On a cold and wet Thursday evening in late October 2025, a packed room of Liverpool residents gathered over a warm apple crumble to discuss the city’s food culture – and more specifically, the role that food plays in our homes, and amongst the producers and providers on our doorsteps.
It was only fitting that this final instalment in our 2025 seminar series should be held in perhaps the newest food venue on Liverpool’s waterfront: Daffodil. Renovated after 50 years’ service as the ‘Royal Daffodil’ Mersey Ferry, the ship now boasts a panoramic bar, luxurious restaurant, and cavernous event space, and is fast becoming a keystone of Liverpool’s waterfront hospitality scene.
It was down in the former engine room of the ship that we found ourselves with two speakers who could help us understand how we, as citizens, can become the ‘engine’ of change for Liverpool’s food culture, both supporting and pushing local producers, retailers, and public authorities to deliver fairer, more sustainable food solutions for everyone.
First up was 2021 BBC Food & Farming Community Champion, and Senior Project Manager at campaigning food justice charity Foodrise, Lucy Antal.
Lucy Antal, on a fairer local food system
Liverpool born and bred, Lucy knew that fresh food often isn’t available in the city centre. She realised this leads people to become disconnected and disengaged from food. Lucy referred back to something our opening keynote speaker, Sheila Dillon had said – that “time is running out” for a reconfiguration of our relationship with food, as supermarkets dominate the industry (accounting for nearly 97% of grocery sales) and hollow out the social fabric of our cities from their ‘out of town’ walled keeps.
“Everything is connected” she argued: multi-national corporations, a growing disconnection from food production, poor fresh food availability, rising everyday costs, food deserts, and a breakdown in local social ties. This negative feedback loop, she explained, is something her charity, Foodrise, aims to reset.
Lucy shared examples of conversations she’d had in her time at Foodrise – from Macmillan nurses who had to drive miles to bring their clients fresh food because there was nothing available nearby, to a young mum who had to give up being a vegetarian because her nearby community food pantries never had enough nutritious vegetarian options.
Taking a short diversion, Lucy revealed how over 3.12 million people in the UK are now reliant on food banks and food pantries. “We’re not just fire-fighting any more,” she said, “this is a whole secondary food economy.” But the process for distributing food via these organisations is completely broken. Over 30% of food donated to food banks isn’t even suitable for consumption—especially the most desperately needed fresh food—because it’s often taken so long for the food to make its way to a food pantry’s shelves, that there’s no time left before it expires. “There are costs to this, both financial and emotional”, Lucy explained, “for the people who run food banks.” They exist to support people who have no other choice, but what can you do when you’re donated this subpar food? “Great, we’ve got 5000 pitta breads,” Lucy joked, “now what!?”
The reality, sadly, is that we’re often better donating money to food banks, instead of food, so that they can spend it on the specific items they know their service users need at that time, rather than burdening them with yet another tin of bland chickpeas to add to the pile.
This led Lucy into a series of suggestions for what we, and other actors in Liverpool’s food society, could do to turn our relationship with food around.
She started with a role for policy-setters. Even if food banks have to remain a necessary support for the country’s broken finances, how can local and national policy fix their supply chains, so that they’re at least able to get the right food to the right people, for healthier, more long-term outcomes? How can policy combat the emergence of ‘food deserts’ in Liverpool’s suburbs, where no fresh food can be found in a 1500 metre radius? How can the local authorities in the Liverpool City Region meaningfully engage local residents, to design food strategies that help us all have a healthier, more sustainable relationship with food?
There’s a role, too, for food producers. Perverse incentives mean farmers are often left growing the wrong types of crops on their land – Lucy shared an example of a farmer who found it was more financially sustainable for them to grow bird food than human food. No wonder, then, that there’s a shortage of home-grown fresh food on our shelves.
Referring back to the contributions of Sally-Anne Hopkiss from Homebaked at the previous seminar, Lucy shared her experience of how food can act not just as a social glue, but also have massive positive social, health, and financial outcomes. She shared another example of work she’d been doing with teenagers in Blackburn, Lancashire: “They’d say Blackburn Gets Hangry” she explained, because kids go to school hungry, maybe drink a can of coke for energy, but then that hollow energy leaves them unfocussed and disruptive in the classroom for the rest of the day.
Food in schools, she revealed, is a particularly problematic area, with far too many kids not being fed, or being fed the wrong things. This is, thankfully, something many Liverpool schools are starting to turn around, thanks to the efforts of one of this evening’s partners, Food for Thought. This not-for-profit provides nutritious, freshly made meals to over 90 schools in the Liverpool area – as well as the delicious warm apple crumble that greeted our attendees tonight! “Thank God for Food for Thought,” Lucy continued, “instilling a culture of abundance in our kids.” Although schools are ultimately responsible for how the meals are served to kids, Food for Thought encourages them to offer things like a salad bar, and multiple ‘seconds’, to reconfigure kids’ relationships with food. There’s a role for us as parents, to demand food like this in our kids’ schools.
There’s also a role for us as shoppers, to shop local where we can. “You might be surprised how cheap it is,” Lucy added, pointing to Homebaked pies like the ones our audience tasted at the previous seminar, and freshly-made samosas from Granby Street Market. Even when we can’t shop locally, we can do our part to shape industry through our shopping choices, she argued. “When you see that cheap chicken, think about why it can be so cheap.”
