Life in Charms with Thomasina Miers

0:01I'm Annoushka Ducas and I've been designing jewellery for 30 years and collecting charms for as long as I can remember. In this podcast I will be asking a series of extraordinary women to tell me their life story in charms. Welcome to My Life in Charms. Today's guest on My Life in Charms is passionate about many things. Chilis, sustainable food and dancing. But above all, Mexico. The culture, the people and especially the food. She first caught the nation's attention when she won MasterChef back in 2005, swapping the catwalk for the kitchen and launching what's become a remarkable career in food.

0:41When she couldn't find proper Mexican street food in London, what did she do? She launched her own restaurant, Oaxaca, bringing the bold, vibrant colours of Mexico to people all over the UK. Since then, she's written eight cookery books, earned an OBE for services for food, and helped found Chefs in Schools, a brilliant charity working to transform what children eat and how they think about food. She's also a mother of three and somehow manages to juggle family life with big ideas about sustainability, activism and making the world better, three meals at a time. Three times a day, we have the chance to save the world, she says.

1:22by choosing what we eat and where it comes from. She is Tomasina, or Tommy Myers, co-founder of Oaxaca. Tommy, a very warm welcome to My Life in Charms.

1:32Thomasina Miers:Thank you, Nishka. What a pleasure to be here. Well, we've been trying to do this for quite a long time, so it's really lovely that you're here. So we'll talk about all of these charms one by one. They are beautiful. They're so beautiful. I mean, your joy is always beautiful. I have you on my inbox I don't have many newsletters in my inbox but I read regularly days at all your beautiful things that you create amazing thank you, that's great well I love the way you classic and modern that's a very nice balance I think surely shouldn't be about trend it should be timeless and we're still going to have the same jewellery.

2:20Your kids are going to have your jewellery when we're long gone. So I'm a real believer in it. It's not about... But also fun. Fun, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It should be about conversation and memory and all of that. So your first charm, I've drawn it as a martini glass. I'm kind of assuming with your background that it might have some salt around the rim. so I've done it as yellow gold with diamonds around the rim to represent the salt which I assume is where we would you know put the glass into the salt it's got a slice of orange just made of orange sapphires set in gold and a little brieole citrine drop which is almost where the drop of drink is coming out of it and obviously cocktails you've got to have a straw whether you use it or not nice paper straw made of uh made in white gold so tell me about this well so i mean

3:23Thomasina Miers:i grew up uh shaking cocktails so my grandmother who was the model um was from tennessee yeah and lillian wales uh that one yeah that one yeah the welsh one yeah she's american from the deep south and she came to the uk became you know started becoming a model very glamorous she was married a formula one driver who was killed at Le Mans then she married my grandfather who was a kind of amazing mathematician kind of mad inventor who I kind of never really knew but felt very connected to anyway my memory of holidays in Wales was getting dressed in my grandmother's incredible collection of clothes um you know just nina ricci bikinis 50s aussie clark suits um kenzo tights from the 70s i mean you know just an amazing spectrum of clothes over the decades um but also my father shaking cocktails so one of her boyfriends had given her a silver asprey's cocktail shaker in the shape of a large bell so um my father would make cocktails shake the bell and and so cocktails have always been a massive part of your growing up you know signifying fun and parties I love dancing so much like I just love dancing um it's one of my favorite things I think um you know I am basically a hippie and I I I really believe that we're animals and and if we live in our physical selves then we're happier but you know dancing is fun and parties and the cocktails I mean and my husband my husband bless him is he's such a gentleman and I think one of the reasons I fell for him you know they say they say you fall in love with a kind of copy of your father yes there is a bit of that about my husband because my father is a cabinet maker he makes furniture uh he he started doing that in his 50s so very late in life yeah but um he makes beautiful furniture um and my husband's also very good with his hands can build things and fix things very practical but he's also complete gentleman and so when we're getting ready for a dinner or a party he'll always say can I make you a drink and you know I remember literally the other day we were going out and he said can I make you a drink and I said oh yes please it was Friday night and you know I still get that ridiculous excitement when it's Friday night just so great I mean also it's just the weekend like thank goodness the week's over just like deep sigh of relief just like even if the weekend is full it's just there's something about that Friday night feeling and um I took a shower because we had to go out and I heard this shake shake shake shake shake shake and mark had arrived shaking a cocktail with an iced cocktail glass that he then put on the ledge of our shower and poured me a margarita while i was in the shower that is movie that stuff's made of movies i mean it was so romantic so good how did you meet mark uh and my cousin's wedding oh yes uh yeah he was going out with a great girl called tash who's just he's amazing she's godmother one of our children and they'd split and she I was on my bike outside my flatness brush ran into my cousin who said um we're chatting and then I went off and we chatted for three minutes and she said who was that and he said that's my cousin and she said you should ask her to your wedding she'd be perfect for mark and there we are the rest is history so what when when did you get married uh 15 years ago yeah oh yeah so yeah i just want to talk about mexico because your kind of love affair 30 year love affair with mexico yeah um started what age because you actually went to mexico when you were really young yeah 18 why did you go to mexico quite a good friend had gone to mexico three weeks before to do a language course so I thought that's that sounds fun so we traveled around Mexico together and in the first week we stayed with very good friends of her family in Mexico City and um that was John and Pam Holmes who I feel like are kind of related to me now I mean I've known their family for so long their granddaughter is now studying in Central St.

