Health and Hospitality: When Does Food Stop Being Food? (Thomasina Miers)

19:25Amol Rajan:That's partly an enforcement thing. It's worth saying that's partly an enforcement thing. Jamie Oliver was on this podcast before Christmas, and he was saying that you've got the standards, they're just not being enforced.

19:32Thomasina Miers:They're not being enforced, exactly. But there's well no motivation to enforce them. They're not part of the off-stand inspections.

19:38Amol Rajan:That was it, yeah.

19:39Thomasina Miers:So the schools have no...

19:40Amol Rajan:As Henry Dimmerby said that as well on the Today programme, yeah.

19:42Thomasina Miers:Yeah, so the schools have got no real motivation. I mean, heads of schools are incredible people and they've got so many things to juggle. So if they're not being judged by the food in Ofsted, you can see why that motivation comes down. But so many of them have seen the benefits. So we have been in 150 schools in six years, chefs in schools this is, and all you have to do is put one trained chef into a school kitchen and they can completely transform how 600 children eat. Now, what big food and the big catering companies who are making a lot of profit from serving cheap, brown, industrialised food is they'll say, oh, if you give children healthy food or green food or lots of vegetables, they just won't eat it.

20:21Thomasina Miers:So it's all very well saying that. But that's actually rubbish because, I mean, we've proven it. If you produce food that tastes good.

20:27Amol Rajan:How would you make that? Why would anyone be able to persuade anyone that if you give food, healthy food to kids, they won't eat it?

20:33Thomasina Miers:That's what so many people say. They say, oh, well, it's all very well saying healthy food, but they don't eat it. which is why, by the way, we didn't ever say healthy food. We talk about delicious food. We talk about flavour. Real food. We talk about real food and cooking it from scratch. And so we found in all the schools we've been in, the attention span of children is much, much better. They don't fall asleep in the afternoon, which was a really common complaint from the children themselves, is that we always fall asleep straight after lunch. The attainment's better. That's because they've had a sugar spike, right?

20:59Amol Rajan:They've had a dose of sugar, suddenly loads of energy, and then they crash, yeah?

21:03Thomasina Miers:Yeah, and it's simple. It's simple carbohydrates. When you say sugar, it's not necessarily just the pudding. It's the white pasta. It's the brown food, which is basically simple sugars. There's nothing to process them and they go straight into your bloodstream. And I've done that. We've all done that, right? You've had a big lunch, you fall asleep after lunch. So schools is one solution. I would argue that what we're doing to restaurants, I mean, the government policies at the moment are killing restaurants that make food from scratch and favouring restaurants that do industrialised food. I mean, we have 650 staff in our restaurants and we make everything from scratch.

21:35Thomasina Miers:I think in our supply chain, we have 2 % of ultra processed. And that's down to two lines for tortillas that we don't make in house. Apart from that, we make everything from scratch. So but the cost now of that labor is meaning that the entire industry of really good restaurants, and I would argue that the restaurants in Britain bring in, I mean, 64 billion, was it 54 billion pounds of revenue for the for the exchequer and for the taxpayer through our restaurants, I'd argue the tourism comes because the quality of our restaurants is so phenomenal. and our reputation now, as opposed to 20 years ago, is you can eat the best food in the UK.

22:10Amol Rajan:I want to ask you about the industry very specifically. I say this with the enormous bias of someone who is a bit of a foodie, used to be a restaurant critic and not a very good one. How much trouble is the sector in?

22:19Thomasina Miers:The worst trouble I've ever, ever seen it in. So I spoke to a chef of a Michelin-style restaurant on Friday. I said to him, so how's it going for you? So he opened a restaurant about two years ago. It's full. It's one of the most popular restaurants in London. You can't get a table for love nor money. He's got the highest reputation, I say, in the game right now. And I said, so how's it going? He said, well, we're full. We're break even. I said, wow. So you're full. You're at the top of your game. You cannot get a table in your restaurant.

