How food shapes cultures - with Rachel Karasik, head chef of The Good Egg
Rachel is head chef at The Good Egg in Kingly Court and has worked across the industry from pop-ups to private events, at street food stalls, and in catering as well as restaurants.
In 2015 she took a break from the kitchen and completed a masters degree in Food Anthropology. We start the conversation by delving into the reasons she wanted to study that course in particular, what she learnt and what she took from it back into the kitchen. We talk in quite a bit of depth about kitchen culture and the ways in which that is changing in response to both external and interal pressures. Towards the end of the conversation we talk quite a bit about the difficulty getting people into the industry, the reasons for that, and how immigration policy in future might affect it.
This is a really thought provoking conversation with someone who has worked widely in the industry and has spent time thinking about food generally and its cultural impact in particular. One of the key themes in Doing Good Through Food has been that food - what you choose to eat, how you eat it - says something about who you are and this conversation develops that idea in a number of really interesting ways. One of the main takeaways is that when it comes to the decisions we make in food, context is everything and most positions can be understood whether we agree with them or not.