A Bigger Table (Kitchens #6)

Beginning in a bustling drop-in session run by refugee support service West London Welcome, this episode explores who our society gives permission to eat together at home. Lucy meets Betul, a Turkish asylum seeker who recently spent almost six months living in a hotel room with no kitchen, and Jo, co-founder and director of the organisation who explains the importance of people being allowed to cook for themselves and others. And to conclude the series, academic and activist Marsha Smith shares her practice and theory of the importance of social eating. Maybe the key to the perfect kitchen lies outside of the home?

Credits

Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove

Thanks to my contributors on this episode Betul Piyade and Joanne MacInnes at West London Welcome, and Marsha Smith.

West London Welcome is an amazing place. This interview was recorded a few months ago, before the crisis in Afghanistan, and the centre is now working to support newly arrived Afghan refugees, as well as their existing members. You can donate to support their work via LocalGiving here.

Buy the Kitchens print zine featuring original essays and illustrations!

Original music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley, with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions

Research and production assistance from Nadia Mehdi.

Editorial feedback by Rory Dearlove

Cover collage by Stephanie Hartman

If you’ve enjoyed what you heard on this episode, or generally on Lecker, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening, and telling a friend about it!

The next thing on the Lecker schedule is a three part series about food and folklore on the Isle of Man, which is being generously funded by Culture Vannin! I’m making that with the brilliant Manx audio producer Katie Callin and it’ll be out before the end of the year. If you liked the episode Bonnag then you’ll love this!

Find Lecker on twitter and instagram.

[Hob clicks and bursts into flame, noises of the kitchen build up; cupboard doors are shut, cutlery is rattled, pots are clashed, a collage of voices talking about kitchens begins to speak over jaunty lounge music. Each speaker is separated by a dash].

You go in the back door - It’s a really small kitchen, it’s tiny - It’s like a tiny little box - Gas hob - So you have the stove - Worktop - Counter - Sink - A small fridge - Underneath the draining board was the gas fridge - If more than one person’s in there, everyone starts to get a bit flustered. That’s the general vibe.

This is Kitchens, a podcast series by Lecker, about the most important room in the home. I’m Lucy Dearlove.

They left out any element of human emotion and emotional intelligence in what people needed from kitchens. - This kitchen is not, it’s not suitable for me, it doesn’t enable me to cook. - Kitchens are more clones of each other than living rooms or bedrooms are. Why? Why is that?

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Episode 6 - A Bigger Table

Lucy: Most producers ask people, when they’re trying to set up their levels, what did you have for breakfast?

Betul: Whoa!! Today?

Lucy: Today!

B: Today...yes, I made some egg with butter and chilli flakes, little bit of chilli flakes. And also green tea, I like green tea for breakfast. Errr, and that’s it I think. With bread [FADES OUT]

In early April this year, just as lockdown restrictions began to ease, I took the tube to Hammersmith, got a rapid lateral flow test at a walk in, and went to eat in a room with other people for the first time in many months.

OK, although that did feel significant for a few reasons, lunch wasn’t actually the most important reason for my visit. I’d come to Hammersmith to meet Betul and Jo from West London Welcome.

Joanne MacInnes: West London Welcome is a community center, above all, that's what...we're a community group. So we're all members together. Our members say this is like the first family I've, I've encountered.

This is Jo - Joanne MacInnes - West London Welcome’s founder and director along with her colleague, the deputy director Leyla Williams. The community centre is run for and with refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and other locals.

JM: People go through the food bank in a social distanced way. And they are seeing the same people every week. So it's just having that...get out of the house, you know, countering loneliness. In the support groups, we do a bit of English conversation, a few English….And we just let people have that, that social time together. But we also on top of that, we, we give out clothing, we give out laptops, we give out phones, we have an advisory service, we help people to get housing and immigration lawyers and advocate for them with the home office, and we do a hot lunch. We feel like the lunch is like the, the glue of the whole thing. And yeah, so it's the excitement of the day, really, we're just so reluctant to give up on the lunch.

Food is a really important part of the work that West London Welcome does. And so it felt fitting that my usual line check what did you have for breakfast conversation got way more in depth than usual.

BP: My dream Turkish breakfast...Some different kind of olive. I like olive too much! Some kind of cheese, different kind of cheese. Turkish tea with a Turkish pot, you know.

LD: Really strong?

