Adulting - #94 BONUS Pod with My Dad

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Hey Podulters, I hope you're well! This special bonus episode of Adulting is sponsored by Oatly, my absolute favourite dairy alternative drink! As this is a special episode, we also have a special guest; Namely, my dad. He is a consultant cardiologist, car enthusiast and very amateur rugby player. We discuss the impact of food on the climate crisis, what his relationship with food was like when he was younger and the generational differences between him and I, when it comes to attitudes towards sustainability. This was so much fun to record and I think I learnt more from my dad than he did from me! I hope you enjoy :) If you want to get chatting to your dad - or any family member for that matter - about making sustainable swaps, visit  oatly.com/helpdad.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Podlters. Surprise! I know I said that the last episode was the end of the season, and it was, it was the end of the season. But I have a very special bonus episode for you because this episode is sponsored by, drumroll please, Oatly. This is a very exciting moment for me because I'm such a big fan of Oatly. I have it in my coffee three times a day. And I just think it's really the best thing ever since anything. And this episode is with my dad, who I never really thought I'd feature on the podcast, but here we go. Because I only have a new campaign live called Help Dad. And it's all about having that intergenerational conversation about making small sustainable swaps and thinking about the

environment when you are cooking and buying food. So I speak to my dad about sustainable eating, about his diet, about what his relationship with food was like when he was growing up. And we discuss the climate crisis, how food impacts that, and lots of general chit chat. I actually learned a lot from my dad in this episode, and I really enjoyed speaking to him. So I really hope that you enjoy listening. And as always, please do rate, review and subscribe. Bye. Hello and welcome to Adulting. Today, I'm joined by Lance Forbat, who happens to be my dad. Hello, Anoni.

How are you? A little bit tired. I was up till half three last night and four the other night because i was fixing my car that got flooded in wales which you knew about got it going two little gremlins to sort so is it actually working i can't do you want to tell the story of what happened to the car well basically i was on call and going in for nine o'clock and i'm in a village which is off a reasonable road in Wales, past Camargon, towards a place called Withybush.

And the side road that goes to where I'm staying in a rental is a bit up and down a single lane. And I've used it regularly. And on a Wednesday, I might normally have gone to another hospital, a different route. But I was going to my normal hospital. It was a shorter route. I took it.

And being a bit silly, I saw this water across the road. I thought, well, I'll just drive in a bit, see if I can do it. Realized it was too deep. Just as I realized that, the car stopped working. So I thought, blimey. The river was flooding ahead of me from a river that was under a little bridge. And obviously, there was a dip before it went up onto the main road. So I realized that was too deep. So I reversed reversed once I got the engine going I was really pleased

but because the road was wet both sides I couldn't tell exactly the width and I just caught a bit of mud on the side and then ended up stuck in the mud probably a small ditch or just soggy mud at the side of the road and couldn't move so then the car started filling up on the driver's side but sat on the passenger side and it came up middle of the passenger door and as far as the middle well on the other side um and so i rang the aa they weren't interested because they said you drove into the flood although i think they probably would have done something if i had the right person rang the fire brigade who came from the direction I was coming to and came out with sticks and decided the water was too deep for them so they would go the other way around and said well we

can't rescue we're not allowed to tow we just make sure you're safe so I had to wait for a taxi and then they helped me carry stuff to the car so I just rolled my suit trousers up shoes and socks off and packed everything up in the car and got a taxi back to the hospital well via my flat changed everything overnight closed in case which I didn't need in the end and got to the hospital so that was that day I can't believe it works though because dad sent us a video and honestly the water was all the way up to the hand like it was flooded in the car it was in the middle of the you know the middle bit where you step over in the rear that was, you know, the middle bit where you step over in the rear. That was just lapping over the middle bit. So the back seat, just where my briefcase was, unfortunately, on the driver's side, got a bit damp.

That's dried out now. But it was a bit of a shock. So I had the car, then I had to pay for it to be picked up by a removal company to the car park at the hospital. And I just then managed to get the AI agreed then to relay it and it's been relayed home on Friday. Does it smell? It probably does I don't know if I can smell it that I'm a bit used to it but the heat is on hot to dry it and I haven't lifted the carpet so it probably will be a bit with a muddy smell. Oh god well let's hope that that fixes itself we'll have to see but you've mentioned that a bit I a muddy smell oh god well let's hope that that um fixes itself we'll have to see

but you've mentioned that a bit i'm sure people can guess what you do but obviously not everyone might know so can you give us an introduction to who you are what you do and a little bit about you all right well i'm a doctor that specializes in in hearts or cardiology and i qualified in 1980 at st thomas's and did a whole series of different training jobs in and around London and then went to Leicester for a few years for my specialty in cardiology and after some temporary sort of locum consultant works waiting for a full-time post went to work in Whitehaven and you remember being brought up in Cockermouth etc for schools so there seven years and then came down to Bristol area the

job I did in in West Cumberland Hospital Whitehaven turned out to be a lemon so not going to too much detail I left that and then a year and I've been doing independent work on and off through different NHS jobs around the country as an agency some private work and medical legal work and some interest in telemedicine so I monitor some patients remotely if I can you know find suitable ones so this was a job that came up in Withybush in Wales so it's a six-month job and that's what I was doing there Monday to Friday. So how have you found it because you've been on the front lines a bit working on the Covid wards and things how's your year pandemic wise how have you found

that well it started it started in i was in conquest hospital in hastings and at that stage there was no ppe and it was starting to hot up and we were struggling to get it for any of the doctors or staff and at one point although they locked stuff in the cupboard in the operating theater for heart procedures, people were actually breaking into locked cupboards to steal the PPE. People were so worried. So that was quite traumatic. I moved to another hospital when they couldn't extend or provide what I wanted

