Thomasina Miers: Just the savings to the public health system, their version of the NHS, they reckon, we're not even thinking about better soils, more biodiversity, happier farmers and cleaner waterways, because even the cleaner waterways will save the government a couple of billion because it costs a lot, right, to clean up your waterways and the kind of ensuing fallout from polluted rivers. So just across the National Health Service, for every euro they spent in setting this project up, they're saving, so one off cost of every euro, they're saving annually 35 euros.
Dr Rupy: It was an absolute pleasure to host Thomasina Miers on the podcast today. Entrepreneur, cook, TV personality, activist, writer and so much more. There isn't, there isn't much that this person cannot do. And like many of us, she learned how to cook at her mother's side and after attempting to forge a career in advertising, journalism, digital consultancy, she followed her heart and she went to cookery school. Fast forward a few years after travelling the world, she went on to win Masterchef and then create Wahaca, inspired by the markets of Mexico during her trips. Tommy also deeply cares about where our food comes from and it really comes through in our chat today, how it's grown, how it supports the soil, biodiversity and the planet and also believes that everyone should have access to good ingredients. I learned so much more about Tommy and we chat about the importance of soil today, how Chefs in Schools, the charity that she's a patron of, is changing what our children eat. How Groove Armada, one half of Groove Armada, sold his record rights to start an organic farm, something I'm definitely going to look into because I love Groove Armada. Why the ancient Mayan civilisation disappeared as well, or potentially disappeared. Remember you can check out her incredible book Meat-Free Mexican. I can personally vouch for the recipes, they are wonderful. And they have some glorious dishes and her regular column is in the Guardian as well. All the links to our discussion topics can be found on the doctorskitchen.com/podcasts. And remember a no cost way of supporting the of supporting the podcast is to watch on YouTube and subscribe whilst you're there as well. Check out my newsletter Eat, Listen and Read. Every single week I send you a recipe to cook and some mindfully curated media to help you have a healthier, happier week. And if you want to supercharge your health and take it to the next level, check out the Doctor's Kitchen app. It's out on the App Store. We have hundreds of recipes. You can filter according to health goals. Every recipe has step-by-step images to make it a super simple to eat well every day. And you can check it out with a 14 day free trial in the App Store as well. I really do hope you enjoy this conversation.
Dr Rupy: Tommy, thank you so much for making the time for jumping on the podcast. I was so stoked to meet you at Melissa's dinner party to celebrate her book. And when you told me that you were listening to the pod, I felt all, I had butterflies. So thank you so much. I really, really do appreciate your time.
Thomasina Miers: Oh, I felt like I totally like grabbed you, slightly fan-girling. I was like, oh my god, it's Rupy. Because I felt like I started listening to you in lockdown and there's so much wisdom in your podcast and I was so attracted to how you seem to get these brilliant brains from all sorts of disciplines and just extract such amazing nuggets from them. But also I find totally infectious your just willingness and wanting to just learn from everyone and deep dive into all these things. It's really, it's so infectious, it's wonderful.
Dr Rupy: Thank you. That's that's so lovely of you. And we, you know, we met up afterwards and we had coffee, we were just like bouncing around ideas and stuff. And, you know, I I will already knew that you were somewhat of an activist, a like a real deep thinker about different topics that expand beyond our plate. But I really got a sense of just how many things you're you're involved in. But to to anchor the listener, I'd love to talk a bit about how you got into food, your your earliest sort of like memories of food. Because I I gather you learned a lot from your mother, is that right?
Thomasina Miers: Yeah, I mean, I was, my brother and sister, I felt when I was young, I felt this kind of torture that they were the creative ones. And in the playroom, they were like always creating these stories and these fantasies. And I just was a bit bored hanging around at the edge, thinking, but then I found, I loved my mother and I kind of always wanted to be quite close to her. And then I found this amazing area in the kitchen that you could just play and create and do all this stuff. And and from quite early on, I just remember being sandwiched next to her on the kind of stool. I'm sitting on a stool now around my table. We'd set the counter and she'd explain to me why she was slow cooking the onions, why she was cooking out the flour when she was making the bechamel to get the most flavour out and to stop it tasting raw. Just those really simple building blocks. But also because my father was really bad at making money, we always bought very kind of simple ingredients, humble ingredients, I say, but she was really good at getting the most amount of flavour. So we ate really well. And and we, you know, food was a massive thing growing up. On Saturdays, we'd have sandwich making competitions. Even like BLTs were a bit of a ritual on a Saturday. But you know, when we went to see my granny in Wales, we'd buy like mass buy this streaky bacon because the butcher would like slice it wafer wafer thin so that when you put it in the frying pan, it was all crisp and sizzling and delicious. And then my mother would like skin the tomatoes, dress them in salt, brown sugar, pepper, a bit of vinegar, and they'd be on the table, iceberg lettuce in those days. And then we'd all make our own BLTs the way we kind of wanted them and they were just, I mean, that's where food was. You know, my father's special treat, we never ate in restaurants. When I did Masterchef later and there's this Michelin star challenge where you have to make a plate of food that looks like a Michelin plate of food. I was completely like out of sea. I was like, I've never eaten in a Michelin star restaurant. That's not what we did when I was growing up. So, because like occasionally for a birthday, Dad would like, we'd go out very occasionally and he'd just like look at all the prices on the menu. He's a nightmare. And then everyone would be tense and he'd be like, we could cook this so much better at home. So then after that, basically that's what he did. He had a motorbike and he'd go off to Selfridges food hall if there was a real special occasion and buy a really nice, you know, bit of steak or a really nice bit of fish and then he would cook it. And that's how we celebrated, mostly at home just around a kitchen table.