BP: Really really strong. But you can prepare some little bit of water or more water. And some jam. My mum and my grandmother always make your own jam from our trees, especially damson trees, in Turkey, in Izmir.

I’m Betul Piyade, I’m from Turkey, I’ve been living here just five...five and a half months. And I’m an asylum seeker right now. Yeah, I’m 29 and also my real job is psychologist [LAUGHS] I’m a psychologist.

When I first got in touch with West London Welcome, Jo suggested that Betul would be a great person for me to speak to.

BP: Errrr….I was a psychologist in Turkey for a long time, approximately seven years. And then right now, I’m struggling with learning English quickly [LAUGHS]. But I know, maybe I know just one hundred words. But I can speak with my body language! [Child yells in background.]

As you can hear in the background, West London Welcome is a busy, joyfully noisy place. When I met Betul and o, the centre’s home was a church they used once a week, though they’ve since moved to a dedicated space of their own. It’s been a really important part of Betul’s life since she arrived here.

BP: I’m a volunteer in West London Welcome, and I try to help people, also Jo and Leyla. Today for instance, today I made some cooking for other people and, err, I’m barista right now! I’m so excited about that. WLW is beyond a charity and community for me, really. They’re my family in UK. Yeah I’m so lucky, I think. When you come somewhere that you have no idea about the place, you probably feel uncomfortable. Also you have to struggle with your unknown things. But I didn’t scare from anything, thanks to West London Welcome. In my opinion, I’m a strong person, really [clears throat] except sickness. [Laughs] I had a sick and felt so bad in my hotel room. In fact, nobody did dare, even my mother, except Jo and Holly.

From what I understand about West London Welcome as an organisation, this is the sort of thing they do a lot - visiting someone in their hotel room while they’re ill to make sure they have everything they need. They take the idea of their members being a family very seriously, which is particularly important given what people have gone through when West London Welcome first meet them.

JM: People come from, I mean, 35 different countries and people are coming for all manner of reasons. It might be gangs, lots of El Salvadorians coming with gang-related violence, some of it can be domestic, we have a lot of trafficked women, we have a lot of people escaping war in Syria, and Libya and Yemen...and Iraqis. So just usually escaping some pretty horrific things. And people have a lot of trauma.

Betul talked about being ill in her hotel room. And that’s because that’s where she was living when she first arrived in the UK. Not by choice - that was the accommodation that she was housed in. I asked Jo to explain a bit more about why this has been a particular issue over the past year or so.

JM: When people arrive one way or the other, they're immediately put into hotels. And this is because the asylum accommodation that would normally be provided, isn't available because they weren't allowed to evict people. If you're an asylum seeker, and you're in asylum accommodation, which is usually a flat or a hotel in cheaper areas in Britain, then you would have to leave as soon as you get a Home Office decision. So that's like, Oh, you've got leave to remain, you can stay, you've got two weeks to leave. If you've got been refused, you have two weeks to leave, you're not given any help to find new accommodation. But what happened was when there was a ban on evictions, the home office couldn't force people out of the asylum accommodation. So that meant they had a real shortfall. And so they had...you know, understandably, a good idea at the time is to put people in hotels

Jo initially did think this might be a positive thing.

JM: I was delighted, I thought, Oh, great! People can have, you know, luxury lifestyle of, you know, use the spa, have the buffet, but actually, they use these hotels, just as a vessel. And they often put their own new staff in. So there's all these middlemen, you know, middle businesses, subcontractors all the way down the line, and they subcontract the food and there's only one or two hotels where they make the food on premises.

This creates a terrible problem because there's no choice, everything's delivered in a takeaway tub, which is heated with the lid on in the microwave. Whilst we recognize it's very different, difficult to make food for all different people from different backgrounds and different, you know, food tastes. We do it here and most people eat everything up but it was so cheap, where we've tried to find out how much the actual spend is per meal. We know that the home office gives £6 a day per person for three meals, but there are two or three contractors in the middle. So we're wondering how much the spend is.

West London Welcome have kept a very close on this food that people are being served in the hotels, and have actually played a part in the Home Office committing to better food for people in these situations, with their twitter threads highlighting the inadequate meals people have been served in the past. It’s also important to note that these rooms that people have been and are currently still being housed in are very basic, with no kitchens or any special cooking facilities at all apart from kettles. And people like Betul are stuck there for a long time.

