the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.uk 7Prue Leith
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‘It’s the will of the wrong people.’‘It’s the will of the wrong people.’I
made the mistake of saying I thought
insects might help feed the world.
They are high-protein, cheap to farm
(they breed like rabbits and grow like
Topsy), require little water and energy
and probably wouldn’t mind being
factory-farmed. Now my post is full of
mealworm powder and cricket flour and
invitations to champion bug farms.B
eing an adviser to the hospital
food review has been surprisingly
uplifting. The panel members are mostly
NHS professionals who are champing
at the bit to improve matters and
have already led changes in their own
hospitals, so know it can be done. In one
hospital, lunch was as good as the best
home cooking. Yes, some hospital food is
dire, and reform will be a huge task and
take years. But with the Health Secretary
and PM on side, I think we dare to hope.M
y carbon footprint should put me
in jail. I spent three weeks in India
over Christmas, two weeks filming in
Cambodia and two weeks working in
South Africa. India was pure tourism and
we’ve cracked how to do it: mornings
tramping round palaces and museums,
nice lunch, afternoons asleep by the
pool or siesta in bed, then a street walk
in the cool, eating what the locals eat.
Cambodia was to make a documentary
for Channel 4, trying to trace my
Cambodian daughter’s roots. As a babe
in arms, she was flown out of Phnom
Penh just before it fell to the Khmer
Rouge. We went down some blind alleys
and some good ones, both illuminating
and upsetting. I don’t like the idea of
blubbing on camera. But we had a lot of
fun too, helped by nightly drinks with the
crew on the roof of the hotel. The South
African trip was to visit my chefs’ school
in Pretoria, opened 23 years ago, then
called the Prue Leith College of Food
and Wine. After ten years it morphed
into the Prue Leith Chefs Academy and
has now been grandly renamed the Prue
Leith Culinary Institute. It reflects the
fact that we no longer just teach chefs
how to cook. Students might become
restaurateurs, home economists, food
stylists, recipe developers, teachers,
writers, YouTube demonstrators etc.N
eedless to say, being the commercial
woman I am, I was also flogging
my range of specs and my books. We
lugged a case of 78 styles of glasses round
Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria.
South African media are pretty relaxed
about guests hyping stuff. I’d be on a telly
set, demonstrating a paneer curry, while the
presenters tried on the glasses and talked
about the renamed food school. But it was
hard to stop them questioning me aboutwhat interested them far more — my
80th birthday. Why hadn’t I retired?
What was the secret? Was it Botox? Did
I go to the gym? They weren’t impressed
with my recipe: good sleep, good food,
and happiness.E
verywhere I went cakes appeared.
The chefs’ school (oops! institute) ran
a competition for the best birthday cake.
The winner had printed photographs on
the icing, from every decade of my life. I
think she knows more about me than I
do. A stalker’s cake.B
ack home I missed my slot on Bob
Mills’s talk show because we got
stuck in the News International lift for
an hour and a half. Every ten minutes
the luckless security man had to ask,
through the intercom, if we were OK.
We were fine. I lay on the floor and read
Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir.O
n my actual birthday, a letter
from the DWP arrived telling
me I now qualify for an extra 25p per
week. Well, an extra teabag on Sunday
mornings is very welcome. My children
took the family to dinner on the
excellent Grand Duchess barge, moored
on the canal near Paddington Station.
I’m resisting the idea of a monster party,
and instead plan to have a summer
fortnight doing what I love best: fishing
on the Naver with ten friends for a week,
then five days on the last remaining
‘Puffer’, the VIC 32. These coal-fired
boats used to ply the seas and canals of
the Highlands and Islands with cargoes
of building materials, coal and sheep.
The Puffer has been converted into a
pleasure boat and I plan to take ten
more friends from Corpach through the
Caledonian canals to Inverness. I haven’t
told them about the need to stoke the
boiler, nor about the mozzies.P
eta Leith, with whom I’ve written
The Vegetarian Cookbook, and I
are to be interviewed for a Spectator
event on 24 March by Sam Leith
(Peta’s brother, my nephew, and literary
editor of this fine organ). You can book
tickets at http://www.spectator.co.uk/prue.
Let’s keep in it the family, hey?Prue Leith diary_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 7 26/02/2020 12: