Our Common Ground screening panel discussion: the full transcript

On Wednesday 23 July 2025, BRiMM’s name could be seen in lights (well, retro black lettering) at the Curzon Soho, where we hosted our inaugural screening and talk for our members and collective. The film? Common Ground, the excellent follow-up to 2020’s Kiss the Ground, the Woody Harrelson-narrated documentary, but this time Woody and the filmmakers – plus Laura Dern, Donald Glover and others – are heading to Congress. The audience? Guests including Melanie Rickey from The Enoughness podcast, model and sustainable fashion advocate Brett Staniland and fashion designer Alice Holland-Lu were in attendance, plus many more loyal BRiMM faces.

We followed the film with a panel discussion covering everything from prisons to polyester between four key voices – all of whom are pioneering regenerative practices in their own businesses. They included:
* Our host and one of our first Journal authors, environmental innovator Mark Shayler
* Founder and creative director of fashion label AKYN, Amy Powney 
* Head of growth at Sitopia Farm and sustainable garden designer, Sarah Alun-Jones 
* Head of operations at Citizens of Soil (as found in our Pantry Essentials Reset Box), Natalie Williams

Here’s the thoughtful, surprising and inspiring conversation in full…

James Haycock [BRiMM’s founder]: Thank you. Hope you all enjoyed that. We're now delighted to have a fantastic panel. A good friend of mine, Mark Shayler, is going to lead the panel. Mark and I met in a field in Wales a number of years ago, and then reconnected in the same field a few years later, and kept in contact since. I'm never too sure how to describe what he does, because he does lots of things, but he works in this field of innovation and sustainability, working with brands and groups of people to help them think about where they're going and what they can do to think about their impact on the planet and also their positive growth. So he was an obvious choice to host this panel. Thank you, Mark. I'll let him introduce the rest of the panel. 

Mark: How are you all, happy? What did you all eat today? Anything regenerative, degenerative, healthy? I'm really excited to have this conversation for lots and lots of reasons. I've worked in regenerative ag‘ for about the last, well, I mean, I guess in reality, about the last 20 years: setting up permaculture groups in Bradford and kind of food supply groups at a community basis. More latterly, with Waitrose and Gabe on regenerative agriculture within that large supermarket. So it's really serious. We've got to sort this stuff out, and we've got an amazing panel to have a conversation with. So I'll introduce them. They can come up and introduce themselves in a minute. But we've got Amy Powney, British fashion designer known for her work in sustainable and ethical fashion. Amy, come and grab a seat under your name. Sarah Alun-Jones, who's loved gardens and being outside for as long as she can remember. And really weirdly, really weirdly, used to be the babysitter for my kids, and neither of us knew that, even when we were talking to each other. And then we did the ‘where did you grow up?’ ‘Carlton near Market Bosworth’, ‘Oh, really?’ And then we worked it all out. And I texted my wife, and it's definitely you, yeah! How weird is that? So Sarah, welcome. And we've got Natalie Williams, head of operations and finance, Citizens of Soil, everyone's favourite olive oil Company. Welcome.

So before we take any questions, we're going to have about 25 minutes of conversation between us. Then we're going to open it up to you, because you don't want to hear us all the time, right? We want to hear your questions, but do you want to each introduce yourselves and maybe say who you are, what you do, and then give me what your childhood tasted of? I know, weird, but it might be interesting, right? And we'll start with you, Amy, because you're next to me.

Amy: So, I'm Amy. I'm the Creative Director of a fashion brand, well, previously Mother of Pearl, but I’ve just launched a new brand, AKYN. We focus on regeneration, using natural regenerative fibres, I’m wearing one of my t-shirts appropriately! It says ‘soil, not oil’. What did my childhood taste of? Ironically, I grew up on a farm, off-grid, with no water, no electricity or anything. But actually, my childhood tasted of Gino Ginelli and Viennetta, because my parents, even though we worked on the farms, fed us terribly, and we just ate frozen food. My mum said that, actually, she would never cook food. She just ‘assembled it’. 

Mark: I love that, Viennetta, though it's the crisp shatter, isn't it? It's not just the taste, it's the texture. Okay, Sarah, tell us about you. What do you do? Why do you matter? And what did your childhood taste of? 

Sarah: I'm Sarah. I'm an organic grower and landscape designer. I'm currently on maternity leave from a job at Sitopia Farm, which is a two and a half acre no-dig Market Garden in South London. So I've been an organic grower for about the last 13 years. I grew up in a small village, babysitting his children, and yeah, did something else. I was a filmmaker, and then I found it really uninspiring and purposeless, and kind of found my way back to growing, and I've done it ever since. And before working at Sitopia, I helped to set up a project called Grow. Which is a community farm, six-acre farm that's based on a state secondary school in Barnet that grows food for state schools and teaches young people about where their food comes from. And my childhood – it's funny when you said that, I was like, instantly, know the answer: it's broad beans. I always think there's that, you know that thing, like a madeleine, which is the thing that takes you back to a memory, and broad beans just, they're my favourite thing to grow, and it's always the first thing that comes in in the season, and they just take me back to my granddad's garden. He used to have fresh broad beans and put bacon dripping on them, and we'd have them with a cup of tea and a slice of really processed white bread.

Mark: Do you take the skin off the inner broad bean? 

Sarah: Interesting. I saw this as a poll recently on Instagram. Like, I never take them off until maybe, like, the last couple of weeks of the season when they're a bit tough, they can get a bit leathery. I’m of the opinion that life's too short to peel a broad bean, personally.

Mark: Right? I do think you're right. Natalie Williams, tell us a bit about you, what you do, why you matter, and what did your childhood taste of?

Natalie: Hello. I'm from Citizens of Soil, I look after operations. So if you don't know us, we're an extra virgin olive oil brand, and we work with regenerative and organic farmers all across the Med and one from South Africa, which I always don't want to forget. My mum will murder me for this getting out, but she used to say ‘it's Pop Pop Dinner tonight’: lots of ready meals. It's vastly improved since then. I work with a very small team, and they're all super feedy. Imogen, who's here, she's basically a chef, so it's improving. But I've come from a ready-meal type environment up north, but it's getting there. It's getting there. 

