The Charleston Festival was packed with food book fans last week as the current culinary kings and queens teamed up with the world of art and literature to discuss all of life through the prism of food. Composer/musician Nitin Sawhney chewed over the symbiotic relationship between art, politics and society with food writer, chef and restaurateur Ravinder Bhogal, while food royalty Bee Wilson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall explored the moral, ethical and health choices we’re forced to make about food every day.

There was even a surprise visit from Queen Camilla who opened the event with poet laureate Joseph Coelho, presenter and comedian Lenny Henry, children’s authors Jacqueline Wilson and Francesca Simon, and actor Jenny Agutter. Shame she didn’t hang on for the Bee and Hugh session; I think she’d have had a lot to chat about with Charles had she stayed on to learn how to eat 30 plants a week

But it was why we need to eat 30 plants a week that was the subject of the afternoon. The impact of factory farmed animals on climate change and the immorality of eating industrially fast-grown caged birds who can barely move, let alone exhibit their natural behaviour was high on the list for Hugh. And as host, the Food Programme presenter, Leyla Kazim asked how the average shopper can choose between the many and various ethical signposting, thank the Lord that Hugh put paid to any suggestion that Red Tractor has anything to do with compassion in farming.

Deliberately confusing the messaging is what retailers do best, and Hugh and Bee suggested that we simply side step the ultra-processed aisles in the supermarket. ‘It’s a mind bomb that sets you free,’ said Bee, as she urged us to think about real ingredients – vegetables, fruit, meat and fish – instead of the ultra processed foods that have cast a spell over an increasingly robotic shopper.

For Hugh, eating more vegetables to improve the health of the nation and the planet is about storytelling. ‘It’s about elevating the way we eat, rather than being banging on about being virtuous’, he said. And he reminded us that our ancestors were obsessed with storytelling about food. They would spend the whole day hunting and gathering, he told us, and as the community gathered to cook and eat together at the end of the day, they’d chat about what they’d been up to. And that was food. Instagram’s obsession with food has nothing on the Hunter Gatherers.

Be more hunter gatherer, was the take out of the afternoon. Forage for nettles with the kids, pick blackberries with the grandchildren, taste and tell in schools, and a whole new generation will grow up not in the shadow of their food wasting, UPF addicted, climate changing community, but of their deer stalking, herb picking ancestors.

Gilly Smith