What’s in your kitchen?

I always have a lot of fruits and vegetables and salad with every meal. I fill up my bicycle bag much too heavy with fruits and vegetables from Leather Lane market in London. I also have a small garden for rarer plants.

Buying Fairtrade is my number one priority such as walnuts and brazil nuts. I also buy things in season. I love getting apples and pears in autumn and the summer fruits.

How would you sum up your food philosophy?

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I think we’ve overcomplicated food, today. I like simple foods. I’m vegetarian so that changes the way you eat. I eat a lot of nuts and, recently, tofu. The way food is prepared has become complicated. There is no end to the number of recipes and cooking programmes and yet you find out so many young people can’t cook. I think it's because they make it look more complicated than it is.

I lived in india for six years and being a vegetarian was the daily norm. I became a vegetarian because the amount of resources that it takes to produce meat is enormous. Now, I just wouldn’t like meat because I haven’t eaten it for so long.

How has British food and our attitude to it changed in your lifetime?

Two big countertrends are going on. One is, bizarrely, that we’re actually valuing food less and less. In the 1950s, we spent a third of our income on food, now we spend a fifth.

The price of food has been in a long-term decline and this has impacted famers. This is happening because we are not valuing food properly. I heard that we throw away a third of all of our food, which is incredible.

For example, I was in Malawi and met this lady who adopted five orphans. I said, "My goodness, how can you manage?", and she said that sometimes she has to skip a meal in order to be able to afford to send them to school. It’s unsustainable.

When people learn about the falling prices of food they’re happy to help out Fairtrade farmers. The backlash against devaluing food has started.

A positive countertrend is the rise in buying organic and using local markets.

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