In the second episode of our 2026 summer series, Farmerama hears from Sheila Das, Head of Gardens and Parks at the National Trust. She reflects on regenerative agriculture’s influence on gardening, argues for less combative language (rejecting terms like “maintenance” and “ornamental”), and more focus on soil, roots, process, and seeing weeds as signals in living systems.
Josiah Meldrum of Hodmedod introduces their forthcoming cookbook Whole Food (DK), framed as both recipes and a “recipe” for food-system change by “eating the rotation,” reviving stigmatized dishes like gruel and pottage, and valuing diverse UK arable crops and bi-cropping.
Anand Ethirajalu of Conscious Planet outlines Cauvery Calling’s agroforestry-led plan (2.42 billion trees; 140 million planted), organic nurseries, and Save Soil’s farmer training (50,000 trained; one-third transitioned), emphasising farm accounting and net profit.
Finally, baker and historian Chloe-Rose Crabtree of SOURCED Journeys discusses their Sugar Season: linking sugar’s technical uses to histories of slavery and ongoing exploitation, questioning ethical sourcing and exploring unrefined sugars like piloncillo/panela.
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Sheila Das is Head of Gardens and Parks at the National Trust, working with gardeners and staff across around 260 gardens. Previously she worked at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), studied at Kew, and worked for English Heritage, after an earlier career in warehouse logistics. With a background in edible growing, she has become increasingly focused on soil and regenerative approaches, and encourages stronger connections between gardening and farming communities.
Josiah Meldrum is co-founder of Hodmedod, a business started in 2012 that works with UK farmers to supply diverse crops from arable rotations, including peas, beans, cereals and other seed crops. He is a driving force behind Hodmedod’s work to help people cook with less familiar ingredients and to build markets that support more diverse, resilient farm rotations. Hodmedod’s first cookbook Whole Food is published October 9th by Dorling Kindersley; you can preorder here: Bookshop.org
Anand Ethirajalu is an Indian farmer turned environmental leader based in Tamil Nadu. He is Project Director of the Cauvery Calling river revitalisation campaign and heads Save Soil’s Regenerative Revolution, both initiatives of the international NGO Conscious Planet. Since 2004 he has worked on community-based tree planting focused on agroforestry and on supporting farmers to transition from chemical-intensive agriculture to regenerative practices.
Chloe-Rose Crabtree is head baker at Bake Street, a bakery and cafe in London, and is a chef and food historian. She co-runs the food publication SOURCED Journeys with Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, using ingredients to explore food systems through accessible writing that connects kitchen practice with the politics, history and culture of food—currently focusing on sugar.
Don’t forget to listen to Cereal Revisited and explore our Digital Soundmap! This soundmap, created alongside the Cereal Revisited podcast, offers the opportunity to explore listener stories from around the world, from farmers, bakers, millers, and those who have engaged with our 2019 Cereal series. Cereal explored how the needs of industrial bread production have come to dictate how seeds are bred, grain is grown, flour is milled, and bread is baked and eaten. Alongside this, the series documented the emergence of local grain networks in the UK and the ideas and challenges within this growing movement.
The soundmap traces how Cereal has shaped thinking, practice, and connection across grain and food systems, and what actions people are taking today – from Scotland to Australia.
This is an ongoing project and we’d love to hear from you! If Cereal has resonated with you in any way, or sparked a shift in how you think or work with grain, you’re warmly invited to add to the soundmap.
Send us a voice note via the Farmerama WhatsApp +447466301300, telling us who you are, how you came across the series, and how it inspired any change or action – big or small.
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https://soundcloud.com/farmerama-radio/94-gardening-language-eating
Transcript:
Rosie: Hello and welcome to Farmerama.
Lucy: This month we hear from a gardener who is questioning the language of gardening and linking this to a complete shift in how we see and interact with gardens, we dive into a cook book that is enabling us to literally Eat the rotation and garnering a gruel revival, we jump to the southern tip of India where large scale tree planting and farmer focused accounting are part of the large scale regeneration efforts and finally we dip our toe into sugar.