7:53Thomasina Miers:Martins in London over from Mexico um and so that's three generations that family who I'm still in touch with and they they said I I remember just saying what is this food that I was tasting in their house it was complete unfamiliar and I remember Pam saying this is Mexican food Tommy like and so that whole traveling around Mexico with my eyes wide open because I already was new that was something to look for I remember just eating around the whole country just going this food is insane like it's delicious and it's vibrant as you said it's like and the chilies that weren't just heat they were bringing different flavor profiles to the food the citrus and lime that was adding sparkle to the dishes the amazing herbs that were being chopped up into the fresh sauces or um so mexican table which is the book that i've just written this latest one the latest one which i wrote in mexico because last year i took the family back to mexico for six months to live to go and reconnect with the country learn again get back into kitchens and really introduced my children to Mexico because I realized that they just didn't really know the country at all because that's quite a thing so you took them out of school yeah and put them into Mexican school yeah in in Mexico City yeah where most of my friends lived yeah and um and really to just introduce them to this country that's been such a massive part of my life yeah and um so I wrote the book basically because I spent six months well not just cooking with chefs in kitchens or cooking festivals around the country you know we traveled everywhere and went all over the place but also I was cooking for them every day because the first six weeks I had no help yeah Mark was commuting from London amazingly I mean so you know talk about a husband who stands by your mad kind of crazy ideas um so supportive and um and then so I had all this food that I had been cooking for my kids for my friends out there and I just wanted to write them down but I also feel like still Mexican food needs to be demystified so because people think it's just tactics don't they yeah so the food is the books arranged by chapters of ingredients which are quite hot what quite easy to get a hold of you know like courgettes there's a courgettes and pumpkin that family is from is a mexican yeah vegetable um but obviously everyone can get courgettes now so and all the different ways or tomato in the mexican ingredient so you know when i started cooking mexican food the italians were very snobby about it and i'd be like you can't be snobby about mexican food because they gave you the tomato so like give this you know you've just put this in perspective here so um yeah so i just fell in love with i mean mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world so the ingredients are just extraordinary um we went spent three three or four weeks three weeks i think a couple of years ago i was just awesome yeah just and those amazing markets those indoor markets where you can go and eat from one stall to the next stall and it's very democratic so i mean obviously in mexico just like any other country big food and i call it big food because it is you know it's a few countries making a lot of money selling ultra processed food that shelf stable for a year that's made from uh intensely grown industrialized crops you know that whole system but they have worked out how to get into every country so in mexico it happened earlier than a lot of other developing countries because of their proximity to america okay yeah and so in mexico you get this incredible dichotomy between an ancient cuisine that is unbelievably healthy and um steeped so the molets of mexico so there are two chapters on nuts and seeds yeah in the book because a lot of the sauces the molets can be very simple and just enriched with pumpkin seeds or sesame seeds or ground nuts that you can eat with vegetables and so incredibly healthy and vibrant and full of flavor but um but but in mexico you also get this awful side of you know bimbo coca-cola you know just massive fast food um and so there's this there's this i the gastronomy and the culture is steeped around food and anyone will talk to you about food and the state they're from it's very regional 36 states um in just oaxaca there's like eight regions that it's the second largest state in mexico so each region of oaxaca has different food different ingredients um so it's just it's mind-blowing and it's enormity and it's fun uh i mean you've talked about the chili i designed this chili i mean i i really want to make this charmer it's just gorgeous i've done it uh as a kind of red chili so I've done it in rose gold um three-dimensional um all pavé so rubies going to kind of pink sapphires at the bottom um and uh the the leaf that's on it actually will turn um so and like it's kind of blowing in the wind but I think it's been really tactile um and absolutely gorgeous but um can we just because it's quite a jump to go from going to Mexico I know there's quite a lot in between to coming back and winning MasterChef so let's just talk about that I was 28, I'd been to cooking school been traveling around Mexico, lived in Mexico for a year still nowhere didn't know what I was going to do with my life and so I saw this advert it was like do you want to be the new Nigella or the new Jamie Oliver, whatever and I had to fill out this form and it was the first season of the new format MasterChef with John and Greg and um I didn't really know what I was going into but I was a bit embarrassed about applying for it so I didn't really tell anyone I was cooking for this family in Norfolk being a kind of nanny yeah kind of not work trying to work out you know maybe I'll be a food writer or yeah what what on earth was I going to do yeah and I got this call up to an audition I remember having to leg it down from Norfolk um in my 2CV to get there it was a Friday afternoon I remember having to ditch my 2zv um at Royston kind of train station because it was Friday traffic and you had you know literally jumping onto a train to get the audition and I remember that the the program the producer at the time said you are the only contestant that we put through immediately without even discussing it they were like she is going through she's got to go on the show why because I was just because I was just talking so fast about how much I love food and they were like okay okay this is like a hundred percent she like lives and breathes food she's going through and so i had like a crazy ride of master chef like you know i was definitely not an actual winner i had complete disasters in my my my six weeks of competition is terrifying as it looks it's terrifying it's literally terrifying because obviously if we only see what the what the edit is but in terms of kind of what happens it's mind-blowingly terrifying like you literally you turn up having no idea what to expect right and then these enormous cameras get wheeled out and then your bare soul is on camera for everyone to see because you are cooking with everything you've got because you think this might take me to somewhere i don't know where but it might be a way of finding out what the hell i'm gonna do with my life and so you are literally got everything on on riding on it in your head and yet every mistake is being watched and your hands are shaking because you're so nervous which which means you're kind of slicing through your fingers.