Dr Rupy: That's epic. Yeah. I that frugality, I think is sort of imbued into me as well. And it it's funny you you mentioned that uh that the picture you painted of you sat around the kitchen table on a stool and stuff. That's exactly how I learned how to cook from my mom and just like watching her with the careful use of spices, using one of those real typical sort of uh bowls with a lid on of all the different spices and small tallies. And uh and you know, it's like, oh, this is when you put in the mustard seeds, this is when you put in the curry leaves, you want to flavour the oil and all that kind of stuff. So it it's weird how you like absorb all these different things. And when you go to teach other people about how to cook, you kind of assume that people have that knowledge. And actually, just through like me doing social media, I've realized actually how how little sort of education there is in this and how little sort of um sixth sense around cooking there is just just generally. I do want to talk about Chefs in Schools in a bit, but instead of like jumping around, one thing I love about your career is that you've tried a whole bunch of things prior to to going into cookery. What led you to go down those sort of quite and quite more traditional paths before you went into cookery?
Thomasina Miers: Well, I went to a really academic like day school. I feel like, I don't know whether I made this up or not, but I feel like part of our school motto at one stage was get out of the kitchen because it was a real feminist, you know, our girls can do anything. We can like, we can turn out, you know, bankers, lawyers, human rights lawyers, politicians. So yeah, it was St Paul's in London and food was seen, I'm really interested in this and I feel it pervades politics, that food is seen as something other that's not related to how you perform mentally, how you feet, how you um fare physically in life. Food is seen as almost a luxury, an extravagance, um something that's set up in a little box kind of over in a corner. Um and definitely the idea that I could cook for a career was out of the question. Um in fact, there was a girl from school called um Allegra McEvedy who was a real bad girl when I was at school. She's like the naughty one and she did go off and become a chef. But it was like she was like, you know, she was, you know, she was the kind of bad girl of the school. She won't mind me saying this, she's really cool. So it didn't really seem like a possibility. And and I I've gone back now and I talk at that school and I'm always saying how fundamental because what you're saying just then about our background knowledge when we were growing up, what that gives us, you and me, is the skill to coming home late at night, opening the kitchen, the fridge doors and even if you've got apparently nothing in the fridge, you can still make something really delicious out of almost nothing that costs very little because you just know that if you've got a bit of pasta or, you know, a broccoli or I was reading actually, there's an amazing book by Tamar Adler who is a wonderful food writer who trained at Chez Panisse. Um and her new book is about this. It's about, you know, boiling, boiling a vegetable, how, you know, you can put a head of broccoli or a head of cauliflower and boil it in water and then use that water to boil your pasta. And then you might use that water again to cook some beans later on for eating on later on the week. And she always talks about, you know, cook more vegetables than you need because then tomorrow or the next day, you're set up already for another meal. And I think that's what the skills you're given by your mother when you learn that kind of intuitive cooking is you just know, I had like 10 people around last night for dinner, but I had no time to cook because I was out all day, but I knew I had some chicken liver pate in the freezer because I always make it because I always save the chicken livers from the chicken because I buy them at the market. Um and I knew I had some spice nuts in my larder. I always have them because they're delicious and they're healthy, good snacks for the kids on the go. I had some homemade strawberry ice cream in the freezer. I had some homemade chocolate pump street chocolate and white brownies left over from a kids' fair, so I knew I could put those in the oven and get them all gooey. Uh I had some really killer Neal's Yard creme fraiche that lasts forever, so that was great, picked that out. And then on Monday I made a Thai green curry paste from lots of stuff that I bought from this amazing Thai grocery, very cheap. Um I bought some amazing Brussels sprout stems from the market. Like, oh, they're so fun. And then the girls helped me prep them. We did that on Monday. Um on Tuesday, I think on Monday I did that, on Tuesday I prepped the curry paste, put it in the freezer so it stays fresh. And then on in the morning, I I prepped the pumpkin that I'd also bought the market, amazing crown prince squash, delicious, shoved it in the oven and said to my childminder, do you think you can take it out um, you know, in 35 minutes. So basically, dinner was kind of prepped. And I think that's the joy of of knowing how to cook is it means you can eat delicious food all the time without spending a fortune. Um and for me, and we can jump around, but that's why Chefs in Schools is for me is such an inspiring charity because we are teaching generations of kids how to put food at the centre of your life to give you pleasure, you know, flavour, pleasure, but also health, mental health, physical health, affordability. You know, it's all there in one thing. How did we put food on the outside when food, if we don't eat, we die. It's like a survival thing. And and nutrition, like nourishing food, you know, the heart of nourishment is that the food gives you something. You're not eating it for fun. I mean, you are hopefully eating it for fun because it should always be delicious, but it's supposed to actually nourish your body and mind. That's the whole point of it, right? To keep you alive. And we kind of lost that somehow. That that idea. And so what people are eating now, they call it food. I would I would argue that ultra processed food, we should ban them from being able to label it as food because it's not food because it's actually making people sick and it's not nourishing them. Surely when we say food, that idea of nourishment should be woven up in the word. Anyway, there you are. I'm quite passionate about the subject.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. No, no, no. It we're going to be jumping around a lot. I know we are. So that's cool. Um I uh I I feel like it's my unfair advantage actually. Um it's my sort of privilege that I do have those skills that I can just open up the fridge or the store cupboard and I can just see, you know, meals, I can see recipes. It's almost like I I just paint them in in my brain and then I just sort of allow the the recipe to sort of come together. And they're like, they're non-recipe recipes. There there's this famous book, I think by um the New York Times of these uh recipes and you can't cook them unless you're an intuitive cook because they don't put any measurements in the in the book. There's just literally a list of ingredients, which I I find amazing, but for like a novice cook, that's like a nightmare. And I chat to a lot of my my friends and and and colleagues in medicine and they struggle and that that's where you come to rely on ultra processed foods, takeaway foods, deliveries, all that kind of stuff because you can't see how you can create a delicious bean stew using some frozen items in your in your freezer and the can of beans that you've got on your in your larder. Like you just can't see that. And what you described there about how you're cooking for 10 people, people hearing that would be like, how on earth do you do all these different things? But for you, it's just it's not, it's just like, oh, I'll just put that there and put that there and and you know, I I've got a full meal for everyone. For for most people to cook for 10 people would take the entire day, let alone like looking after your kids in the in the midst of all that. So it's it it is pretty incredible. And I think what you're doing with Chefs in School, why don't why don't you introduce Chefs in Schools actually? What is what is the mission, the ethos and what what are you hoping to uh create out of that that organization?