BP: When I arrived at hotel I waited to move another place like house by...I had been living for five and a half months in that little poor room. That's why I bought some cooking equipments, which are mixing bowl, grater, spoon, fork and can opener. [Laughs] Also to make some salads - because they didn't give salads really - so I always make my own vegetables, cheese, yoghurts, olives and oils. I waited to move patiently but nothing happened. So I was thinking to make my own food in hotel room.

Neither I nor anyone at West London Welcome can confirm or deny this happening because the hotels very explicitly don’t allow it for - they say - safety reasons, but there are reports of people using kettles to cook with - in quite ingenious ways, cooking spaghetti in them then making carbonara, that sort of thing. Imagine living somewhere indefinitely and the closest thing you had to a kitchen was one of those little travel kettles that barely fit under the bathroom tap...that’s your only means of cooking your own hot food. And then it might be taken off you. I think I’d be pretty gutted about that.

Betul managed some incredibly creative things in her room.

BP: I also made my own yogurt in the room.

LD: Did you?!

BP: And dried apple in rope. Can you imagine?

LD: How did you dry the apple?!

BP: They gave...some apple, so much apple and I don't like, I don't like to waste something and I just, I was, I was thinking how can I eat them without waste, be waste. And my mother [Laughs]...my mother is also good...drier. [Laughs] Yes we can dry something because you know Izmir is really hot. And we have to keep something, some food without be waste.

Even I gave them to my friends as gift!

Finally I felt like in my house, with my cooking foods. That's...I think that's really important for all people.

Thinking about living in a hotel room, there’s two things that strike me about specifically eating in this situation. It’s very hard not to be able to cook the food you choose to eat and that you like; partly because of comfort but also especially hard for people who have children, or who can’t eat a wide variety of food for various reasons. There’s dignity in having the freedom to choose what to eat and when to eat it, and having the means to prepare it yourself.

But there’s also the aspect of being unable to eat with other people. Socialising through food, whether it’s cooking big dinners for other people or eating takeaways together, is hugely important.

As the sociologist Alice Julier, author of the book Eating Together, writes: “In its extreme outcomes, commensality (that’s the practice of eating together) exists alongside the possibility that people starve if not included in shared meals. In less dire, but equally determinant situations, exclusion from shared meals means isolation from important and useful social and cultural resources, or capital.”

Taking part in shared meals is almost impossible in a hotel room. I felt energised by Betul’s productivity and creativity in connecting with people in any way she can through food, whether that’s doing volunteer cooking and barista shifts at WLW, or by drying apple strung around her room to give to friends. Her circumstances living in the hotel made it almost impossible to have this experience of social eating and she managed it only by pushing back against the limitations of her environment.

JM: People need to cook, you know, you can only sit in a hotel room on a bed and eat out of a Tupperware thing for so long. You know when people have been there 8, 9, 10 12 months just in a room and you know, have no money to walk around or look at anything or travel and can't work, can't get benefits. So you just sitting in a room... we've had people with children just sitting in a room for four months, you know, and, sometimes they don't even have kettles. And that was a real problem for women who were making powdered milk or things, you know, so...and then the home office is worried about people cooking in the kettles. Can you imagine?! [Laughs] And yeah, so no microwave, you know, health and safety. Yeah, yeah. It's very frustrating. Then imagine children who are always fussy and all of us are catering towards a child who, you know, won’t eat this...and and children are losing a lot of weight and parents are weeping about not being able to offer children any choice or anything that the child likes to eat. And people would be perfectly happy to put up with it for a month or two. But it's been so long.

It really seems to be people's number one complaint is not being able to cook the food that they like that they know their children like, and just having that, you know….it doesn't matter what culture you're from you, you know, I cook differently to the next Canadian. [Laughs] So everybody just wants that comfort of like, making what you like,

and you know, having that freedom to do so. So, yeah, that's, it's, it's a real grievance for people and just…...they do feel it's dehumanizing.

BP: I think five months or more than...I think more than one month is really hard to live in just in little hotel room without kitchen, especially for mum. I know. I know, a lot of mothers with one or two children and they're living in a hotel room for a long time. Really. It's really hard to, it's really hard to explain to children. These, they told their mother, I just want to eat something. And also I know I know one mother who has three daughters. They told me I just want to eat dolma. And I went to Joe's house and made dolma. And they were really they were so happy. They were so happy. They need, they need kitchen. Really? They need. They need kitchen. They need good quality of foods.