Abby: Sheila Das is Head of Gardens and Parks for the National Trust. We met at Groundswell a couple months ago and we got talking as I had noticed that many more gardeners were attending this farming conference, something Sheila has been encouraging with the many gardeners she works with. Here we share some of the excerpts from our multi-layered conversation.
Sheila: So I’m Sheila Das, head of gardens and parks for the National Trust. I’ve been with the National Trust for about a year and a half, my role involves working with all of our gardeners and National Trust staff across some 260 gardens, actually. Prior to the Trust, I worked for the Royal Horticultural Society at the RHS, and prior to that, I, I studied at Kew, worked for English Heritage and, uh, I career changed, so I used to work in logistics in warehouses, so, uh, bit of a change, and my warehouse now is much more beautiful So I obviously have a background in edible growing. I’m passionate about that, then I got drawn into learning about regenerative agriculture because I didn’t feel that in the world of horticulture I inhabited, that we were interrogating systems as much as we should. And it actually all started for me with the film Kiss the Ground. I was so inspired by the kind of the, the message really of hope that film embodied. I was already interested in soil and that obviously just sealed the deal for me. I was like, “Well, it’s, it’s non-negotiable now. This is the most important thing.” But what it did was it really pulled me to look across to the world of regen agriculture. And I started listening to various podcasts and things, and I just thought there’s so much transferrable learning here to the world of … And I don’t like making the distinction or calling it ornamental horticulture, and, and we can get to that. But I really felt that there was something to be found in that crossover. In Gabe Brown’s book Dirt to Soil, he quotes his, h- one of his ranchers or something, doesn’t he, and says, uh, ” it’s not the way you do things, it’s the way you see things that counts.” And that really sat with me for a long time. And I found starting to think like this made me look at things in a different way. So I wasn’t just thinking superficially what presents itself to me above the ground. I was thinking, “Well, why is that happening? If that’s happening over there, why is that happening?” And the whole kind of like read your weeds idea, isn’t it? In a garden and in the gardening world, the weeds have been seen as the enemy, but actually I think I was probably a little bit misquoted at a press conference once as describing weeds as superheroes ’cause I don- I kind of don’t speak like that, but apparently I said it. They kind of got billed as hero plants when I was talking about them. Just insofar as they are un- unlocking something. A, they’re trying to help. They are repairing something. And also they’re just telling you so much more than you can ever learn than by going on the internet and googling something and saying, “Tell me the answer to this.” And then I very much started to look at gardening as much more of a call and response, and it was the most liberating thing that could’ve happened to me as a garden manager, actually, because suddenly I thought, “I don’t actually have to come up with a plan. And it’s fascinating for me. In a heritage environment, as I am in the National Trust, where there’s so much kind of you know, you’re really placed on a timeline, I often feel that particularly where you can be in a garden that somebody’s created 100 years ago and there can be some plants that self-seed that may have been the plants that they originally sowed, and I always think of that as, well, they’re still gardening, and it just transcends time and it transcends control really that we feel we have to have.
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Language for me is something that really opens doors, full stop. My first degree was in literature, so all of these pieces come together, don’t they? And I As I started to change the way I thought about gardening, it became very clear to me that this language that we use around gardening and in agriculture was entirely combative. Anyone who has ever met me will know that I loathe the word maintenance when we talk about gardening. Maintenance is something that you might do to your car or the oven or something else that just needs fixing, just to keep it running as it is, and it isn’t generative, and that’s not what gardening is. I’m not maintaining a garden, I’m caring for it. I don’t like the word ornamental gardening ornamental horticulture. It makes it sound like it’s something that’s not necessary. I like the word gardening. It feels not intimidating. I would argue and everyone can disagree with me, but farmers are gardeners, rangers are gardeners. Everyone’s just gardening. We’re all just interacting, and that’s really what gardening is for me.
