I’ve arranged to meet Ian Walker, chef and author of Thirty Miles – A Local Journey in Food, at the Landmark Hotel in London. The huge, fake, palm trees rising high above the continental brunch buffet in the hotel’s ‘Winter Garden’ make for an odd setting to talk about local food, but it’s convenient for us both.
Thirty Miles is Ian Walker’s response to a claim from a member of the family whose cottage he was staying in, whilst on holiday in North Wales, that he’d struggle to find good local food in the area. 228 pages of recipes and heart-warming tales of North Wales folk later, that claim looks like it’s been disproved in some style.
I’m looking forward to meeting Ian (and to launching BigBarn as an internationally-acclaimed purveyor of incisive literary comment into the bargain). He comes across in the book as the sort of person who grabs life with both hands and isn’t afraid to get stuck in. I like that.
I’m not disappointed. He grabs my hand warmly by way of a welcome and we quickly get stuck in. In fact, he’s so keen to get stuck in that we completely forget to order any coffee, despite the fact that he’s nursing the results of a weekend stag-do in Derbyshire.
And before I can even ask any questions, he’s offering his services as a prize in our forthcoming competition (which had been simply to win a copy of the book).
‘You tell me who the winner is and I’ll cook a meal for them, at their house, using food from within 30 miles’ he pipes up. I snap up the offer. It’ll be first prize and there will be 10 copies of the book to be won, too.
On with the questions. I start by asking him about North Wales and its notoriously insular people.
‘It’s not an area that smacks you in the face with its gastronomic delights’ he admits. And that’s apparently the point. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.
‘But the people were incredible. Of course, food is a central point for anybody and you just need to build up trust with people. The bloke in the book that produces chickens didn’t even normally give his number out to people’.
Being met with that sort of situation would send most people fleeing for the convenience of a supermarket in no time, but Ian is one of those infectiously enthusiastic people who breaks down barriers of this sort and my incredulity at his having made so many friends in such a hostile environment quickly subsides.
I decide to rewind a little, to get the hirthtoforeabovementioned BigBarn incisive literary comment thing going a bit by uncovering the psychological motivation behind his love of local food. I cunningly ask him where his interest in food started.
‘It started with school and my Mum, I suppose. We used to bake at home – when I was eight I used to bake cakes and make quiches and all that kind of stuff and then at school I was one of the few boys who did HE (Home Economics). Of course I did HE partly because of the food and partly because of the girls – it was a double whammy really’.
From there he went on to college and began working as a chef in a number of London’s top restaurants.
‘don’t call me a Top Chef, will you.’ It’s not a question. I promise not to. He probably is, of course, but the limits of respect I will pay to those seeking to distance themselves from celebrity in a world where everyone seems to want to be one, know no bounds.
And so on to Local Food, his consuming passion and something about which he seems desperate to bang the drum at every opportunity.
‘It’s not easy [sourcing food locally]‘ he admits,
‘People have to be prepared to change’. He’s comfortable talking about both producers and consumers and I suspect he means both.
‘People haven’t always cared that much. But they are starting to. It’ll take a long time to get people in the country eating [local food]. We don’t have the food culture or the infrastructure, but the point about the book is that there are so many great producers out there’
That really is the point of the book. It’s a practical demonstration of how one man put his beliefs to the test and proved them right. But finding producers is surely only one part of the challenge. In the summer and autumn months, the job of sourcing food from local producers is relatively easy – the real challenge must lie in doing it out of season.
It’s a point that’s quickly acknowledged. He didn’t, he assures me, simply lope off to Wales when the going got easy. He was there at the lean times of year too. February. March. Leek and potato soup time.
‘I didn’t want to cheat or for it to be too easy. That would have ripped the heart out of the book’.
He is, however, also quick to acknowledge that the task becomes significantly harder out of season and that sometimes all you can do is your best.
‘this is about what we grow in this country and how we use it. That should be used as a basis. But if we don’t physically grow something in this country then I think it’s fine to import it. I love bananas and mango.’
It’s reassuring to hear that even someone as committed to local food as Ian admits to a dalliance in gastronomic adultery.