15:41Thomasina Miers:Everyone's wearing blue plasters because they're so nervous. And how's the relationship with the other contestants? How is that? So a couple of them are really good mates. Some of them are very competitive, I remember. But also when we did it, it was the first season. So now it's such a big thing. And I remember just I was doing it in my customary winging it by the seat of my pants, kind of just really kicking from moment to moment. my final yeah what was your final uh I did a little ravioli of um I think I whipped up a chicken mousse with cob nuts and I put it inside a ravioli with a kind of sage butter and some quince that I'd made and I did a john dory I think it was very seasonal I made a little it wasn't Mexican uh Mexican was in my semi-final okay I did um grouse with muley and I remember Greg going I just don't get it what's this sauce I just don't get it I mean how am I supposed to know know if it's good or not and I remember saying to him well if it tastes good then it's good surely that's all you need to know he's like yeah I guess yeah so so because I'd never seen Mexican food before no I mean yeah this is your next charm is so not about that in that way but I like any charm that I can actually make move and do all the things that it should do so this is a bicycle but anyway i've done it yellow gold um the wheels turn exactly perfectly the pedal turns everything turns um and in the i don't know what you call that bit in the middle of the spokes but it's got a little diamond in the middle of the spokes and black rhodium seat um and uh black rhodium handles and mud guard also black rhodium on both on both the wheels but um well you came here on your bike these are amazing these are amazing i did come here i love my bike so you came on your bike so um tell me about them you've obviously been bicycling forever have you i love my bike so much because it can get me anywhere um it means i'm not answerable to anyone i'm completely free i'm on my own schedule yeah and and it's fast and and it makes me feel good so the exercise thing it definitely wasn't conscious but I think then when I went and saw this guy in my 20s um the CBT yeah CBT um I realized then he started saying well maybe exercise is a good thing and I think I started realizing then that um but I'm not you know I'm not good in a gym I'm not very good gym person I'm just I'd much rather be out in nature and running around doing stuff doing stuff getting somewhere or like tennis i love because it's the only thing i am do love actually is swimming which i do um i normally swim about once a week just because there's a calm and i'm you know i'm an aquarium and i've always we um my father was an engine in venezuela when we were very young so we spent quite a spell in venezuela and my mother remembers always having to fish me out at the bottom of the swing pool i was always just sitting in the bottom from the swing ball just quietly blowing bubbles and they'd have to kind of hike me out all the time so I've always had this affinity with water and um and there's something about swimming that really relaxes me if I'm feeling tense or anxious about something I know if I go for a swim I can just kind of swim it out it's so good when I read that I was like you know the three things I really love doing are swimming I'm lazier than you I'll get on the electric bike riding and and dancing and I want to talk to you about this dancing because I think I've read somewhere that you think that the government should sponsor somehow dance classes for the nation.

