£6.5 billion a year. That’s how much obesity costs the NHS today. And while government schemes such as calorie labelling and sugar levies are gradually encouraging healthier food choices, for a significant portion of the population, these choices are often out of their control.
Empowering people is exactly what drove Alicia Weston to set up Bags of Taste, a not-for-profit cooking programme for people facing multiple disadvantages, in 2014. What started as face-to-face classes turned into the virtual Mentored Home Cooking Programme in 2020 and has now reached over 14,000 participants from 22 locations across the UK.
It all began when Alicia started the Parkholme Supper Club in 2010, raising £120,000 for Médecins Sans Frontières. Not long after, the homeless charity Crisis asked her to host cooking classes. But after two, Alicia sensed that the sessions weren’t achieving the “big-picture stuff”.
“I could see enormous social benefits for the people who came,” she explains. “But the one thing I didn’t see was people going home and cooking it again. They were largely still eating junk food and takeaways.”
After going back to work full-time for an economic think-tank, the issue continued to gnaw away at Alicia. She was determined to help others use what they had learned in a cooking class, to actually improve their diet and lifestyle at home.
“I thought, I spend my life at work solving bigger problems like how to finance social housing,” she says. “Why can’t I work on this?”
Alicia approached Bags of Taste in the ways she’d learned to work on similar projects – conducting focus groups and talking to as many people as possible.
“Everyone was asking, ‘How can we provide more cooking lessons?’” she reflects. “But it’s not about that. ‘How can we get people to cook differently at home?’. That’s the right question to ask.”
Alicia describes Bags of Taste as a combination of Leiths and Hello Fresh, designed specifically for those who might face additional challenges, or be vulnerable or disadvantaged in some way.
While people can self-refer, the majority of students are referred by one of a growing number of programme partners, including Mind, Samuel Lewis Trust, Islington Council, and the NHS. To join, students must meet at least four of the criteria, which include living in insecure housing, being on long-term benefits, living with a disability, or being a single parent with school-age children.
“We’re a short-term intervention that focuses on long-term outcomes,” Alicia explains. “I’ve done face-to-face and those classes were wonderful places to be. People interacted with each other, came back to us as volunteers, and made friendships. I’m not discouraging anyone from doing that. But, largely, we’re trying to find people who have fallen through those gaps and need something more.
“Everyone is obsessed with face-to-face [solutions] – and they’re right: social isolation kills,” Alicia adds. “But you need to recognise that there’s also a segment of people who will never get out, and another that maybe will one day but need to be shifted along the scale before they’ve got that confidence. Some people have physical limitations or are so anxious that they will never make it down to a community centre. What is there for these people, to access from and experience in their own homes? Very little – telephone befriending services, that’s about it. Certainly nothing around nutritional support.”
Bags of Taste provides participants with a bag of ingredients, detailed but simple recipes, and a few essential pieces of equipment such as measuring spoons and knives. Participants learn three recipes – pasta sauce, curry, and pilaf – and have to complete certain skills before earning their completion certificate. They’re also invited to a WhatsApp group where a volunteer mentor provides personalised support, additional tips, and videos, and fellow students share their cooking successes and failures.
While the premise is simple, it’s more than just a cooking class. The overarching aim is to help people access their own agency.
“We’re a whole kitchen management programme,” Alicia says. “We talk about batch cooking, where to source things, store cupboard cookery, and what to buy.
“We’re helping people help themselves; we’re actively trying to make sure that participants are independent when they’re done with us. One way we do that is we give people printed shopping lists with tick boxes. We provide them with local shopping guides to show where it’s good to buy certain things, suggest how much they should expect to pay (and how to save money), and how to properly store leftovers.
“We also work on batch cooking. A lot of people are sick and can’t always get out of bed. We’re encouraging them to take control of their diets and not end up relying on takeaways.”
It’s easy to make assumptions about what people need. But Alicia starts by asking why they’re making poor decisions that negatively impact their physical and mental health in the first place and what support they need to change their habits for good without creating a dependency on anyone or anything.