and then went and had some PPE at that hospital at West Suffolk. But unfortunately, although I was well protected on the wards, the dining rooms were a mess there's no social distancing I think I caught Covid from there so I had about a Covid in April which lasted a couple of weeks and although it wasn't severe it knocked me back for two weeks afterwards as well mainly aches pains headache fatigue and a bit of tummy upset but funnily no cough no obvious loss of smell or taste and I was still doing my morning exercises and feeling better for it but it took me another two weeks

to catch up in my stamina. One of the things that you was keeping you busy and that you were loving to do whilst you had Covid was doing your like you were sending us pictures of all the meals you were eating whilst you're in isolation. Oh yeah well when I was in isolation yes it got to the point where there was a whatsapp group for the cardiologists and there's a bit of banter on it so one day or two I just sent this is what I'm having for supper tonight and I've got a bit of feedback so they got a picture with the comment and they used to reply one or two of them regularly particularly the Irish consultant if I put a Guinness up with it or something or which wine I'm having and so that he said you must make a book well I started it but I haven't made a monograph yet but I thought maybe I should do a lockdown diary of my eating and

exercise and Covid experience for that period and when I get time maybe I will. Well the reason it's entertaining is because you do make quite um wild and wacky concoctions you're not very not the word not discerning but you're quite happy to eat a very white weird and wonderful combination of foods together well that's because when i go to the shop and i'm having daily i just go and see what's on offer and if it looks okay i'll buy what's on offer and make something from it i'm desperate for something different then i'll go and buy but you know the full price food so i was always um sort of watching the pennies so as you know this podcast is sponsored by oatly um and the whole conversation is about how men of a certain age particularly dads around your age are probably the least likely to start making sustainable swaps to their diet so i wanted

to know have you ever had yeah do you want to tell everyone how old you are so i'll be 65 on the 3rd of march that gives you an idea so yeah i think around that demographic are maybe the least likely but so i want to know have you had oatly that can remember? I think you gave me some from a fridge at one time and I had it, I think in a drink, but not on a cereal or anything. So what do you think, have you thought, have you and mum ever spoken about making sustainable swaps, like changing things to plant-based in your diet at all? Is it not something you've thought about? Well, I have actually um since uh probably

the break point when I started doing touch rugby and also after Anthony died I decided to get fitter but I've also um tend to when I'm at work have a vegetarian meal in the daytime two or three times a week so if I cook a meat in the evening so I've quite enjoyed having the veggie type lunchtime meals in the hospitals if they're reasonable and then i i have a less meat diet during the week i tend to eat fish twice at least a week if i can and the rest i do like red meat and steaks which are medium rare and that sort of stuff but i am aware of of cows and methane and the environments and all that but not really made the change so

much for that immediately as an individual it's more for my own health side of things so Anthony just to clarify is my uncle is your brother who sadly passed away three years ago now He died on, I think it was the 12th of June 2019, 18, I think. Yeah, coming up to three years. Yeah, his birthday was the 27th of December. So he was 14 months older than me. So he looked two years older for a month or two. And then I catch up, be a year younger than him. So that's interesting that you were obviously that impacted how you

were viewing life and how you then suddenly thought because you really have made kind of big changes in terms of trying to be really you're always quite fit but you do lots of exercise now so you were willing to sort of yeah the first bit was just um when uh emily uh got interested in a rugby player and i thought i fancy doing a bit of rugby and I joined UWE for 25 pounds mum thought I was mad but I went once a week but it was on astroturf and I pulled muscles and ached afterwards we used to come to the pizza hut in the pizza express rather in in Clifton afterwards at nine ish so that we can have a meal together but I'd be limping out the car and waddling and then I did a couple of times when I was working away from home on sandy rather than wet astroturf slip badly and pulled a tendon and

calf muscles so I decided to do some exercises so I asked Joe you said do calf reps and I just built up from there with resistance bands and medicine balls and sit-ups and then Anthony died and I thought well I just I just you only got one body and he was fit and could swim more than I could and he died of that and I just thought well I'll just look after my body more and enjoy the sport that I can do when it's not lockdown so so that's how it sort of went and then eating away from home myself choosing stuff every day it was a bit hch potch as you say but I like doing that past just the time in the evening when you're on your own listen to radio

so why is it that you think that you you choose the vegetarian meal at lunch when you're at work is that because you think it's generally a bit healthier or because you were thinking I could swap out a meal here and and maybe cut down a bit on my meat consumption. Well, I just thought some of them were tastier than I expected, so I thought an experiment. So I would have a look and see if it didn't look very nice. But if there's anything vegetarian, lasagna or quiche things or whatever that was on offer, I'd sample it. If it was good, then it was great.

And certainly the ones with pulses and nuts, if they do those they're quite nice and so it's you know there would be various dishes at different hospitals i'd try um and then if if i had slightly smaller lunch than i would i could eat more in the evening especially if i had a pint of beer or a couple of glasses of wine because the calories in that. So I tend to eat a bit less at lunchtime, but always had the same breakfast. For years I've had two shredded wheat milk and half a banana sliced on it and my own apple juice I make from home if I've got it

and a cup of tea or two. So that's the morning and lunch is sort of the middle bit. And in the evening I will have one course normally but occasionally if I'm home we might have a pudding if mum does it you know. You're cut down quite a lot on meat especially because when we were younger I think you would definitely have lots of kind of meats and cold meats and cheeses for lunches when you're at home wouldn't you? Yes I mean I still have cheese and biscuits as a starter when I get back from work while I'm waiting to cook something or listen to the news. So I will have that. But as children, we had free school milk. There was five of us in the children. So we always had that third of a pint of silver top. Or you could have red top, but we had silver top. And it was left out in metal crates. And if you went out on the right time, there'd be holes in the top from the sparrows pecking into the milk through the silver top and it was left out in metal crates and if you went out on the right time there'd be holes in the top from the sparrows pecking into the milk through the silver top

cover and if you got gold top of course you had the cream on the top so you got extra cream so we had quite a lot of calcium supplements in terms of milk every day at school and we had free school meals because of five children at that time so would you think that now in terms of like swapping out certain dairy products for instance having like oatly oat drink or they do actually have alternatives to creme fraiche which I love would you consider that or would would you feel resistant to changing a few bits of cheese and dairy if it tasted all right, I would. I mean, some of the corn stuff I haven't been that impressed with when I tried it.