Mark: So who taught you to cook when you when you left?

Natalie: I mean, the team will say that I'm probably not as bad as I make out, but I think I've worked in other food companies, and it sort of seeps in, the idea that it does generally taste better if you make it yourself. And I'm getting there slowly, but surely, but the rest of the team are much better than me, for sure.

Mark: I love that. Sarah. I'm really interested in granddad. I'm really interested because when I have this conversation with people, it's normally not about growing the broad beans. It's normally about time spent with grandma or granddad or mum or dad or whoever. Those lessons that the previous generations have taught us, they rest in us somewhere. We can find the half-life of those somewhere. When you explain what you do to him, is he still alive? Is still with us? 

Sarah: He's not. 

Mark: How long ago did he die?

Sarah: 10 years ago. 

Mark: Okay. But when you talk about food, when you talked about food with him, was there ever any like, little, ‘yeah, that started in my greenhouse. You owe me.’ Was there?

Sarah: Yeah, I think so. So, my son's middle name is Gwyn, which is after him. So he was really like – I think actually, I didn't realise when he was alive, but he was the reason why I do this. He was a teacher. And he also was a food grower. He worked on the railways in South Wales. And him and his his boss, used to, they used to grow food on the side of the railways in Cwmbran. And he started school gardens in his school in Cwmbran, in this really quite grotty bit of South Wales. And he just had that joy of food, and I think that really translated. He had a story I enjoy about him which is that he grew carnations, and he grew them for my grandma, and she had them in her wedding bouquet, and then they took cuttings from them and made new plants. And both my mum and my auntie had them in their wedding bouquets. But he was just a very wise man. That was probably because he was so in touch with the natural world. And, yeah, good guy. 

Mark: Thank you. And Amy, who taught you to cook, who taught you to grow, who taught you to fashion things?

Amy: Well, my mum ‘assembled’ food, as I mentioned, so I definitely didn't get cooking experience from them. I had to learn how to cook myself, actually, completely. We actually grew up in a piece of green belt in a barn, essentially, so we had to live in a caravan. Watching the film, it sort of triggers quite a lot of emotions, actually, because we worked for local farmers who were wealthy, and they were always, you know, white, it's so true. And we were, you know, the people that worked on the farm, and there were a lot of immigrants that came to our village to work on the farms as well. But it really was back then, if you were a farmer, you were wealthy. It's changed a lot, I think, since then. And so I actually spent my summers in the fields, picking cabbages. You know, in summer holidays, I'd be doing bedding plants in the greenhouse. Christmas, I'd be making holly wreaths for like, you know, 5p a wreath or something, working at 11. Pretty sure that was slave labour. Yeah, and yeah, I guess I learned to grow through that. But weirdly, it was so industrial, it wasn't rooted and connected. So like, for me, it was like a supply chain, you know? It really was just this, like treadmill, and I, I didn't realize what I was doing. It was just, it was corporate, you know, and it's only like, as a grown woman and a mother now that I have this, like, unprecedented longing to go and start growing food. And I think that's me tapping in, you know, learning a lot, my maternal instinct coming through. And even though I've known how to do it, it never felt relevant. And so I think once I do start doing it, all that stuff I actually was doing back then will come into fruition. But it just didn't even occur to me that I was a grower, you know, because it just felt so industrial.

Sarah: Yeah, I think that's really interesting, because I think there's a lot of farms that I grew up around. It's very similar, because it's not, it's in an industrial context. So actually, they are still quite divorced from the natural world. My best friend, when I was a kid, they had a dairy farm, and I used to spend lots of time on the farm, and they used to buy all their food in Costco, but we used to have peaches and ice cream for pudding, and horrible cereal for breakfast, but there would be a pail of milk that had come straight from the cows, and it was this really weird disconnect. And they couldn't really afford to buy their own food, but they lived in this beautiful, beautiful farm.

Amy: We milked the goat before we went to school and drank the goat's milk, but everything we ate was just pre-packed from Farm Foods, which is like the northern equivalent to Iceland, because we didn't, my parents didn't understand nutrition. We hadn't grasped the concept of what we were doing. And I think in the industrialization had hit in so much, and I think everybody in the 80s, so it was absolutely brilliant, because it was just convenience and it was easy, and working mums could just feed their kids in like five minutes. 

Mark: There was a really big freeing of women from domestic chores when processed food came. And you can, you can see why. I remember my mum. I'm a lot older than you, I'm 56, but I remember my mum kind of discovering Findus crispy pancakes and these, and, you're all going ‘horrible, but I'll have one’, right? And, and it kind of freed her from servitude, so she could go and work for somebody else. It was a really interesting time. When it comes to you [Natalie], how does fat fit in, and how has fat changed over the last 30 years? Because, or no, go back further, 50 years: when I was growing up, the only olive oil in our house was bought by my nan to baste herself with when she went on the beach in Swanage.

Natalie: Some customers do that. They do all sorts with oil. We get some very odd emails.

Mark: It's really weird, but we cooked in lard. We cooked in ghee, to a degree, Ilived very close to Leicester. So, what's really interesting is: how has fat changed, and what impact has that change had upon soil?

Natalie: From the olive oil perspective, just in olive oil, I think it came from a really intense farming. So a lot of our farms that are now, well, almost all of them are owned, or 50%, by a woman, but they've inherited them from their fathers, mostly fathers, but they haven't necessarily been well farmed previously. So olive oil in itself hasn't always been a ‘good fat’, so to speak, although there's obviously good and bad in everything, I think fat, more generally speaking, has almost got a bad reputation. There's so much good to fat, especially in olive oils, ghee, butter, everything. There's a place for almost all foods. We don't want to say that one is better than the other, but I think there's a lot in terms of what people have been eating, sort of in processed fats. So even your butter, your margarine, seed oils. Are our seed oils finding their way into your olive oils, and things like that. I mean, all of ours are extra virgin olive oil, but there's a place for virgin olive oil in the world. There's probably a small place for olive oil that is processed, but that's a little bit more complex. But, yeah, fat is a very, very large area to cover. Extra virgin olive oil is, generally speaking, definitely getting there, to a good place again, at least the ones that we buy.

