How to kill the hospitality industry, find great Filipino food, and save one of the UK’s greatest cultural assets

All not quite in a day’s work

What holds the biggest sway over where you next eat out? Is it a recommendation from a friend? A well-composed instagram post? Or maybe a ‘best of’ listicle in The Telegraph?

Whichever way, it’s highly likely to have been the eventual result of the efforts from a PR professional. A dark art, you might call it, that calls forward certain ethical conundrums.

That’s one of the topics in this somewhat new and experimental format for the WFJ – a sort of digestation of what’s happening in the food world (or in my head) at this present moment. Mostly to do with Somerset, of course, but also what’s physically and figuratively around it – ‘context’, I think they call it.

Let’s crack on with this then.

Lua Riberia: ‘Feeding the pigs at Gothelney Farm’. Photo for We Feed The UK / The Gaia Foundation

Last week I went to Bristol to the opening of We Feed The UK, a photography exhibition – and the culmination of many other photography exhibitions held around the country – documenting nature-friendly, community-driven farming projects. These are presented as inspirational, hopeful, and acting against or in response to the de facto of conventional agribusinesses. What I found most moving however, was the perspectives of the photographers and other artists momentarily embedded within these farming projects – many or most of whom from urban backgrounds. “I felt hope for the first time in ages,” photographer Johannah Churchill said of documenting Wharmley Farm in Northumberland. “I have a completely new relationship with soil now,” said ‘hot poet’ Kate Fox. “I thought eco-poetry was mostly boring and didactic [...] but now I see it as some of the most vital creative work there is.” Somerset is represented in the exhibition by Gothelney Farm, which is perhaps apt – I tend to think of it as the nucleus to which a large amount of good farming practices in the county are related.

As part of The Government’s latest attempt to kill the hospitality industry, the chancellor is now imposing an increase in National Insurance Contributions – and higher business rates – on pubs, restaurants, and cafes. What that means for you is the national average for a pint is now £5, bacon sandwiches from a certain local cafe have gone up to £10, and you may well find an increase in the rate of closures over the next year. For more on that, here’s owner of the The Beckford Group’s (The Talbot, Bath Arms, Beckford Canteen, etc) take on it.