GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Bellies, Not Bins, with Corin Bell
What happens when passion for sustainability combines with culinary creativity? Meet Corin Bell, Executive Director of Open Kitchen, who is busy revolutionising how we think about food waste, sustainability, and community wellbeing. With a team she describes as "wizard-level chefs" playing "the culinary equivalent of jazz," Open Kitchen creates ever-changing menus from ingredients that would otherwise go to waste, complemented by locally-sourced, sustainable produce.
Beyond the inspiring story of Open Kitchen itself, our conversation expands into an exploration of city-wide food systems. Corin articulates a compelling vision for more decentralised, local food networks that could transform urban sustainability while addressing critical issues of access and affordability.
Corin also challenges the very concept of "consumer choice" in our food system–she reframes the discussion around "food environments" rather than individual responsibility, highlighting how economic structures, marketing, and accessibility fundamentally shape what we eat. Ready to rethink your relationship with food? Have a listen to our latest episode.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Corinne Bell, the Executive Director of Open Kitchen, a food and drink social enterprise in Manchester. Open Kitchen has created a unique, sustainable and ethical model and operates an events catering business and a cafe at the People's History Museum.
Speaker 3:And I have to I'm afraid I have to come clean and admit that I've eaten the food of Open Kitchen, so I'm very biased a lot and I'm a big fan. Corinne is also chair of the Greater Manchester Food Partnership, focused on food waste, sustainable food, futures, social inclusion, community well-being Lots of really important stuff that we're going to get into in a minute. Corinne, you've been a plastics campaigner and your first mission to feed bellies, not bins Good soundbite Was the real junk food project in Manchester, and you've also worked on climate policy and action for the City of Manchester, which is where we first met. So thank you so much for taking time to talk to Dan and myself.
Speaker 4:It's a delight to be here.
Speaker 3:Fabulous. So first of all, can we get the backstory, corinne? So we like to ask all our guests how they ended up where they are. So what's you know what drives them, what's their journey? So how did you end up leading the team at open kitchen?
Speaker 4:um, okay. I often joke that I think I probably did something really bad in a past life and now I'm making up for it with vegetables. Um, I, um okay. Did a uh, politics undergrad degree at uni, left uni, bounced around all over the show having lots of different jobs, mostly public sector, mostly never trying to sell anyone anything trained as a project manager with Manchester City Council and ended up and this was where we first met ended up working for Manchester City Council's environmental strategy team and I was part of the first little team that wrote the first ever climate change action plan for the city of Manchester, which you were involved in, steve, about 6 million years ago. Manchester, which you were involved in, steve, um, about six million years ago, I think that happened?
Speaker 3:uh, no, it was to 2009, I think something like that.
Speaker 4:Yep, so, um. So that was all really interesting and I liked working in environmental strategy. And then 2011. We got that first awful no May 2010 election. We got that first awful coalition government. That was actually the start of the Tory nightmare that followed, and I think Manchester lost 109 million pounds from its budget that year. So I looked at everything that was going on and thought I'm not going to get to do the work that I thought was really interesting. So I took voluntary redundancy, bounced around working as a freelance project manager for a few more years and just found myself it was not a plan. I cannot stress how much it was not a plan.
Speaker 4:Found myself working more and more on projects around food and it was food waste, food poverty, helping a local grower create a veg box scheme. I spent a summer driving a mobile greengrocer's around old folks' homes in East Manchester. That was brilliant and at a certain point, had seen a lot of projects and kind of was you know, I like that about this one, I don't like that about this one. I just found myself with a group of friends. You know, I like that about this one and I don't like that about this one. I just found myself with a group of friends, campaigners. You know. You get in the pub and after two pints you've had an idea. And after five pints you've gone online, registered with Companies House and you've started a business that Excellent, wow.
Speaker 2:Well, I want to find those two pints and three pints and then starting a business plan. That's brilliant, that's so fun and you did a great job in the end. But I think our listeners do need a little bit more about what's going on with Open Kitchen. So what is Open Kitchen's proposition, how does it work and how do you make the magic happen?