I did buy a burger once. It was cheap on sort of the sell-by-date gone on Astro or somewhere. I was a bit disappointed. And it said, lady burger, it was a bit of a damp squib, that one. So I wasn't going to buy that one again. Maybe that's why it's so cheap but you know if something is made well and has flavor then I don't have a problem um in in mixing it up a bit but I wouldn't necessarily go vegetarian or vegan no I don't think it's about I'm not vegetarian or vegan I think what's really important is about everyone

doing like small changes so I don't have dairy milk ever because I love oat drink and just have oatly um and then I try I do similar to you and don't have meat in a lot of my lunches um but I'm definitely not vegan and I don't I don't think that that's ever suitable for everyone do you think that in terms of like calcium would you be worried about not getting like being deficient in things is that something that would also stop you do you think well i'm outside a lot so unless it's you know dismal i'm getting vitamin d through that um through the sun calcium uh i don't know if i'll be deficient with my current diet even if i swapped a bit out but there are lots of foods with calcium in it and obviously milk i just like the

flavor of the semi-skimmed i don't like the the full skim milk and i've gone off the full milk simply because of the fat content and the benefits uh to reduce your fat intake so i want to know because i actually think that even though my generation are quite good at making sustainable swaps i think often we can be a bit more wasteful so like Matt and I have a subscription to a wonky veg box thing which is really good because it means that you don't waste veg and you get like um the things that wouldn't have been sold in the supermarket but I think that in terms of having an abundance to be able to buy everything whilst we might buy more sustainably when you were growing up I seem to remember Nana and Papa never ever wasting food and there would always be bits of stuff in the fridge that had been foiled

up and do you think that's true do you think more than that they were in the war don't forget and there was rationing so a jar of jam or marmalade or anything in a jar wouldn't be thrown away until you'd scraped every last bit out with a knife at the bottom. And I still do that, scrape jars out until I've got the last bit out before I throw it away or wash it. So I don't like leaving waste at the bottom. And then anything left over like bread would be bread pudding. We'd have fried bread in dripping. We used to have the fat off the cooking that'd be kept in a bowl in the fridge that'd go hard. And that'd be dripping.

And you'd have fried bread in dripping with fried eggs on top or something like that that sounds really yummy what other things do you have when you're growing up that you would would you eat that now would you be too worried about how high fat it is probably would occasionally for fun yeah but i wouldn't have dripping on bread regularly but you know fried bread and marmalade is the other thing that people used to have um but we had lots of potato i mean we used to have a thing called a pressure cooker and we had a potato peeler that mama used to have a lid and a handle on and you could just put all the potatoes in and turn it around it had little blades like a lawnmower blades that cut peel the potato so she used to do pressure cooker stews and

meals very quickly potatoes cook very quickly five or six minutes in a pressure cooker then she'd do uh casseroles a lot of casseroles um she also made that rococ crumpley the hungarian dish with lead ham egg and and cream and mashed potato which you may lead sliced potato and then sort of in the three layers keep going can you fill the thing up that was quite fun um bacon and eggs we always had eggs go to work on the egg there was an advert when we were young which you may not have heard of but we had eggs regularly quite a lot and with five of us you know we could eat three dozen eggs without thinking in a day um so there was quite a lot of bread as boys growing up had lots of bread tended all to be white bread i think from memory um and crumpets crumpets were common even when we were growing up and we'd go to

your family with all our cousins there would always the bread would go within like five minutes because there's so many of us and you would have to really like that's right boys will eat a loaf of bread when they're growing up in a day or in a meal yeah so i sometimes buy a um you know when you go to waitrose and you're hungry and it's lunchtime i buy those um olive bread sticks you know the best heels of olive and eat half one of those on the way home because you can eat that meat it's quite nice but i want to know more about like growing up with Nana and Papa and like what especially because Papa was evacuated and obviously that's quite like a tumultuous childhood and I remember reading he wrote a book called Evacuee Boys and he always wanted sweets and like the difference

between the ease with which I can go out to the shop and buy cuisine from all over the world compared to how you grew up does it like do you just get used to that gradually or do you still find it quite shocking that you can kind of go and buy like a bao bun I well I didn't really notice the change just going up you know as we got old I mean that we had been abroad we've been to Italy and Spain and countries and eaten food abroad and dad traveled around the world a lot with his business so you know having different foods in America and that so he used to introduce us to things I mean I always remember he was away for six years and around my birthday when I was between sort of seven or eight and my early teens and he always bring stuff back and

invariably we'd go for a t-bone steak until i was full to the brim and go and watch a james bond film or something or whichever way around it was so he'd he'd bring that into it but i didn't notice a sudden change think oh gosh since i've left home at home i think we had quite a balanced diet with mum was a good cook so we had quite tasty food and casseroles you can make with all sorts of flavors um not curries very much funnily enough well you mum love curry you always make curries don't you yeah well mum mum's more curry than me um sometimes i find it upsets me a bit if i have a too strong one so i don't have it on the day before I drive three hours in a car. But I do like curries.