Over the last 10 years, Alicia’s research has highlighted key barriers and misconceptions that she’s also keen to challenge.
She explains to me that when talking about food poverty, access, and literacy, many people cite costs or lack of cooking skills as contributing factors. Yet Bags of Taste data shows that 80 per cent of the people they work with rate their cooking skills as average to good, but that they still aren’t cooking. They also spend an average of £1,260 each year on takeaways and ready meals – “The money is being spent in the wrong place”.
Many of her students also claim to be “too lazy” to cook, a term that Alicia has come to understand as meaning they’ve hit too many external barriers that are out of their control – from living in food deserts to being unable to afford cooking equipment like a blender – and have given up.
Keen to break this cycle, Alicia continues to gather data and feedback, and has even A/B tested different techniques and marketing messages, all with the intention of getting the right people on the course and supporting them the best way possible.
The proof is in the pudding, too. Over 85 per cent of Bags of Taste students say they cook more after six months, with many reporting improved physical and mental health as a result of the programme. What’s more, they report a 90 per cent drop in takeaway and ready meal consumption, leading to financial savings of around £1,040 per year.
“We allow people to take complete control, including financial control, over what they eat,” Alicia stresses. “For the people that we’re working with, independence is such an important thing.
“Social supermarkets and food banks are great,” she adds. “ But when you go down there, there must always be some underlying [question] of what if they close down? What if they don’t get funding this year? But Tesco is never closing down, so you can always feed your family. This is the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – if you can’t get that base footing right, everything else above you crumbles.”
Learn more about Bags of Taste, here.
As a Director of a Higher Education institute I was constantly concerned at the problems facing our students who could not afford to feed themselves properly. A big part of their problem, like so many people struggling with the cost of living, is that they do not have the knowledge of how to make tasty meals out of cheap ingredients eg pulses, they often do not have access to the right sort of easy to use equipment, they cannot afford the energy to run traditional ovens and hobs for long periods and they are often time poor. There is also a perception problem ie that buying fresh veg, especially organic, and small amounts of quality meat is unaffordable. All these could be overcome.
Number 1.
The need for ‘education’ or rather knowledge. Social media gets used for all sorts of malign purposes, how about harnessing it to spread real knowledge and confidence on how anyone on a low income, time poor , can still feed themselves deliciously and cheaply if only they know how. I am willing to bet most students, and others, who live on a diet of UHP takeaways and pre-packed rubbish from supermarkets could for the same amount of money feed themselves with far more healthy and delicious food. Lack of knowledge and confidence is a major barrier but there are others which can also be overcome.
Number 2.
Access to cheap , safe and reliable means of cooking. I believe that three relatively recent and cheap pieces of equipment are all anyone needs to solve a lot of the above challenges.
The first is the modern electric pressure/slow cooker- that can solves a lot of the time shortage problem
The second is the Airfryer, a misnomer if ever there was one. Its a high speed mini fan oven.
The third is a small induction ‘hob’- ideal for those with limited space and especially students moving from place to place.
The three together equal a full kitchen yet are portable, safe and very cheap to use.
We have thousands of charities in this country. How about a charity in partnership perhaps with a reputable retailer or two who would give hefty discounts in return for the potential volume of sales to fund and supply such equipment to all who need it?
Clearly having the kit doesn’t work without the knowledge of what to do with it , that’s where the social media or better still a u-tube channel comes in. Would Riverford consider setting up such a channel to teach everyone how to make delicious , nutritional food from non UHP ingredients at prices everyone can afford?
The problem with the charitable sector is that it is so diffuse. An awful lot of resource , both time and money is wasted by new charities being set up often wholly, or partly in competition with others already doing much the same thing. So I am writing this in response to Alice and Bags of Taste who are clearly already doing a great job to suggest she/they might take on Board the above suggestions and consider widening their scope and impact.
What brilliant common sense suggestions for tackling the problems outlined in the article. If only other organisations would take note – wildlife charities, conservation charities…… How many charities can we think of that are in “competition with others” – e.g. for donations, volunteer time – “already doing much the same thing” ?