19:26Thomasina Miers:And I'm with you. Well, I think also why all these... Smile. But also why are all these nightclubs shutting down? So I think in the last 15 years, half of London's nightclubs have just shut. And I think we're very... The government's quite slow at thinking about the things that make us happy humans. And if you're a happy human, you obviously are more productive at work as well. It just seems so obvious and so obviously linked. Totally. So, yeah, dancing is amazing. And actually, when you go to places like Spain or Mexico, you know, in Mexico you get these big open kind of pavilions or central squares or zoccalos and people are dancing.

20:03Thomasina Miers:But it's part of the culture, though, isn't it? It's part of the culture. Part of the culture. But also, actually, Oaxaca, so my restaurant group, we have amazing staff parties. And because our employees, you know, 500 of them are from all over the world and, you know, much younger than most of them, there's just so much energy at work. And so when we have our staff parties, I feel happy and lucky that, you know, my friends who are lawyers have their law parties, but they aren't the same kind of. I feel like our parties are, you know, when I go to a work party, it's a proper work party. party yeah actually in all of this I can't I can't imagine why we haven't spoken about it we really haven't spoken about Oaxaca so what I was going to ask you was once you'd won MasterChef was that the kind of next thing was that I mean I want me what I really want to know is why Oaxaca how did you start Oaxaca I met my business partner at Mark Selby he was at university we were put in touch together through a mutual friend from university and I took him to Mexico I showed him all these places I've been eating in in Mexico City um I said look there really isn't anything like this and I think if you want to because he was looking to open a restaurant yeah and I was like look if you want to sell out anything I think Mexican food would be something really quite fun to do in those days Mexican food was considered deeply uncle yeah naff yeah down market like what year old undesirable we're talking about 2006 okay so yeah 20 years ago yeah and it was like it was just if you if you told any chef you're going to set up a mexican food they kind of give you a withering look and kind of look away or go are you sure yeah you know you must be mad yeah um but he he came out with me and he was just like yeah this is this is yeah and so we spent a year looking for a restaurant and i remember the first restaurant we opened was in Comp Garden great big um Irish pub in a basement which was meant that lease was really cheap we could afford it um but vast and I remember thinking what am I doing this is mad another terrifying experience I think MasterChef had been very good at conditioning me for being terrified because it was still more terror to go opening a restaurant um really not knowing what we were doing but it was interesting we set out because I'd always had this environmental yes feeling of caring about the rainforest and yeah I wanted Oaxaca to have an element of looking after the planet and so I wanted the food to be delicious and you know we are 18 years old this year our food has never been better I am so proud of that legacy and it's taken me a long time to be able to say i'm proud of of you know various things you know i think it takes a while to grow up and own your stuff yes and be able to say no that that's good everyone else has been saying that so you know but you know our food is unbelievably delicious and i think people forget that because we've been around so long it's never been more delicious than it is now um half our menu is vegetarian but the most delicious vegetarian things um our beef is from jordan's genitive farms we take half carcasses in break them down slow cook them in these delicious kind of blends of dry chilies and and they are like mouth-watering i mean we work so we work with ribford organic we work with small suppliers to put really good ingredients on and you know it's a really fun legacy so i as you can see i've drawn a um i've drawn on us on the set as past the charm a bikini bottom uh it's yellow gold at the back and there's a tiny uh a tiny little thing a little engraving that says uh barber and the front uh it's all little um pavé green savourites and the bows on the side of the bikini are made of chain so they move and then on the same bale is a white gold spoon big cookery but you know like a wooden spoon with your name Thomasina engraved on it so it's very simple but it will it'll move and they'll both move slightly independently of each other but I mean I drew this and I was like I love the idea of this but can you just talk me through this a bit it's not obvious I can't I I was wondering whether because one of my one of my really bad things is indecision so I've got I'll remind you that what you said is that you you did some modeling early on yes uh again tell me about that let's start with that but then you've turned to me I've done some modeling and then we went on to Ballymaloo.

