WITH BAKERS, BUTCHERS AND CHEESEMAKERS, EXPOSED ME TO THE PASSIONS THAT DRIVE PEOPLE TO MAKE FOOD”

People who have done both will occasionally remark that writing a book is akin to having a baby. I’m yet to experience motherhood so am not best placed to judge, though I will accept that creating a book renders you similarly incapable of thinking or talking about anything else for quite a while.

Where the two definitely differ, however, is in their inception. Unlike a child, there is rarely one clear point in which a book is conceived. They are instead an accumulation and distillation of moments and experiences, some of which feel important at the time, many of which only appear so in retrospect. Like my dad scrambling eggs in the microwave or my briefly dating a man who drank Huel because he was “too busy to chew”.

Working with Borough Market, however, has been one of those experiences that I knew all along to be formative. It is where my food writing career began and where it continues. It is where the seeds of my new book, Hungry Heart, were sown.

From my first trader interview (with Hayleigh from So Chocolicious, I think) to my most recent field trip to the Arbroath smokehouse that supplies Oak & Smoke, the Market has rooted me firmly in its values of community, largesse and sustainability. When I first started working on Market Life magazine in 2012, I was still recovering from the eating disorders that had sabotaged much of my teenage years. It was Borough, its traders and their produce that taught me how food represents so much more than flavour and calories; that a good meal in company of good people sustains our minds and relationships as much – if not more than – it does our bodies.

Interviews with cheesemakers, bakers and butchers exposed me to the passions that drive people to make food and drink. To talk to any of these hard-working individuals, who slog away for hours on end, often while most of us are sleeping, is to receive a lesson in life, love and philosophy – be that the curiously intense relationship a baker has with their starter, the mindfulness of cutting and stacking cheese curds, or the respect owed to an Iberico ham leg, expertly cured.

The most philosophical of all the producers I interviewed at the Market was – perhaps unsurprisingly – a French baker, Olivier Favrel of Olivier’s Bakery, whose bakery in Bermondsey I was fortunate enough to visit. I write about that visit in Hungry Heart, about the huge sacks of flour, the ovens, the scent of freshly baked boules, pains au levain and baguettes, of course – and how the one style of bread Olivier refuses to bake is the roll. “Bread is for sharing,” he said. “If you pay attention at dinner or lunch, you will feel a little difference when people pass each other the bread – more than passing the salad, or the salt and pepper. There’s a connection there: in the bread being touched, broken and shared around. There’s no love in an individual roll.”

Indeed, the relationship between bread and love runs deep. I devote a whole chapter to it, during which I recall eating a basket of bread in Paris with my best friend, Lizzie. We’d barely eaten all day and, scraping the last of the butter onto our final pieces of bread, I felt in practice what I’d only known before in theory: that to break bread with friends doesn’t just mean to eat with them. It means to chew over thoughts and experiences. It means to partake in a tradition that transcends countries and cultures, that represents civilisation, conviviality and hope.

The baguette is the quintessence of France and French hospitality. It’s something the French pride themselves on. It connects them – quite literally, in the queue for the boulangerie every morning, and more poetically through the act of sharing. If all Olivier wanted was to make money, he would make rolls, for which he could charge a lot more per unit – but he is content not making much money. He told me he feels rich enough in his wife, young twins, Oscar and Ophelia, and in his customers; and he is constantly struck by the power of baking to bring them joy.   

It was also Borough that taught me the importance of process to food and drink – to its production, of course, but also to its consumption. At one point I interviewed a director at Neal’s Yard Dairy, who told me that day by day the team at the company’s Bermondsey headquarters and maturing rooms take turns to cook lunch, then sit down and feast together at the long wooden table occupying the centre of the room. It was vital to how they worked, he said: on a practical level, by boosting communication between different departments, but on a personal level too, by ensuring each employee feels valued and can foster meaningful friendships. The Market is full of such examples of companies and communities forged and reinforced through good food.

A simple lunch lovingly prepared and enjoyed with others cannot compare with a supermarket sandwich eaten alone over your keyboard. A chocolate truffle handmade with Ghanaian cocoa sourced from farmers who can invest in their community will inspire more mindful eating than a Twix between calls. At Borough – and beyond – I learned to slow down and consider food not as fuel but as a fulcrum: the steady, sumptuous beat to which our days, weeks, months and years play out. To understand the value of that precious first cup of tea in the morning, or of plump, perfect ravioli bursting with beetroot, is to understand the value not just of meals, but of all that meals signify: time spent together, the change in seasons, human ingenuity, discovery, familiarity and simple pleasures.

Hungry Heart is not just my story: far from it. There are interviews with friends, food psychologists, anthropologists, even a kitchen designer. I speak to fellow food writers and friends of the Market, like Diana Henry, Bee Wilson and Polly Toynbee; I speak to chefs like Jeremy Lee, and I speak to traders. My story – of my grandparents’ hotel kitchen, my parents’ divorce and the dinners my newly single dad scrambled together with love and a microwave, my parents remarrying and our forging new families around old kitchen tables, my eating disorders and my recovery – is simply the thread that connects this wealth of other stories and creates what is hopefully a universal tale.

As our relationship towards what, when and where we eat becomes ever-more complicated, the time feels ripe to cut through the clutter and ask how food shapes our love for other people and ourselves. Many of the answers can be found at Borough Market.

Hungry Heart: a story of food and love, by Clare Finney (Quarto)