Jo described the hot lunch that West London Welcome do once a week as “the glue of the whole thing”. Eating together in this way - with members, volunteers, visitors all eating a home-cooked meal - is so beneficial. Not just from a practical standpoint, with some of West London Welcome’s members being unable to cook for themselves in their hotel rooms, but from a social perspective too.

In an article for The Conversation called ‘For a sustainable future, we need to reconnect with what we’re eating – and each other’, a group of academics from Trinity College Dublin discussed the wide range of benefits of sharing food, and identified a number of reasons why eating alone is on the rise.

It’s partly to do with a growth in insecure and inconsistent working patterns, and an increasing number of people live alone. The variety of people’s social circles is also decreasing..

As they put it: All this is capitalised upon by the food industry. Solo dining suits commercial interests across the food system, with the rising giants of the food industry keen to communicate a convenience culture around food – eat when you want, wherever you are.

Marsha Smith: At the moment, in the UK, we've got a real issue around food insecurity, which means that people..rising numbers of people are struggling to access affordable food, and appropriate food in ways that are sort of yeah... available and accessible. But beyond that, I'd also consider food insecurity to be the capacity to eat together. And that isn't something that's covered under the current definition. But to me, when you consider how fundamental eating together in groups is to social life for the fabric of social life, and its maintenance and transformation, when there was a range of people that are excluded from that activity….that is also, as far as I'm concerned, an understanding of food insecurity. And we ought to be broadening that definition of food insecurity. Because when people are food insecure, they really struggle to reciprocate around meals. So again, things like kids birthday parties going out for dinner after work, those sorts of things are, you know, they are really challenging for people on low incomes.

This is Marsha Smith. Marsha lives in Nottingham, and is currently finishing a PhD at Coventry University in sociology and social eating initiatives. She’s an academic now, but has very much come from extremely hands-on roles in social eating, and is still heavily involved with various projects.

MS: Social eating is a, I probably didn't come up with the term, but it's the term that I use to describe eating practices that happen in the public using surplus foods at mealtimes. So, social eating initiatives are, are public places where anyone can access a cheap and affordable meal that is served at a meal time. And they don't have a fixed menu, they have a dynamic menu that changes according to what surplus deliveries the groups get. And the focus really is on making affordable food available to people in a sort of convenient and easy manner. But with this sort of strong emphasis on social socializing. So like public canteens, I guess, in some ways.

MS: Well, there's a range of reasons why social eating has become important. I mean, historically, eating together in groups is really the most important activities that humans undertake. And even though it seems really mundane, it's actually because it's so deeply embedded in society, because it's so important. So it's one of the primary ways in which we bond socially, and which create social cohesion. So we all know, family meals, community meals, wedding meals, but more broadly, again, you know, people eat together to cement their social bonds. So social eating is really, really important, across cultures across time, is one of these really sort of potent and persistent practices that underpins much of social life.

Marsha mentioned how people on low incomes struggle to reciprocate around food. That’s a result of eating together only being possible in lots of common scenarios if certain conditions are met. It happens in restaurants and other commercial eating spaces, to an extent, but this relies entirely on you unequivocally being able to afford to pay the prices on the menu. There’s usually little space for negotiation on that.

And then it also happens in domestic spaces - birthday parties, family dinners etc, but there are conditions that have to be met there, too. You have to have enough space for people to gather together; this is ultimately an issue that rests on how much space you can afford to buy or rent and in lots of homes - or hotel rooms - this isn’t physically possible. This comes back to the previously discussed issue of many rented homes not having a living room, and people sometimes not really having full access to their own kitchens. And there’s a question of permission here too; you have to be allowed to have people round to gather like this as again, in some forms of accommodation you can’t do this. And you need to be able to pay for the food that’s being cooked and consumed. If you’re an asylum seeker, on benefits, or on a low income, this might not be possible.

People are creative in finding opportunities to gather in large groups to share food. I’m thinking about the communal BBQs in Burgess Park, not far from where I live in South London and the joyful groups of friends and families you see there grilling food together on warm summer evenings. It’s like a public back garden for people who don’t have any of their own outdoor space. But in a cold country like this, there’s limited opportunity to gather outside in this way, and indoor space is even more heavily privatised than outdoor.