24:57Yes. So, so, and Clarissa Dixon-Wright.

25:00Thomasina Miers:So I was an unsuccessful model, but, um, but I was modeling in a fashion show with Clarissa Dixon-Wright for Barber. I know, I knew Clarissa Dixon-Wright and she wouldn't have been modeling now. Well, she was modeling a coat. She was modeling a coat and we were raising money for charity and, um. Was she at school with you? no no so she was um so I'd met I met her in the dressing room having our hair and makeup done and uh at that stage I must have been about 24 25 right 26 and I said to her I just don't know what I'm doing with myself I'm kind of desperate I was desperate really really felt that feeling feeling of failure very very real and she said well what do you enjoy in life and I said well I love cooking and so cooking had never occurred to me that it was a viable career choice because of this big expectation of going to that very academic school that you had to do something worthwhile yeah and yet here was someone who was clearly successful clearly bright who said if you love cooking go do that of course is what you should do with your career and she literally the next week phoned up doing allen who runs bali malu which is an incredibly progressive cooking school in east cork in ireland yeah where the first recipe you learn is how to make your own compost where they have a whole sustainability course they now teach regenerative farming on there and it's the whole link of how you farm with nature how that's linked to the food you grow how that's linked to the nutrition and the food you know in in those days you'd be seen as complete hippie yeah probably in some circles still seen as complete hippie but by most people's standards this is kind of early 80s this is early yeah I guess it's well probably 90s actually right probably 90s or too early 2000s actually early 2000s this is when I went and um I remember just feeling blown away when I got there and you know I said I remember saying to my parents this is what you know this amazing woman said and Doreen had put me to the top of the waiting list because even back then the course was always oversubscribed yeah but there was a waiting list and i think the favor to clarissa was putting me at the top of the waiting list and i remember like a week before the course started i suddenly got a call up going they've got a place for you and i remember those days i drove a green and white striped 2cv dolly de cheveux citron and i was do that did you pinch people when you saw a green one uh no that game we used to see a green dish we used to pinch somebody oh I love that I was uh I was spending the New Year's Eve with my boyfriend at the time in his house in Anglesey and I remember driving across in the ferry um and then arriving in Ireland and just feeling like for the first time in a decade or longer that life was beginning to feel like it was making sense and the second I started that cooking school I was just like it was like this great release of breath of just like of course this is right of course this makes sense amazing story so yeah so so the spoon you know the wooden spoon is um you know it's everything for me that wooden spoon is is you know the moment i put a wooden spoon pick up a wooden spoon i feel happy there's a sense of um there's something about cooking for me that means so much more than just stirring a pot but I guess there's everything in it too because it's the memory of stirring the onions with my mother it's safety it's a kind of it's safety but also for me it's about the you know cooking cooking for people it's such an I mean the way we eat nowadays is so appalling um and you know 56 % of our shopping basket in the UK is ultra processed food it's killing people particularly people on low incomes you know particularly they have a worse diet some people you can afford to eat better or have the luxury of time you know there's lots of things you can drill into it but we eat in a way we grow food in a way that's toasted ruinous for the environment so 33 percent of greenhouse gas emissions is how we farm and since the second world war where we inherited this Haberbosch process where we're putting all these Haberbosch which was the the guys who invented basically nitrates and realized that you could take the nitrates they were using to make bombs and actually