What Bristol Means to Me: The Children’s Kitchen director Jo Ingleby

Director of The Children’s Kitchen Jo Ingleby is on a mission to tackle food inequality in Bristol by encouraging families to cook and grow fresh produce
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In 2015, she won BBC Cook of the Year for her work at Redcliffe Children’s Centre and is currently trying to expand The Children’s Kitchen to other parts of the UK after its success in Bristol.

Here Jo chats to BristolWorld about what she loves about the job and her adopted home city, as well as where her passion for food began.

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I run the Children’s Kitchen which is all about bringing food education to children and families who live in areas of food insecurity. Rather than the traditional activities you might imagine like icing biscuits, we’re really big on children exploring food that has come directly from the ground, sometimes that includes growing it themselves. I think children like to take food apart, look inside it and explore it. A child’s experience of food can be very joyful and that’s the best part of the job.

I started off as a kind of artist-in-residence at Redcliffe Children’s Centre before I took over the kitchen there. The ‘food exploration’ side of things worked really well at the centre because the nursery was based in a block of high-rise flats where the children didn’t have access to a garden or a growing space.I ended up winning BBC Cook of the Year 2015 for my work there which was crazy and it was such an exciting time. When I had to leave that job I was determined to take what I had learned city-wide and now we work all over from Hartcliffe to Lockleaze to Southmead.

I’ve lived in Bristol for 18 years now and love it because it’s the sort of city where people work together really successfully with a common goal, especially after the pandemic. Feeding Bristol is a great example of this, it’s such an incredible charity. There are people working all over the city to tackle food poverty but Feeding Bristol is the umbrella that brings it all together so it becomes a co-ordinated effort. Do the Government put enough money into food education? Absolutely not! We really have to hunt for funding. Cooking should be a part of the every day cirriculum but while most schools are well-intentioned and would love that to be the case, they just don’t have the resources or staff.

The Children’s Kitchen director Jo Ingleby.The Children’s Kitchen director Jo Ingleby.
The Children’s Kitchen director Jo Ingleby.

The Children’s Kitchen is a sharing project, all about collaboration, working with Feeding Bristol and Bristol Early Years. It’s been designed for children that need it most and has changed over time. It was originally designed for nurseries but has become more about working with families together - and amazingly, it tends to have a really big impact, quite quickly. We’re about to release our fifth cookery book which has some brilliant global recipes contributed by local chefs. Our latest project deals with teaching community leaders to teach cookery. You might be able to cook, but not know how to teach it! This is something they can with them into their youth groups etc. Ideally, I’d love to see The Children’s Kitchen in cities all over the country and we’re currently trying to pilot it at groups in Nottinghamshire.

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Bristol is a foodie city and home to some wonderful restaurants, but there’s a lot of food inequality. Not all people can rock up to Clifton or Wapping Wharf for lunch. My favourite place that I feel is accessible to everyone is the cafe at Windmill Hill City Farm, which is in Bedminster but feels like the countryside. They literally just pluck things from the field and will use it in a dish at the cafe. I’m really lucky as my office is here and when I look out of the window and see a three-year-old smiling at a pig, it inspires me and reminds me that I’m on the right path.

My love of cooking and food began in childhood. I’m from Coventry originally which, like Bristol, is a super diverse city. We had an allotment and my mum always cooked from scratch, but we also had lodgers who studied at the nearby language school and would share their food with us. I grew up eating Chinese food, German food, you name it. I also lived in Spain for three years which really opened my eyes to eating fresh and going to the market to hand-pick my food. Food has always been at the centre of any personal growth I’ve gone through and I guess that simply evolved into what I do now.

You’d be amazed at what you can create from some fresh vegetables and good spices. With the children we tend to do a lot of cooking on fire, in a fire pit or whatever, and they get really excited about it even if we’re just roasting a rainbow mixture of veggies. We also use spice packs specially designed for children that focus on colour rather than countries. I don’t eat meat personally and while I think it’s great that families are eating less meat, I have a lot of concern about fake meat products. They contain a lot of salt and some aren’t all that better for the environment as they’re made of soya. What can you turn round with some carrots, lentils, beans, broccoli? That’s my kind of cooking.

For more information on Feeding Bristol, click here: https://www.feedingbristol.org/

More information on Bristol Early Years can be found here: https://www.bristolearlyyears.org.uk/

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