Speaker 4:Okay, so Open Kitchen is a social enterprise and we run an events catering business predominantly, and our model is quite unique. So we work with a huge range of food businesses and we intercept perfectly edible food that will otherwise go to waste and we also buy ingredients, and everything that we buy is locally sourced, sustainably produced. We work with a lot of local, very small, independent producers. So the idea of the model is that we're highlighting some of the problems in our food system, food waste being a massive one, and we're also highlighting what we think are some of the solutions local, plant-based, seasonal, sustainably produced, ethically traded. All of that wonderful stuff and with that bonkers, ever-changing mix of ingredients, um, I have basically a wizard level team of chefs that play the biggest game of ready, steady cook you have ever seen in your life, um, and they invent menus and we do, um, events, catering and it's everything from meetings, workshops.
Speaker 4:We've got a lot of corporate customers who are just of a weekday. We're having a meeting, we're having a workshop. We need a simple lunch, simple breakfast. Right up to we do a lot of weddings, we do product launches, gala dinners, sustainable wine tastings, all sorts, and it's quite nice because what we do is. I'm told I should use the word unique and stop saying weird, because what we do is weird. We get, you know, people get interested and they get excited so we get a lot of bonkers offers. So, for example, we recently did a wine tasting evening with the art gallery on Moseley Street in the centre of Manchester. So we did a tour of the art gallery. That was five different paintings paired with five different sustainable wines and that's just a beautiful and delightfully weird way to spend an evening. That's gorgeous.
Speaker 3:I'm just so impressed because I I can't. It's one of those I imagine. Catering and restaurants and all of it in my head is like one of the most stressful high pressure bonkers pursuits you can ever imagine and I just why not make it more unpredictable, right?
Speaker 2:I know right harder I know, I know.
Speaker 3:I don't imagine just throwing in completely random ingredients just to make it. I just honestly, I'm just no, I'm in awe, total awe there's.
Speaker 4:One of our chefs has said it's like the, it's the culinary equivalent of jazz. You know, there's some, you do some like classical pieces and you practice and practice and practice, you do them exactly the same. And then jazz is just this kind of there's sort of a structure in the middle and we'll just we'll just play around it and it'll be fine. And it is like the nice thing about what we do is it attracts a certain type of chef. What we tend to attract are very experienced chefs who have done a lot of work in fine dining and high-end dining and have just gotten bored. Because it can be very structured and it can be very rigid and actually, if you've gotten to a point where you're really good at that, so it's not so stressful anymore, it can get quite dull no, I think it's amazing.
Speaker 3:Absolutely my jazz cooking. It's the future, yeah, um the. So let's go. Let's, let's go a bit more cerebral, all right, and talk about cities. So by the middle of the century, just go all academic honors. Uh, by the middle of the century, 80 of humankind will be living in cities. So cities are a big deal and you're part of a partnership that's working to make food more sustainable generally across Greater Manchester. So, pulling out to that city region focus, what do sustainable food systems look like through the lens of a city? What are the challenges, what are the opportunities?
Speaker 4:Yeah, they look messy and they look complicated. I think the honest answer, which is why it's quite tricky, I think what we've pushed towards basically since World War II, is bigger and predictable, is better and actually we've hit a point in terms of politics, in terms of economics, definitely in terms of climate change, where you're already starting to see the cracks in that model and it doesn't actually suit the world we've got. It was never particularly good for the planet and it's become less and less economically fair as the decades have gone on. But it's actually really starting to not work now and what we need to do now is shift towards a much more decentralized, local food system. So it's never and again, the complicated bit is, I think, a lot of the time, particularly in the media, what people want is an answer.
Speaker 4:The answer, a simple answer and the honest answer about our food system is what we need to do is get a much larger percentage of our food locally and seasonally in a variety of ways. Some of that is, you know, greater Manchester. If you just you know, put a bubble around Greater Manchester. Greater Manchester could not possibly feed itself because we've built on too much of the land. We just physically don't have the space, but Greater Manchester could source a huge proportion more of its food from within 100 miles, within 200 miles, and then a smaller proportion of foods coming from further away that can be grown organically, that travel well more slowly, that can come over on shipping containers and never need to be air freighted.