Mark: It's the finest, I have it in my coffee, weirdly. I know. So, Amy, Common Ground, which we've just seen, focuses on farming for food and being able to feed ourselves, but many of the same principles apply to fibers and fabric. How does regenerative agriculture fit into the future of fashion. There's lots of eff's in that.

Amy: Also that fat conversation was really triggering when you work in fashion, because, of a whole different principle. So, yeah, I think with agriculture, you know, field to table is such a common narrative we understand it. My mum might not have so much when she was buying convenience food. But, you know, the reality is that, you know, we get produce in and they've still got dirt on them, if you're buying them well. So consumers have a real connection to the field when they're eating their food, a visual representation and understanding – all the marketing is, you know, around that. But in fashion, we've completely just, you know, absolutely voided the back end of anything to do with supply chains, mostly because it's filthy and corrupt and unethical. And so you just see this glossy marketing campaign with very skinny women and people have completely forgotten where their fibers come from, and in natural fibers, that's either the ground for crops, so that's cotton and hemp, for instance. It's animals, if it's leather or if it's wool. Trees make your viscose, your cellulose fibers. And you know, silk comes from a worm, essentially. And they have fossil fuels, which make up all the polyester, which is the largest fiber pool that we have to date. And I think there's just like a giant disconnect. 

And also when it comes to the climate conversation, you know, government, government and leaders – you know, I did a TED talk on this – people just go, oh, fashion. That's like a silly girl’s little industry over there. And actually, all the same things that we talk about, which are the big contributors to climate change, fossil fuels, that's exactly where polyester comes from, agriculture, and the impact on the soil is exactly where your cotton comes from. And I should have come prepared with the statistic, I can't remember it, but cotton farming takes up an obscene amount of land use. And when we talk about agriculture, we just simply talk about food, but actually, cotton is one of the most destructive, and it's taking up a huge amount of our land mass, and then we have a lot of animal welfare issues and things like that, so it's just a giant disconnect. 

And all the same big players in climate change are actually where your clothes come from, and all the same issues that we're talking about in agriculture are exactly where your clothes come from. But people just like, if you ask, I asked my office, once ‘do you know where silk comes from?’ And almost none of them knew. And this is in fashion, you know? I mean, obviously they weren't necessarily all in design, but you know, I think if you ask a kid, where do your clothes come from, they'll just say, the shop. And whereas if you ask them where food comes from, I think for the most part, people have connected that. So it's just this, yeah, a huge, kind of hidden back-end to essentially what is exactly the same conversation as this.

Mark: It is. It's really fascinating. And there's a company called Howies, who are based in Carmarthen, and they used to make a nice organic jean. And the label was massive on the inside, and it said, ‘100% cotton, 73% true’. Our jeans contain organic cotton, indigo dye. Other jeans contain all kinds of stuff: aldehydes, benzene in there. There's a whole load of stuff. And then right at the bottom, it said, you sit in your jeans for eight hours a day. And we all know how nicotine patches work. I didn't buy non-organic jeans ever again. 

Amy: And also, you say ‘organic cotton’ and people are so confused about ‘what does that even mean?’ Because they understand organic produce and consuming it, it's affecting my body. But what do you mean? You know, I put this on, and there's actually zero official data or research out there on what – your skin is your biggest organ. So we actually have no idea right now what synthetics are doing; what we're absorbing. Microplastics, which shed from polyester in your washing machine. It's in your water. It's in placentas, it's in our children. It's all over our body, and it’s coming from washing and synthesizing natural fabrics as well. It's a giant web and very undisclosed and undiscussed. 

Mark: Are we all going to be wearing hemp again? That's what I want.

Amy: Oh, we use hemp. We only use four fibers, and one of them is hemp.

Mark: It's beautiful, isn't it? And nettle as well. There's a whole load of stuff that we could develop there. Sarah, the film talks about rebuilding our relationship with soil: from a Sitopia perspective, how do we begin to rebuild that relationship, maybe at a city or at a policy level, not just on farms? You can see it on farms, but if I'm sat in Victoria Park village, which is often, how do I begin to rebuild that relationship?

Sarah: Yeah. So I think if I answer that first of all with how small farms could be part of that. So I really, I know that I'm biased, but I do think that food and farming is really like a huge answer to the climate crisis. Because, as you say, it's a really easy way to connect everybody to the natural world. And you know, I really do believe that all of the problems that we're facing at the minute from the climate crisis, mental health crisis, obesity, everything, all comes down to a fundamental disconnection from the natural world, which has started in the industrial revolution and has, like permeated into every facet of modern life. And the first part of it is understanding how disconnected we are and starting to reconnect. And I think that local food, small, resilient farms and local food systems can do all of that. So you've got short supply chains where you're getting well grown food with not many food miles. You can, like, eyeball your producer. You can meet them at your local farmers’ market. You can also do education. You can have community volunteering, which, you know, for people who are struggling with their mental health or don't feel the connection, can be hugely life-changing. And also, obviously they're doing all the great bits for biodiversity and all the rest of it. So that's the kind of idealistic answer that small farms are the answer.

In reality, it's basically impossible to make a small farm viable for many reasons. Most small farms, Sitopia, every farm, bar one that I've ever worked on, is too small to get any government subsidy. There's all sorts of biases in the kind of sustainable farming initiatives that are biased to larger farms. And so basically, they don't get any subsidy, which means that the food then becomes expensive, which means that it becomes only affordable to people who can afford it, and that shouldn't be the case. Obviously, organic shouldn't be a privilege. It should be the way that everything's grown. Side note, I would also say that, though regenerative is really great, I think in the UK, there's no certification, so anyone can say that they're regenerative, and you can be putting glyphosate absolutely everywhere. So I think, though it's a really good way for mainstream farming to be changing, just be careful, because it's a bit of a wild west at the minute, and anyone can say they're regenerative, and there's no checks and balances. Whether something is organic is the only thing that's actually certified anyway. 