22:47Amol Rajan:This person is presumably a big name, which is more than most people are. So they've got social media pulled and all the rest.

22:51Thomasina Miers:And the best you can hope for is break even. So that is what our industry is facing. And then let's look at the role of our industry. So let's separate out the restaurants that serve ultra processed food that's just fried in a fryer, because I think that is completely different from a restaurant that makes things from scratch, that buys ingredients from farms that are custodians of the land. So when I look at the job of a farmer, it's not just to produce the food, it's to look after the nature. So I think we've got to start thinking about how is our food made and is it healthy food or, you know, what's the nutritional basis of the food?

23:27Thomasina Miers:because a lot of farmers who are doing an amazing job are growing food with nature, not against it. So that's brilliant for us because it's great for biodiversity. It's great for nature. It's great for the dung beetle and earthworm on whose survival, humanity's survival relies on because without the dung beetle and the earthworm and the bees, basically we can't exist anymore because 99 % of the food we grow still is in soil. So we're killing our soil by nuking biodiversity. I'm now completely using my thread. But so real restaurants serving proper food buy from good farmers. So they are supporting a whole industry of farmers that arguably the supermarkets are not.

24:05Thomasina Miers:But they're also providing pleasure. But they're also providing real food. They're also training chefs. So chefs in schools, the job we do, because in schools now they don't teach cooking. They might in some cases teach nutrition or like what's the content of an apple? It's got some fiber in it. That's boring stuff. You don't want to dat. what we put into schools are chef educators. So they're not only produced delicious tasting food that the children yum up. And by the way, let's also talk about the makeup of our diet because in chefs in schools, two out of the five days are vegetarian because you cannot support a kind of greener planet and better nature if we're eating the amount of meat we're eating.

24:44Amol Rajan:Can I just separate a few things that you said? So incentivising good restaurants and separating them out from restaurants that just serve junk. There's a few things to go out there. One is, how do you measure which restaurants are, I mean, in practical terms, there are hundreds of thousands of restaurants. So, you know, the dodgy Chinese in, you know, in Hartlepool, the kind of, you know, the kind of the nice Mexican place in Rotherham. How do you actually as a country go into these places and say, well, you do healthy food. You're called Oaxaca and only 2 % of your food is ultra processed. That's tortillas and you're branching that out.

25:18Amol Rajan:But 98 % of your, or phasing that out, 98 % of your food is really, really high quality nutritious grub. Whereas you, lovely man who's had this sort of Chinese on the corner of a street in Cambridge for the last 40 years, but occasionally puts a little heap of MSG, which is monosodium glutamate, into your food, you're bad. I mean, in practical terms, you can't actually do that as a country, can you?

25:38Thomasina Miers:I'm not saying bad and good, but what I am saying is... You're saying ultra-processed and real. I mean, ultra-process is bad. But what I would argue is that the taxes the government have just put in place are anti-people taxes. So they talk a lot about the worker. But the taxes they're putting on right now, the NIC...

25:58Amol Rajan:Employee National Insurance Contributions, yep.

26:01Thomasina Miers:Exactly. So it now costs so much money for a business person to employ a person that they're doing everything they can to employ as few people as possible. because they can't afford to employ people. So what restaurants do is they skill up people. And by the way, I'm talking to artist friends of mine too who their business rates on their studios are so high and the people they employ. It's the same case. What we are doing is we're taxing out the skilling up of people. So anything that involves...

26:30Amol Rajan:What has been the impact of the rise? And I'm going to put to you in a minute because we believe in accuracy and fullness here what the Treasury say about this. What has been... You know, you've got 650 people who depend on you to be able to pay their mortgages and feed their families. What has been the impact of the sharp rise in employee national insurance contribution on our hospitality sector?

