On the one hand, you’ll be amused by the multi-million-pound venues that draw world premiers from globally admired artists. On the other hand, you’ll find yourself fascinated by the more grassroots, DIY art scene fueled by up-and-coming artists (Rob Bailey! Mariel Osborn! Caroline Dowsett!) who operate out of renovated red-brick mills and hidden studios that occasionally open up treasure chests to the public, letting them peek inside the cutting edge work that makes the city a top-rated artist destination.
How do we get from the complete mess that we’re in now to a sustainable food future? It’s a big job. How do I not feel overwhelmed by the scale of it? Massive ingrained narcissism: I genuinely believe I can save the world. When you’re raised by Irish bricklayers, you learn how to break things down into chunks. You go to a flat piece of ground and say, ‘I’m going to build a six-bedroom house here.’ You do a bit every day, and eventually, there’s a six-bedroom house.
The plastics challenge globally is absolutely huge, but the Mancunian attitude is a brilliant thing: ‘We did it first, and if we didn’t do it first we did it better.’ We lead by example. You get brave enough to fail, do some big experiments and keep going until you find a model that works.
With Real Junk Food Manchester (now Open Kitchen MCR), at first we just wanted to stop food from being wasted. We ran Manchester’s first pay-as-you-feel food-waste restaurant from September 2017 to August 2018. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We had about ten food businesses and we’d agreed to collect anything they knew was okay but wasn’t going to be sold. The food’s not going in a bin because it’s bad – when it’s cheaper to dump it than keep it in the food system, that’s when food becomes waste.
I think, in part, pay-as-you-feel was a nice big ‘fuck you’ to capitalism; some people aspire to be able to afford to go to The French [at the Midland] because they make assumptions about the connection between quality and price. The restaurant was always going to be a temporary home for us, and the developers told us they needed it back. Onward Homes happened to have, in their HQ in south Manchester, a full catering kitchen. So we moved there in August, deciding that a waste-food catering business would be a more solid financial base. Now we operate two office canteens and run the outside catering enterprise as a pay-it-forward model, with different prices for corporate and community events, and we work with frontline groups for free. Canapés, weddings, gala dinners, one-pot wonders, sandwiches – my chefs are creative types who are not easily fazed. They basically play the biggest game of Ready Steady Cook you’ve ever seen. There’s other things we want to do, too; we might have found a space to come back to the city centre with a slightly different concept.
The Plastic Free GM campaign is good because it’s just one step at a time – first, we need to get everyone to stop using plastic straws and single-use stirrers. We’re starting with food, drink and hospitality because that’s an area of life where our expectation of convenience has left us drowning in packaging. It’s not just plastics, it’s disposables. There’s more than 7 billion of us on this planet and the point when it was possible for us to take resources out of the ground, use them once and then burn them or bury them or even try to recycle them, that’s gone. There needs to be a complete cultural shift. I mean, ‘disposable’ is a really ridiculous term. Where do you think it goes?
Interview by Kate Feld