Between Two Waters by Pam Brunton review - ' lucid on complex problems'

Using her experience of setting up a restaurant on the shores of Loch Fyne as a jumping off point, Pam Brunton’s new book puts food at the centre of a spiral which takes in politics, economics and identity, writes Susan Mansfield

In 2015, chef Pam Brunton and her partner Rob opened Inver, on the shores of Loch Fyne, which would go on to win a clutch of awards and a Green Michelin Star. However, before she moved into cooking, Brunton had dropped out of a philosophy degree, and has an MSc in Food Policy, and this book, billed as part-memoir, is an exercise in thinking deeply about food, culture and history.

The memoir component is fairly small. Brunton paints a vivid picture of her arrival at Inver, having worked at high-end restaurants in London and Belgium, ploughing “every last penny and scrap of sanity” into the business. But this is not a book about the success of Inver. Its mainstay is in much bigger questions.

Her stated aim for the restaurant is to serve “modern Scottish food”, and the book begins with an interrogation of what that means. In the early weeks, she received a memorable phone call asking if they served “normal Scottish food, like lasagne or fish and chips”. What, then, is Scottish food? How have our ideas of it been formed? And how has that, in turn, formed us?

Loch Fyne PIC: John Devlin

She then reaches further and deeper, delving into history from feudal society through the industrial revolution to modernity. Food, she contends, should not be studied in isolation, it connects to economics, land use, the environment, society, community, identity. It is a powerful part of our memories and informs our sense of who we are.

It’s a wide-ranging and knowledgable book. Brunton does economics, from Adam Smith to Gramsci, explains how Cartesian dualism shaped a formative understanding of our relationship with the natural world which is only now being overturned. Sometimes she finds inventive ways to survey a subject: her father is her guide to exploring the traditional urban working-class diet; she looks at global food economy through the lens of sweetcorn.

She’s lucid on some of the complex problems: why are rainforests being destroyed to plant soya-based crops to feed animals? Why is wild foraging encouraged, while the Scottish landscape continues to disfigured by the way sporting estates are managed? Why do we, as a nation, waste as much as one third of our food?

Brunton employs a range of styles. Her careful explanatory tone sometimes gives way to poetic description and personal experience; there are even occasional recipes. The last chapter looks at the fascinating subject of gender in the kitchen, though it feels like a bit of step-change from the thesis in the rest of the book.

Much of the factual content here is not new, but it is carefully and helpfully summarised. Most interesting is the way she puts food at the centre of a spiral which takes in politics, economics and identity, suggesting that perhaps, after all, we are what we eat.

Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape and the Modern Cook, by Pam Brunton, Canongate, £20. Pam Brunton is appearing at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 24 August.