26:51Thomasina Miers:It is going to kill us. It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I know people who have very, very famous chefs. I know very, very hip restaurants. And they are seriously looking at the future and whether it's sustainable to keep their doors open. But not only that. so when you put things like the nic up to the extent we had you the business owners have to put up prices and by the way i'm all for paying people brilliantly but if you tax at every level um it results in an industry that is on its knees and i think it's such a sad testament of as you say it's the purpose of like what is food anyway i mean without food we die but it's also this pleasure side and then i think going back to why is food inflation at such a high point it's because of climate change.

27:38Thomasina Miers:It's because of how we farm.

27:39Amol Rajan:There was also a specific issue with the energy spike around the Ukraine war.

27:43Thomasina Miers:There was a definite issue with that. But food inflation hasn't gone away, by the way. And by the way, the inflation last month, interest rates didn't go down this month because inflation is still an issue. One of the reasons inflation is still an issue is because the service industry keeps having to put their prices up because the tax rises on employment are so high that we have to put our prices up.

28:03Amol Rajan:Can you put some numbers for people who don't own 14 restaurants and who I don't know, might even call themselves budding entrepreneurs. What has the rise in employee NICs actually, actually meant? Can you just give us a second? I'm not asking you for your P &L, but what has it actually meant in terms of how your business has been affected by that change?

28:21Thomasina Miers:So last year, before this April, it was a rise of about 2.2 million.

28:27Amol Rajan:Across for Hacker?

28:28Thomasina Miers:Yeah. This year in April, another 1 million.

28:32Amol Rajan:So compared to two and a half years ago, you were having to find 3.2 million pounds.

28:35Thomasina Miers:Just magic it up.

28:37Amol Rajan:out of nowhere.

28:38Thomasina Miers:So I spoke to a really good friend of mine in Cardiff who's got three really wonderful Spanish restaurants, three restaurants. His wage bill went up by 600 ,000 at the same time. That's not including this April that's coming. God knows what happens then. So these numbers are staggering and totally unsustainable.

28:57Amol Rajan:Let me put to you, by the way, what the Treasury said about that. A government spokesman said, we're backing hospitality with a£4.3 billion support package to limit business rate bill rises alongside capping corporation tax at 25%, cutting red tape and investing£1.5 billion to create 50 ,000 more apprentices and foundation apprenticeships. The fair and necessary decisions we made at this budget and the last mean we can deliver on the country's priorities, cutting waiting lists, cutting debt and borrowing and cutting the cost of living. What do you say to that?

29:27Thomasina Miers:It's just so ridiculous. It's just, I mean...

29:29Amol Rajan:Why is it ridiculous? Is there anything that's false there? They capping corporation tax at 25%. They put in a£4.3 billion support package. I mean, that's not nothing.

29:37Thomasina Miers:Why do they need a support package, by the way? We never needed a support package before. So why suddenly do they need to support us? The reason they need to support us is because they've created a level playing field that's so completely against any employment of people. At the same time, they're talking about this absolute crisis that young people can't get into work. And Keir Starmer announced this huge thing of like, how are we going to get young people into work? The reason why young people can't get into work is because businesses can't afford to pay young people. It's as simple as that.

30:09Thomasina Miers:I've had three friends of mine in the last two weeks saying, can you get my son or my daughter a job in one of your restaurants? Now, the amazing thing about the hospitality industry is we can take anyone off the street. So one of my friends has got two very bright kids and then one of them is also very bright, but he suffers from severe ADHD. He's been in and out of school. He's now been successfully a butcher for six months. He's doing really well. He's charming. He's bright. People love him. And guess what? A restaurant can take this kid and they can train him. They can get him coming in. They can get him used to coming into work every day.

30:43Thomasina Miers:So I would say the job we do is we train a nation of young people into work and we give them skills. We give them self-confidence. We give them so many skills about the importance of turning up into work, the importance of teams.

30:57Amol Rajan:Structure, discipline.