Mark: And we'll come back to that. That's really interesting, yeah, but I won't interrupt you again.

Sarah: In terms of like, how can we actually make it viable? We need subsidy. We need the government to support good farming. And then also, I think a huge part of it is public procurement. So hospitals, schools, prisons, is a giant part of where food is coming from, where food is going and could have such a transformative effect on the school system, the prison system, the health system. You know, who's ever eaten hospital food? It's not healing in any way. And actually, prisons in the UK used to grow about 70% of their own food. We used to have loads of prison farms all across the country, and that's a huge thing that could be used, but the public procurement process is so complicated that it always basically has to go to the cheapest provider. So, yeah, we need a bit of a rethink.

Mark: So lots of those procurement rules work against us. And living in Bradford all those years ago and setting up small farms and kind of guerrilla gardening I was involved with, tangentially involved with Incredible Edible, where I started in Calderdale in Halifax, was amazing, but trying to get the council to take that food was that actually impossible? You just had to smuggle it in, which felt really, really, really weird. But I mean, Regenified are offering accreditation here, but there's no one ensuring that or asking for that. The ASA, the Advertising Standards Authority, are really hot on this at the moment, though, so all hope is not lost. They are going to double down on claims. But the problem is, there's nothing to measure those claims against. It’s a really fascinating opportunity. And small farms are I think really interesting. I buy my milk from a vending machine, which feels not close to the farmer at the end of the farmer's track

Sarah: That’s good for the farmer, though. 

Mark: They love it, because they're making money while they sleep, because I always forget until about 10 at night and then go and buy, like, three, three litres of milk or whatever. Really fascinating. Thank you. I really enjoyed that. And then when it comes to, Natalie, when it comes to the way that you tell stories around taste and why you're building an art and an artisan into it. Are you able to get consumer, which is a horrible word, or customer interest in what you're doing? Because there's this kind of like flavour and foodie element to what you do. Is that another hook?

Natalie: Yeah, I mean Sarah, who's one of the founders, so Sarah and Michael, are a married couple. Sarah is the marketing genius behind the company, but ultimately, taste is at the top of the list of our products. So even if we have the most sustainable, ethical product, if it doesn't taste good, people won't buy it. And we believe it is worth every penny that you pay for our product. Our farmers work incredibly hard. We go out and visit them and see them, and it is a really, really, really difficult job. We have a lot of weight on our shoulders to make sure we communicate that to our customers. So I think what really verifies it for us is when we get reviews and they say, ‘Oh, I've just got Anna's oil’, because every bottle that we have has the grower’s name printed on it. If you're part of the club, we give you a little background on them, how they got into farming, and a recipe that they like, usually.

But really this isn't about us. We're not farmers, we try and tell their story and bring them in as much as possible, but the customers come back for taste. Second to that is really the connection to the farmer, and they refer to ‘Mariah’, and ‘when’s Anna’s oil coming back? You haven't bought enough of it’, and all of those questions. But the marketing side is super, super important, and we always bring the farmers to the forefront with that. With anything that we do. 

Mark: The stories pop out. You know, you pick up one of your products and you're reading about this person's life.

Natalie: And they're all so different as well, which makes our lives easier, because you're not telling the same story there. Some of them are scientists that moved back from the city, and some of them have stayed for their family. So yeah, there's so many different interesting stories there. 

Mark: And how did you cope when there was a big old oil shortage, I think, two, two years ago now: prices went sky high, etc, and we all paid too little for food. Weirdly, there’s a whole other conversation we can have – but how did you cope when you were sourcing from women-owned farms, or 50% women-owned farms. How did you deal with the supply issue?

Natalie: So our sort of like tagline to the company is ‘turning a commodity into a community’, basically as a very quick snapshot of olive oil. It is intensively farmed, and you are paid based on weight, not the quality of it, anything like that. So farmers aren't incentivised to make better. They're incentivised to make the most. So back in the ’23 harvest, when globally, it was down, and in Spain and Greece in particular, which are the largest producers, that caused the market to explode. Basically, there was more demand than supply. We already pay significantly more than commodity prices for our oil. I think that year, we paid maybe 40, 45% more than commodity rates. So actually, I mean, we were much smaller back then as well. We could get oil very easily because we'd already built relationships with our farmers. They already knew that they were going to get paid more than commodity rates.

But I suppose, actually what it did create is some awareness, because all the other prices shot up – of ‘actually, maybe this is what your oil should be costing you’, because you've got to think of it like wine and terroir. It takes so much effort and so much work just for one harvest. So if you think you're buying extra virgin olive oil and it's five or six pounds, you've probably got some questions around what products are in there, what sort of farming it took to get that product at that price. 

Mark: I agree completely, and I think it was also a good lesson in scarcity surplus and how harvests vary and when they fail. Why did they fail? And I'm not saying it was a climate change driven problem, but as we see acidification of sea water, that changes the way the fish are caught. And as we see desertification of Spain and Greece, increasingly we’re going to see crop failure. And it's kind of, it's not a good reminder, it's a dreadful reminder. But maybe it wakes people up to the fact that what they're eating is grown. It all comes from the soil. Natalie, what does regeneration mean to you personally, as a present, human being, rather than as a business? 

Natalie: It's a big question. So I think actually that, before I get on to that, the certification element is actually something we're looking at right now. So we're organically certified for a lot of our oils, our farmers are sort of in the process of becoming certified, if not, because there isn't something yet that we found that will work for all of our farmers, it's quite a difficult thing to attach to, so we don't print that. We don't use it in our marketing because that wouldn't be correct to do so.

I suppose, for me personally, I think we've revisited a few of our farmers. So we saw Mariana last year. Who’s Peloponnese in Greece, you will have got her oil if you are a member of the club. And I think it's basically just farming as they used to do. She's probably one of the examples of a farmer who's always had such history where it's always been done the right way, so to speak. So they have just done things that are in equivalence with the nature around them. They have ground cover. All of their families make their life from the land, so they've looked after it properly, and it works to their benefit, because they work regeneratively. The trees are better prepared for the climate crisis as it comes. So when the trees don't get water for three months, and they do like that to some extent, but the soil is better prepared, and is able to provide water when it may not have done previously. But I think, yeah, to me, it's just probably doing farming as it used to be done.