Speaker 4:It's that, but there's some massive and really tricky transitions that need to come like. We need a lot of our beef and sheep farmers to convert, where the land is appropriate and where it's possible, to growing peas, beans and legumes and that's you know, for a whole host of reasons. I mean, jesus, try having a conversation about that with a farmer. I'm lucky I'm still here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you talk about it like that, it just pops in my mind that, okay, at some point in our human history we had this idea of going big, and then everything got out of hand and now it's big on steroids and we can't manage it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, pretty much. I mean it was a response to the end of World War II. You know people were starving war ii, you know people were starving in in the millions people were starving and the the mission, the drive, was just create enough food to feed our population. And that's when we started genetically engineering, um, the modern wheat strains that we've got, and, and we started making pest-resistant strains of rice. There were all sorts of things that happened with the best of intentions, genuinely with the best of intentions. We need to feed this massive growing population and we need to feed them cheaply Carbs, we need crops, and you know.
Speaker 4:And then, and then the profit machine came in, and then the supermarkets came in, and then and they've just been, it's taken, you know, probably 100,000, maybe a million tiny little ill thought through decisions that were either about. You know, like I speak to senior people working at big supermarkets and big food businesses on a regular basis and they're not evil, they're not the devil, they've not got hope, they're not trying to kill anyone, they're good people trying to do a good job and they're sitting within a structure, within a system, within a world where people have limited incomes, and they're feeling the push to make cheaper food. To make it more shelf stable. To make transport easier damla.
Speaker 3:I'm just gonna jump back in just one little one so before damla comes in, because I know dam wants to talk about consumers and stuff. But um, one thing for me. Do you think it's a kind of offshoot of sustainable food systems and cities and how they were? What about the kind of techno future of vertical farming and intelligent composting of all our food waste, so it becomes a sort of virtue? Do you imagine, is there a sci-fi, slightly sci-fi food system that might work at a sea scale?
Speaker 4:it's got a place it's again, it's that it's. It's a patchwork, it's complicated, um and like container growing, like I've seen. So I am obsessed at the moment with the walk-in farm. It's a new thing that's happening. It's so sexy. So you get a walk-in fridge and a walk-in freezer and then you've got your walk-in farm in your at the back of your restaurant, and some of them are doing it and it's like a shipping container and it's all what's the lighting you can grow under yeah, grow lamps and hydroponics yeah, and you grow your own salads.
Speaker 4:So it's zero soil, it's um, it's's a lot of it. Them are aquaponics systems, zero transport miles. There's zero waste. You know things like that have a place in this. And you know the vertical farming has a place. Realistically, I'd be surprised if it was ever more than 10% of the picture. And the tricky thing about that and I'm sorry, steve, I'm going to be slightly judgy now White men in suits fucking love a tech solution.
Speaker 4:They fucking love it. I am so sick of the word innovation at the moment because funders are just all. What we want to see is innovation. Well, actually, a lot of the stuff we need to do to feed our communities and feed them well is literally as old as bread. It's as old as the potato. We don't need innovation. We need people to properly fund really bloody grounded, really tried and tested, really old solutions. So it's, you know, yes, the techie stuff is cool. I get really excited about it and it has a place, but people get so distracted Like it's a shiny thing, you know, and it's a shiny thing. That's actually really distracting and it's taking a lot of funding from some really valuable work that just people with spades from some really valuable work that just people with spades that's just you just need spades.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, I love you. I love you. That was brilliant, but now traveling all the way from field to fork. Let's talk about the consumers. It's not all down to their choices, of course, and there is a whole industrial food complex that needs to change and what for you, in your opinion, needs to shift in the hearts and minds of consumers to make the food we eat more sustainable.
Speaker 4:Oh okay, I always get a bit tripped up with the conversation about consumers because I'm very much like hate the game, not the players, is my feeling at the moment. Diet is it implies choice. It also implies responsibility. Diet-related ill health there's always a little bit of blame there and there's a lot of people at the moment refusing to call it diet-related ill health and starting to use the term food-related ill health, and particularly with consumers that are on more limited budgets and there's more and more of them every year.