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I think the dimensions of a living system are really important, and we see everything in one dimension currently, and we’re very focused on the visual, aren’t we? And The more we stop thinking we have to have an instant garden, and everything has to be planted at the same time, and then you’ve started and you’ve finished it, you know, that idea that you can do a garden project, in inverted commas, and I started it then and I finished it two years later, and then it’s done. It’s a nonsense. If we allow ourselves to start thinking about process more, we might not get to the end point. And if we start gardening like that, the benefits that people are already, I know, starting to see in their gardens are huge, and these are about how we create systems, natural systems, natural spaces that are as nature intended, which sounds a ridiculous thing to say, but the more roots in the ground, the more opportunity for moisture retention, the more layering of foliage above the ground, so the more we can make a, a more complex set of kind of canopy structure in our gardens, allowing water, when it pours in deluge, to step down more gently into the soil and then be absorbed in a much healthier way. And I’ve seen, certainly in this horrifically dry summer, there are things where people are going, “Oh wow, that’s still okay.” And it’s like when you start to interrogate what the history of, of that piece of ground is, you’re like, oh actually, this is somewhere that has been allowed to settle and find its feet. We’ve largely ignored roots in gardening. We design for above the ground. So just to give every garden designer, you know, even more of a nightmare, I’m now saying we need to be thinking about in our matrices of planting, having different root profiles that will A, kind of speak to different parts of the soil and just create that depth and structure, but also then will cope in this kind of swinging backwards and forwards of different extremes of weather.
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One of the things I said when I went to the National Trust and I took this job up, is that the trust does everything from farming to fine art, and you can find everything in between in a garden. But as a food grower, and I’ve been thinking a lot about food security and what can we do? And for me, it’s about knowing that everything is on a scale, and our security will come by having a diversity of approaches. . and, and I think in our gardens we can do something that the farmer can’t do. So we can grow all the things that are really hard to harvest, move about, store, do whatever. I love mulberries. You’re never gonna make mulberries a commercial crop. But I can have a mulberry tree in my garden and be delighted at that time of year where I can get absolutely covered in mulberry juice and just enjoy that and then, you know, make some mulberry gin or something. You know, I can’t grow everything that I’m gonna need for the whole year of every crop. But the farmer can do much more of that, whereas in my garden, I can produce nutritional diversity in a way that the farmer can’t. So I can eat seasonally, I can graze my garden throughout the seasons. So this is where I think it all slots together. In a world where we are so divided, where there’s so much difference of opinion, if there’s one thing that we all have in common is that we’ve got to eat. And that, for me, is the most powerful thing that we can come together over, and the most powerful thing that we can all play a part in, really.
Rosie: Gardeners do actually now have a soil health and biodiversity focused festival of their own, the Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival which will take place 17-19th September. Sheila will be speaking there, along with many other people connecting gardening to soil health and this more systemic way of thinking about the garden. We’d be curious to go along as farmers and see what we might learn!!