put them on the fields because after we stopped bombing people at the end of the second world war they needed to do something all these chemicals they'd invented and they worked out that actually if you put them on the fields you got this amazing surge of vegetables which by the way that was called the green revolution which was an amazing invention because our main preoccupation post-war was how we're going to feed the world you know that was like there was proper famine and starvation and so it was not it was a good thing it was particularly that was seen as this an absolute miracle they got a nobel prize for it um but i don't think we really worked out that if you carry on putting nitrates on the soil and more and more and more what is the downstream result of that and you know these days we hear a lot about the water companies polluting the rivers and and the awful things that are happening to our british rivers but what we don't uh hear about so much is that 25 of that is yes it's the awful really really kind of terrible behavior of the water companies um letting pollution um overspill into our rivers but that's 25 of the pollution 40 of this is agricultural runoff and that is the chemicals we're putting on our land to grow our food and so the wooden spoon for me symbolizes how we eat how we think about food the importance we give to food how we nurture people how we feed people um but your your next charm is a brain apart from being super brainy no i'm like not super super dappy i mean it's quite a tricky charm to do this i gotta say i'm like okay well I've done it as a kind of um so I've done it as a two-dimensional coin um with really a head um a head kind of like almost like a Roman coin so you can feel it and touch it um and very difficult to describe this but um you can see from what I've done that the brain is very much there in the back in the in the head I've done it in yellow gold and the brain part is kind of white gold um and i've just put it with um kind of little um blue sapphire kind of rays coming out because that's what i'm kind of thinking that emanates from the brain um and it'll it's it's set in in a in a kind of bezel with diamonds around it um anyway i haven't done a good job of describing that it's beautiful I mean all of these are so stunning but can you tell me um I mean I I'm guessing that quite a lot of this is about your diagnosis of ADHD um but tell me why you've chosen a brain well I just think through my background and I've just realized that they're quite fragile brains um they're not all wired the same way um and some are more fragile than the others so you know when I look at my brother and you know my my history my family's history you know I think that um some people have a higher tolerance to things than others and you know some brains are quite and how you have to look after them and that for me is down to how you eat how you you know how you live your life and whether you're enjoying yourself you know in so many aspects you know i i think we have to and and interestingly you know we now learn so much about the second brain which is our gut which is now called the second brain and the link between the gut and the brain and how all those things you're feeding yourself are traveling up and down your kind of nervous system through your two brains so um and not to take that lightly you know life is about enjoyment and having fun and and nurturing ourselves so that we are our best lives and absolutely now I've done this I've designed this elephant just as an elephant's head actually because I think it would make a beautiful charm but it's yellow gold on its skin his you know his gorgeous skin it will have those kind of creases and things into the gold because you can do so much detail in the gold.

33:57I quite love the way that elephants have slightly torn ears sometimes so I put brown diamonds on on the edges of his of his ears and he's got black black diamond eyes and he's actually got his tusks are just in white gold and you can see between the trunk and his tusks he's actually holding a little garnet heart and that's to represent your love of elephants anyway it's an interesting one so talk me through why we've got why we're looking at an elephant here because it could have been a horse it could have been a dog but it's an elephant well I've