Speaker 4:Rather than talking about consumer choice, we're talking about the food environment. You can only reasonably call something a choice if a person reasonably has access to it, can access it either geographically or financially. So at the moment, at this particular point in history, I am not focusing on consumers because they're sheep. They do as they're told Marketing.
Speaker 4:There's a reason that marketing is a multi, multi, multi-billion dollar industry. It works, it's really effective and the honest truth about our food system is you make very little profit, even if you're a supermarket. You make very little profit out of basic, unprocessed things like a bag of rice or kale, and you can make a lot more money if you can process something, put a brand on it, put some hype around it. So that's where all the money goes, and that's where all the marketing goes, and that's what's put in front of you and that's the food environment that we are exposed to. So I think any suggestion that you blame consumers for a brainwashing, a very effective brainwashing game that has been, you know, 40, 50 years in the making and is expertly executed every single day of your life, um, I think would be a bit unfair.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I want to jump in, Steve. I'm sorry because you love that talk, but I think it also hides the fact that all sustainability issues are interconnected with the system we're in. And I said it now because it's not only a choice of, I mean, accessibility what's out there, what's being marketed but also always the other unhealthy options are easier to get and cheaper to get, and people have to think about the family budgets also. So this is not only a food issue, this is a systemic issue. There. I said it, Steve, it's all ours.
Speaker 3:What you missed out there, damla, was, of course, questioning the underpinning capitalist system that has brought us to this precipice in the first place.
Speaker 4:Thank, you very much. I mean, that is the tricky thing. There's a point I spend a lot of time talking about food and food systems and you talk, people talk about food poverty and actually food poverty doesn't exist. It's a political term that was invented. You know, if you're making choices about whether you can afford to turn the heating on or buy food, food poverty you're just in poverty. And there's a point at which when we talk about food poverty or we talk about health, you know, talk about diabetes, obesity, talk about food sustainability. You know why are we not producing food really sustainably? Because money. Why are people not buying the healthiest food they can? Because money, because you know, there's a point at which we're not really talking about food at all. We are. We're talking about the nature of economics and the fact that that's gone completely wonky.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, no, completely. I mean, it's funny. I was talking to this a little bit with the head of public affairs for a leading supermarket and I won't name, and we were talking with um, a metro mayor, so you can guess a metro mayor in a supermarket, put them together and um, and she was talking about the pressure that they are still feeling to create these sort of like food lines and budget lines where they can just get the get it down and get it down. And famously over christmas wasn't there, corinne, and here in the uk there was a period where people were discounting potatoes down to like a bag of potatoes for like 30p or something, which could never ever reflect the actual cost. And and I was talking to her and I said, come on, be honest, you, you, you can't go any lower, you've gone as low as you can go.
Speaker 3:The. The food system that you're trying a game is as debased as it could possibly get and you can't cut prices anymore. And and she kind of said, yeah, it's kind of we've run out of road and what we're gonna do. So I mean, do you feel on that? I mean I was going to get into food poverty, but you said it doesn't exist, so let's move on. Um, you can eradicate that piece of work. Um, it's just poverty, but do is a broken food system something that we can change without having literally without having a full scale revolution? How on earth do we do it?
Speaker 4:okay. So the way I don't go mad or cry into my porridge or start drinking at noon most days is you've got to think it has taken hundreds of thousands of tiny little ill thought through decisions to get where we are, and there is not one silver bullet, there's not 10 silver bullets, there's not 100 silver bullets. It's going to take you know, it's that increments, and there's a reason people don't take a food systems approach, which is what we're trying to take now. You know, classically, you'll have people in public health dealing with diet related ill health and people in the local authority dealing with food poverty, and then people in you know, not even in the public sector, in NGOs like Sustain, thinking about the future of sustainable farming. You actually take a food systems approach and try and take a 360 view of the impact that your food project is having on health, accessibility, well-being, economics, jobs and employment sustainability. It can feel a bit like it's too big and you can't take a step forward, forward. So I think there's something there about just very small increments and just we are now trying to take more of a food systems approach and just trying to make smaller progress and push in a lot of directions, um, and the other big thing for me. So I had a have had a couple of conversations with fairly senior people in supermarkets and actually quietly and behind closed doors. I think they're very open to regulation.