Lucy: Next up we hear from long-time friend of the show Josiah Meldrum, co-founder of Hodmedod. Hodmedod are launching their first cookbook in October, called Whole Food, published by Dorling Kindersley. It’s definitely a cookbook with a bit of a twist, so we asked Josiah to tell us a bit more…
Josiah: I’m Josiah Meldrum, and I’m co-founder of a business called Hodmedod, and we work with UK farmers to supply diverse crops from arable rotations, peas and beans primarily, but also cereals and other seed crops. We started in 2012, and over the years we’ve often been asked, you know, “When are you gonna write a recipe book?” The reason we get asked that a lot is because the ingredients we sell are often really unfamiliar, and people want some support in cooking them and finding ways to create delicious food from them and make them a part of their everyday lives. It’s a recipe book in the conventional sense in that it’s a set of ways of cooking particular ingredients, but it’s also a recipe for changing the food system. So it’s a recipe book that will help us to make more use of the diversity of crops that can be grown on UK arable farms and to create delicious, really nutritious, and joyful food. One of the challenges for the agricultural transition that we’re all agitating for, you know, how do we create this resilient, abundant future on our farms and in our countryside, is that if we don’t eat things that the farmers are growing, there’s really no point in them doing it, and there’s certainly no economic future in them doing it. And part of that is a cultural shift that involves changing the way we eat, changing the way we think about the ingredients we use when we’re cooking, and I think that’s what the book sets out to do. So the book is called Whole Food, and it’s called that for a number of reasons. One of them, because we wanted to reflect eating the whole rotation, every crop that might be grown. We wanted to reflect finding higher value routes to market for farmers who might otherwise be growing animal feeds. But it’s also about eating foods that are minimally processed, close to the point of production. So whole grains, whole pulses, or very simply milled, ingredients or flaked ingredients. The really interesting thing that we discovered as we began to explore the ingredients that grow very well on farms in the UK, things like peas and fava beans and a set of cereals that include barleys and oats as well as wheat and rye, was that a lot of the traditional foods that would’ve been made out of those ingredients are really heavily stigmatized. They are the foods of poverty, and the reason that we don’t eat things like fava beans is because they became stigmatized as poor people’s food. And gruel is one of the recipes that really perhaps carries the most stigma in British culture. It’s in Dickens, “Can I have some more, sir?” It’s the food of the workhouse. It’s the food of the invalid or the unwell. And the fact is that if it came from Vietnam or Mexico, if it was a congee, for example, which it effectively is, we’d have dedicated restaurants in London springing up to celebrate it. And yet because it’s part of our food history and food culture, and because it carries this heavy, heavy stigma that came around with the Industrial Revolution and the intensification and simplification of agricultural systems, we just don’t even consider it. And it is amazingly delicious, and I think we really need to celebrate a revival of gruel and the diversity of ways in which it can be prepared. It’s essentially a simple porridge of seasonal vegetables, pulses, and grains. It couldn’t be more delicious. And we also have pottage, which is a, a simple usually vegetable and pulse stew made of similar ingredients, but it’s slightly chunkier. And again, pottage was the thing that sustained peasant and yeoman farmers for thousands of years. It was the thing that fed most people before we went from the countryside into the city and were treated to delights of white bread and tea. It’s also about eating in a way that is harmonious or synchronous with an arable rotation that works in the UK, and we’ve kind of lost touch with that. And I think globally, the UK has lost touch with that in a way that almost no other country has. Because we industrialized so early and because we colonized so much of the world, we see our food as very, very global. The kinds of foods that we celebrate in the UK on our Sunday evening television programs and the like are Victorian confections. They’re bourbon biscuits or Dundee cake or marmalade, and all of these things are made with ingredients that have come from our colonies.. It’s probably worth saying a little bit about what eating the rotation actually means. Hodmedod’s work is about creating a more diverse rotation and finding higher value routes to market for a wider range of crops. So that might mean a farmer growing, a less usual or heritage cereal. It might mean growing that with peas or with beans as a bi-crop, which can also be eaten. It might mean following that cereal with, say, barley or oats. It could mean growing some seed crops like quinoa in that rotation, which have different functions in terms of nutrient cycling and their demands on the soil. And then it would involve a rest period where there might be livestock grazing. And our book is not a vegetarian recipe book, I should say. There is some meat in it, and those balanced rotations would include livestock who accelerate nutrient cycling and are really, really important. We’ve pioneered the production of lentils with a small group of farmers in the UK. And where we’ve had the most success in our field scale trials is when we’ve bi-cropped the lentils with camelina, which is a small seeded brassica. The camelina holds up the lentils. It offers some weed-suppressing properties which help the lentils ’cause they’re not very weed competitive, and it in turn benefits from the nitrogen that the lentil plants are fixing from the atmosphere. And when we harvest those two crops together, there are mainly lentils, and that’s the target, but we also harvest some camelina seeds. Not huge quantities, but to really value that work on farm, we need to be finding economic uses for that camelina. So can we use it as an alternative to sesame on the top of buns, for example? Can it be used in place of flax as an egg replacer? Can it be used to bring flavor to salads and as an ingredient in crumble toppings? A lot of the work that we’ve done at Hobnob over the years has been introducing people to ingredients that frankly they’ve probably never heard of prior to our conversations, and that they certainly probably don’t know what to do with. And the recipe book highlights that, and hopefully makes it easier for our customers, but eaters more broadly, to engage with what’s happening on a farm and understand how supporting the farm is eating what they’ve produced.