And we used to do takeaway or eat-out curries, but now we prefer making our own, certainly chicken curry. But in India, I like the curries completely different. What's it like in India? Well, in India, from north to south, it goes from more meat in the north to vegetarian right in the south. And the curries are made a much longer period in preparation. The spices and the flavors are much more there than the heat,

although they get hotter as you go further south in terms of the amount of spice they put in it. But you get a complete different feel to the one that you get in the restaurants here, although some are good, you don't still get the same type of food when you were in south india and you were having but did you always have vegetarian curries there i think they produced vegetarian it was off banana leaves in kerala i remember eating off banana leaves with rice and no utensils just your hands um and that was i was only there a short while traveling around and i was um doing uh in the second year of my medical school had a project and then at the end travel around india but did you at that because some people even matt's quite like this sometimes

he doesn't always think a meal is a proper meal unless it's got a bit of meat at that age even were you kind of like oh i wish i had some chicken or have you always been quite accepting of food just as it is oh yeah i mean it was a bit disappointing when i was in ludiana in the medical school and the digs they just give you a pile of chapatis about three inches four inches high and some soup stuff um and there was some meat in that but when i was eating vegetarian stuff in the south it it was a good quantity it didn't worry me but so it was only short periods you see a few days here and there in each place so it wasn't as if it had a major impact so do you think that's what it is because i think that's a big part of people not wanting to move to plant bases they think it's

not going to be satiating because i feel like the meat especially in the UK meat and two veg and some potatoes is such a staple meal do you feel that you can get sufficiently full of something um I'm sure I've made you and mum like a vegan meal once when I came home from uni do you remember and it was well I'll say yeah but I mean I do I I like uh if you do a nicely balanced balanced mixture of vegetables or pulses or things together and get the flavors right, then it fills you up and it tastes nice and you don't have a problem. It's just occasionally you like a fancier steak or a nice fish and chips of resource and that's something you might want. And so I don't have a particular problem with mixing matching but i i can't see myself you know going much further than i am currently i mean i'm reasonably balanced diet and i'm doing

exercise at the milk but i like the flavor of and i haven't thought of changing from milk to be honest um although i've sampled other milk um i think armor milk i tried once as well which i'm not sure that suited my palate as much but do you think that i think the thing is it's i would definitely think that oatly in tea i can't tell that it's not milk and i think it's such an easy thing to change in terms of it's to me feels like the least drastic change that you can make and it's not about as i said it's like well maybe we'll have to do a taste test once this pandemic is over you know that when you make tea i reckon you can tell the difference if you make the tea in the pot and pour the milk in first than if you make the tea in the cup and add the milk afterwards which tastes different well which way can see in a cup

i know you do because you'll make a pot okay well if i don't i'll have two cups and put tea in one cup milk in the other and pour it across so scientifically the new scientist did something when i was a student saying how it changes the milk when you when you heat it into hot tea as opposed to pouring tea onto the milk and you get a different uh molecular change affects the taste. Really? So, I think, yeah, yeah. That's so interesting.

I never knew that. You shouldn't make coffee with boiling water, they say. It should be less than boiling. It changes the flavour. Whereas tea needs to be boiled

to get the tea leaves to elute the tea flavour from them. So, there is a difference I've read between the two. That does make sense

because I think with coffee, you burn the coffee if you do it with boiling water. Yeah, although I don't know how it works with percolated coffee or coffee grinder, whether they're different. Yeah, maybe they're not the same. Okay, I want to tell you this because I think this is interesting. I didn't know this.

So basically, you know that the new Paris Agreement, which the us has thankfully re-signed up to is that um we need to get the global warming to well below two degrees but in order for this to happen it means that our lunches and dinners should not generate a higher climate impact than 0.5 kilojoule kilograms 0.5 kg co2 emissions per meal but one portion of spaghetto lanaise has a carbon footprint of three kilograms of co2 does when you hear statistics like that like how incentivized do you feel i think because the other thing is with your generation well not to be rude but you are closer to the end than someone who's like 15. Do you think that that changes?

Yeah, when people have family, you know, you might think about your children and grandchildren and looking at the climate change, what's going on now. I mean, one of the problems is we need to sort out cows and their methane and carbon capture, which is another thing that's coming on. And there are things that may come in to mitigate that. But in terms of the the world production the difficulty is everyone probably thinks well we can do it here in england but you look at the third world countries which are generating so much of the

greenhouse gases that people feel well it's a waste of their time i think that's a lot of attitude unless everyone's doing it they feel they're not making an impact i don't think that's true i'm sure that we and also if if like the global south are the ones creating the carbon emissions it's because we consume so much in the uk and and richer countries that's produced in those places so actually there might be higher carbon emissions but it's actually because we are buying fruits vegetables and clothes from those places so actually our consumption directly impacts their co2 the consumption i'm saying is in in your own backyard i mean obviously farming with with cattle particularly around the world and it has an effect on deforestation as well if they're needing the grazing land so i mean but the states have a massive for example meat production site but we also have the same and you'd have to switch

quite a big amount of the way people eat in in the western world to make a big difference there unless you've got some other mechanism of curtailing it um obviously the interesting thing has been the reduction in emissions during the lockdowns in the cities and towns so there's less pollution in the air for health at a local level and the carbon emissions themselves will have reduced the atmospheric carbon to some degree but I don't know if that stays like that for a period where it makes a big impact in the short term. Yeah I know that is really and it does make you wonder if people I mean obviously some people have to get to work and like you drive quite far because you have to commute but in terms of people

taking really long haul flights really regularly I wonder if this will change some people's get to work and like you drive quite far because you have to commute but in terms of people taking really long haul flights really regularly i wonder if this will change some people's attitudes and realize that you know you don't there's a lot of things to be found in the comfort of your own home you don't have to go so far afield well i think that's true although i suspect in the next 10 to 15 years there will be almost carbon neutral flights if they get electric or or other forms of propulsion engines up i mean the engines are getting cleaner but there's no doubt that he throw and gatwick shut there's a massive difference around the world in all the other areas in emissions but there's implications from the people in the industry when you read the old

