I am what I eat: Debbie Vernon

This post first appeared on the Borough Market website as part of my series, I Am What I Eat, where I explore the links between food and identity, interviewing traders about the foods that are important to them and why. In the second series, I chose to speak to a few people who have interesting or different relationships with food, such as this interview with Debbie, who is a vegetarian. Debbie initially became a vegetarian because she didn't like eating meat, but her choice is grounded in a solid foundation of moral and ethical values.

 “I always remember not liking meat as a kid. I would sit and chew it and chew it and my mum would say: ‘Oh for heaven’s sake! Go and spit it out in the kitchen bin.’ Unlike normal teenagers, who had pictures of Donny Osmond on their walls, I had anti-vivisection posters.”

Debbie Vernon, who co-owns Ellie’s Dairy with her partner, David, became a vegetarian as soon as she left home. At university in Birmingham, she started experimenting with “strange and exotic things” she’d never really had at home, such as Asian and Indian herbs and spices, pulses, beans, lentils and rice. Was it a moral choice to become a vegetarian? “I just didn’t like eating dead things, it was quite a simple choice for me really. I made the decision before I was even aware of the word ‘vegetarian’.”

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I am what I eat: Marcello Basini

This post first appeared on the Borough Market website as part of my series, I Am What I Eat, where I explore the links between food and identity, interviewing traders about the foods that are important to them and why. This post is the first of the second series, and who better to start with than Marcello, a warm and charming Italian with a cheeky sense of humour and a passion for all things food.

When I embarked on the first series of this project, my brief was to look at the relationship between food and national identity, interviewing traders from a range of cultural backgrounds about the foods that were important to them. What I found was that national identity rarely played a central role. Instead what united those individuals was the importance that particular people and places on a more local level—family home, hometown—played in developing their attachment to certain foods.

I wasn’t surprised, then, when Marcello Basini, manager at Jumi Cheese, began by telling me: “I am very much attached to the cuisine of my grandmother and my town, Piacenza” (Emilia Romagna, Italy). What did surprise me was that, unlike everyone else I have spoken to about this, he chooses not to recreate these dishes now that he lives in London.

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I Am What I Eat: Urvesh

I loved interviewing Urvesh Pavais for the Borough Market blog. My first impression was of someone calm, quiet and collected. Perhaps it was his voice, which is mellow and unwavering. This was true even when I got him talking about his favourite subject, but his eyes lit up and he talked thoughtfully and at length about the topic he is most passionate about. In fact, most of my questions for him remained unasked. Just one question was enough to elicit the answer to my next five! 

This made it very difficult to decide what the theme of the post should be. I decided to focus on the visceral nature of food and the memories associated with taste and smell, as it followed on nicely from the previous post. However, it meant missing out a lot of really interesting material on Gujurati history and cuisine, the ambiguous lines between local, regional and national identity and cuisines, food and religion, food and symbolism... the list goes on.

Here is how the post began...

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I Am What I Eat: Anne

I have now finished my first series for Borough Market and started a new one, Box Clever. It feels like the right time to share the rest of the I Am What I Eat series. For my second post, I interviewed Anne Gumuschian, trader at La Marche du Quartier. Anne grew up in France, the daughter of a French-Italian mother and Armenian father. I talked to her about the foods that she grew up with, identity and migration. This is how the post began...

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I am what I eat: Borough Market Blog

In September I started a project for Borough Market, interviewing traders from different backgrounds about the foods that are important to them, the foods that make them feel nostalgic, that remind them of home. It has been a wonderful experience. I have met some really interesting people from diverse cultural backgrounds. They all had different stories to tell, but one thing that unites them is their passion for food and their joy in sharing it with others. 

As the series is coming to a close, I thought I would share the posts here too. In my first post I aimed to give a little context to the series by looking briefly at the concept of national cuisine and identity and then considering what that might mean to the individual. 

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