Abby: We’re all really excited to start cooking from this book. You can pre-order Whole Food now via Bookshop.org and it will be published October 9th. Find the link in our show notes.
Lucy: Anand Ethirajalu is an Indian farmer turned environmental leader based in Tamil Nadu. Anand is Project Director of the Cauvery Calling river revitalisation campaign, and head of Save Soil’s Regenerative Revolution both initiatives from international NGO Conscious Planet.
Anand: Namaskaram. My name is Anand Yettirajulu, and, uh, I, uh, started off as a farmer, and, uh, later on got inspired by Sadhguru’s environmental initiatives in India, and joined, uh, the foundation as a full-time volunteer in 2004. Since 2004, I have been involved in, community-based tree planting projects, focused on, uh, agroforestry or, as we call it, tree-based agriculture. And, uh, transitioning farmers from, uh, heavily chemical, based, uh, agriculture to regenerative farming practices. These are the two main, uh, initiatives that, uh, have been part of in the last, 22 to 25 years. When I was in my 10th standard, I had an opportunity to submit a science project. For whatever reason, I heard about food adulteration very commonly being discussed among my father’s family, friends, and so on. So I took it up as a science project, and I collected as much information as possible. Those were the days without internet, so I have to go and collect physical newspaper articles, cut the pieces, stick it to a paper, and write notes below it. And it was very surprising that, uh, in a matter of, one year, I was able to collect over 900 articles which were printed in newspapers regarding food adulteration. I realized that my… everything that I eat is adulterated. My rice is adulterated with silica. My coffee is adulterated with tamarind powder. My tea is adulterated with cow dung, and my biscuits are adulterated with, human hair which is sterilized and bleached and powdered. So the kinds of adulteration that I came across was so shocking that at a dinner table conversation, I told my dad, “What is the point becoming an engineer or a doctor or an accountant and earn all this money and not have clean food to eat and healthy food to eat?” So we discussed over this for the next couple of months, and both of us decided to take a farm. None of us were farmers in our ancestors, so we were first generational farmers. We decided that we will grow our own food. So with just two hectares of land, in a matter of three to four years after we purchased the land, with appropriate guidance from a regenerative farming expert in Tamil Nadu, uh, Dr. Namalwar, who’s no more, uh, since 2013. He guided us, and within three years’ time, we were able to eat our own rice. We are able to eat our own fruits, vegetables, oils, eggs, milk. Everything that we ate came from the farm. Very few things like salt or some spices which cannot be grown in my locality is what we used to purchase. Do we need script here to intro this? Or just give context for it at the start Cauvery Calling is one of the initiatives of the Conscious Planet movement. The Cauvery Calling movement actually has a very ambitious plan of planting 2.42 billion trees in the river basin of Cauvery in South India. This is mainly to plant trees in farmers’ land, which are also economically beneficial to them in the form of agroforestry. So how to scale In the last 22 years, over 140 million trees have been planted in farmlands. Cauvery Calling originally started just as a tree-planting program, where we wanted to bring back, one third of the land into permanent green cover through trees. But what we realized is that the trees that we planted in public spaces and common lands, government lands, forest lands, et cetera, et cetera, after three years when I went and saw the survival rate, the survival rate were very poor. And when we dig deeper to see what was the key reason, the key reason is lack of ownership. The key reason is that there is no economic benefit to anybody while we are planting these trees. Though conceptually tree-planting is good for the entire planet and it reduces global warming, blah, blah, blah, but