Food is Complex as Hell and Your Cause is Not the Only Answer

Gavin Wren Food Opinion Pieces, Writing

Yesterday I attended a talk at Hay Festival entitled ‘Feeding the Nine Billion’, which very quickly qualified that the large population growth predicted for the next thirty years will almost exclusively be found in developing countries.

This news is no surprise, it’s long been acknowledged that parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are growing at a rapid rate and this is where our ‘global community’ will be developing the most. The chair, Jonathon Harrington, an agronomy advisor and fierce proponent of GM crops, began by saying this was the most important question of the day and wanted to see how we could solve it in an hour.

For a discussion of developing world issues, it was acutely amusing that this talk featured the whitest audience I’ve seen at a food talk for a long time, and that’s really saying something, for a genre of events which is famed for…

are you privileged af then use it

Are You Privileged AF? OK, Then Use It

Gavin Wren Food Opinion Pieces, Writing

Have you ever shoplifted food because you couldn’t afford to buy it?

Not because you were drunk and it seemed a giggle, or because you stole sweets from the corner shop when you were eleven years old to impress your friends, or because you were trying to fund a smack habit or because you went through a phase of life where stealing seemed like good entertainment.

Have you ever found yourself in the situation where the only remaining feasible option to stave off hunger remaining open to you, is taking food without paying for it, from a business?

That is the question that Matthew Thomson put to a room of ~150 academics, charity and food workers, many of whom have, or will be, studying food poverty.

The answer was 4 or 5.

The discussion was on ‘lived experience’ and ‘experts by experience’, which are the catchy academic monikers given to…

Unpopular Opinion Cooking is Dull

Unpopular Opinion: Cooking is Dull

Gavin Wren Food Opinion Pieces, Writing

Heretic. Who would dare say such a thing? Certainly not a ‘foodie’, that’s for sure.

Eating is the foundation of life on earth, across continents and through species, but cooking is the technique that homo-sapiens has adopted for it’s unique spin on this primeval process. No other living creature cooks what they eat, it’s unique to us, the humans.

If I had a pound for every time someone told me cooking skills will solve virtually all problems with the food world, I’d be an extremely wealthy man. It’s oft repeated, quoted rote in the face of any question about making the world healthy again. It is, of course, a marvellous skill, perhaps one that I take for granted, because I’ve done a lot of it.

From my young days spent licking cake mix off a spoon in my mum’s kitchen, through being occasionally dumped in a hotel kitchen to…

we're not going to die yet

We’re not going to die yet.

Gavin Wren YouTube Food Videos

Sitting at my desk last week I decided to film a very quick video on my iPhone, a rant in response to various articles which I had read in the press that day.

George Monbiot doom-mongering about the state of the environment and Giles Coren’s clickbait-esque headline about hating Jane Austen all feature, alongside the amount of calories people eat.

Watch the video on YouTube below or via this link.

Here's a food photography lightroom tutorial along with how to make the perfect sourdough cheese toastie with homemade red onion chutney.

Food Photography Lightroom Tutorial and Sourdough Cheese Toastie

Gavin Wren Food Education, Recipes, Sandwiches & Wraps, Writing

Today’s post is a bumper double edition where I’m giving you quick food photography lightroom tutorial demonstrating how to select images, colour adjust them and edit them, alongside a lovely simple recipe for a sourdough cheese toastie with my own lovely, homemade red onion chutney.

I’m going to keep it short today and let the video do all the talking. But first, here are the images before and after Lightroom, you’ll find the video below them… come and read more…

The view from Random House offices

How to Write a Cookbook

Gavin Wren Cookbook Reviews, Writing

I was recently invited to a blogger morning hosted by The Happy Foodie, a unique event held at the headquarters of Penguin Random House, home to the work of some of food writing’s greatest names including my personal hero, Mr Ottolenghi. The November sun shone across the rooftops of London, showcasing the spectacular view from the Penguin Random House offices, but there were greater treats in store for us shortly afterwards. The highlight of the …