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.”