JP McMAHON
proponents of New Nordic cuisine fitted perfectly into Brunton and Latimer’s story. “We live in a remote
location in a landscape that is very similar to the Nordic countries – we share ingredients, we share history – so we went to those restaurants quite intentionally to learn to use products from the landscape. It’s not like we went there and were suddenly inspired,” she says. “We’re very conscious of not creating a theme restaurant of Scotland.” Unlike Noma, which
famously restricted itself to cooking with local ingredients, at Inver there are no limits on the produce they use – as long as it’s morally sound. “We have traded with the rest of the world for hundreds of years and to suddenly start only serving lamb
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and barley wouldn’t make sense. I love spice, so we use spices, we use citrus, we buy wines from elsewhere and things Scotland doesn’t produce, like chocolate and coffee. We do that because we have done so for hundreds of years and you don’t reverse that just because new Nordic is a trend,” she says. Instead she supports sustainable ways of doing business, buying chocolate that is traceable, for example, bought through small cooperatives that sidestep the major commodity chocolate markets. Food is political, whether
we like or not. She has been conscious of this since she was a child and, aged 11, first connected the lambs in the field with what was on her plate. Te experience made her a vegetarian.
Tis belief eventually took her to the public policy master’s degree after years of working in restaurants. “I was working in fine dining restaurants, some of them very high-end and expensive, and I was very aware that there was a much bigger picture to food out there. I wanted to find out more rather than just feed rich food to rich people all the time.” Te campaign work that
followed focused mainly on public sector food in hospitals, schools and prisons. “We tried to promote better use of public money because that is what is funding these places. Instead of putting in cheap food that makes people sick, while certain companies profit, we were arguing that different people should profit from public money and people should get healthier,
tastier food,” she explains. Tis is nearly 20 years
ago, and she is acutely aware that progress remains glacial, recalling a recent meeting in her community, organized by the Scottish government to improve local food access. “It was so exasperating. It’s
like nothing’s changed. We know exactly what we need to make this work: better infrastructure, funding for community hubs, bigger picture subsidies to change so they’re rewarding farmers for not causing environmental damage,” she says. “Why is this going round and round in circles? We don’t need any more of these meetings. We just need to do it.”
GOING HOME TO INVER
About a year into the Belgian adventure somebody from home
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