practically to scale it up on the ground, unless it’s made a scalable economic solution, we found that most tree-planting projects will reach a certain saturation and they die down after that. 90% of our plantations has been in private farmlands, and we chose the species which can give different kind of products to the farmers. Farmers who don’t, uh, want to have active engagement with the tree plantation, we ask them to go into timber forestry, which will last for, like, say, 20 years, 25, 30 years. They become like an asset to the farmer or, or a life insurance to the farmer. If the farmer is actively engaged in agriculture, we promote fruit trees, like avocado, mango plantations, jackfruit plantations, and we also teach them value addition techniques, how they can convert their fruits into pulps, jams, and so on and so forth. If the farmer is into animal husbandry, then we plant more fodder-giving trees which are rich in nitrogen content and also helps improve the soil conditions. So these combos are available in multiple options where at least there are 54 species of trees that the farmer can choose from. We advise them on the right species. When we started planting the trees, what we found is that the choice of species that the people want to plant is not available in government-run forest department nurseries or agriculture department nurseries. So we figured out that we have to create our own nursery structure. Second reason is that most of the nurseries, including government nurseries, use chemical fertilizer to boost the growth of the sapling, where it grows very fast and tall and they look very lush green in the first six to eight months. But once they are planted, the mortality rate is very high because farmers won’t be able to nurture it like they have been nurtured in the government nursery. So what we started doing is we developed our own organic nurseries where these saplings are grown in 100% organic, uh, conditions with organic fertilizers and compost and so on and so forth. The Save Soil is another initiative. The Save Soil movement primarily focuses on how to transition farmers step by step from heavily chemical-intensive farming to regenerative systems. We have trained over 50,000 farmers in the last, 10 to 12 years, and out of the 50,000, one-third of them have transitioned to regenerative farming, and they’re consistently growing in the same sector. One key aspect is teaching farmers to make accounts, because, uh, most of the farmers don’t have the habit of keeping house accounts and farm accounts separately. They don’t really look into the net profit or the net income. So we started speaking more on net income and net profit rather than yield, because overall we are seeing that globally food production, there is no dearth of food production as a country, at least for India. But the quality of food has gone down, the net profitability of farms have come down. So first step is we started making them see the accounts. When they saw the accounts, then they were able to understand that their cost of cultivation is very high. What we started, uh, telling them started making sense that we have to reduce the input cost and optimize the yield in such a way that they’re able to grow in this sector.
Abby: It was interesting to hear that the initial focus in the regenerative training is in keeping clear farm accounts. I did some research a few years ago into farms that had transitioned to a regenerative approach successfully and one of the unforeseen insights was that a change in how they looked at the accounts had played a role in all of those transitions. It was clear – accounts that really show you where the farm is making and losing money, true profitability, are a vital part of a healthy business and therefore a vital part of a healthy farm.
Rosie: Chloe-Rose Crabtree is head baker at Bake Street, a bakery and cafe in London, and she also co-runs a food publication called SOURCED journeys. They’ve previously published work around the themes of soil, water and gourds, but are currently in Sugar season: exploring the historical and cultural context of sugar.