Thomasina Miers: So, so my kids' school had this amazing uh bit of land that's fairly derelict. So I got um excited about saving this bit of land. I got a bit obsessive about the government selling off playgrounds. It was before my kids were at the school actually. I kept passing it by, it's kind of on my road. And I kept thinking they've got to like, they've got to do something with this garden before someone decides it's a good idea to like sell it off and make some money. So I got quite obsessive about this and with a girl called Laura Harper-Hinton who runs a group of restaurants called Caravan, who's also a local, we started doing these um festivals in the school to raise money to help build the playground and start growing food in it. We had a dome and growing food and all that stuff. So we had these great festivals, we raised lots of money, but the school cooks, the school was lucky enough to have a kitchen, but the school cooks didn't know what to do with these seasonal vegetables. They didn't know how to incorporate in the food. Basically, they didn't have the skills. And at almost at the same time, a guy called Henry Dimbleby who wrote the food strategy, um was happening, having similar experiences in his local primary school. His, you know, grew up with really good cooking, his mother was a food writer, and the food in his primary school was rubbish. And so he put a tweet out saying, can anyone uh let me know, I need a school cook. And this amazing girl called Nicole Pisani, who's the co-founder of Chefs in Schools. So she was the head chef at Nopi, one of Ottolenghi's kind of stellar restaurants in London. And she was kind of burnt out and she saw this tweet or someone sent her it and she became the school cook at Henry Dimbleby's kids' school and started really transforming the school food. And she is hilarious. The stories she will tell you about, particularly mushrooms. Mushrooms are something that's so hard for any kid to love. She will tell you so many disaster stories about trying to put mushrooms and hiding them to food. But but you know, she has, she is brilliant and um she and the MD now of Chefs in Schools is another amazing girl, uh are really transforming school food. And and basically, we all got around a table together because I had meanwhile been talking to a head of an autistic school in Shepherd's Bush who had transformed the school food. Food and eating for autistic children is really problematic. And she won um an award, an observer food monthly award when I was judging one year. And I remember talking to her going, how how did you do it? And she said, for me, that all the learning was, if you put a trained chef in, that is the transformative piece because a chef is trained to make food look beautiful, for texture, for colour, for that's just their training, that's their innate, that's what they do. And they want to please people. They love people enjoying their food. That's, you know, that's any chef, their main motivation, when you look back in the journey of the childhood, me and my childhood, quite a problematic upbringing, quite a lot of stress and noise. When I fed people, I made them happy. That was basically my core motivation was to please people and get that kind of positive feedback. And I reckon you can talk to 99% of chefs and that was their fundamental, something in their childhood and that feeling of giving pleasure to people. So anyway, this guy transformed the food and so Nicole and um uh Henry and I and and a girl called Joe Weinberg sat around a table at Wahaca actually and we were like, I think we should do this. And also what was really appealing about it is the business model because you know, I am an entrepreneur, Wahaca is my group of restaurants and I'm all for efficiency. So one trained chef in a school of 600, 700, 800 kids can transform the eating and the learning of that entire school. And that is basically the business model. And what we've discovered over four years, we've been in 80 schools, but we're going to be in 1300 schools in the next four years because we've got our business model is completely, like we've got it, we've got it razor tight. It's working. We're in, we started off in London, we've got a chapter in Yorkshire, no in Sheffield, sorry. We've got a chapter just opening in the Southwest, uh Cornwall, Somerset. We're talking um to to Scotland at the moment. It's so inspiring. But but essentially what we've what we discovered was because these chefs are so well trained, that even though we'd stopped feeding the kids this cheap beige food that basically had no nutrition, no fiber, and as some of the kids said, you know, we used to fall asleep straight after lunch because they were so bogged down with these kind of simple carbs, high sugar spikes and then these sugar crashes straight after lunch because they had no fiber, no kind of, you know, that rainbow plate of veg thing on your. So we were feeding the kids, we do feed the kids vegetarian twice a week, so we're bringing generations of kids up to love a diversity of vegetables, which is great for the planet, great for their microbiome and gut health. Um but also we're making bread fresh from scratch, we're having the joy of cooking. And we're doing this, well before Ukraine and that crazy, you know, this crazy inflation of food costs, we were doing this at a saving of 50 pence per pupil per day. So we were saving that every day per pupil because the chefs just knew how to work ingredients. They just knew how to get the best of them. They knew how to make a killer doll, which, you know, with homemade bread, it's actually a meal, right? You've got some lovely herbs on. They just knew how to cook and they knew how to organize a kitchen. So even with the existing team of cooks, and you know what's so exciting about this? I was doing a fundraiser in my kitchen just here the other day and one of the chefs from Chefs in Schools was this pretty handsome 30 year old who was DJing at Frieze Art Fair that evening. He trained at St John's, which has got a Michelin star. He's this was a cool kid living in Camberwell, like a really cool guy. And he has been a Chefs in Schools chef for three years. And he's he's there because he is the hero of the school. He's no longer, these school cooks no longer go through the back door where no one knows their name and they're the kind of unseen workforce. These guys are the heroes for the kids because they're making delicious, nutritious food, which kids love. This idea that you can just palm off fried stuff to kids because kids don't love vegetables. It's such a kind of, it's such propaganda. It's such a propaganda to have, you know, the least, the least and cheapest and easiest option for kids. But I think we've got to like stop that rhetoric and and and and bust that myth that kids don't like eating veg because if you feed them delicious food, they will eat it. If you're going to boil the crap out of something and not season it, then maybe they won't like it. But if you're going to cook it beautifully and season it and put lots of herbs on, they're going to love it. So it's really inspiring and and seeing how that whole food approach, the teachers start enjoying the food, they're sitting down with the kids, you know, the dinner ladies are having fun and everyone's engaged and they're learning about food. It's so inspirational. And then the chefs get these amazing hours. You know, famously chefs have bad working hours. They get long school holidays, they go home at four. Um so it's great, it's really fun.