34:35Thomasina Miers:always loved I've always loved elephants ever since I was tiny there's something so gentle but majestic about them and I love the fact they're family creatures you know they're they properly kind of hang around each other and love to hang out in packs um which not all animals do you know the trunk i remember very early i've got a memory of a kind of uh nature show where they filmed elephants picking very ripe fermenting fruit off a tree and getting a bit drunk and kind of staggering around you know these huge creatures basically having had one too many yeah which was just the sweetest funniest sight and it's just something has always called out to me about them and I think then I started you know you start learning as you get older about elephants in captivity and there's just something particularly about I probably saw Born Free I I I learned about Virginia McKenna's work yeah um early on and there's just something that really called out to me about them and the fact that we knew that they were social creatures and yet they were so many of them were captivity you know tusks sawn off for ivory and and I guess I was quite an idealist and I couldn't I couldn't work out why things like that didn't stop you know as a young person I think you think that adults have got it all sorted out and that they'll just fix stuff and then you realize as you grow up that's not quite the case so family-wise just growing up let's just talk about that so you're a twin and your brother has some disabilities I think am I my brother's schizophrenic right um and so he was diagnosed in his early 20s um so that has been that has been hugely sad but also I guess um you know in terms of being an activist I think you mentioned yeah I think you know the the kind of the experiences you have early on definitely inform you and I think um it's interesting the experience of his mental health care has made me definitely feel that um in this country and probably in the world we are very bad at finding long-term solutions for things so it's always very short-term and politics particularly and so you know like mental health care in this country is diabolical and when I think about my brother who essentially doesn't work and can't work because he's drugged so much but sees a psychiatrist once a year once a year yeah so that's his health care and then he's given a blood test you know once a month or something but his drugs he's fed are so debilitating that he can't get up before one um he's you know he's my he's always been my build which is typically skinny you know just how we're built in my family but he's absolutely huge so since he started taking these meds that he's on yeah he's vast um and did that happen early on or so yeah so well so my my maternal grandmother killed herself when we were 21 and I think that really when my mother was three yeah wow so um so that I think might have been a kind of trigger trigger so yeah you the more you read about mental health you yeah you read about triggers and and and the kind of life changes and there were a couple of triggers that might have been the thing you know he was very dyslexic there's a lot of stuff going up school you know when they kind of put him back a class said he was stupid when actually he's very intelligent and yeah um amazing human being um so were you in the set because because do you have that kind of bond that people talk about in within so when When we were young, we had a language that only my sister could translate, apparently.