Speaker 4:Because the tricky thing is the first CEO of a major supermarket that gets rid of the buy one, get one freeze, takes on board the full environmental and social cost of the produce that they're selling, gets rid of the ultra processed food that's just going to be the first one that gets sacked and all that's going to happen is their customers are going to go down the road. Because the tricky thing about supermarkets is we've got this image of them that they're here to feed the nation and you know we're here for your family and you know not to pick on everyone, anyone, but every little helps. And actually the honest truth is their businesses, their companies and some of them are, you know, a lot of this. What started out as supermarkets are now massive multinational conglomerates with lots of different arms and some of them make a lot more money out of credit cards and insurance and mobile phones than they do food. Now it's a much smaller part of their business and actually their job, what they're here to do, what's written into their articles of association is they're here to pay out to shareholders. That's their legal duty. That's what they're for. They're businesses and they just happen to make their profit out of food.
Speaker 4:So that idea that they should you know free market economics, they should. Just you know they're here to feed the nation. They'll sort it out it's a terrible idea. But if you don't level the playing field and regulate them all, they're kind of stuck because their job is to make money and pay out to their shareholders and you would have to. You can't feed the nation at the moment because of the complete lack of regulation. You can't feed the nation in a healthy way and look after our population and do your legal duty that is written into your company rules and regs and pay out good returns to your shareholders. So they're stuck. They are doing their job, but we need to be really clear their job is not the health and wellbeing of our nation.
Speaker 2:Okay, I need to clear the air a bit and change the tone. Maybe more optimistic things.
Speaker 3:No, bring down capitalism immediately. I've smashed the system.
Speaker 4:Why are we being optimistic? Oh guys, oh, I've got much darker rants than that Optimism of the will.
Speaker 2:Please. Optimism of the will. Oh, we've not even chipped it honestly, go on, damlala, keep going almost our last question, and as it's a foodie episode of the podcast, could you tell us what lovely things are cooking in the open kitchen today?
Speaker 4:oh, good question. Uh, okay, we've got a wedding tomorrow. We're hosting a wedding, so I know the guys are currently prepping a. We're doing family style sharing plates for 85. And it's a sort of Middle Eastern mezze theme, so there's lots of beautiful smells coming up. There's a lot of garlic and lemon going on at the moment and some pomegranate molasses that I want to steal. So there's some beautiful things going on at the moment and some pomegranate molasses that I want to steal. So there's some beautiful things going on. And then I mean, the question is always all sorts, because the fun thing about food waste intercepting food that would otherwise go to waste is it really does come in kind of boom and bust. It's not, like you know, a kind of regular weekly delivery, because no one plans for waste. So I think at the moment there's a lot of passata being made, because someone I think it was possibly a truck that got stuck at Calais or something, but we've got about 35 pallets of cherry tomatoes. So that makes it passata day.
Speaker 3:Excellent, I know where to come from, passata. So, corinnene, final, final question. Our network is ironically called do not smile um, because we know that we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness in the world. So our final question for you is what object, place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:okay, the I can do all three. Um highfield country park in leaven june, my dogs tennis ball. Put those three together.
Speaker 3:Heaven, you've just it's heaven there we go, and will this tennis ball park dog triumvirate be in action shortly this afternoon?
Speaker 4:yes, yeah, you are my last bit of work today and we are gonna go and throw a tennis ball around for an hour that's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 3:Well listen, corinne, it's been excellent talking to you. We didn't pick up on your brainwashing theme adequately, I feel, uh, and as somebody who does actually believe that advertising is mental pollution, I think we could have talked for quite a while about that, um, but maybe we'll just have to do a follow-up, another one, another chat we'll do a brain yeah, brainwashing episode next, and then we can do a death episode.
Speaker 4:We can, honestly, you can get me back about nine times.
Speaker 3:I've got so many we'll have to do the corinne mini series down low we'll just call that one.
Speaker 4:How dark can it get?
Speaker 3:oh, excellent, right. Damla closes up so thanks to everyone who has listened to our good guys podcast, brought to you by the do not smile network of agencies and make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people like corinne about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So so, corinne, damla, see you soon.
Speaker 2:Bye, thank you.
Speaker 1:Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