Dr Rupy: That's epic. Can can we dive into because I'm interested in the business model of this and I think there's a nice sort of parallel between what I hope to do within hospitals as well. So with the with the chefs, so is it one uh senior lead chef that you have in the school?
Thomasina Miers: So it's a head chef. So we model it just like a restaurant kitchen. So there's a head chef, he's got a couple of sous chefs under him and the structure is exactly like a restaurant kitchen. And that really works. And then just like a restaurant kitchen, you start training up your team. So the guy who's on the pot wash, which traditionally in the kitchen is, you know, somebody who doesn't speak English, who's just come over from England, from all sorts of backgrounds, and you start with you respect them from the start because they're doing the hardest job, which is the washing up. You know, that's literally the hardest job. The the pot washer in any restaurant is like the hero of the kitchen. And then you start training them and skilling them up. And that's how any restaurant kitchen is. You start skilling your workforce so they can start, you know, moving up the ladder and taking on more responsibility. So that's exactly how it works.
Dr Rupy: Okay. And so the head chef would would you be paying them a similar wage to them working in any other restaurant in in different parts of the country, whether it be York or Central London or Bristol? Is it is it like tiered according to a certain system or?
Thomasina Miers: So it's it has all again been completely skewed in the last 12 months by um by COVID, shortage, staff shortages, um because right now the inflation rate of chefs in restaurant kitchens is crazy because basically there are not enough, there are not enough people working in kitchens to support the amount of restaurants that are open. People can't get into restaurants on Mondays, Tuesdays, Sundays anymore because people just don't have enough staff. If you'd let refugees actually work for a living, earn money and pay taxes, you might solve that problem, but that's another story.
Dr Rupy: And and with with the is it a similar situation to other public sector areas where you are allocated a certain amount per pupil or user of said service?
Thomasina Miers: Yes. And you have that pot of money and then you choose from again, regulated suppliers. So you have to choose certain suppliers of of produce.
Thomasina Miers: So what we have done, um which I think is really interesting is because um Nicole came from Nopi, which is a really well respected, very upmarket, you know, she she restaurant in London. Um so she brought those suppliers that she used at Nopi to the table because she didn't see why she'd start using, you know, chicken nuggets, frozen chicken nuggets to feed the kids when she could bread her own chicken and she knew that she could get the chicken from a good farm. So the business model was set up with a set of suppliers who from the outset were really high quality. So I'd like to say climate friendly suppliers because these are suppliers who are already fairly smaller scale, some of them, looking after their farms or their, that you know, that however they're producing their food, trusted partners that, you know, when you work in a kind of, when you go and eat in a really good restaurant, normally the chef has got quite trusted partners and they're working with people who already have a real respect for the ingredient, how it's grown, you know, the the earth and the soil, it's kind of all linked. And that's also what I love about the system. It's this is kind of anti-system because you are starting to bring those producers who are looking after the environment in their small way into a kind of public procurement sector. So you're you're pulling people through to be able to give them more market share in a sense through these schools and you're feeding kids food that's hopefully more nutritious because it's been grown in better soil, maybe it's been sprayed less. I mean, definitely Wildfarmed is a company I work for, which is an incredible company set up by Andy Cato, who's one half of Groove Armada. And he was DJing in Ibiza and he was on the kind of the bus, kind of roadie bus, and he read this piece about um the amount of chemicals being put onto the soil um in a kind of conventional system. And the piece at the end, there was a kind of killer line at the end that said, if you don't like the system, don't be a part of it. And it kind of was that light bulb moment and he basically sold his music rights to Groove Armada and bought a farm in Southwest France and and moved his family out there. And then ensued a kind of 15-year battle because the farm that he bought, unbeknown to him, the soil was completely knackered. So we don't really talk about soil enough. I think in the general, in the general population now, we talk, we know about carbon, but for me, soil is a bigger threat to humankind as carbon because we're killing our soil the way we're growing vegetables, you know, spraying, nuking them really with herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, killing all the microorganisms, killing the birds and the, no, killing, sorry, killing the worms and the bumblebees and the beetles, which support a whole web of life from from kind of everything, ground up. Um this soil that he inherited, basically you couldn't grow food in. He wanted to be an organic farmer and he spent kind of eight years trying to farm organically and he realized that even that, although he wasn't spraying, he was still battling with weeds and how to grow the food. And he started uh really reading into it and discovering this regenerative farming, which essentially is growing food but putting back into the soil. So you're kind of nourishing the soil as you're extracting food. Um so you're not, we have this really extractive system, I think in the capitalist West of always taking out from the planet and never thinking there's a, there's, you know, never thinking there might be a finite limit to how much we take out and never thinking about what we can put back in. It's kind of mad. It's a bit like having children, right? You don't just, you know, thrash them, do your homework, do your homework, come out, come out. You know at some stage you've got to tuck them up into bed, you know, give them a bath, feed them something nice and they'll be better people the next day again. It's the same with farming, right? You've got to like nourish the soil as well, knowing that it's got to rest and be fed well as well. Otherwise, obviously there's a limit to it. You know, your child's become a monster and like collapse. Um so, so that's what we're doing worldwide. We're losing three football fields a minute of good soil and it's going to to muck. And yet, 95% of the food we grow is in in soil. So we're we're farming in a way that's killing the soil. And that's how the Mayans died out. You know, I I always think back to this. I went to Palenque with this, you know, because I do lots of Mexican food. I flew out to Palenque with my parents. I was doing a work trip and they came out with my youngest. And we were wandering around Palenque, these amazing ruins. And the chief archaeologist had said, you know, we finally discovered why the Mayans, who were the most powerful people in the history of mankind, they'd like ruled over this huge swathe of the Americas. And then they suddenly died out over about 50 years. And we've traced it back to soil erosion. They had a bit of a population boom, so they started farming too much. And meanwhile, they were making these killer pyramids that look great and made them feel strong and brave. And they just basically cut down all their trees and they had such bad soil erosion in the end with their high intense farming and the pyramid building that they lost the ability to grow food and collapsed as a as a species. And you think, wow, that's what we're doing now. So looping back to Chefs in Schools, um we buy Wildfarmed flour because we know that flour is not spraying the soil with herbicides, pesticides, fungicides. It's regenerating the soil and it's also producing this amazing stable of ancient varieties of wheats which are which are grown for nutritional purposes, deeper roots, um better in droughts, um better at withstanding floods, more resilient, but basically got more nutrition in them in the first place. It's the actual flour they're making the bread with is better for the kids and better for the planet. Win-win.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, that that's like a win-win. And and we're definitely going to jump around because we we're going to talk about something that you were doing very recently uh with with Nesta and a couple of other organizations. Just just to give the listener some insight into how stretched the budget is per pupil. I wonder if you know some of the numbers that uh the the the actual price per per pupil that the government give for for for school lunches and stuff.