newspaper article that that may change and change the dynamics. It's a question of how long is this rise of one or two degrees that we're seeing going to keep going before those things kick in? And then how do you change a very big population, often who are unable to see how to purchase cheaply good food, spending money on processed and other food,

which may or may not, I'm not sure about the carbon footprint, but it's unhealthy. Obesity is a problem. I know, but that's difficult because a lot of that is tied into factors to do with socioeconomic issues and people not having a good educational baseline understanding of food that comes from a real place of privilege so we think a lot of that is we used to have it you see uh the girls did not the boys they used to have lessons in cooking i forgot what it's called now

and you know home keeping and that sort of stuff that's so sexist well it does no but that's what happened i know i know but that's how the schools run it i'm not saying it's right or wrong but but there used to be that and the boys used to go and do woodwork or something you know that's how it used to be and it was it was gender orientated but that's that's the facts of life then what i'm saying is that even if boys were doing it then nobody seems to be doing it at school now i mean even in duology we were cooking stuff to see what happened to starch and you know that sort of thing in our lessons as the whole class you do learn you do have like food tech education but it's like not everyone first of all has an access to an education that's

the first thing and um i don't know i think that's a very separate issue that's it's a very tricky place to get to because it comes down to i would say kind of government legislation not being strong enough so perhaps i think it's a price it's driven by price you see so you know if you can get a cheap takeaway or whatever drive-through meal uh you'd have to think hard if you're not educated that you can do better with a bag of rice and some vegetables and you know some mints or something whatever from the supermarket and do it at the same price. But you have to have the knowledge that you can deal with that and the time factor.

Maybe people think it's too difficult, but a lot of people prepare meals when they're not busy and put them in the freezer, and then they just use them when they need them. So you can make time-efficient use of food that way yeah that's true but then you also might have you know a single mum with four children and she probably the best option for her might just be to go to mcdonald's you know sometimes there's lots of factors when dad he used way months on business traveling around to the states and places so

mum was looking after five of us on her own around to the states and places so mom was looking after five of us on her own for weeks on end and she managed to well don't forget she had the wartime experience and being frugal but buying stuff and making things go longer distances why not waste so but she had the educational background and the experience to do it but she was typically a single mom on and off you know i wanted to go back to what you said earlier because i think it's a really common idea that you know everyone feels like oh my god it's such a big task to take on I personally don't want to go vegan so there's no point and that's how I used to view it I used to think well if I don't buy a steak from Sainsbury's that steak is still going to be on the shelf but

really the more we vote with our wallet as consumers for instance Matt and I not buying dairy milk and having oatly instead which i would say like 90 of my friends do as well we we've all kind of converted that will hugely change the um supply and demand for meat and dairy products so i think that it's more about everyone making really small changes i think even you having your vegetarian lunches is amazing if imagine if everyone in your hospital did that instead of choosing the meat option that would have a drastic a drastic impact so I think that's another problem as people see it as too big of a task to take on and that they personally can't solve it but it's more about everyone coming

together and doing a little bit to make a big change I mean they do offer in the hospitals this mixture which is which is good so it's not like school dinners you get one choice so there is one or two vegetarian dishes as well as one or two meat dishes at most canteens now so I think the hospital side of it and I imagine schools would be like the same but for individuals it depends on I mean you do see people just buying chips and putting gravy on it and walking out with a takeaway chips and gravy. And this is doctors that might be better off having something more healthy in their diet. But a lot of people do that.

They just pick and go the things that give them gratification, I suppose. But that's the thing, because this is what I was going to ask you. You've got quite a neutral, I would say, relationship with food. And I don't think you have, like when I was younger, a neutral I would say relationship with food and that I don't think you have like when I was younger I had quite difficult relationship with food and I think women in general can be more impacted by food and a lot of people eat for emotion or they eat because they're insecure about their body but you seem to look at it in a balanced way of what's healthy and what's good for me. I could eat anything and i never got overweight and i was always running around doing things so it was it was really fuel and i saw food and if it tasted

nice as well then obviously as kiddies you go for it but i mean we educated to to eat greens and everything from young so we didn't have a problem with with things that some children won't eat which is the start of maybe people getting used to veg is when you just get carrots and sprouts or boiled cabbage and if it's all overcooked and soggy then of course it puts them off and they don't then go down that route maybe as much as they might for vegetables it's interesting because i am just reading a statistic and it said 49 of men aged 45 to 75 don't consider the environmental impact of food and drinks before making a purchase but i would say that from what we've spoken about it sounds like you actually are

quite conscious conscious about it like how how do you feel the climate crisis impacts you do you see it as an emergency? Is it something you worry about? Or is it something that you've kind of become accustomed to over the years and perhaps remember fleetingly? How do you feel about it? I mean, I think it is a problem in the next decade as to whether you can make changes to prevent this weather.

Well, what we think is now climate change in the weather being quite unpredictable and quite big swings between you know heavy rain and thunderstorms and floods versus hot days um when we're growing up we did have very hot summers i remember in the 1970s and being off long holidays and droughts and things um but that's some time ago but i i think most people are aware of climate change but it's the question of whether they can change their lives because they depend on the car or the cheap second-hand car which belches out more co2 because they can't afford the new ones and certainly electric cars which are being proposed have some downsides at the moment because producing electricity has a carbon footprint and i don't know if you realize that while we're on this doing audio we're saving carbon if we did a

video um the carbon footprint using all the servers that are needed to transmit this electronically from my computer to yours, is a massive carbon footprint that's coming from people using YouTube videos and Zoom and all those things. So you're actually reducing your carbon footprint by only doing audio with me. I didn't know that until I think someone, maybe it was Matt was telling me the other day, but I never really thought about how all of the streaming services and things that we use actually obviously emit co2 but how did they is there any way that you could invent a way that they wouldn't well the thing is you've got to have computers which are generating heat and need energy so