38:26Thomasina Miers:Yeah, so we were very, and I was very protective of him. But also, I think I was quite good at getting his chocolate stash. Dee Dee, I'm really hungry. I've eaten all my chocolate. Can I have yours, Breeze? Of course, Tommy. Oh, of course. But yeah, so I think we were really close. I think we were so close that at some stage, the school said to my parents, you've actually got to separate them. because all Tommy does is like look out for him yeah and at some stage one she's got to look up be on her own two feet and also he has to yeah so at that stage we were kind of slightly split up and your sister uh my sister is an artist um and kind of mad and fun late diagnosed with autism uh you know like five years ago incredibly creative she did a kind of art um I think when she was 15 she left school and went and got a kind of first at pre-foundation art school um but never has really you know still paints and but definitely lives a kind of alternative life yeah yeah so was it a happy we was it a happy childhood if you had to say the standout thing for my childhood about my mother it was the hugs you know she just would hug everything out and she was very brave at you know when we had arguments she'd always say right come on let's have it out you know and so like many supper tables there were always not always scenes of joy and fun a lot of them were like you know the fights and the rows and but she really believed in thrashing those out so I think that was that was a hugely positive thing because it's made me always it's made me quite open about dealing with shit you know what up front up front yeah or trying to at least yeah trying to yeah so you do that with your own children yes I think my husband is who's a much gentler um character than me and and and and I think you know temperamentally we're so different yin and yang which I guess in a marriage works right it works so um but my way of like thrashing everything out in quite a full-on way he's sometimes like you know you could just calm down and everyone can calm down and but then I'm like yeah but you do need to address these things you can't then brush them under the carpet yeah because from my experience I've seen you know lots of families do just brush things under the carpet and I think that's also not the right way about we could talk about uh all of those things all day long but um your final charm um is planet earth yes how we have to look after the planet as you've talked about a lot I'm um I I've done it um in a in a frame three-dimensional it's a like a malachite um bead really to represent the green of the earth or what it should be green of the earth um and the continents are all in yellow gold um and it it turns a bit like the one I showed you earlier um so it spins and then in Mexico I've just put a little ruby in Mexico because there's been such an important part of your of your life um i think you know it'll be really tactile and something you really want to play with um but you've talked a lot about um about the earth and how and how we have to look after it but tell me a bit more about why you've why you've chosen that well i just think we're so disconnected from everything now i think it's so interesting the kind of in the phone developed world and the kind of this idea of progress people talk a lot about progress of civilization yeah and um i'm sure in some ways we have progressed from victorian age where people were dying of disease and stuff but you know we're still designing dying to see just different diseases prevalent yeah and and and the world is you know the world no matter what um some people might believe you know the world is in a pretty dire state we have to do is look at the species decline across the you know across the board and you know I think nature is incredible and I think human beings feel naturally so good when we're in nature and I think that's the sadness about how urban we've become and how divorced from nature we are becoming as a species is that young people who are never given access to nature grow up not having any understanding of that amazing impact you have when you walk through a woodland or walk through trees and you know even the way we're farming now if you walk through farms you know if they're conventional farms you know you're breathing in toxins you're breathing in you know there are so many links now between cancers and autoimmune diseases and the farmers who've been much closer to hand or the children of farmers who are now with these terrible autoimmune diseases because of the herbicides because they're so close to these chemicals which are you know made to kill things um so i think you know we it's just the appreciation of the natural world because it makes me so happy i i i am very happy when i'm in trees and in nature you're so right because so many people haven't been outside a city yes they can't appreciate that or nature or animals or all of those things which i assume is why you you started this or helped to get involved in the charity to educate so chefs in schools is about so i as um you know anyone who deals in business likes uh i like anything that um what's the word efficient efficiency right so the amazing thing was so i was doing a lot of work in schools um i put on a lot of festivals at my local primary school to raise money to build a garden because I was quite fixated ADHD hyper fixation on this idea that multiple governments Labour and Conservative were steadily selling off playgrounds of schools so that kids basically couldn't get any exercise during the school day now well not enough but not enough time is built into school day for them to exercise anyway and the idea that all these children can actually learn properly when they're not given an access to run around from firsthand I know that I perform so much better when I've bicycled to work and then my brain's all charging and ready to go so I rescued the school playground um we did some festivals and then I realized that the cooks in the school didn't know what to do with ingredients that they were growing in the garden yeah and I did some work into it I was a judge on the food monthly awards I remember interviewing this incredible head who'd won an award on the food she was feeding in an autistic school and just making that link at the same time that henry dimbleby had made the link in east london with nicole pasani who is an ex-nope chef who'd come in and started cooking at his kids primary school right so in east london and in west london we were both separately going to the same conclusion that if you put one trained chef into a school kitchen you could transform how 600 children felt about food and how they ate their relationship with vegetables so and so the model became very simple so we got together i got we we sat down on the table at oaxaca nicole and henry and joanna weinberg and a group of us and we said right let's set up this charity and then henry was like wait what are you going to do and at that stage i'd already the year before being put on bed rest for a week because I was over like literally kind of burnout um and I remember saying to him with a heavy heart I don't think I can be actively I'd love to be a trustee yeah but I don't think I can be day-to-day I've got Waxaca I've got my kids yeah I've got just got too much and so um but from the sidelines as a trustee have been helping them ever since um you know raising money and helping steer and it's a charity that is phenomenal we've been in 300 schools um in six years we are now in the top five percent or one percent of charities i think in the uk um we have shown the government how affordable and easy or possible it is to feed children i mean that's your you know what you said about changing the world three times a day is I thought such a kind of powerful statement well yeah even down to the individual like some people generally don't have a choice they live in a few desert they're on the bread line but if you do have a choice you can choose what system am I putting my money into is it a system that only benefits multinationals or is it a system where it's benefiting many yeah many smaller guys I know with a better food system well anyway i mean i absolutely love mexican food and probably thanks to you probably absolutely is tommy thank you so much well these are the most beautiful charms i've ever seen so the next thing is um so as a thank you for coming um i'd like to make you one so i'm fascinated to know which one that's gonna be you i have to tell you now yeah you do um i would love to have i love green i love green you can see i'm wearing green skirt i would love the planet the planet perfect with mexico right there that's very exciting we would thank you love to make you that separately i might ask you to make me chili um the chili would be divine yeah it will be absolutely divine yeah um but we'll i'd love to make you the planet and I look forward to giving it to you.