FOOD - Kate Humble Kate Humble: ‘We’ve become so disconnect- ed with the whole process of food’
By Lauren Taylor, PA
Despite self-describing as “the least crafty person in the world”,TV presenter Kate Humble is a bit of a “fan girl” for anyone with the skills to craft things by hand. “With the rise of AI and the whole workplace changing so quickly – if you’re a writer or photographer or in TV,AI can do all this s*** for us,” says the 55-year-old.“So there’s actually been a resurgence in people wanting to learn how to make things, build a drywall or do blacksmithery, because people are fearing that AI will take away white collar jobs.” Even in the age of careers made entirely on the internet,“There might be a real artisan uprising”, she says,“which would be amazing”. Humble, who has presented BBC’s Back To The Land, Springwatch and Animal Park, says she doesn’t have “the creative gene” but “I’m really good at manual labour, and my kind of creative side actually is with cooking”. The author of several books, her latest, cookbook Home Made, celebrates the beauty of artisan, handmade products – all of which are used in food and cooking in some way. Stories of individual artisan makers of aprons, knives, firepits, and pans are weaved in around simple, countryside recipes inspired by those people and their products. “We live in a society which is extremely wasteful,” says Humble, who lives in rural Monmouthshire,Wales,“because mass production makes things much more affordable. Of course I’ve bought mass-produced stuff, partly because I hadn’t always known there was another option. “A lot of people will say,‘Well, if you buy beautiful, handmade, artisan stuff, it’s very expensive’, which is also true. However, it will often outlast anything that is mass-produced. So I think you buy things like that with a different mindset, of them being almost heritage pieces that you will keep forever and you will look after. “If people go and buy lots of cheap clothes, they think it’s great, they’re cheap, but the expense to the planet is enormous.We’ve been pushed down a very virulent consumer route – which is buy, buy, buy.” The people featured in the book – from glassmaker Emsie Sharp and basket weaver Amanda Rayner, to Ben Ward who gave up his office job to become a professional vegetable grower – are “incredibly inspiring but also relatable,” Humble says.“These are all just ordinary people who’ve made an extraordinary choice to kind of really follow their hearts and do something that they love and that they’re skilled at. Because it’s not the normal way of [doing] things nowadays.” And there’s courage in pursuing that.“I hope it taps into everyone’s little brave bits of their heart and the free bits of their spirit – even if they don’t go off and whittle spoons forever.
After all, modern life is moving us further and further into what’s fast and convenient.
“We’ve become so disconnected with the whole process of food, even more so I think in the last sort of five years, with the rise of delivery companies that just deliver cooked food
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