in order to produce the electricity to run them, unless you've got nuclear energy producing it or wind farm energy, then the of that the electricity is being generated from. So it all stems, that's why electric cars overall, you know, might still, although it makes the air cleaner in terms of the cities and environment locally, I'm not sure what the sums add up to if everything's electric and then you've got to generate all that electricity and have the grids, you know, bolstered to manage it. So I don't think it's an easy answer to that but then also volcanoes can spew out as much damage you know as a year or two car emissions i think there's some natural causes as well that you can't affect but in terms of you know the

environment and eating it's a lot of it is due to the loss of the carbon sink with the denuding of the Amazon and all the stuff going on in those parts of the world. So you might be generating more, but we're also losing capture. Same with digging up the peat bogs. You're losing the carbon trapped in the peat bogs. There's issues around that. So I think it's like anything it's an equation on equilibrium between in and out and and it's a question of whether you can get the reduction fast enough and or if not

replace it with some sort of sponge to remove the the the thing and the problem with warming is of course the sea is now not absorbing as much gas as it used to so that sink is losing its capacity you actually know way more about this than i do i suppose being a medical i just read the papers and pick things up from the tv i'm interested in the scientific bits um but i haven't sort of oh hang on let me just um yeah that's fine you can do that jerry i'll bring you back in a minute all right i just on a zoom cheers uh yeah uh that's a friend of mine who i said can you come and use your analyzer on my bmw to see why a couple of bits aren't working so that i can get them fixed so um he's a local chap that's helped me with my car when i get stuck occasionally

yeah that but well you're i mean your worst thing but that's because you at my car when I get stuck occasionally. But your worst thing, that's because you at the minute can't afford to buy a new car, but how many miles had you done on your old car? Well, no, the BMW before this, from 2001 to 19, I did just over 720,000 miles on it with admittedly a couple of engine rebuilds when the garage didn't change a radiator once it did about 350 000 before the engine went and then i carried on with that until i unfortunately

went off the road for some reason either micro sleep or hit a bit of dirt and totaled it and i was on the way to see a patient i ended up spinning the car no one behind me and facing the right way on the hard shoulder but the bumper was off the wheels had see a patient. I ended up spinning the car, no one behind me, and facing the right way on the hard shoulder. But the bumper was off, the wheels had gone, all the lights had gone off the corners. So I got relayed. And then Anthony, who died, gave me a legacy for this one. So I got the next youngest version of this model, which I like.

And I'm saving the planet, you see, because I'm recycling these old cars. So I go to the Reclamation and raid old cars for bits so I got bits from my old car that I've had that fit this car so when I've lost a screw down the back of the engine when I was two in the morning trying to fix it I could find one upstairs in the mezzanine floor I built so I'm saving all this money by using all these secondhand parts you see but that's that's the thing like as you said earlier your car runs on petrol and that's obviously worse environment but money is such a big barrier for people to make sustainable changes whereas i think like that's that's why swapping something like an oat drink for milk is not as

catastrophically um large to your bank balance as something which to most people is you know inconceivably hard like most people will not in this lifetime be able to afford the new electric car that's just not accessible. I mean the obviously the age group the demographic you're looking at with me is quite different from your generation, which is more likely to make the swap. And going forward, they're more likely to have an impact if they are going towards electric car or don't even have a car if they're using public transport out of lockdown in cities, or if they're going to be more attuned to having vegetarian-type food.

I don't know whether you think our generation hasn't got enough time left to make a big difference over 40 to 70 age range or do you think that that is a bigger a bigger effect than i'm thinking if everybody in that age group did it i i think it's about just the the biggest number we can get. And I do think that obviously not everyone, but as a generalization, I think that younger people, especially people younger than me, are really engaged in the climate crisis because they've grown up with it. And also grown up with this idea, like politicians almost say that the younger generations are going to fix it. So you almost feel like the responsibility is on your shoulders. And I think that a lot of younger people might feel as though this issue was made before they were even born and they've been born into a world where now they're kind of lumbered with the responsibility of fixing

it um but i don't think of young people are you talking about you thinking if you take people from their teens to their late 20s what percentage do you think really engage with this out of the population and is it class and educational related divide as well in that so it says here that 50 of 16 to 24 year olds agree that they would consider eating more plant based food product to reduce the environmental impact while only 32 of men aged 40 to 75 would do the same um why do the ones you say 60 60 percent so they're 50 percent of 16 to 24 year olds all right so why the other way what's the reason that other 50 don't do you have anything from the survey as to why they don't is that dependent on where they're from their their ethnic background, their class, their social status?

Because 50% is still quite a big gap. Yeah, but it's not as big as 68%. No, I realize that. We've still got to double it, haven't we? I think that it would be probably down to all of the things that you said. Definitely certain religious or cultural backgrounds will impact how people eat but i think it's more about looking at the pool of people who one have access so they've got the education the privilege in terms of the monetary ability

um and then you know where they live where they have access i do think that living in london i have so much more access to buying plant-based foods but i think that's really spreading out across the board now i think that's changing i do think there used to be an element of elitism to being able to be sustainable which I hope is sort of changing as the consumer demands more I think that before it was such as say in North India a lot more meat was eaten than the South India so there are populations that tend to be a bit more skewed historically but this is again i guess going back to the problem of accessibility because what's happened is years ago you would have eaten things seasonally so for instance you wouldn't i don't even know if you would have had asparagus but now i can buy asparagus all year round whereas it's

probably only in season for a few months of the year and i guess with the rise of people flying foods from abroad accessibility to other food those things that would normally have been common gone with the seasons and probably a bit like you're saying where certain areas it's the same in Italy where we go in Italy it's a very mountainous region when I go with Matt and they eat a lot of goat and like things from the mountains whereas if you go to the places like um what's it called what's the little island sardinia they just eat fish whereas we don't seem to have that as much in the uk sourcing regional seasonal food we eat things from all over the place all the time so it does have to be a conscious