Thomasina Miers: I really wish I had Naomi, our MD here with me because she knows all these numbers back to front. I'm just a kind of humble trustee. Um but it is tiny. It is tiny, but but also you will know from your work in hospitals that it's tiny and that it's also tiny in prisons. Um but what I'm most interested in is that we scrimp and save on this, you know, upfront food cost. Um even though we, you know, we save that food cost um in our in our kind of business model, although we put it back into salaries. So we didn't actually make it, it wasn't cheaper. We put the food, the savings of food cost back into the salaries and paid our people better. But um but what I find fascinating is that diet related disease now, which incidentally is killing people more than alcohol or smoking, both of which are taxed. So you can talk about whether you should tax ultra processed food, which is doing the same job. Um which is, you know, not doing good for people. But but what it's costing the taxpayer, you know, it's costing you and me 54 billion pounds a year now, diet related disease and all the kind of ensuing fallout on the NHS, on on people's health, on sick days, you know, diet related disease, as you know, causes all sorts of maladies from, well, yeah, well you'll know, heart disease and diabetes, all this stuff. So it's not as if this cheap food that for so long has been lobbied as, you know, we're doing such a good service, we're feeding people on low incomes food that's affordable. It's not that affordable if you think it's costing us 54 billion pounds a year and causing misery for people because we are, we are the most obese country in Europe now. We have the worst diet and people will say, don't give me that thing, don't tell me what I can eat. I've got free choice. And you're like, look, I love eating doughnuts and crisps and chips dipped in mayonnaise more than anyone else. But I know that I have got access to also eating fresh fruit and vegetables when I want and I've got the skills to do it. We're talking about people who are, they don't have a choice. The idea that they've got a choice is is also another massive piece of propaganda. There are people who, you know, single mothers who've got two jobs, they've got no time to cook. They might have no kitchen or they might just have a microwave because a lot of council houses have a tiny kitchen with a microwave in and then a massive telly room. So there are so many people in this country, um and George Monbiot said about 13 or 14% of people in this country don't even have access to kitchens. So they do not have a choice to eat better. They're literally, there's no way they can. And they're surrounded by food deserts, which means they've got no fresh fruit and vegetables on sale near them. They've just got chicken shops. Um it is cheap at the point of buy, um but not cheap further down the line. So this idea that we've got a choice, not to mention the advertising. I mean, advertising of junk food to kids as well on the hundreds and hundreds of millions spent on making us want those really unhealthy, high profit numbers that are kind of high in the saturated fats and sweet. I mean, I think it's very clever the marketing that people who talk about public health are kind of made out as these killjoys of like, oh, you just, you don't want, you don't want to take away good food from us and we want to eat lovely. I mean, we all want to eat delicious things, right? We all want to eat delicious things, but at what point did delicious have to not mean nutritious as well? And even nutritious sounds a bit boring, doesn't it? It sounds a bit like, oh, you've taken the fun out of it. But, you know, covering dal in ghee, like spice with or oil with, you know, full of like the mustard seeds and the curry leaves and, you know, and covering it in that oil and then dumping your fresh cooked naan bread in it and, you know, scooping it up and, you know, fat, how delicious is fat? I'm always throwing fat all over my food. Who said, you know, food has to be fat bad? No, that's madness.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I I it's it's a really interesting point. I'm glad you you brought up the the P word propaganda because I think it is pervasive in that anyone who wants to speak out against ultra processed foods, cheap foods is seen as elitist. Um and you definitely see it on social media where you have people who kind of feel like they need to police the internet somewhat. Um I was chatting to Professor Tim Spector about this actually on the on the pod a couple of weeks ago and he was sort of like uh grumbling about the same thing. It's like, you know, we know through doing the studies, through reading the research that ultra high, ultra processed food is not satiating. It actually makes you eat more. The calories that you're consuming are that they have no nutritional value whatsoever. But there is this pervasive belief that the food industry is doing a service by making palatable, portable, very cheap food accessible to as many people as possible. Um and it's just it's just not the case. And I and I think being antagonistic to that idea, unfortunately brings a a bit of shade to to you. Um and so I'm glad, you know, we're having this pretty open conversation about not only how we can introduce better nutrition into into the food system, but also how you can do it on a budget and save food. So the fact that, you know, putting a trained chef in schools can actually lead to a saving that you put back into salaries that makes a happier environment and a more sort of cohesive environment. I think it's a one wonderful idea and it's something that we should be adopting all all over.
