Food. Mary Hoffman shares her thoughts.

armadilloeditor
28 minutes ago
3 min read

Food has always been a topic of interest in our family. For a start it’s a mixed marriage: my husband is an omnivore and I have been a vegetarian since I was twenty-four (before we met). When we had our three daughters we had to decide how we were going to bring them up. As a working mum, I didn’t have the time to purée delicious little dishes for them and the vegetarian options in baby food were limited to two. So, the decision made itself: they were going to be omnivores.

That baby mush was the last highly processed food they had. We have always cooked from scratch. My mum was a cook in other people’s houses before her marriage and was excellent at traditional English food. But she shopped every day and didn’t work outside the home. I couldn’t do that.

Now of the three, one is vegetarian, one vegan and the youngest is an omnivore. I can’t say “still,” as she was a vegetarian between the ages of eight and fifteen. So, food is always something that has been talked about at home and we all have good appetites. Even if in your family it is less highlighted, someone has to decide what to make every day, shop for it and cook it, even if it’s only a case of bunging a ready meal in the microwave or ordering a takeaway. We all have to eat, after all.

But children have very little idea where the food they eat comes from, how it is grown, harvested and distributed, or how animals are raised for human food. So, Ros Asquith and I decided we’d like to make a book together that would cast some light on all that, in a child-friendly and humorous way. It’s our eleventh book together and by now we have a lot of experience in how to present big ideas to small people.

We wanted to present the facts without preaching. Not “Everyone should be a vegetarian,” but “More and more land is being used for raising animals. If we are to make sure no one in the world goes hungry, people in rich countries might need to eat a bit less meat.” And the facts about ultra-processed food are incontrovertible; you can’t open a newspaper or turn on the radio or TV without hearing about another report on how bad they are for our health.

We talk about factory farming in a child-friendly way, without inflicting the real horrors in animal welfare, but contrasting how farm animals look in picture books with how little space and freedom they have so that we can buy cheaper food.

Climate change is a big issue and you can’t talk about food poverty without addressing it. And social inequality: why do rich people have (and waste) so much food when poor people are struggling to get enough to eat. So, yes, there are food banks in this book. And the fact that famines may be caused by human factors like climate change, war and greed. There is enough food grown or raised in the world to feed 10 billion people but one in ten go hungry.

These are huge topics and, to lighten the mood and give another perspective, Ros came up with the idea of a little alien creature, who can be found on every spread commenting on the weird food habits of the people of planet earth. His speech bubbles are mostly questions like “why do you put food on a plane and fly it thousands of miles away instead of just eating it?” Some are comments: he is puzzled why we have so many different kinds of foods as, on his planet, they just eat rocks and minerals.

I think we have worked harder on this book than the previous ten! Draft after draft, fact-checking, reading the current books on ultra-processed food and a better diet for all, design issues, solved by the wonderful Sophie Pelham; we wondered if we’d ever make publication day.

But we did and Food for All (its third title) was published. The subtitle is “what we eat and where it comes from” and we hope it does what it says on the tin.