sort of unlearning of accessibility more than animals you see that's the problem because if you're breeding animals then you don't have the same swing in seasons yeah but it's the same with vegetables because you just import them from countries that have them in season at that point in time i know but i'm saying if you didn't have vegetables imported and they weren't growing then it may i don't know if it in fact affected the amount of meat you ate in that period because there's nothing else oh yeah potatoes maybe i'm sure it definitely would but that's the problem I think we almost need to go back a bit and how we view food and rather than being like I can have whatever I want whenever I want it which I think my generation is more likely to do than you would for instance

in a funny way you're much better at eating like you said you buy whatever's on offer that's actually really good because you're buying up the stuff that might go to landfill otherwise which is sustainable in lots of ways um whereas i might you know go and buy an avocado and something else which has been flown over from god knows where and has a bigger carbon footprint so there is definitely lots of kind of variation in in how your diet impacts co2 emissions but i think that single or shopping on your own. There's always two of everything. I find that a real nuisance. So you end up having waste or you end up buying something in a pack of two and freezing it and using it later. But there's not enough single products.

And, of course, they're all packaged with plastic that you can't open to add to the fun. Well, that's the thing that I think is going to change because lots of people have been campaigning and they have done. I know in lots of supermarkets now there is the option i will always try to buy the option that is not packaged because there's so much plastic and obviously i never buy a shopping bag now do you always have a reusable shopping bag oh i had a few that i just keep going even they've got holes in you know until they fall apart um but um they are the so-called bags for life and if they do break they give you another one of course that's the irony of it but paper bags now are being used for vegetables a lot in

the supermarkets so you're a bit like the americans when you think what they walk around with these funny square paper bags with no handles at the top yeah that's right um so i think that that is a change that's coming and to be honest the five piano bag stopped a lot of people buying them because psychologically had a big that's so really interesting though isn't it it really has an impact on me i never want to buy a bag so i often will walk home and have to bring the doorbell with my nose because i'm carrying everything with my hands and i can't open the door well i won't if i go into the shop and i've not brought a bag and it's in the boot did you you want a bag? If I can carry it on the top of the Times newspaper rolled up

and carry the milk under the other hand with everything under the arm and manage to open the car door, then I won't get a bag. I'll just take the chance if I can get it to the car without dropping eggs on the floor or something. So, yeah, I did that today. In fact, I forgot my mask and they had a mask in Waitrose they could give me because I changed between cars and that and a mask in Waitrose they could give me because I changed, you know, between cars and that. I didn't have it with me.

But I think people are averse to little changes. So if you see a penny off petrol, you'll drive probably at the cost of the petrol to save the money that you're spending to get there sometimes. So I think certain things logically have an impact on people you just got to know which buttons to press as to what will make people change their mind so whether it's people thinking ahead for their future generations as a means of trying to get people motivated to change I don't know so do you think that you felt do you feel now that maybe you would consider like with mum for instance thinking about doing a meat-free day on a weekend like do you think that maybe it's something that you would be happy to do that yeah yeah I mean I don't mind having a

vegetable lasagna or you know or a salad mix lots of nice um you nice nuts and bits and pieces in it, walldorf or whatever, possibly with a bit of fish occasionally with it or something like that. There are times we do that, but other times we will have bacon, eggs, beans and mushrooms and whatever as a brunch and you'll still do that.

But I think it's just a question of I'm only home a couple of days a week now with mum away so she tends to want to cook something maybe she's not eating much in the week on her own so it tends to be more her choice of what she wants to eat but I think that's fine also having your special meals because for instance Matt and I do a roast every weekend and that always means having either a chicken or some pork or lamb and so you are having a big cut of meat but that becomes but this is another thing i imagine just quickly that i remember mum saying this is i guess when you're growing up meat was way more luxury and this is how i've tried to start shopping with meat is thinking i'm gonna get a really nice piece of meat and we're gonna

have that on sunday rather than you can buy these. We always have a Sunday roast, yeah. But would meat have been much more of a luxury back then? Because I feel like now you can get such cheap cuts of meat that you could have a steak every day. You can buy those pound steaks from Sainsbury's or whatever. And that changes people's… Yeah, I don't think we had expensive meat. No, I think we had a lot of eggs as we were growing up and we had probably mincemeat with a lot of stuff and chicken a lot.

But I don't remember actually having steaks except when dad came back from America or anything what we would have termed you know expensive then it would have been shoulders of lamb or sausages you know things that were not in themselves that expensive and you should get five kilos and fed with them quite easily. I don't mean expensive I mean did was meat more of a luxury in those days than people view it now? Because people are quite throwaway about food because you can kind of get a lot of things a lot easier. Do you think that...

Yeah, I don't... I'm not sure. I don't get the feeling that when we were growing up, because when parents had come through the the sort of war and the rationing and it'd been decades or so since so as we grew up i think dad's income was such that they could get a reasonable balanced diet um you know for the five of us even even though we had free school meals and free school milk um i don't remember being lacking in anything but then it was whatever we ate was quite normal then probably our peer group so we weren't struggling but we didn't do any exotic stuff you know like

avocado smashed avocados and all that sort of thing yeah well i think that that's i think that perhaps one of the things that my generation need to do is look at certain foods as more of a luxury so not necessarily buy an avocado every day because you've got is look at certain foods as more of a luxury so not necessarily buy an avocado every day because you've got to look at the sort of mileage that that's come from and then the small changes that your generation could be is you know cutting down as you do on your lunches and maybe having oatly instead of milk because I think let me find the statistics on milk it says that um so the uk produces 15 billion liters of milk per year and the average brit consumes 70 liters of milk a year so that's roughly 1.4 liters a week