Thomasina Miers: Yeah, and as you say, we should be adopting it in in hospitals where people stay for longer in hospital because they're so malnourished while they're there, they actually get sicker. Or in prisons, like at what point did we think it was a sensible idea to feed a set of people that might be, you know, some people might think, well, they've broken the law, they're on the fringe of society, why should we feed them good food? But unless you're feeding them food that makes them feel good. I mean, there's a high prevalence of mental health in people in prison, um you know, really poor mental health. You know, how did they get there in the first place? If we look at prison offenders and like they're bad, just lock them up, throw away the key. What about trying to rehabilitate people? What about trying to nourish them, feed them, get them physically active, get them mentally well, and then thinking, oh, now I want to contribute to society. Now I feel like I'm back on my feet. Maybe I'll even learn a skill in prison. That would be good, wouldn't it? So that when I get out, I'm actually then contributing to society, paying taxes, you know, happy in my environment, looking after my family again. You know, it's it just it's nuts um the way we have it this pervasive idea that good food is a luxury. Like, how did how did that get marketed? It it's really the idea that food keeps us alive. How is that a luxury?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I'm glad you bring up the um uh the the issue around prison food as well because I I was lucky enough to present at the public sector catering conference earlier this year and so they had people from MOD, uh NHS chefs, uh and they're wonderful sort of competitions to create sort of like public sector caterers that that we can shine a light on. And uh we had also some people from different prisons across the country as well. And the opinions that people have about prison food and whether we should be investing anything at all into prison food, super divisive. I'm definitely of the opinion that we should be trying to nourish uh people in their most vulnerable state and that includes prisoners because many of them, as you just mentioned, you know, you just scratch away the surface and you realize that you're putting, not for everyone, obviously, there are certainly people who are just bad, but actually I would argue that's the minority. You scratch away at the surface and you realize you put anyone in that environment from childhood, um the the the environments in which they they grew up in, the people they were surrounded with, it's almost inevitable. And maybe like, you know, I've read a bit too much Gabor Maté and like done a bit, you know, I I've read a lot of sort of opinions from from different from different authors. Uh but I'm certainly of the opinion that everyone deserves nutritious food regardless of your situation and particularly if you're in your most vulnerable, which is hospitals, prisons and and and and schools. So, yeah, I I just want to put it out there because I I know that some people will definitely have some opinions on on prison food, but um that that's where my mindset is.
Thomasina Miers: But I think you're brilliant the way you say that, you know, you scratch under the surface of every story of everyone who's in prison. And as you say, there are some people in there who are genuinely evil and you know, it's better for society to have them there. But then so many will be, you know, you'll find out, you know, they came from a broken home, you know, they came from, they had single parents or no parents, um there was no youth club near them, there was no kind of parental figure, there was nowhere to secure them up. Maybe they got, you know, kicked out of school, another really criminal kind of policy where, you know, if the kid's not doing well, you just get rid of them. Uh they were picked up by a gang, that became their family, they supported them, they made them feel like they belonged for the first time. And then suddenly they're in a gang, you know, and then they get locked up. So, yeah, I think we don't want to just forget these people. We want to bring them back into society if we can because apart from anything else, that's got to be better for the economy, right? Get those people back working, um contributing and and being part of society.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I I think it's it's almost like multivitamins, I I think with with humans, like, yes, I could just take a a crushed vitamin tablet and that will give me all my calcium and potassium needs and all the rest of it. But am I going to be healthy? No, I'm not. I'm going to survive, but I won't be thriving for sure. I'll just be, you know, a withered uh sort of shell of a human if I was just relying on that. And there is so much intelligence in the food that we consume. Um and we don't really appreciate it. And I think the intelligence of our soils is something that is sort of, you know, completely lost. I mean, my my family, we come from Punjab, obviously, you're aware of the the farmer protests from from last year and um that sort of reliance on uh petrochemicals uh in in the agricultural industry and stuff. It it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth because I I see the sort of struggles of farmers and farmers just aren't championed enough, I think, in the same way chefs aren't aren't championed enough, I think. Um and I think we need to really adjust our appreciation for the people who are foundations for for life on earth and they have such an a critical role in this new era of diet related illness and climate change. Um these guys should really be be be put on pedestals.
Thomasina Miers: But what I find is exciting again is you talk about policy change and the investment as being a kind of barrier to making this stuff happen. But what I find really exciting is that if you follow the money, the money's wise, right? And investment is wise. So even, so Alison Rose is a great hero of mine. She is the chair of NatWest. And she realized um recently that uh 3% of her customers created 20% of her carbon emissions. So as a company trying to get to net zero, she knew that this tiny percentage of her clients were creating massive amount of her emissions. They were farmers. So she started really drilling down into that because, you know, conventional farming is really, you know, it emits so much carbon and is so reliant on this chemical hungry way of farming. So she started really exploring to this and and actually if you look at where the smart money is going, investments now, look at farms and how are you farming? Because if you're farming in a way where you know your soil run off is increasing, you have to keep putting on these nitrates where the cost of them is going up all the time. You're not building a resilient business. You're not building a business that I really think I should be investing in because I can see how it's going to be falling down. Your costs are rising, your yields are falling and meanwhile your soil is kind of being degraded all the time. Let's look now at a regenerative system where you're investing in the soil, we know that you're in a drought system, you've got better soil, so you've got more water retention. We know when it floods, you're actually not losing that water or the top soil, it's actually sucking all that water in, so you're not getting that same run off. Your your crops are protected. That is the type of business model I want to invest in. So I think although governments probably behind a bit behind and slow to catch up on, business isn't. Business is really seeing like, oh, so you're using a diversity of wheat crops now and they've all got deeper root systems. So in a drought, this conventional wheat that we've grown just for yield, they've got really short roots. So they will be the first ones to go. But these ancient varieties of wheat got these really deep root systems which can access all that deep down water. That is more resilient. That's the business that I'm going to put my money in because I'm a smart businessman. And I think that's what's really interesting now is people are looking deeper into these things and and that's where the money will be going.
Dr Rupy: I mean, I love Wahaca, but I don't think we're going to get a chance, we're not going to get a chance to talk about Wahaca and your story today, but I I I wanted to dive into to Denmark a bit because I think it's an incredible example of what can be done. Um so what what was the time period that they they made these changes in um in procurement of organic uh produce for for the public sector? Because that that seems like that that's huge and it's an amazing example of of the fact that it can be done at a at a at a country level.