Mark: Going backwards to go forwards. And Amy, I mean, you've had an amazing career, and you've taken Mother of Pearl and now AKYN on a journey towards traceability, towards lower-impact materials. What have you learned from engaging in the supply side of fashion? And do you deal directly with farmers at all, or sheep farmers, and what are the lessons you can pull from there that could maybe change the industry, rather than just my wardrobe or your wardrobe?

Amy: It's a really good question. And actually, someone made a documentary about my journey, and as the viewer, you're kind of going on the journey as I go on the journey, because she filmed my kind of, you know, I just said ‘I need to make a sustainable brand. I've heard all these terrible things. What’s the impact on the people on the planet? I'm just going to go and try and do it’. And she followed me. So it's quite fascinating, because you kind of see through my eyes, as I'm learning things that are really complex in fashion or textiles, let's say, because fashion is just a, you know, format of textiles. But making the textiles is again, to get back to food, to olives, to any food, you've got one step probably right. There might be some kind of processing and packing in the middle. But, you know, the problem with textiles is you're going from raw material, which is, well, a seed in the ground, then you're harvesting that, which is probably similar to the agriculture in food. But then you are spinning it, you're weaving it, you're dying it, you're processing it, you know, and then you're turning it into garments. You're cutting and sewing it, you're manufacturing it. And there's just so many processes to get it to the final consumer. It's very, very hard to get back to source. 

And also, for instance, like in cotton or wool, it doesn't matter: wool tops, cotton tops, that's like the raw material you like, pull off the crop the way, like, essentially, sorters work, where they get all the raw material in, and they sort it. It can come from hundreds and hundreds of different fields. So there will be big kinds of organisations, or big companies who essentially go out to all the farmers. And some of them will be huge farmers that give them a massive amount and some of them will be really small ones, and they go and pick some up from them. But then you could be actually ordering yarn that contains 50 different farmer’s cotton. That's probably an exaggeration, but, you know, it's really hard to get it back. And then also, we speak, for instance, to the factory or to the fiber supplier. And then you say, ‘Well, where did you get your yarn from?’ They say, ‘speak to the yarn supplier’. Then you speak to the yarn supplier, but ‘where did you get it from’, and they’re like ‘speak to the, you know, the top supplier’. And it's really hard to break it down. And in the film, you see me get to my wool farmer Pedro, and I'm like, ‘I need to work with this guy. I need to use this wool’. But it literally was impossible for us to do it, because he sells containers to people that spin yarn, and he sells to different ones at different times. Because basically, it's like the fossil fuel market. It's just like, ‘What is the price at the time? Who's got the cheapest one? And where are people buying it in from?’ They don't even look at source. They just look at the numbers. And so it's really, really hard to get back to the farmers, and there's very few people doing it. 

So the best we can get to is kind of like vertically integrated companies that actually take the tops, they spin it, weave it, dye it, finish it, and turn it into yarn. So at least we can kind of see that middle process. And then we just have to rely on buying on certifications. But certifications have a huge amount of issues connected to them. In one instance, we went to a GOTS [Global Organic Textile Standard] organic cotton farm to film as part of the documentary. We were filming, and there were children in the field, and part of their certification says, we don't use child labour, but they just laugh at you and say, ‘Well, what, you know? What do you expect? You're paying, like a pound per how many kilos of cotton’. These kids can't go to school, you know? So you can't even really rely on certification. So it's a much, much bigger spider web in fashion, and it's much harder to get traceability. 

Mark: I can see that. I mean, I can buy my crops or my meat from three fields away. I know that I can go and see the farmer. I can probably do that for wool, but it tends to be like a carpet-grade wall. And even that's not got any demand in this country anymore. I've worked with Solid wWool a few times. I mean, their whole business is based on, no one wants their wool. 

Amy: It’s beautiful, and it's from the UK, and, yeah, so, but that's also a very niche thing to be able to do. There are organisations like Sheep Inc, for instance, and they're amazing. They've just focused on one product category.They started with supply chain and then made product and they basically can tell you which sheep gave them their wool, but it's a very niche kind of business model, which is incredible. And more business models like that are popping up. But this post-industrial revolution – we've just become machines and factories and, yeah, it's really complex.

Mark: – and commodities and things like Beaumont, they're really successful, but there are very, very few of these. 

Amy: Sorry, I just want to say one other thing. I was actually really glad in that film, they brought in colonialism, because actually, that is the root of everything. And you asked the question about what regeneration means, and it is literally, ‘but what are we supposed to do, and what did we do?’ And that's it. That's just the question. We've just spent too many generations separated from it. And, you know, I'm really glad though that was part of the film.

Sarah: Yeah, I think Lyla June, who's in it, is an amazing thinker on that. And there's also – she's been saying she's writing a book for like, eight years, and hasn't, but I saw her speak at the Oxford Real Farming Conference about eight years ago – a farmer called Rebecca Hosking, and she's also an amazing writer. She did this amazing talk, which you can watch on YouTube, but she kind of looks at the history of colonialism and how it has really changed our view of the natural world. And she says so many interesting things, like the word – does anyone know what the actual definition of the word nature is? [No answer] It's ‘the world without humans’. So even within the word that we use, there's a separation. And she looks at all the indigenous cultures that have stayed on their land from, you know, time immemorial and all of the language that they use to discuss it. I think she kind of said what they say in the Native American language.

All of the indigenous cultures that have stayed on the land have a different word for nature that kind of translates as ‘the world around us, our friends, our family’, stuff like that, and even in the way that we speak about it, there's a separation. And, you know, there's so much interesting stuff about it, but like our whole culture of farming, that we think of at the minute is using nature, it's even in the word nature. And we need to step away from this oppositional way of thinking about it.

