Between Two Waters is the bold new book from chef Pam Brunton in which she reflects on Scotland’s culinary heritage, the gender politics of the food industry, and offers a call to arms for everyone the world over to start using food more sustainably. We spoke with Pam about how she approached this and her childhood inspiration.

Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape and the Modern Cook 
By Pam Brunton
Published by Canongate

Hello Pam, many congratulations on the publication of Between Two Waters. Could you tell our readers a little bit of what to expect from your book? It’s a very different kind of book, part memoir, part call-to-arms. 

The book tells some deeply personal stories from my own life to show how each of us is intimately connected, through food, to people and landscapes the world over. We are united, to each other and with the natural world, it only takes a wee bit of imagination and empathy to understand that.  

The book really explores the wider issues around food and our relationship with it. One is of Scotland’s own relationship to its food heritage; what would you like to see happen so that kitchen dwellers rustling up family meals every day can appreciate what’s on our own doorsteps? 

I’d like to see better accessibility to the country’s great, affordable produce, for all – our fresh vegetables and fruits, meat like wild venison, or bivalve shellfish like mussels, available from independent shops that are as easy to access as supermarkets are now.  This is bigger than individual shoppers’ decision-making; it would take a concerted effort from local government planning departments, national government infrastructure directives and budgets, and the education department re-instating proper cooking skills in schools. These are all the conscious, structural decisions that currently direct our choices of  the food we put in our baskets. We just don’t see them happening.  

What are your first memories of food? What inspired you to get into the kitchen? 

In my childhood, cooking was an everyday craft. Mum worked full-time (so did dad) but most meals were cooked simply from fresh ingredients and mum grew veg in the garden. There was little fanfare; no-one would have considered themselves a ‘foodie’. Cooking – and growing- was normal. I started work in a professional kitchen because my friend offered me a job in one, and I had recently quit uni so I needed to work! But I stayed with it because I valued the craft.  

Your time studying philosophy shines in the book – you think deeply about landscape, community and culture and how they relate to food. Why do you think food touches so many aspects of living? 

We take food for granted today because it is – in our relatively rich Western country- seemingly so cheap and plentiful. But really food is the first thing any government must secure if its population is to survive, never mind thrive. These days our governments have outsourced this task to the supermarkets, who are allowed to make a lot of money at the expense of farmers, public health, environment and climate (and we pay for the clean up with our taxes). All of our lives are organised around procuring food – human lives always have been; just because others are now making unseen decisions on our behalf doesn’t make this any less true.  

Tell our readers more about your restaurant, Inver, near Loch Fyne. Your memory of telling a potential customer your menu over the phone made me drool! 

Inver is a prism for all the landscapes on a plate: the human and imaginative landscapes as well as the beautiful, historic, ’natural’ landscapes outside the window, and much further away. We use produce from the loch, hills, farms, gardens and hedgerows around us, animals and plants raised and harvested by the people who share our community and love of craft. I hope we allow them all to sing.  

Do you have any favourite books on food you’d like to recommend?   

There are so many! I have a very nerdy collection of several hundred books… Catherine Brown’s Scottish Cookery was an early reference, my great-aunt Ann’s century-long hand-written kitchen notebooks are another. Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma was one of the first to question industrialised eating in recent years, in an accessible way, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring decades before that. And Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook was the first in my experience to feature farmers and growers and their stories alongside the recipes and glossy photos. Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook is perfect for simple recipes that let great produce really shine. And more recently Anna Higham’s The Last Bite shares that same ethos, with a more contemporary aesthetic - everything I’ve cooked from it has been super delicious!  

Between Two Waters by Pam Brunton is published by Canongate, priced £20.00.