Jack – extracts from Edinburgh Festival interview with Kit de Waal 2022 (The interview was supposed to be about Good Food for Bad Days which clearly Jack hadn’t read in advance of the interview but Kit had) I go into anaphylactic shock when I'm stressed. So it will be really quite obvious if it happens but my EpiPen is two floors up - you just jab it into a fatty bit. Actually originally titled Depressipies which I am very pleased with that term so much so that I trademarked it which cost me 26 quid. I was reading the chapter on fueling your reserve tank. Do you want to tell us what the reserve tank is? I will have to refresh myself because I've written another two books since then. Let me just wasn't expecting to be asked this bear with me. I do have an occasional side hustle which is where a friend or a friend of a friend or a friend of a friend of a friend will say will you come round my house and cook a really fancy dinner for me. And my friend and then piss off 10 minutes before it's served. So I can pretend I did it myself and I can really go to town and go to Borough Market. I can buy all the nice mushrooms I can make ludicrous ludicrous recipes that wouldn't be out of place on MasterChef but that's not the stuff that I write about. Ironically it's why I don't have a cookery series on television because of all the times it's been pitched to me by like documentary producers or TV companies they want to put me in a kitchen the size of an aircraft hangar sponsor it by KitchenAid. And then they get absolutely horrified when I pull out like cans of mushy peas and dried noodles. They're all a bit weirded out by the by all the tins and all their dried stuff and all the store cupboard basics because it's not like hand-reared beef and organic this that and the other. First Time around is a flail around. What I've got what I think. We'll go together. Chuck it all in the pan weave that was delicious. What did I do? I should probably make that again and write it down and then I make it again. And then I do it a third time and I'm rigorously time everything away. Everything and got some very very dodgy scales in my house that I bought from a very very dodgy smoke shop on a hill. I live in a little Seaside town and I saw these little scales in the window and I'm really really accurate tiny little black scales and and I went in and I I was like can I have some of those scat can either set those scales fruits and the guy looked at me and I think I've suit jacket on at the time I don't think I look like his regular clientele and I was like I'd like I want them for weighing spices. It was like interesting. And I had I've been getting quite a lot of abuse online lately. And the Essex police turned up at my house a few weeks ago I hadn't called them. They were doing a welfare check because they've been made aware that people were making the various threats to my livelihood and my son and whatever. And they thought they’d just swing by. Not completely alarmingly two squad cars outside my house and my lovely neighborhood. And I was like this is this is bad and they turned up and they were walking through my kitchen and there's these scales and I was making my own ketchup. So these little tiny little black dodgy-looking scales had MSG sprinkled all over the top of them which is a fine white powder and and they walked in. And they stood there in my kitchen and talking to me and I'm looking and I was like if I don't say anything and they don't say anything we can just pretend that that doesn't look like what it looks like. Neither of us said anything. We walked through the lounge and I made them a cup of tea and it was all fine but I'm probably got some soft information on my file somewhere. Every now and then people say oh well who needs to rinse spaghetti hoops? Well you know people who live in B&Bs people who've fled domestic violence and don't have anywhere to live and they're living in a hostel. And they’re you know people who live in student accommodation people who live in shared housing where there's nine of them sharing a kitchen people who don't have an oven people who don't have any gas on the gas card guess what? Lots of people need to rinse spaghetti hoops and just because you weren't one of them and you don't know any of them doesn't mean those people don't exist. Just because their experiences are outside the realm of what you can imagine people's lives their everyday lives are really like doesn't mean that those people's situations aren't real and valid. And I get into those arguments quite a lot lately because it seems firstly because I'm belligerent and I can't let things lie like that. And secondly because okay you may never have come across somebody in those circumstances or it may never have occurred to you that people may be living that way but let me tell you about it and then you'll know and then you won't have an excuse to be such an ignorant prick next time. I decided I would start to track it in something called The Vimes Boots Index. Well I've said this being yeah, I've got box of receipts. This will be a piece of cake. It is not a piece of cake. It is the reason why the Office of National Statistics has got about 60 members of full-time staff because it's a complicated and difficult job and it's still one that is underway. I’m hoping to publish it in full by the end of the year. It is a compilation of 120 products and how the prices of those products have changed in supermarkets over the last 10 years and to track inflation how it really happens to people with the least and the Office of National Statistics have been brilliant. For somebody whose first dealings with me was for me to give them a public clobbering they got in touch and they said we'd like to work with you on this. We'd like to track inflation at different income deciles we've got the resources to do it. What were they measuring before you got in touch? An average And what sort of products? Things like legs of lamb, bedroom furniture, bottles of champagne. Those everyday essentials. And that was another thing. Taking those 120 products was a minefield because a lot of it is stuff that I use in my recipes all the time. So that sardines and chicken all right, chicken that one chicken, gave me a headache because in three of the four major supermarkets you could buy a bag of chicken wings for about £1.70. But one of them you can only