TALKING ABOUT FOOD

I'm currently back home in Sarawak, Malaysia. The day in punctuated by food, your metronome is meal times. Breakfast is eaten out, at a coffee shop, the hunt for the best laksa, kolo mee et al, is always on. We talk about where is good, where has had a dip in quality. It is serious talk that we start the day with. Dad comes back from work for lunch and we all sit down together. If you're not home for lunch - you call. As with dinner. There is always rice, there is always conversation. Lunch and dinner are home cooked meals. All meals are relaxed, quick, un-ceremonial. They are points of contact, checking in, keeping pace. Each with a slightly different rhythm and topic of conversation. Dinner is reflective of the times, the last week of July 2016 is a precipice. The East looks to the West and waits to see what it will do - fall or fly, there doesn't seem to be any other options. Dinner follows a pattern, it doesn't change, except who asks the questions. W

I’m really interested in the things we talk about when we share food, and that time we share when we sit down and eat and drink. I’m interested in community, how we fit into the world, how we measure ourselves against the world, and the fact this year seems a particularly political year.  I am also acutely aware that within popular media, there are still too few a space for women to have complex and in-depth conversation - the Bechdel test is still relevant to do today, with many films failing. Therefore, this is an interview column with women I find inspiring, and we sit down and eat and drink. I recently meet with Emma Underwood, GM of Burnt Truffle in Haswell, for an earlier dinner. She was down in London to do Blood Shot at The Dairy with the Sticky Walnut crew. We spoke about how a restaurant can create a community, how people can still feel tribal about the space they have carved out for themselves. Both our PhDs had feminism theory as the main component and so we spoke