um and then oat oat drink only on the other hand generates 73 less co2 than cow's milk i mean there needs to be a driver to to motivate the big companies to see it not as profit from those sort of foods, same with alcohol, you know, and the high markup and the profit they can get from that. So I think it's got to be driven by the carrot, pardon the pun, of economics. Yeah. As far as the stick of the downside of health and climate change effects well i think that you made a good point there which is what i always come back to as well as i think that the small sustainable swaps like the things that i've made like getting a veg subscription box which i actually think saves money because you don't have any veg waste and drinking oatly and having like you do a vegetarian lunch i think that's amazing but fundamentally a lot of those changes need to

come from legislation and that's where i think the government's really failing us because you know if there was a way of implementing better change for people so they had access to buying the correct things with the education we wouldn't have to be so down on the individual which i think is what's wrong and corrupt a lot of the time well you know that of course there's lobbying by big companies to to affect the laws made in the country everywhere in the world in fact so lobbying by big big companies big industry uh would have to change because that influences decision making at the top so i think global warming is probably having a an impact in people's psyche but it's still got inertia in the decision making but having said that there's dates now for when we're meant to go all electric if they can

get the infrastructure there and and there are moves to reduce you know the type of airplanes that produce more co2 than currently doing getting. So the trouble is the time it takes to reskill and rejig industry to meet the volumes. But with individuals, it's a question of are people in their echo chambers on Facebook or Twitter and not looking outside and how you change that because if people aren't aware, then how do you educate them to change or what's going to make them change and that's probably the difficult bit if you could get a platform and an influencer such as yourself maybe at your age group but I don't know how many people

in my age group will be influenced by listening to podcasts or going on to Twitter or Facebook it's funny you say that because this campaign by Oatly is called Help Dad and they've actually got the website, let me, it's oatly.com forward slash help dad and on there they have statistics,

tips and like recipes and things and it's a bit tongue-in-cheek, Help Dad, it's just a bit of a joke but the point is that me and you having this conversation

will hopefully encourage everyone listening that if they've never broached this subject. Maybe I should put this subject my lockdown meals for them to look at oh my god you can you can definitely i mean i put them on my story and everyone thought it was hilarious but some look nice some don't look nice but they taste fine it's just that i don't often plate them up like janie me oliver i just put them on the plate when it's done because i'm on my own and whatever but to be fair i'm actually very impressed with um how good you are I wasn't expecting you and you're very knowledgeable so this was actually a lot easier chat I wasn't sure if you were gonna be resistant to it but

it sounds like you're actually very open-minded when it comes to oh no I'm not and I haven't challenged you on topics that you do your other podcasts on so I'm giving you an easy ride here oh well thanks very much that so that basically it's funny you said that because the idea is that me about how your generation to find out obviously people of my generation listen to the podcast so the only concept is that after us talking about it our generation can then go away and talk to the people in our lives who perhaps because I do think social media is a massive driver in social change. And a lot of the things that I've learned about social systems or racism or feminism have come from listening to other people online. And I do think that your demographic

obviously doesn't have that same level of interaction with, you know, certain social movements via Instagram and things like that so maybe it needs to be an intergenerational conversation in the home or around the dinner table or on Zoom. Yeah well of course historically people might just watch the telly and there was only two or three stations to watch now with Netflix and other things and all the choices you have I don't know whether people and less adverts depending on what you're getting you don't get so many adverts now the adverts were negative in a sense pushing towards the bad options but whether people are watching things and avoiding adverts because the technology you

can actually cut them out you probably won't get through the those sort of channels that you used to in the old day and not many people read newspapers like we do now in the same way. So it's all based on social media, probably, and maybe a few influences on telly or these food programs might have an effect, but I'm not sure how big that is. I think that definitely Twitter, for me, is where I get most of my news because you get a culmination then of everyone sharing different articles from almost every newspaper, and I feel like it's quite quite well rounded rather than i've never bought a physical newspaper i don't think have you gone on to wikipedia i don't use it but that's a source where people

put a lot of information on i wonder if wikipedia has got a big following whether something on that i don't think but i think that wikipedia also it's not for profit i think they're done by they don't have advertising but they also can be edited by anyone so wikipedia also it's not for profit i think they're done by they don't have advertising but they also can be edited by anyone so wikipedia is not that reliable because anyone can go onto a wikipedia page and edit it but then people correct it and put references so but it is hard work to pick out yeah you know i imagine but i think the majority of people get information through sharing i think the most impactful way to learn is always through someone that you respect or know or talk about like we've had quite heated

discussions at christmas time about difficult discussions and i think that that can change yes i mean i think uh talking and understanding different viewpoints and not being in a bubble is probably the only way to break the cycle. Education and finance, I think, are the two key things that are going to change large sections of society. The financial bit has really got to be sorted first, I think, because people are trying to make ends meet. Time pressures and two people working and now you've got the extra burden of homeschooling if you've got children and

everything else it's even more difficult yeah I agree well this has been such a good chat dad I'm really pleased that you came on I actually feel like I've learned more from you than you have for me well I hoped I'd been alive a bit longer I might have picked up a few tips so when are we going to be expecting your cookbook then well I'll have to work on it when I'm not too tired yes I started the first chapter but I've only I've got lots of pictures but I'll have to work on it and see if I can come out with something well we will meanwhile i've got a few things in the car oh yeah well we'll pay for the car hopefully that does fix because you'll be

really upset if that doesn't but um thank you so much for joining me did you have a fun time yeah no i enjoyed it thank you and uh you've done very well with your recent uh sojourn on bbz2 and other things so your name gets dropped by me occasionally when i say do you ever listen to a podcast and so some people uh might be picking up more than you think so uh you might you might get more interest than you expect from different sources thanks so much i appreciate it so time for supper thank you everyone for listening as well you gotta say bye now bye bye bye everybody So time for supper. Thank you everyone for listening as well. You've got to say bye now. Bye. Bye.

Bye-bye everybody.