buy frozen chicken wings. That's not a like-for- like product because the frozen ones were cheaper but the other ones didn't all have frozen chicken wings. So I had to go for drumsticks and then the pack sizes were different and there were things like sanitary protection and then other things like washing up liquid and shampoo and and trying to screw down 120 like-for-like products that are available all the big four supermarkets has been really the bulk of doing the work and then getting the pricing data by crowdsourcing people's dusty old shopping receipts over the last 10 years into my email inbox and then sifting through them. Putting all of that data together while being GDPR are compliant, it's been a lot of work and a lot of surprising work actually. And because although for the supermarket I shop in and the one I used to shop in - Sainsbury and Asda basically, I know that stuff. Like for some reason I can't even remember my son's birthday sometimes, but I can remember the price of stock cubes in Sainsbury's in 2013 I've got that information screwed into my brain. I don't have it for the other two supermarkets and I need to back everything up and evidence it and reference it and but the ONS have been great. And they've also started tracking things across different income deciles. They released a press statement shortly after saying there were no longer going to measure the price of one kind of apple at the supermarket but every kind of apple in every supermarket, I was like ambitious but good, you you crack on and I'll crack on with my bit, and we'll see where we end up. And so the index is nearly done and then I'm going to send it to the big boys at the ONS and they are going to mark my homework and make sure that it's all presented nicely and maybe some snazzy graphics and stuff and then release it into the wild. It's it's such a good piece of work and it's going to demonstrate how austerity and inflation is impacting the most vulnerable as we know. Yeah. And there were some leading financial and economic journalists who argued with me something chronic at the start saying no, everyone experiences the same inflation. This is why you're wrong. I'm a balding white man who works for the Financial Times and I know what I'm talking about. And I've just sat and waited and then the ONS released their provisional report last week and it showed that inflation for people across the lowest income deciles was many many times higher than inflation as an average. And I waited for the apology to come from certain quarters but must be something wrong with the refresh button on my Twitter because I can't see it anywhere My shoes? I nicked them from a press shoot about six years ago and actually. I was just still wearing them when everyone went home and I realized afterwards and I sent a really panicked email to the pr thinking oh God they're journalists they're going to write the I'm a terrible person and a thief and I stole the knife shoes and the pr person to see my back where our keep him. okay thank you very much for the Fancy Shoes but I've got nowhere to wear them apart from home. But for example I was on Good Morning Britain a couple of weeks ago and I was on with a guy from The Institute of Economic Affairs and we were talking about energy price caps and surprisingly to me the person from The Institute of Economic Affairs was so gung-ho about energy companies and how great they were and how brilliant they were. And I'm practically you know the model for society is there anyone going to declare that you're funded by energy companies? Though is that down to me to point out to this audience of two million people that you actually have a financial interest in promoting these people and all hell broke loose. The production team behind the scenes were googling and looking up legal things were all can she say that? Because she saw you and afterwards so night Jack and I was like no I'm not if I was being paid by an energy company and I went on national television and energy companies a great somebody would call me out on it. So why can't I call them out on it? And it seems to be every time I do something like that a direct spanner in the spokes of the establishment the attacks increase like 20-fold online from quickly set up an anonymous accounts designed to delegitimize me and make me out to be a fraud a liar a scammer of not what I seem all of those things. And that's you know I can see this for what it is. It's it's an establishment shitstorm but many have tried over the years. If there is really a murky Horrible Secret you know whatever going on in my background. Some of the investigative hacks that have trolled and plagued my family and friends doorstepped my sick disabled mother. For around something other than I am currently trying to pin down a memoir which is sit around spent the best part of 10 years drunk is Just going to be a bit tricky in places but it's it's coming back. 422 days sober. Now I'm getting bits of my memory back. I'm not liking all of it. Any tips for budgeting for pet food and supplies? My friend just lost her job and I mentioned that you shop for 20 pounds a week and have some pets. So to follow you. But she said she couldn't find any tips on Pet Food. My cat eats better than I do. Unfortunately I'm going to the most de 20 most deprived Wards in Britain hopping on trains and just seeing what is available there. As I said to as during the beginning of all of this if it's not universally available it's useless. There's no point in having your cheap smart price mix hubs in Nottingham. If you're single mother is living in Southend. That is a thing that impacts quite a lot of communities and people across Britain and it is something that I will be looking into probably as a secondary part of the index. So the index will go out as a this is the landscape at large and then I'm going to dive into like pockets of rural communities and places that are Are not particularly well served by public transport or places that are a bit more far-flung or a bit more remote Funnily enough I do a lot of work up here in Scotland with rural communities and places where there's quite a lot of hidden poverty. But I also know on a personal level dozens and dozens of excellent constituency Labour MPs who are doing everything in their power to try to help the people who are in desperate need in their communities.