So community meals, produced using surplus which keeps costs down for organisations, and which allow pay what you feel, or - like West London Welcome - are entirely free for their members, provide a space for people who maybe don’t have many other opportunities to eat communally.

MS: And then also in the current UK society, you've got something called the de-structuration of the meal time, the sort of the diminishment of the significance of the meal time, which means that more and more people are struggling to schedule eating together. And again, we have a concurrent rise in sort of snacking, fast food, ready meals, convenience foods, and all of those things put together...also, including social isolation, loads of people feeling socially isolated, especially at the moment. And lots of groups that we don't traditionally associate with feeling lonely, like young people. So if you add all of those things in together in the UK society at the moment, you've got a real challenge around people eating together. And that means in lots of ways people are able to contribute to the maintenance and the building of social life in the UK. So that's really, you know, socially eating is incredibly important for everybody and for a broader society.

It feels like every few months there’s a news story about how terrible it is that no-one eats together at the table as a family any more. But these reports often gloss over why meal times are being destructured, which is very often - as previously mentioned - due to unsociable or awkward working hours or just down to the sheer amount of time people are spending at work, or because their living situations don’t allow it.

And this misplaced advice relates to a wider point. Over the past couple of years - more than ever - there’s been a real gap between what communities are saying they need and what’s being provided. A recent example of this was Marcus Rashford’s campaign for the government to extend free school meals to school holidays during the middle of the pandemic. The conservative MP Ben Bradley tweeted Rashford to state that extending FSM to holidays “passes responsibility for feeding kids away from parents, to the state. It increases dependency." Rashford pointed out that the reasons people couldn’t afford to feed their kids were out of their control: jobs cut, wages reduced, zero hours contracts even more harmful than usual during the pandemic. But this is a commonly heard narrative around discussion of food insecurity: the myth of creating dependence.

MS: I think a lot of the public health messaging historically has been really top down and it's been about trying to educate people to cook with lentils more and to grow their own food on the windowsills and you, you know, to budget better. And there’s this idea that particularly poor people of which disabled people also make a huge part of that demographic, it's that they need, they need to do more. And recognizing that actually, we don't stigmatize people who are going to Waitrose and buying ready meals. And that's actually its primary, like, function. It's one of the biggest things that convenience stores sell nowadays. But we punish people that are on the lower end of that spectrum financially and expect them to just do more and more, without recognizing that actually, a lot of people have got a huge amount to do all the time. And actually, what they need is someone to care for them.

And this ideology that you create dependency through caring for people, is, I just think it must be a sort of...an effect of public school education, where you just get, you know that it's beaten out of you. And it's seen as a...it's seen as a problem. And again, just giving poor people even more things to do seems to me to just be really inhuman, without recognizing that actually, if you want to change the way that people behave, you also have to care for them, and actually show care. And there's nothing wrong with that.

And again, it's no wonder that when people are really pressed, pressured and stressed that they're going for things like takeaways. And it's also this idea that poor people are always in deficit, rather than actually, there's loads of evidence to show that people are quite able to budget but you can only make a limited amount of money go so far. And if you...and if you haven't got a lot of money, you don't try new things, because you can't afford to waste that food if your children don't want to eat it. So there's loads of stuff here that's going on that I think social eating is almost like this, this Crux point that can address a number of the challenges we're having around sort of industrial levels of food wastage, food insecurity, in its broadest sense, social isolation, and the sort of, you know, the rise of fast foods and convenience foods, which we see as problematic...to me social eating, is this sort of mechanism that can deliver a cascade of benefits across all of those things. But also, fundamentally, it's harnessing the deeper need for people to eat together in a positive way. And recognizing that there's, yeah, rather than seeing it as people becoming dependent on a cheap meal, recognize it as almost like a loyalty to that social eating space. And also pleasure! God, people want pleasure around food, it’s not just this industrial consumption of calories, you know, it should be a really pleasurable activity. Instead, what we’ve done for too many people is just made it really bloody stressful.