I actually think really there's, like, a really positive way to think about it, if you can realise that we are thinking of the whole thing in opposition. It's why sometimes I have a bit of a problem with like, rewilding, because it suggests that we can't be trusted to be part of the natural landscape. And actually good farmers are part of the world around you, and you're part of the ecosystem. And actually, if we can feel that, then that's incredible, and then we can be part of doing something about it, rather than feeling separate from it. And I personally, for me, that was like a real gamechanger in how we thinking about, how we think about it. 

Amy: Really, really quickly. One thing I always get asked at talks and to go on stage and talk about how we fix fashion, and they always want data and like numbers and a solution and industrial solution. I'm like, ‘can we just get teach everyone to be connected?’ Because if you care about something, you will go to work every single day and fight for that the same way we feel about our children, that, you know, we need to instill care and connection and the rest will fall into place. And the sticky plasters you're just putting in the middle and the spreadsheets you're making people fill in on their targets and their carbon targets and their numbers and their carbon credits. And I was like, ‘you're just not giving anyone a reason for doing it’.

Mark: We've tried to scare people into a changed behavior, rather than show them a better way of living and that dislocation’s crucial, right? I'm looking at you lot. Any questions – I can be Robert Kilroy silk – do people still remember him? Hopefully… any questions from the audience for our illustrious panel? 

Audience member: Hi. I'm not quite sure who this is for, but I thought the film was amazing because it shows there's so much momentum. And I think maybe it's just America I'm interested in, like, how do we create the change? You know, it feels like, I mean, the stuff that's happening, it’s happening in the US around regenerative agriculture, but it isn't happening from the government down. It's private companies. It's individuals. They've created this momentum around it. And in the UK, obviously there's Groundswell, which is now like 2,500, like loads and loads of farmers. How do we kind of galvanize that change in the UK? Do we need the government to lead on it? Do we need private individuals to lead on it? Do we need companies, like Citizens of Soil to lead on it? Like, what's the moment that we need? In your opinion?

Mark: That's a great question. And there are some really interesting things happening. In India, it's a government-down initiative. And in America, it isn't. It's a community-up initiative. How do we tackle that here? Sarah, you first.

Sarah: I don't have one answer. I think it's really, really hard to be a farmer in the UK at the moment. I think, you know, we're like, hemorrhaging farmers, at industrial scale and small-scale organic. They're going out of business, left, right and centre. And part of that is the kind of supermarkets’ stranglehold. There's lots of good things with the new Sustainable Farming Initiative, but it doesn't really support actual food growing. So actually, I was hearing about farmers at the last Oxford Real Farming Conference, that because you can basically pick the initiatives by the money that you get. There's no land strategy for the UK. There's no overarching strategy for how we use land in the UK.

So basically, farmers can pick which payments they want. So lots are picking the one that makes them the most money, getting that and then retiring, and they know that they'll get more money for the capital off their farm. There's also the inheritance tax stuff going on. But I do think it comes down to the fact that the vast majority of people don't understand how our food is grown, and that allows this all to happen. We've had farmers protesting recently and the inheritance tax things, but does anyone actually understand the intricacies of it?

It's not really an answer, but I feel like we do need to get back to a place where we have more connection with farming, and it's not just something that's done in the countryside and we've got no idea how it happens and then it turns up in our supermarkets. Once we kind of can hopefully know that and know a bit more about how things grow and where, when things are grown here, then you will be shocked that there's asparagus in January from Israel, and you will be shocked that there's strawberries every month of the year in the supermarket. But if you don't understand it, then how can you know?

Amy: I feel as well in fashion – because we have exactly the same problem – the momentum was going and all of a sudden it's just stopped, and we're now on a downward trajectory of like, interest and communication and coverage. But I think it's – and this is just a gut feeling – I think it's linked to the wars that we're watching. I think there's just an overwhelming sense of sadness and depression that feels so much greater, which is connected to climate change. It's connected to wars. It feels dystopian. But watching that [Common Ground] you just suddenly felt hope again. I think all these things that were gaining momentum – the food industry was, the fashion industry – there was this change coming, and it felt like it was positive. When my film came out, it felt like the moment when people were talking about it, and of all of a sudden in the last year, just two years, but specifically last year, just this weight, Donald Trump weight, like geopolitical issues, war issues, just destruction. And I think everybody feels paralysed. And so all these things that we would sort of going on a bit of a trajectory with, I feel everybody's just paralysed and frozen. I don't know, I think that's my gut feeling.

Sarah: I think it's also, you know, the cost of living crisis. Those two are related. 

Amy: Yeah, exactly. And it feels like there's so many bigger things going on, which is frightening, that everybody's just stopping and nobody's making traction on all these things that we need to do.

Mark: But Natalie, I'm interested in: if it's not going to be government-led, and it probably isn't, and it's not in everyone's ability for it to come from the community, how can someone kind of connect community and the user, the consumer, then the citizen. How? What's your role, and, more importantly, how do we duplicate you in other markets? And is that maybe that's something you're already thinking about?

Natalie: Yeah. We recently got all of our farmers together for the first time, so there's maybe 20 of them nearly now, or at least 20 pairs and families and things. And basically put the question to them of, ‘how can we make this easier for you? What improvements to your life? How can we help spread this faster?’ Some of our producers have now linked us with other producers that we now buy from. I think bureaucracy and there's a lot of red tape and policy, especially when it's over different countries. Although they're mostly all in the EU, it's still very different country to country, so trying to get support for them at that level is incredibly time-consuming and very expensive in some cases.

Where I think we do lean more on the education side of ‘we want to bring a better product to consumers who will spend their money on better products’, which keeps highlighting the fact that people are willing to spend more, or maybe they shouldn't have to spend more, but buying products that are better made or what people want. But really we always include the farmer. We keep going back to them. ‘Where can we make improvements here? How can we make this bigger? Who do you know? How can we make your lives easier?’ It's constant communication and education between them all, so they will pick in with different things. 

Mark: That's not answered your question entirely, but there are three interesting perspectives there. And America is a really weird example, because it's the best of the world and it's the worst of the world. It's the worst farming in the world. And yet, we're seeing this amazing stuff. Any more questions in the audience? I can't quite see at the back… yes, there is one right at the back. Lovely. Thank you.