30:57Thomasina Miers:All of that sort of stuff that we provide. Why, when without food we die, when food is the most important thing we do, without food within three days we're all dead. Why is there no minister of food? Why is there no department for food? Why is food spliced up between DEFRA and the environment and economics? Why isn't it a central cause of food?

31:17Amol Rajan:Well, I'm not here to defend the government, but wouldn't they say that's because food has implications for health? It has implications for tax receipts. It has implications for the environment, has implications for society and communities. I mean, it's just in the nature of food, you know, I mean, maybe that's not an argument against there being a minister for or of food. But they would say it's because they've got to deal with it in a multifaceted way.

31:39Thomasina Miers:So if it's so important to the nation, why don't they take it more seriously? Why aren't the standards in schools updated and actually maintained? why is food seen as such a kind of second rate thing why isn't good food real food uh absolutely heroed and for instance a green grocer why isn't there green growth on every high street why is there allowed to be increasing numbers of chicken shops i mean i spoke to a very very big md of a very very big food chain uh i spoke to him at the end of last year and he said it's amazing we're going to open 15 more sites next year i said wow that's amazing even when you're making no money he said doesn't really matter about that because as long as we've opened them once all the laws change again we start making money again we've got those we've got those restaurants in place now this is industrialized food by the way this is a big food chain so so the people selling really bad food there's no warrant there's no break on that you can still open another chicken farm if you want to on the river wide there's no there's a 10 increase on industrialized chicken

32:37Amol Rajan:farms in this country what exactly is wrong with chicken shops fried chicken shops if it's i by the

32:43Thomasina Miers:way i love deep fried chicken my children last week for my birthday gave me a deep fat fryer delighted we sat on my bed for half an hour deciding what we're going to cook in it so the

32:51Amol Rajan:chicken shop at the end of the road which charges you um 3.99 for 12 chicken wings and you get some greasy chips and some ketchup and mayo uh and it gives someone a job what's wrong with all that

33:02Thomasina Miers:uh i think there's nothing wrong with that if it's if it's a treat for a special occasion if that's all you eat then you end up in hospital then you end up with your system bunged up then you are maybe obese maybe you've got dementia earlier on you've got cancers coming out but that's

33:20Amol Rajan:an issue for that family isn't it with respect isn't it i mean if that's all you eat certain families rich poor whatever need to inculcate in their children a desire to eat a more varied diet

33:30Thomasina Miers:that's not but if you live if you live in an area where there's a food desert that's the only thing on your high street there is no green grocer because for instance it doesn't it doesn't make a lot of money growing vegetables and you know you've talked to farms you talked to jones v banks there's very little profit in good food and real food and so the government idea how do you get a green grocer on every street how do you know business rates absolutely no business rates in fact you should look at your entire rate system if you look across europe where by the way the diet of ultra processed food in france is 12 12 i think in italy it's 14 in portugal it's nine percent and

34:04Amol Rajan:Here it's 56.

34:04Thomasina Miers:Here it's 56. Their restaurants pay half VAT, like 9 % or 10%. Their restaurants are commended. And then let's look at social canteens. So effectively, chefs in schools are providing social canteens in schools. Why aren't there social canteens on every high street? Why isn't good quality food being produced where people on low incomes can have access to it? Because the issue is access. People on low incomes have no access to good food. There are a million people in this country who don't even own a fridge. So how do you persuade those people to eat good food when they have no fridge to preserve it, they have no oven to cook it in, and they have no skills, and they have no money, and they have no time because maybe some of them are having three jobs?

34:44Thomasina Miers:What is a social canteen? A social canteen is, I mean, they're all over Europe. They're in Italy, they're in Poland, they're in Mexico. They are basically very simple canteens offering a very simple menu. Normally it's just a choice of starter, main course pudding, and it's affordable. and you're effectively providing healthy food for your nation instead of selling very cheap food, cheap unhealthy food to your nation, which is what we're currently doing.