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MS: I was working in a refugee legal charity, and I got made redundant. And so for the summer holiday because my daughter was small, I was really stressed about getting another job. And my mum said, Why don't...if you just got some redundancy money, Why don't you just take the summer holiday off, which was just like, Oh, my God, I could actually take six weeks off, like, I could do that, like shit, I could do that I didn’t have much money, but I could. So I did that. And I did loads of voluntary cooking. And I got involved in a number of sort of voluntary cooking projects. So someone said to me, your food's really good, why don't you set up a cafe. And I thought, you know what, actually, I could have a go at doing that. But the thought of setting up something really big and complicated, especially with no money and a little child, I was like this, this is not really for me. But I could maybe rent out the local church hall once a week, once or twice a week and just make some food. And then people could come and eat it. Just like, you know, I've been doing that in the voluntary capacity. So I set up a little business called Secret Kitchen. And then obviously coming across lots of kids that were you know, we're hungry through local contacts, and through some of my own contacts,

I was thinking, god this is really depressing. I've never, I just thought we wouldn't have hunger in this country, again, especially amongst children. And then just seeing, you know, with the changes to the benefits system with austerity, you know, just sort of suddenly this bloody ballooning of people that were obviously really struggling to afford to feed themselves properly. And so I set up another project called Family Cafe, which I ran, I think I think we run it three evenings a week after school and just did a meal using surplus and it was pay what you feel. And it was brilliant. In some ways, it's a disaster in others, because we never made any money and people just put like 2p in the thing. And then the volunteers’d get cross because they'd be cooking all day. But we did start to use surplus from FareShare. We didn't even know that there was this food, we did know food was being chucked away, but didn't realize that the levels that you could intercept. So we ran Family Cafe for a year. And then I set up a project called Super Kitchen, which is basically proliferating that model of using surplus, being open on a limited time, and just having a public mealtime. But we made it a cheap paid for service, which enabled some sustainability. And again, we just I think we brought the network up to quite a few groups. As that's how I get I got involved and I left Super Kitchen due to a clash with the governing body, let's say in a polite way. And I just thought I'm going to try to get into academia and go back to uni. And I'm still involved with the network I run a regular network meeting during the pandemic I've monitored and I set up and managed like a number of WhatsApp groups helping to organize the emergency response of committee food groups are led to steering groups, I'm advisor to the National Food Service and food Hall in Sheffield. So I'm really really still involved with you know, the groups and finding out what they're doing. And it's just been a fascinating process for me to move from that really practical delivery to sort of reflecting and understanding in a different way and enriching the body of knowledge that I have, you know, that can really be in service of, of advocating for the wonderful work that these groups do. And I love going out and socially eating! I love...who doesn't love going out, I’m really missing going out socially spaces, especially secret kitchen one which got taken over by this lady called Vicki who's an absolutely amazing cook along with her mum. And I really...you know, who doesn't want to go out or just sit and eat with other people wants twice a week and have a £2.50 dinner.

It seems like everyone could benefit from eating in spaces like this. It’s a way to meet people who might live in the same area as you but lead a life that’s very different from yours. I always remember Leslie Barson, in a previous Lecker episode recorded with her and Dee Woods at the amazing Granville Community Kitchen, talking about how the community meals on the South Kilburn estate meant that people could meet their neighbours properly. If you meet your neighbour properly, and understand their life a bit better, as soon as they make a bit of noise at home, for example, you don’t immediately get angry, or even phone the police, but you have empathy with them. You might just let them get on with it because you know it’s not going to last forever, or you might talk to them directly. It makes you more tolerant. And it’s a positive outcome for everyone.

MS: And actually, as a behaviour as a practice, we are going to need to start eating together in groups, again, it’s a future food practice, for conservation of water, of food of energy, let alone for social cohesion, we are going to need to start doing that. And what the pandemic revealed is that our food system doesn't respond very well to shocks because it's so fragmented and dispersed in terms of just in time production and lots of other stuff. And actually, one of the things that coped really well, were social eating spaces, because they're horizontally organized, they’ve already got the DBS check, they really got the food hygiene, they know how to handle surplus, and they were able to mobilize really quickly and effectively to feed people, and the National Food Service across the UK really showed that.

One of the things I kept coming back to while making this series, especially after talking to Marsha, was that...it’s unsustainable for us to continue living such individualised lives when it comes to our kitchens. Every single household, multiple times a day, heating up the oven, running the microwave, boiling the kettle, simmering and sizzling pots and pans on the stove, opening and closing the fridge, running the blender. All of that fuel, that energy, lots of it being wasted. All that food packaging. All that food going to waste in individual fridges because you’re too tired, or too busy or just too disorganised to cook it in time.