Thomasina Miers: Yeah, so I think, and I I really, I actually, I need to, now that my piece has come out, I can really start shouting about it and um, and I'm I'm banging the drum. I've got to deep dive into it, but I I I I feel it was about, um, you know, it was it was kind of set up about 10 to 15 years ago. Um, and but the the impact has been fairly quick. You know, the the impact on the waterways was very quick because, you know, you stop putting chemicals in the land, that's quite a quick turnaround for the rivers, start regenerating the soil. Um, what I think's interesting about this is it was just organic food. If you put it to regenerative, then you're having a much more positive impact because you're not just having a neutral thing of no chemicals, you're having a positive thing of actually nourishing the soil at the same time. Um, and then the health impact, um, is probably a bit slower, but but not that much behind because if you think about having someone in hospital, if you start feeding them better food, pretty quickly they're going to start feeling better and getting better. Like, you know, anyone who's sick and you feed them some lovely chicken soup or, you know, vegetable broth or whatever it is, that that improvement's quite quick. So actually, it's a pretty fast turnaround this system. And we can see that in Chefs in Schools. You know, we go into a school and within a term, the kids are saying to us, it's amazing. I don't fall asleep anymore after school. I feel well, I feel healthy, I can concentrate in class. You know, so these turnarounds actually are pretty fast. Um, so which is which is very positive as well. Um, and it's it's lovely you mentioned Wahaca because I feel like, um, at Wahaca, which we set up 15 years ago, we always wanted to have um a menu that was really high in vegetables. So half our menu is vegetarian. And it was always something we wanted to do, not um, not just because we love vegetables, but because we thought it was great to give people a choice of having slightly more affordable food, but because we always wanted to put better meat on our on our menu. So all of our meat at the moment is free range and our beef is grass-fed. And we wanted to invest in better quality meat, but then we wanted to have an option for people if they didn't think they could afford that, you know, beautiful free range pork pibil taco, then they could have the delicious kind of mushroom, ancho mushroom taco with crispy beetroot and jalapeno aioli or something, you know, and have an option. So, um, so that I think has governed a lot of this thinking. And I think that I think that is a really good model because we know we've got to eat less meat to be climate friendly, but that doesn't have to be bad. You know, just get delicious vegetables on your plate and that rainbow of them, diversity, and it's a delicious journey. As you know, as all your followers know, vegetables can be so delicious. And for a cook, I love the creativity of cooking vegetables. It's so fun looking at a piece of broccoli or courgette or beetroot, knowing there are so many ways you can cook that thing. It's just like, oh my, what am I going to do with it today? Am I going to shred that beetroot and turn it into a fritter? Am I going to make a soup? Am I going to like deep fry it into a crisp? You know, it's just like, where am I going to take this? You know, steak, great, pan fry it. You know, how creative is that? You can do a different sauce. So I think it's it's really fun cooking vegetables.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, no, I think uh for from a chef's point of view and a recipe creator's point of view, it's a it's an awesome challenge. I I did something recently um with the BBC trying to create some budget friendly meals uh using what we tend to find in people's pantries. Um and boy, is it hard. It's it is really hard to like really extract flavour. And like, you know, I want to make sure that I'm putting in a certain number of vegetables, we're prepping them in a certain way. I wasn't allowed to use the oven, like all these different things. And it's it's challenging, but it but it it really does force you to to to get creative. Um which I think is awesome. On the on the note of um sorry, we're jumping around a bit, but on the note of uh Chefs in Schools, so you're trying to get to 1300 schools. When when's that target? When's sort of like the
Thomasina Miers: Four years. So we've been in existence for four years and we've done 80. But we have, we've got nailed our, we've nailed our model now. So, so this is the fun bit now, right? We want maximum, we want to get in as many schools as possible. But more excitingly, we've got our training program. We've got it all set up. So we've got the capacity, we feel to be in half of the schools in in in the UK in the next, let's say, six to eight years, eight to 10 years because we've got a ready to go training program that's been tested that we can hand over to anyone who's interested. So maybe we can even give that to a hospital or a prison. You know, you could think bigger than this because it's it's basically ready to go. So we're on a kind of bit of a fundraising mission, but we're also just on this, we just want to get the word out as much as possible. I mean, our motto is better is possible because it is possible. It's completely possible. Um so again, using that propaganda word, better is so possible and affordable.
Dr Rupy: How many schools are there in in the UK?
Thomasina Miers: 26,000.
Dr Rupy: 26,000. Okay, so you're going to get into like five around 5% or so uh
Thomasina Miers: That's us with our people, but then our training program could get into another 13,000 we reckon in the next
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, that that's epic. So you're you're literally like at that blitz scale uh to use sort of a Silicon Valley term um in in tech uh that sort of like period, which is super exciting. I mean, it's super nerve-wracking, but it's super exciting. And if you could nail that training program, I don't see why if you've shown in one public sector the ability to change, you you can do it in like parallel in others because I I've seen firsthand how the impact of just having a chef in the in the hospital environment really invigorated everyone and and created that excitement and created delicious food. Um so that that would be amazing. Absolutely, absolutely incredible.