35:15Amol Rajan:I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Thomasine and Myers. If you are, please do us a tiny favour and subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you'll not miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications, is turned on so you get an alert every time we publish a new episode and you never, ever miss out. Thank you so much. And now here's back to Thomasina Myers.

35:40Thomasina Miers:I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's Upset Web, every week for my show, Merrin Talks Money, from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

36:20Amol Rajan:So I've had two radical ideas here, which I'm very, very grateful for. One is green grocers on every street or high street incentivised through 0 % business rates. And the other is social canteens of the kind they do in Europe. Can I just get a couple of specific ideas about how you would save Britain's hospitality sector? One that you work in and I'm very, very passionate about.

36:39Thomasina Miers:So the first thing you look at VAT. I mean, if you can cut the VAT across Europe, why wouldn't you do that for restaurants? It makes no sense.

36:45Amol Rajan:A lot of people won't know what that means. How much VAT are you paying? How much has it risen? What would you pay VAT on what?

36:52Thomasina Miers:On the service we provide. So we pay the same amount of that that anyone does on a good. I would argue that a restaurant is not a luxury good. If you get enough of good restaurants like you have in Italy or France or Spain, where a lot of people go out to eat, but it's affordable. And so you want to make eating out affordable if it's good food. And I would differentiate between restaurants that are serving ultra processed, a lot of fried food and ones that are cooking food from scratch. Definitely that is a differentiation because they're completely different. They're serving different purposes.

37:23Thomasina Miers:One is feeding the nation good food and one is not. So that's a very easy line. Let's say it's 20 % of ultra-processed food going through your supply chain. That's a very easy measure you can work out. Definitely cut that because then it's more affordable for people. At the moment, it's not affordable to go out. I mean, I never went out to eat when I was a tiny child because we had no money. It's become way, way more expensive now. So it should be affordable. It should be good. It should be normal.

37:49Amol Rajan:Cut VAT means what? What's the rate of VAT you're spending at the moment? 20. 20. So you would say, because Rachel Reeves is probably listening to this because they'd like this podcast on the Treasury. If you cut VAT to 15%, I don't know, that would cost you... 10.

38:01Thomasina Miers:That's what it is in most parts of Europe.

38:03Amol Rajan:Cut it to 10. That's going to cost you billions. And they would say, well, then we've got less money for the NHS. We've got less money for... Shutting down the entire

38:09Thomasina Miers:restaurant industry is going to cost them 54 billion because that's what it's worth for them.

38:14Amol Rajan:Sorry, say that again.

38:15Thomasina Miers:54 billion pounds is what we bring in to the chequer every year. And the current... I mean, if they don't do something radical that's just not going to come in anyway and you're not suggesting doing this to

38:27Amol Rajan:every restaurant you're saying only do it to some incentivize the ones that you can so give restaurants an incentive to prove to little miss miggins who's going to come in from the local authority or mr smith to say look we don't do ultra processed food reward us for that by cutting

38:41Thomasina Miers:our vat yeah why not let's let's be radical about a better landscape let's look at a system where people are eating great tasting food. They're sitting down with other people in person. They're getting that connection of humanity. They're in their community. They can go to the green grocer when they want to and buy fresh fruit and vegetables. It's affordable. It's bought from farmers in this country because guess what? If we do go to war with someone like Putin and we're looking at, I think James Rebank said this, we're looking at a 30 % decrease in food production in this country. And yet we might be about to go on the brink of a third world war.

39:15Thomasina Miers:How does that make sense? so let's reward the farmers for growing the food in the fields let's give them an access to market which is the green grocers on the high streets let's give those access to the people where they can take it home and cook it and if they can't take it home cook it because they're really low income so they don't have fridges or freezers or only live on microwaves then have social canteens where they can go and eat it let's live in a world where the food we eat is grown with nature not against it where the birds and the bees are happy where people are happy where our health system and our gut nutrition is healthy and whether cost to the NHS is halved or cut by a third because of the food we eat, it's actually giving us nutrition and not killing us.