I point out that, to my mind, the local food movement (for want of a better term) follows fairly hot on the heals of the internationalisation of food in this country. Over the last fifteen years or so there has been a mainstream acceptance of olive oils, pancettas, chorizos and the like, to the point where continental foods are seen by people as a culinary fashion statement.
This is met with a laugh.
‘Pancetta is just bacon! We’ve had the stuff ourselves for years. We need to become proud of what we produce’. This is the sort of thing that really gets Ian going.
‘I know food people who use strawberries out of season and it destroys me. If you can’t get food people not to use strawberries out of season then you haven’t got a hope in hell’
These ‘food people’ are the ones for whom Ian reserves the bulk of his anger. He means the professionals – the people who set the trends and inform the public.
‘there’s a huge responsibility on food writers and food people. We grow the best apples in the world’ (this is his other favourite subject) ‘and yet we have systematically destroyed the orchards in Kent and Sussex. It’s starting to come back a bit but again, it’s people like the food writers and the food people – it should be their job to promote our apples’
I make the assumption that ‘food people’ include chefs and, knowing his background as a chef, I wonder what the challenges are for them.
‘It’s huge. It’s one of the biggest challenges. It’s the infrastructure that’s the key. If you had a local vegetable market that only took veg from a 100 mile radius and then chefs could get there supplies from there, that would be a huge start. It’s like Spitalfields in Leytonstone, East London – there are times when you can walk round that market and hardly see anything from this country’
But just as much as chefs set a trend, they also, presumably, need to offer what the customer is looking for. So is local a selling point on a menu now?
‘I definitely think so, but I think it’s about a belief amongst chefs and it’s not just a selling point. There’s a restaurant in King’s Cross which is getting a lot of press because the chef there is trying to source everything from within the M25 and one journalist said “ok, but the gimmick doesn’t exactly work” and I thought “what an awful, naive comment”. A gimmick! It’s not a gimmick. I nearly threw the paper in the bin’.
I’m keen to turn the conversation back towards the consumer, so I ask how the challenges of sourcing local food differ between North Wales and, say, London.
‘In some ways it’s actually easier because a lot of the produce, like the lobsters and the crabs, gets shifted straight to places like London anyway – to the fish markets and the veg markets. But the radius from which your food comes needs to be larger. Generally city farmer’s markets draw produce from about 100 miles. It’s still local when you compare it to Argentinian Beef or New Zealand lamb’
Of course one thing that doesn’t help either city or country people is that neither seem to have a clue what the other does any more.
‘One of the farmers I met in Wales said that over the years he’s seen the disconnection of the city from the country. We’ve seen this recently with fox hunting – a huge divide, because people don’t understand the country. But another lady told me that people from the country need to start understanding the city, so there’s a double responsibility’.
If this is the case, and there seems no reason to disbelieve it, then Ian is one of the few who crosses the divide. Between the recipes, his book is full of wide-eyed and willing city-boy goes to the country stories. None of them are relayed with the seasoned, verbal dexterity of a literary man, more with the contagious enthusiasm of the inquisitive chef. Ian laughs at my assertion that these parts of the book are not exactly going to set the literary world alight.
‘they were never meant to. They were the hardest bits for me. It’s a jaunt. It’s little stories and I’m not a natural writer’.
He is a natural communicator though, and his enthusiasm may well encourage people to actually get involved rather than just sitting back and being entertained.
‘that’s what I wanted to do. I never intended to set the literary world alight but I wanted it to feel like there was a strong message throughout the book.
I sold a copy to a girl the other day and she said “but I can’t cook” so I picked her out a few recipes and said “you can definitely cook these”. She asked me if she could come back any time and ask for advice if she needed any and I said “of course you can”. And that’s the biggest thrill for me
‘the second biggest thrill for me would be for someone to come back in a year’s time and say “I’ve absolutely destroyed that book. I’ve cooked everything.”‘
An author who wants his book to be destroyed. Now there’s something. I wrap up BigBarn’s soon-to-be-seminal first interview wondering if I’ve just landed a literary coup and certain, as anyone else who as ever met Ian Walker is, that I’ve just made a new friend.
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