COULD YOU MAKE A MEAL FOR £1 A HEAD?
Alicia Weston stands in a church hall in east London encouraging her audience, a group ranging from a fidgety guy with dreads to a softly spoken elderly Irish woman, to go out and steal. “Bay leaves are everywhere! Just nick them!” Her right-hand woman Linda, stirring a pot of peanut and vegetable stew (see p63), nods: “It’s foraging, isn’t it?”
This is a cookery class with a difference. Alicia, a former investment banker, set up the Bags of Taste project, which is funded from grants and donations, because she believes that conventional courses weren’t changing people’s eating patterns long-term: “People go to them, enjoy them, then fall back into old habits.”
Alicia says a lack of knowledge is not the main barrier to people cooking at home. “The assumption is that people don’t have cooking skills. I’ve taught over a thousand people, and I can tell you that’s rubbish. Everyone can scramble an egg, but people just aren’t doing it.”
”Eight per cent of UK adults didn’t have enough money for food at some point in 2016”
MOTIVATION IS KEY
Instead, Alicia’s classes focus on motivation – giving people a reason to get into the kitchen, rather than relying on processed foods and pricey but convenient (and, often, unhealthy) takeaways. The recipes Alicia teaches come from all over the globe and are the sorts of dishes people actually want to cook and eat.
“Our recipes are designed to motivate people to cook”, says Alicia. “They’re iconic recipes from different cultures. People are more likely to cook great dishes if those dishes are achievable in terms of cost, effort and time. So if our recipes fit that bill as well as being healthy and containing at least two portions of veg per serving, everything else follows – better diets, higher veg consumption and financial savings.”
Alicia passes on vital know-how about shopping on a budget, picked up over years of running her supper club on a shoestring. “If people can’t reproduce the things they can buy very cheaply – bearing in mind you can probably get a chicken tikka masala in Iceland for £1 – they won’t bother to cook. We have to compete on taste as well as price.” Recipes are designed to cost less than £1 per head and the ‘bags of taste’ of the title contain the didn’t have enough money for food at some point in 2016, one in five parents is struggling to feed their children, and the price of food per calorie in the UK is higher for healthier food than for junk food.
COOKING MORE HEALTHILY