39:53Amol Rajan:Suddenly you don't have all these people on type 2 diabetes. Can I ask you, I'm so glad you mentioned nature because we've talked a bit about the health crisis. We've talked a bit about a commercial and economic crisis and a social crisis. There's also an ecological crisis going underway. Also, I just want people to know, which maybe they don't, that in this country, we throw away between half and a third of our food. That is just astonishing. If you think about what goes into it, I say, and do you know what? I'm going to get annoyed here with myself. It really annoys me when my kids waste food.

40:22Amol Rajan:And I try and explain to them, and you know, maybe this is about, these are my issues about parenting, but try and explain to them that porridge. This morning, I had this massive beef with one of them. They threw away this porridge. I thought, it's not just like I've gone to work and I've earned the money for this porridge. It's like someone's grown that.

40:38Thomasina Miers:So Fisha Dunlop wrote a book called Every Grain of Rice because in Chinese society, every single grain of rice is a jewel. And I go to my farmer's market. It's like a religion for me. So I was talking to my daughter about Mother Earth and Gaia, a spirituality. She was talking to me about religion yesterday. And she was saying, what's our religion, mummy? I was like, my religion is Gaia. That's the earth because the earth produces the food that keeps us alive. And if we give back to the earth, then it's a wonderful cycle where it gives us to us and we give back to it. so I go to my farmer's market almost like a religion my husband it drives him mad on a Sunday that I stopped the entire day to go to this farmer's market but I know the names of the people who make my food I know that Chris does the veg I know that Chad makes the milk from from animals that are grown that eat grass and by the way the nutrition of our food is affected by how they're they're bred and everything and I think it's really interesting that if we eat animals or milk that's been industry farmed is full of omega-6s and if it's grass-fed it's full of omega-3s which are much better for us because the proportion of omega-3s and omega-6s we now consume in the west is way out of a kilter it's really kind of a favor to omega-6s it should be one-to-one it's about 20 to one so the very fats that we're eating are killing us but if we had better food though the fat distribution would be different so every kind of molecular bit of the food system we're eating is bad for us.

42:10Thomasina Miers:But if you go to a farmer's market and you start meeting the people who grow the food and you talk to them about how hard it is to grow food, then I think it really gives you an idea about how special food is. But big food doesn't want us to think that. Big food wants it all to be easy because it's much easier for us if we've lost that connection. Because when we lose that connection, then we give in to big food. We give in to being able to just take the Zempic pill and, you know, maybe then if we can carry on eating the way we eat, but just take the pill. So Big Farm and Big Food in this wonderful kind of coalition where they're kind of depending upon each other to keep making the billions of pounds of profit.

42:46Amol Rajan:What do you think of fat jabs? I think it's a terrible shame that the government sees it as a solution to spend billions on fat jabs as opposed to supporting green grocers on the high streets and people cooking real food

43:01Thomasina Miers:and paying farmers a proper amount of money to grow proper food.

43:05Amol Rajan:Isn't that a straightforward treasury? I don't know if I was going to the treasury about this, but a treasury calculation, which is that fat jabs, as Zempic's not the only one, Wegevice, Emaglutide and so on, Manjaro, all this stuff, have a track record. We've got a crisis, an urgent issue, which is obesity is rising very, very sharp. Obesity is strange because in the rich world, obesity is affecting poor people. This is a kind of weird inversion of where we've got to with food, partly because of ultra-processed foods, as you mentioned. Lots and lots of countries at the same time have independently come to the view that fat jabs have a role in addressing a type 2 diabetes and obesity crisis.

43:42Amol Rajan:And they've come to that decision based on the trade-offs. All policies are trade-offs. It's one of my motifs on the Today programme. All policies create losers. If you're going to spend 4 billion, I think you mentioned 4 billion, if you're going to spend 4 billion or a few billion, a decision has been made that that is a trade-off worth making to address an urgent issue.