Thomasina Miers: What I find really exciting about it too is you can work with the big public sector caterers, um and you can help train their cooks and and you can help give them recipes and because I think everyone wants to do better now. Everyone knows, you know, the state of play, you look out at the floods and the extreme heat and all around the world, we're seeing these kind of weather patterns. Everyone wants to make a difference now and put their part in. So, you know, we want to engage with everyone because I talked to a whole um lot of public sector caterers the other day and and as you say, they're everyone wants to do this. They're everyone's, it's like we're just pushing a door that's already a bit open. Everyone knows they've got to make changes and so if you can make it easy and fun and exciting in a way, so you're you're part of this really inspiring movement, then I think that's the way to go.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, someone who's coming at this from not just a charitable perspective and an activist perspective, but a business perspective such as yourself is critical because at the end of the day, organizations including the NHS are looking at the bottom line with all this stuff and it's the, you know, in the UK, it's a bit of an ugly thing to talk about business, but I I think it's absolutely necessary and the commercial element definitely needs to be there. And just just I don't want to I I want to play devil's advocate with the Denmark example because I know I get a lot of pushback for um you know, thinking about uh ways in which to improve the health system, slash that diet related uh um disease bill every year, you know, we we spend billions on type two diabetes and many other preventable conditions. And my sort of running theory is, not theory, it's it's the reality is that nutrition has an impact on every disease state, you know, whether it's not just cardiovascular disease and and obesity, it's mental well-being, it's women's health, you know, cancer, everything, which is why we talk about it so much. With with Denmark, I imagine the pushback you're going to get is, well, Denmark's very different. They have a completely different uh taxation system. They pay way more in uh this is just top of the head from from like background knowledge. I I think they pay a lot more in in tax generally at a population level. Um maybe they have pre-existing farms that are organic or, you know, and uh and they they deal with less people in their public sectors as I'm sure the population size is a lot smaller. What what do you say, what what are sort of like your your throwbacks to those points that are inevitably going to going to come up?
Thomasina Miers: So, so one, we're already doing it. We're already doing it through Chefs in Schools. Effectively what we're doing, you know, we use Wildfarmed flour, we get better quality meat from good providers. We know that our vegetables come from good good growers. So we're already doing it and we've proved that we can still do that and save money. So that's one thing. Two, definitely they've got a different population, but we've got more workers. So we've got more people to feed, but then we've got more workers to feed them. So, and also we've got, we've got lots of people who are looking for work. So let's create jobs that are inspiring, well-paid and and get people motivation to get out of bed in the morning because we can know we can create those jobs because we've seen how even the cool 30 year old who trained at a Michelin star kitchen and DJs at Frieze Art Fair in his like weekends, he likes doing these scenarios because he's like motivated, he's a hero. It's an inspiring job. Let's I mean, what better thing than to create inspiring jobs that people want to work in in society. So, so that's another thing. And then taxation, I mean, again, we're already doing it. Like, we were already saving money in these schools. I think there is always some upfront cost in making a change and that's the most thorny thing is like who's going to do that investment. But when you can see the savings so quickly, and I'm going to really drill down into the detail now, you've given me some homework to do to go and really examine that Denmark model inside out. So next time I'm on a podcast, I'm going to be throwing back these answers straight away. But if you can get such quick change, um then there are ways to finance these things. I really believe. And even if you just start small projects, um I was talking to someone in Jersey just before I came on board and he was really interested in doing like a microcosm of it in Jersey, which is a kind of closed system and then really learning how public health is and but I feel like because we're already doing it in Chefs in Schools and because projects like this are sparking up in hospitals around the country, you know, there are examples of some hospitals doing better. I feel like, I feel that that's not really a bar. I think we've kind of proven that it's not really a bar. Um there does need to be, I feel like there needs to be a cross-bench um agreement that's the right thing to do. But but it feels like it's a really low investment and you can get private enterprise, you know, you can get banks involved. You know, I talked about NatWest wanting to do the right thing. They want their, they've got a real motivation to get those two or three percent of customers doing much better for their like emissions for their for the NatWest emissions. So it's in their interest to get those farmers on the right journey. So we're providing a route to market for the farmers because the farmers also need to know if they're creating these food products that are better for everyone, they need to know they've got a market for them. So we're also creating a market to pull the farmers on this better journey in the total absence of legislation at the moment. So that's also a really good thing. You know, you're pulling everyone in the same direction.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I I um we definitely need to talk uh more about this. I I'm super super excited for you and uh I I know that if there's anyone that's going to make massive change as you've already demonstrated through Chefs in Schools and and the rest of your team as well, um you could definitely do it in in this environment too. I got to tell you a really funny story. So you know when you're on Saturday Kitchen, I can't remember if I already told you this, but uh and you were you were doing a a recipe from your meat free, meat free Mexican, that's the name of the cookbook, isn't it? That came out earlier this year. You made this, it was incredible. This this meal you made, uh you made the the sort of sauce uh salsa from scratch. I think it was called salsa negra. And uh and me and my wife, we were like, oh, we're definitely going to make this at home. But we didn't have any of your ingredients. So we we made it and we tried it and we shared it with one of our friends called Liz. Liz, you got to try this recipe. We made it a bit different, but you got to you got to try it. And we sent her a voice note and we said, ah, instead of red wine vinegar, we used the sherry vinegar we used, we used, instead of like the coriander, we had to use parsley. We basically completely butchered your recipe. And she was like, you haven't made that recipe. You've literally just made something completely different. So it might taste great, but it's definitely not her recipe.
Thomasina Miers: But it's inspired by. That's how it's meant to be.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, exactly. That's what I said.
Thomasina Miers: I mean, I think we get a bit too precious about these things. Like, if a recipe gets someone in the kitchen cooking, that's a win, right? I mean, all of my food writing, I feel like it's a win if someone has got in the kitchen and played with some ingredients and made something they like, you know, like the taste of afterwards. So, yeah, that was so nice. Thank you.
Dr Rupy: That's my sentiment exactly.
Thomasina Miers: That salsa negra, I've got a jar of it in my in my cupboard here and I put it on everything. I just love that salsa.
Dr Rupy: So good.
Thomasina Miers: Can't stop eating it.
Dr Rupy: So good. It's it's amazing. And I and I did make it the right way afterwards. But yeah, I did want to mention that because because as a recipe creator myself, I don't mind if people go completely sideways on the ingredients as long as they're enjoying it, they got in the kitchen, you know, it's inspired them to make something different. That's great. Uh but yeah, no, it was quite it was quite funny how we just completely did it and Liz thought it would be like the worst thing. Anyway, thank you. Tommy, you you're an absolute star. I can't wait to chat to you again and hopefully we can do it in person and maybe even in the kitchen as well. That'd be awesome.
Thomasina Miers: Oh, yeah, let's cook. I'd love to cook. That'd be great. Cool. All right, lovely. Thanks so much for having me.