Audience member: Thank you. Probably one for Sarah. Again, I'd love to come back to this glyphosate issue, because I get told by many farmers, ‘I want to give up the glyphosate, but I can't do it just yet, or I'm scared’. And in the film, The guy came down to 50% hoping to go down to 30% and with the amount of time we've got left, how do we bridge that gap to kind of speed up nature? I know Gabe did it over 10, 15 years and stopped using the glyphosate?

Sarah: Yeah, it's a really interesting question about the glyphosate, because basically, I'm sure most of you know, but it has been proven to cause cancer. There's been a really big study that's just come out recently that's proven it across the across Europe, and actually, weirdly, the less you have of it, the more dangerous it is, which is really scary, and it's incredibly damaging to insect populations and all the stuff that makes our food healthy. But then there is also the kind of scientific fact that basically, when you do industrial farming, your soil becomes a kind of an addict, because it doesn't create its own nutrients, and it's waiting for the glyphosate to produce the nitrogen that it needs. There's a kind of cold-turkey phase, where the soil has to build up its own natural systems and circular systems. But I don't know the intricacies of it.

My problem sometimes with the regenerative farming is I think it's not realistic to expect everyone to convert to organic overnight. It's not going to work. And not everybody wants to be organic. And, you know, it's a broad church. But I do think that what would be great is if regenerative farming could have a kind of game plan for how to get off it long term, which is what I've not really seen. I'm sure there might be examples of it. I'm thinking of Wildfarmed as an example, who are regenerative. But when you get deep into their FAQs, their reasoning for allowing – sorry, they don't use glyphosate, but they use ammonium nitrate – and their reasoning for using ammonium nitrate is because the Soil Association certification standards allow you to use manure which contains a kind of natural version of ammonium nitrate, therefore that's okay. Which, to me, doesn't really make sense. It's fine to use it because they're doing amazing things in getting huge, large-scale arable farmers moving from conventional to regenerative, which is huge, and it's not a small thing, but maybe we could do more to get them further along. Yeah, that's my answer. 

Mark: So having those road maps, that visibility of where we're going to go is really important, and if we extend that question to you guys [Amy and Natalie]: is there anything used in textiles specifically that you think ‘we’ve just got to get that out of the system’ and then in olives? I mean, it's a kind of dirty world, olives, although that’s not your [Natalie’s] world, but it can be so is there anything that you'd like to see the back of, and how realistic is it to do that quickly?

Amy: I mean synthetics immediately. Virgin synthetics immediately. They’re essentially oil. So if we have a problem with fossil fuels, you have a problem with polyester. And I don't know the exact statistic, but it's like: 90% of the fiber pool that is produced on an annual basis is synthetic. So essentially, you're just wearing a plastic bag and calling it fashion, and then it's ending up in landfill. And the problem with recycle synthetics, so we talk about the regenerative and the sticky plasters that people are claiming do things, but they don't really care: recycle synthetics is another massive issue, because, for the most part, it's plastic bottles. And at the moment, the bottles to bottles to bottles, you can kind of melt and remould, melt and remould, but most people take ocean waste and plastic bottles and then you can turn them into fiber. It's quite an intensive chemical process to do that, but the problem is, once you've done that, you can't turn it back into anything else. It changes, I don't know the exact science, but it changes the molecular structure.

Nylon is different. You can keep doing that. There are startups working on scaling solutions, but there is zero scale solutions. And given it's the biggest fiber on the market, we're seeing every brand just going ‘but there's a big hoo ha at the moment about Princess Polly, because they've just got B Corp certified, and that's because they’re essentially using recycled synthetics all the time. And everybody says this is a really good thing, but essentially, it's got no afterlife. It's basically turning a bottle into a wearable bottle and then throwing it into landfill because there's nothing else you can do with it, because it's also fast fashion, so it's only designed to last three months, and it can never be a bottle again, and it could have just stayed in the bottle. So we have the same massive problems, and, you know, and no one understands it, so people think they're doing better. And it's really complicated. 

Mark: Bottle to fiber doesn't need chemical recycling, but fiber back into bottle does, and that's where the big problem is, and it is a really big issue. If we switch to olive oil: is there anything you'd really like to see the back of and that we need a road map for. 

Natalie: I mean, it's really specific to olive oil. A lot of our farmers talk about this: for the actual naming of extra virgin olive oil, you've got to hit certain lab analysis data points. But there is almost, well, there is a human element to what can be certified. Well, not certified, but called extra virgin olive oil, and that is currently way too low. We think. So customers are looking at extra virgin olive oil, and they're just not the same product. They're not nutrient rich. They haven't been grown in nutrient rich soil. It's a fat, but with very little positive to it. And I think that's probably something we'd really like to improve. It's a very big step. But actually, customers are probably buying products and they're not really, really fully aware of what's in them. Even something that’s a one-ingredient product like olive oil –

Mark: Or honey.

Natalie: Yeah, or honey, that’s a good example. It's easy to hide things in a very corrupt world.

Mark: It's counterfeiting. It's crazy. 

Natalie: I think the nutrient density thing is really interesting, though, because there are people doing things around proving the nutrient density of food, and I think that, if it comes off, will be quite a simple way of comparing the value of industrially grown stuff and really well-grown, organic, regenerative, agricultural, whatever-you-want food, because you will just see all of the micronutrients and all the different things that are in it, compared with food grown in dead soil.

Amy: And if we can prove that organ, your skin, is the biggest organ, and you're absorbing that, we would see a massive change too. So maybe certain data and things could come out that could make a massive consumer shift, because essentially, humans care about what they're putting in and their health.

Mark: I agree with you entirely. I'm going to be cheeky and get one more question, in the centre there, and that'll be the last one. There's pizza after – it's regenerative.