And once we have bought food, it’s our responsibility to use it sustainably, reducing food waste as much as possible. Lucy’s other food-related project, Alchemic Kitchen, produced a Zero Waste Cook Book for just this reason, packed with clever recipes for turning left-overs into delicious snacks, meals, and accompaniments. (And, in a weird example of serendipity, the book’s beautiful illustrations were penned by Charlie at Nonconform, the design partner on all of Engage’s events – how’s that for keeping it local!)
But it was most reassuring, after Engage’s previous work with Jon Alexander, to see Lucy round out her presentation by showing that there’s action we can take beyond consumption, and into the realm of democratic and political power…
There’s a massive role for us as citizens, she argued, to ask awkward questions of industry and those in power. Why aren’t healthier options available for families on limited budgets? Why—to pick a common example—is salmon on the menu, when so much of it is now intensively farmed, fed with ground-up seafood dredged from the West coast of Africa where the resulting destruction of the coastal ecosystems is ruining local fishermen’s livelihoods?
There are commercial levers we can pull – asking retailers why they don’t stock local produce, or putting our money where our mouths are and spending locally instead of at the big chains.
But there are also political levers we can pull – writing to our elected representatives to share our experiences of food deserts or poor local options, and asking what they’re doing to represent our interests. Nothing will change without pressure from people like us. And with “time running out”, as Sheila Dillon had put it all those weeks ago, there’s no better time for us to take action than right now.
A local producer’s perspective, from Fozia Choudhry
And from that, we moved on to a lady who decided to take her own action, by starting a business during lockdown in 2020, producing delicious and affordable home-made Kashmiri meals, for Liverpool residents to pop in their freezers and enjoy all year round. Yes, it was local legend, Fozia Choudhry, of Fozia’s Kashmiri Kitchen.
Like so many of us, Fozia‘s food journey started at Squash Liverpool. But it was during COVID-19 that she decided to leave a career of dentistry behind and start cooking and selling food just like her mother used to make. Soon, the business had expanded beyond her kitchen table, into a much-loved shipping container, then their current space on Picton Road – but her Kashmiri Kitchen will shortly be moving to a new space right in the heart of the city, on Renshaw Street. With the current economic pressures, it’s a risky time to be expanding, “but you know me, I like a challenge” Fozia joked.
“Our ethos is bringing what we eat at home, out to you,” she explained, before diving into what that approach to food looked like for her family. “We were frugal in those days,” she said, “there were 10 of us in the family, and my Mum would feed us all on a single medium chicken.” Referencing the Zero Waste Cook Book that Lucy shared a few minutes prior, Fozia admitted that she fears wasting nothing is a skill few people have these days.
“We lived on our cookery books when I was young – Madhur Jaffrey and the Readers Digest.” She continued, “So many young people are no longer taught to cook – so it’s not kids’ fault if they then can’t eat healthily!” This re-skilling of young people is something both Squash and our speakers from last seminar, Kindling Farm, are taking really seriously.
But in a re-iteration of a theme that’s already come up in all three of our seminars this year, she repeated how this culture of prepping and cooking food was a social experience for her, an opportunity for her family and their neighbours to come together, and share more than just food.
In closing, she admitted that the global issues around poverty, the cost of living, and the unsustainability of our food system can feel overwhelming, but she encouraged everyone in attendance to start with the small things you can do – whether that’s cooking with your family, or buying more local, or asking the sorts of questions Lucy posed in her earlier presentation.
Wrapping up
The Q&A section covered a range of topics, from how we as customers can best push local providers to improve their food offering (“even Five Guys shows where their potatoes were grown!” one resident interjected), to how Food for Thought’s school meals model works in practice.
One attendee felt Liverpool has missed an opportunity to combine its high tourist footfall with more home-grown (literally, and metaphorically!) food venues. “Imagine a community-owned food boulevard on Princes Avenue!” he enthused.
Lucy noted that a big barrier here will be the red tape around preparing and serving food to the public. Perhaps, she suggested, a community-run food market might be a place to start? Or reusing the facilities (and paperwork and insurance) of an existing community kitchen? Gerry added that there’s an opportunity for greater involvement of local food producers in the upcoming redevelopment of the central docks area by National Museums Liverpool – although Lucy noted that food sale pitches at the Royal Albert Dock’s “markets” are already prohibitively expensive for many small-scale producers.
Another attendee asked Lucy what she’s seen of people’s relationships to food now. She shared the example of her ‘Growing Knowsley’s Future’ project. In preparing for the project, her team discovered that Knowsley used to be home to over 140 farms. Birdseye peas used to be grown in Knowsley. Through the project, they’ve uncovered lots of heritage recipes for things like homity pies and carrot potato cakes. Participants have talked about “their Nan’s Pea Wack soup” and other long-forgotten specialities. They’ve found that people tend to lack not only the knowledge of what to do with food, but also the choice over what food they have to work with – for example, the proliferation of bags of food handed out by food aid organisations, where you just have to take what you’re given and work out what to do with it. For many, this is a real challenge.
Lucy added that this is something the Queen of Greens bus aims to bypass: offering people a real choice of real, healthy fresh ingredients, and also a way into a community of other suppliers and cooks, to share ideas on how to make the most with the produce you buy.