Chloe: I’m Chloe-Rose Crabtree. I’m a chef and food historian, I also run a food publication called SOURCED Journeys with Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, where we use ingredients as a way to investigate, our food systems and how we operate within them. One of the big things with SOURCED that really drove us forward was we decided that actually it wasn’t just our two voices that would be the most important. It was more important to bring other people in. We wanted to bring sort of the academic conversation about food systems into a space where it could be easily understood across people of all backgrounds, especially people who work in the restaurant industry, as I found that there’s a big gap in that conversation where there’ll be a conversation about, you know, the politics and history of things like sugar on an academic scale. But in actual kitchens, people are so separate from that conversation, yet they’re the ones who are actually actively engaging with the ingredients they’re using. Obviously as a baker by trade, I’m dealing with sugar all the time, and I’m engaging with it in terms of, you know, how much moisture does a brown sugar have over a white sugar? I’m thinking about how it’s gonna change my end product. And then as a historian, also knowing about, like, the slave trade, sugar’s a huge component of that. So we really felt that sugar would open up a conversation both on, like, the technical side of actual food making, but also understanding how it’s become so commonplace as a food, like, as a staple, white sugar specifically. One of the articles we have on the website right now is about not only how sugar plantations grew the South in the US, but also how some… there’s a c- a plantation in particular, I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it’s a prison that is still being used for agriculture because the land that it’s on is so lush. And so when they built the prison there, they said, “Well, we can’t overlook this.” So they ended up creating a sort of modern-day slavery with prisoners to then grow food that is now distributed in places like Target, Walmart, you know, all these big, big name companies. So actually, sugar’s just a inroad for us to start talking about bigger issues within growing in our food system. It’s really hard to say if we can have ethically or sustainably sourced sugar because that sort of makes us have to unpick our whole global farming system in general. I do think we can move away from highly processed sugars, like corn syrups, but it is something that I think we just need to think more about before we can even consider how we can get that more sustainably. There’s one interview I did with, Teresa Finney, who’s a baker in the US. She primarily bakes Mexican pan dulces or things within that realm. And what I really enjoyed about our conversation is we spoke about piloncillo or panela, depending on where you’re at in Central and South America, which is essentially an unrefined cane sugar. But the flavor profile in it is so different, and the way it behaves in baking is so different that it only is now, I think, becoming something that European or North American bakers are looking into. But, like, it’s not a one-for-one substitute. It’s not dried out, which means it has more moisture in it, which means it’s gonna provide more moisture into your bake. So things like bread doughs will come out really floppy. Delicious, but really floppy, really hard to work with. But the flavor is so distinct that it’s really good for adding into things like ice creams or custards or syrups. And it’s an ingredient that I think more people should have fun playing around with. If we think of them as an ingredient that imparts flavor rather than sweetness, then we can sort of broaden what kind of sugars we’re using and maybe disrupt the sugar industry as it stands now. I think that sugar as an ingredient, it’s a great tool. It’s a great preservative. It keeps things from going bad. But if there’s too much of it, actually, it does have negative effects on our health, and I think that is a huge part of the conversation that overtakes other conversations we could be having about what else could we be using or what ways can we disrupt our food system, which it becomes, you know, the sugar tax or these people are not taking care of themselves because they’re eating ultra-processed foods. I don’t think that’s actually a helpful part of the conversation, and sugar takes a big… It, it becomes sort of demonized in a way, in a binary that I don’t like. And also at SOURCED we try to disrupt people from thinking about things in terms of good or bad. It’s more how does this fit into a larger picture, and how can we then recontextualize it in a way that is more sustainable, in our approach to how we create food, how we explain food, and how we share food? So one of the seasons that we did in the past is one of our early seasons, alcohol. That’s probably where we first started talking about sugar because sugar is so important to making alcohol. Actually, sugar and rum are the main reason why it’s in our food system the way that it is now. Because of the triangle trade system, um, which saw enslaved people being moved into the US. Sugar and molasses and rum were all traded together with enslaved people. They sort of operate in tandem during this time period of imperialism in a way that it built up the US economy, it built up the British economy, and stripped the economies of places that were colonized, which they’re still dealing with those effects today.
Rosie: You can find SOURCED on Substack -we’ll link to it in our show notes. They pay their writers from paid subscriptions, so do sign up to that if you’re able. SOURCED are still taking submissions from writers for sugar season – you can find out how to pitch on their substack. They’d particularly love to hear from people based in the places affected by historic sugar plantations interested in writing pieces that dive into the history of sugar.
Lucy: You can subscribe to Farmerama in your favourite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode! If you love the show, it’s really helpful to us if you can leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And head to our website to find out how you can support the work we do here by signing up to our Patreon.
Abby: This episode of Farmerama was made by Lucy Dearlove, Abby Rose, and Rosie Baldwin. Big thanks to the rest of the Farmerama team, Dora Taylor, Katie Revell, Jo Barrett and Lucy Fisher. Our theme music is by Owen Barrett. It. Thanks so much to all of you for tuning in. We’ll be back next month with the final episode in our summer series.