Audience member: Thank you. So first of all, my brain is in overdrive because of all the inspirational things we talked about. So I’ve probably got a million questions, and I'll try to choose one and try to make it clear, but give me some time. It's a bit convoluted here. Now, when I was younger, I didn't care about a lot of the things that I do care about now. I didn't question it. Probably, when I was younger, there wasn't such a thing as a pair of jeans for a fiver. But anyway, I realise now that other things are important, and I'm 45, I’ve got a little one, and I do pay attention to this. And of course, there's a bunch of people who care about certain things, but I do worry about the children. The children will be most impacted by this, and they are - I’m catastrophising here and generalising – but the majority of parents are not here tonight, they’re not sensitive to these kinds of topics. So the actual question is: how do we try to fix the parents, to educate the children? Or do we go straight to the children, therefore, to the school system, the government, whatever? Because if the children of today are not going to be a bit more conscious, they are going to be, I don't know, f***ed, am I allowed to say that?

Amy: I have a daughter who's just started primary school. I've purposely tried not to inflict all my climate anxiety, which I have in an absolute abundance, among other anxieties. I don't want her to know about it yet. The other night, before she went to bed, she said to me, ‘mummy, is it true? That Antarctica is melting?’ And I was a bit taken back by it. And I was like, ‘okay, she's obviously got that from school’. And I said, ‘well, yes, it is true, but you know, we can stop it. Mummy tries to do that, which is really complex, to try and explain I make clothes but I also try and [fight climate change]. And she said, ‘But Mummy, what about the penguins? Are they going to die?’ And she's only just learned about death. And she cried herself to sleep thinking about the penguins and Antarctica. And I felt, obviously devastated, but impressed by the fact that schools had been teaching them that.

My child's at a state school, it is an incredible school, and their headteacher is phenomenal. And the way they're teaching those children, I'm so proud of what they've done as a school, and that my daughter goes there. I think schools are the way, because if you've got so many underprivileged children, so many parents from so many different backgrounds, it's so hard to get every parent on board: people have different cultures and different feelings and different beliefs, but if we can bring it into education – which I'm sure there are probably a load of other problems around, given our government – I'd say, in answer to your question, in my opinion, getting it into schools in the right way, getting kids growing at school like that, would just be so powerful. It was part of the curriculum at my daughter's school: they've made playing the piano part of the curriculum. You learn it as a lesson at the same age you learn maths and english, which I thought was really powerful. Can growing [produce] not become a lesson too? 

Mark: My granddaughters are at Forest School, and they grow on a daily basis. They look after things.

Amy: There's a lot of change, as in parents wanting alternative education.

Sarah: Before I was at Sitopia for the past six years, before that, I was part of this charity called Grow, which, as I said, is a six-acre farm, but the land is owned by a secondary school, and we set it up in conjunction with the secondary school, and we taught. Originally, when we started, we had an hour a week with all year sevens, year eights, year nines, to teach them. And then we realised that was a bit crazy. So we would basically support subjects within the school to learn on the farm. And the joy of food and farming is that, literally, it applies to everything, because everything comes from the land. So you can basically teach every subject out on the farm. So we would have modern language lessons on the farm where we would have a market stall, and the kids would sell the vegetables in French and Spanish. We would have maths on the farm: this was my favourite thing. I hated maths at school, but then so much of it is just about context. And I remember first having to put up a polytunnel and learning this thing called, like, the 345 rule that I then realised was Pythagoras theorem. And then I was like, ‘oh, there's a point to it’. So then we would teach the kids to make raised beds, but using Pythagoras theorem, and then suddenly it sunk in. And we would have drama doing A Midsummer Night's Dream on the farm. We would have art on the farm. You can literally teach anything on the farm, if you're thoughtful enough. And the school: it's an incredibly progressive state school, and they loved it, and the students loved it, the parents loved it.

And then we tried to apply the principles of agroecology, which is, I know there's so many words out there, but agroecology is basically, it's the idea of arming regeneratively, but within the wider political context of the world, so that people describe it as farming beyond the farm gate. I think it's really powerful, because it's this idea of, like, ‘I do something and it has an impact’, which is basic ecology and science. Everything we do. It's not some hippie thing. Everything you do has an impact on the world, and you can kind of apply that to farming. What we tried to do, and it's still running very successfully now, is create a system where it all worked together. So we would teach on the farm, and then we grew food, which would then go into the school canteen, and the farm now supplies other school canteens and just teaches this closed loop system.

The really exciting thing about Grow, I think, is that it targets children from underprivileged backgrounds. So we would do forest school for children on free school meals and stuff like that. Because so often, as we all know, this kind of world is a privilege, and it shouldn't be. It should be available to everybody. It can be more transformative for young people that need it. In a very small context, Grow has proven how transformative the education side of it can be, and the ripple effect of families, in that in that community, and I do think it's something that could be completely scaleable. 

Mark: Natalie, are we going to get kids up in olive oil and change behavior?

Natalie: I think because of where it comes from, I suppose, it is quite different to the UK. Maybe [in Greece, Spain and South Africa and so on] they do have a much better understanding of where their food's coming from, or at least the families that we work with. I suppose, for balance, I'll probably go the other way and say that so many of our customers still don't know what olive oil was. So we were like, ‘it's just fruit juice’. That's all it is. It's just a fresh fruit juice. And people's minds were blown when we said that to them, because even adults and our customers didn't realise. I don't know if it's advertising or things for smaller brands to help get the message out there about real food. We don't have the budgets of the huge corporations, but educating not only children, but probably adults about their food is probably helpful.

Mark: That's where your storytelling really shines through, in my humble opinion. Hey, look, we're gonna have to stop. There's pizza going cold out there. I need to thank a few people: clearly, I need to thank Natalie, Sarah and Amy, you've been amazing, and please carry on doing what you're doing. I need to thank BRiMM and thank James and everyone at BRiMM, because you wouldn't be here if they weren't here. You need, sometimes a little hygroscopic nuclei, which is what a raindrop forms around. And without the grit in the middle, there is no raindrop. So James is the grit in the middle. So thank you so very, very much. But most importantly, you could do anything tonight, right? You could go and see any band anywhere in the biggest, best city in the world, and you come to sit in a Soho theatre listening to us. So thank you so much. Please go and enjoy your pizza, and please mingle and talk to the guests out there. Thank you. 

Now read Mark’s piece on How a New  Food System Can Heal Us and The Planet and our other inspiring Journal articles