43:59Thomasina Miers:So you say it's an urgent issue, which it is. the problem with these jabs is they're they're only as good as when you're taking them so the moment you come off them you put the weight back on and if you have that true is that really true well all the people you interview on the today program say that i mean that's that's what i've read that the second you stop taking them they no longer work so what you have to do while you're taking the fat jabs is address how you're eating and so if you haven't addressed that and let's look again at the cost the cost of the bad diets you would save 210 billion to the exchequer every year if you approached a better diet and this goes back to the tim jackson report he did for the ffccc so the government rachel reeves you would save 210 billion pounds every single year if you switched us on to better diets and so there's no economic case for not switching because the fat jabs are great as long as you take them so there's a cost there but when people stop taking them they go back to unhealthy darts they put weight on again so i'm looking at much longer term solutions what

45:03Amol Rajan:can we do to cut food waste for a country to throw away between a third and half of its food it's kind of disgusting actually it's kind of it's appalling what can you do about that being

45:13Thomasina Miers:more connected with food thinking about how it's growing where it comes from gives you more relevance of every single thing you're throwing away but in 2015 i did a big project with tristan Stewart who wrote a brilliant seminal book on food waste and we uh we our idea our big idea is we needed to reverse a ban on feeding food waste to livestock so after foot and mouth there was a kind of knee-jerk reaction there was an idea that the cause of foot and mouth was down to feeding unprocessed untreated food waste to to livestock actually when you looked at the kind of the strains of the foot and mouth that kind of ravaged our country.

45:54Thomasina Miers:It looked like it was from cheap imports of untreated meat from South Africa. So it looks like that was the cause of the foot and mouth outbreak. Regardless, the knee jerk reaction was to just stop feeding food waste to our livestock. That is the single most efficient way to do anything with our food waste is to cook it. So to get it pasteurized so that it's safe and then feed it back to livestock because they then process it straight back into food. Now, we've been doing that for tens of thousands of years. The knee-jerk reaction spread to Europe overnight, pretty much. We need to reverse that because the single best way to do, first of all, is to not waste food.

46:30Thomasina Miers:And then after that, you need to feed it to animals. Now, what we're doing at the moment is we're anaerobically digesting it. And that's what we do at Oaxaca. We don't waste our food. We go and we make compost with it. But it's much more efficient to feed it to livestock.

46:41Amol Rajan:So I don't know anything about that. So is it still banned, sorry, that you still can't do it? Still can't do it. That's another radical idea. So the ban is based, I might suggest that to a politician on the programme.

46:52Thomasina Miers:Just needs to be pasteurised. All the anaerobic digesters that are around the country right now, could it just be go back to treating our food waste?

47:00Amol Rajan:But the food waste, there'll be hundreds of people employed in food regulation agencies listening to this and saying, ah, but we need these regulations in place. And you'd say they go back to a slight overreach of an understandable public reaction to what happened with foot and mouth 20 plus years ago.

47:14Thomasina Miers:Yeah, but before that, we always did it. we always did it i mean this is the thing we lose sight of the knowledge that we've had for for thousands of years and then you know we we kind of suddenly go oh we can't do that why can't

47:25Amol Rajan:we do that you've so you're very kindly going to stick around and answer some of our listeners questions for our bonus episode and they have uh flooded in because um well you're you're um both famous and followed which are two very different things um and people really respect the way in which you talk about this stuff you've also come up with lots of radical ideas for which i'm very grateful just to be clear if we don't do this if we don't do some of the urgent things you're suggesting where are we heading in terms of our health in terms of our hospitality sector and in terms of the impact of our failing food system as you see it on on nature we are looking

47:58Thomasina Miers:at a future society where the profits go to very few very very rich people at the expense of the health and the happiness of our nation. We are looking at a post, we are looking at a kind of apocalyptic future of industrialised food, industrialised animals. People argue that animals should be just kept inside and we need to have fewer bigger farms. I don't want that world. I don't want an industrialised world where there is no profit for the man on the street, where a farmer can't make a profit on the food that he produces to keep us alive, where the farm shop person can't make a living. I want all of these people to make a living and to add to the benefit and the happiness of society.