One of the lines I came up with to describe this series was ‘the past, present and potential future of the kitchen’. I knew I wanted to write about how the kitchen’s history is still very much interlinked with its present, because so many aspects of the kitchen’s design are still directly related to innovations over a century old. And that’s why this series is centred around people, and their personal stories and experiences of kitchens.

But the future...who knows what that might hold for the kitchen. I find it difficult to think about what the future might hold sometimes. It feels frightening and overwhelming. In that article I mentioned from The Conversation they acknowledge this: “It is sometimes hard to keep positive in the face of social, economic, environmental and political instability,” they write. “So it is heartening that people are organising in solidarity with others around the most basic of human needs: food. Acting together in this way has been shown to be an empowering way to deal with issues of eco-anxiety. By their very existence, these food sharing initiatives provide a demonstration effect for others.”

The National Food Service, which Marsha mentioned, is a network of community food justice projects stretching from Glasgow down to Falmouth. It started in Sheffield in 2018 and is a growing force in building new community eating spaces all over the country. Through the project they run and support, they provide food for people in need, and also share and teach skills, prevent food waste, combat loneliness and promote wellbeing. As Deborah Sugg Ryan writing about them in a recent article for the FT about kitchens: “A different kind of kitchen indeed.”

Over the six episodes of this series I’ve talked about history, architecture, politics, gender roles. So much of the material available to research kitchens is - understandably - rooted in the history of housing and of private domestic lives.

But it’s clear that when it comes to a sustainable future of the kitchen, we have to think outside of the four walls of the home.

Lecker is written and produced by me, Lucy Dearlove.

Thanks to my contributors on this episode Betul Piyade and Jo MacInnes at West London Welcome, and Marsha Smith.

There’s a Kitchens print zine featuring original essays and illustrations about kitchens released alongside this audio series. Buy a copy now at leckerpodcast.com - it’ll remain available as long as people want to buy it, so if you’re listening in the future….it’s most likely still available! It was produced as a companion to the series and there’s lots of crossover with themes and stories. So if you liked the podcast, I think you’ll love the zine.

Kitchens is a six part series, and this is the final episode! I’m so grateful to everyone for listening. This was a personal project I made in my flat, with around half of the interviews recorded remotely in lockdown, and it’s so so gratifying to see the thing that’s been in my head for so long go out into the world like this. The podcast is currently number 3 in the Apple Podcasts Arts chart, which I’m completely blown away by. If you’d like to help me continue to reach such dizzy heights, please leave a rating and review there! I’d be very grateful. And if you enjoyed listening and would love another series like this in the future, please consider becoming a Lecker patron if you’re in the position to do so. Find out more at leckerpodcast.com/patreon.

The original theme music was composed for the series by Jeremy Warmsley - I haven’t talked about how honoured and delighted I am that Jeremy agreed to compose the theme for this series, but I truly am. A fun fact - when I started doing student radio in 2005 Jeremy was the first musician I ever interviewed! I’m a real long time fan of his music and I love the theme he did for me. Hire him!

Research and production assistance over all six episodes of the series came from the brilliant Nadia Mehdi. Nadia got in touch with me a few months ago wanting to get into audio, and as well as providing amazing support and assistance to me on this series, she’s also now got a full time job in audio. A truly amazing achievement and reflective of how talented she is.

I’m very grateful to everyone who gave me their time, energy and knowledge over the 18 months of making this project. I had research calls with more people than I can mention here and if you’re listening, then I just want you to know how much I appreciate what you had to share about Kitchens.

I have to thank Rory Dearlove for being an unofficial production consultant and giving amazing advice after listening to rough cuts of every single episode and doing so with great grace and generosity, despite me being incredibly rude when he first offered to do so. Thanks to all my groupchats and friends and family for being the most supportive throughout this whole project - anyone who listened to me moaning about it, or gave feedback on a draft, or just generally gassed me up about it….thanks.

Until then, find Lecker on twitter and instagram @leckerpodcast - and please do get in touch if you have anything to say about Kitchens the series or kitchens in general, I’m genuinely still not sick of talking about kitchens and I’d love to hear from you. You can do that via the contact page at Leckerpodcast.com

Thanks so much for listening to Kitchens. I’ll be back soon!

KitchensLucy DearloveSeptember 20, 2021West London Welcome, Community Kitchens, Marsha Smith, Social eating, Comensality