48:45Thomasina Miers:I don't want the opposite. And I'm going to campaign against it as long as I live.

48:50Amol Rajan:Thomas, Cien and Myers, thank you so much for joining us on Radical. And thank you so much for emailing us soon after we started and saying, I've got a few radical ideas because it turns out you have.

49:00Thomasina Miers:Thank you for having me.

49:08Amol Rajan:Well, didn't Thomasina Myers turn up and buy into the spirit of this podcast? There was such an urgency and such a compassion in how she approached this issue, but also a sense of kind of moral crisis, frankly, because it's very clear listening to her that she thinks in pretty much every way our food system is not just not what it ought to be, but is storing up massive crises, whether it comes to our health, our economy, our society, or indeed our children. I just want to go through a few of her radical ideas and just resurface them for you. She thinks that basically recent tax changes like the rise in employee national insurance, like business rates and indeed VAT are killing restaurants.

49:48Amol Rajan:Her words, not mine. She would suggest radical reductions in those taxes, including cutting VAT from 20 to 10 percent. I thought her idea of a green grocer on every high street was really interesting. If you had business rates at zero percent, then green grocers would be able to make money and therefore they might start springing up. This social canteen idea, it made me think I was lucky enough to go on holiday to Spain not so long ago. And there is a kind of, there is an approach to food in Europe, which elevates the status of those who work in the industry, but also socializes it in a way she thinks is being lost.

50:21Amol Rajan:And it's worth saying she is someone with real credentials when it comes to charity work. She's done a huge amount of work with this charity, Chefs in Schools, which she set up with Henry Dimbleby, six years, Henry Dimbleby and others over six years ago. And that idea that a single trained chef going into a school kitchen could completely transform the culture of the entire school and its relationship with food and how the young people there, the pupils, think about food. That's a pretty profound idea. And at the moment, it's been done mostly by charities like Chefs in Schools. I think she wants it done much more at the state level.

50:53Amol Rajan:It's worth saying there was a really important distinction between the regulatory and tax proposals that she had, which are issues for Whitehall and Westminster and the British state. And the broader sense that she has that socially we've lost our connection to food. We need to remind ourselves where food actually comes from and use the soft pressure of social stigma to try and make people think that it's worth possibly spending a bit more on food and certainly spending more time investing in it. And that number, that number that we opened up with, that idea that in the UK, 56 % of foods are ultra processed, which is a legal and specific definition, and that we're second only to America.

51:32Amol Rajan:and the fact that teenagers, adolescents have two-thirds of their diet is ultra-processed. I think that's pretty shocking. That is it for this episode. I'll be back on Monday when Tomasina is going to be answering your radical questions. Thank you so much, by the way, to everyone who is sending in radical questions. We're getting a huge number and it's really cool because it means that we can really connect you with the brilliant people that we have on this podcast, not least Tomasina. and you'll hear she's pretty outspoken in response to your questions. In the meantime, why not check out Nick's Political Thinking podcast?

52:06Amol Rajan:Just search for Political Thinking with Nick Robinson. What's really interesting about that podcast is he is expanding to talk about politics with people outside of frontline politics, people like the British Iranian comedian Omid Jalili. He's on the latest episode and I can assure you it is a cracking listen. So listen to that on BBC Sounds, just search for Political Thinking with Nick Robinson and while you're at it, just search for Radical with a moral margin, hit subscribe and that way you can make sure you don't miss future episodes because who would want to miss an episode of Britain's most exciting podcast?

52:38Amol Rajan:But don't tell Nick that.

52:48Thomasina Miers:I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's Upset Web, every week for my show, Merrin Talks Money, from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists, and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.