Through her experiences and perspectives on land use and colonialism, Pam Brunton’s fascinating new book offers a brave recipe for how we shape our food culture

What is Scottish food? According to Pam Brunton, “it depends on who’s cooking, and on which influences they’re acknowledging in their life and their refrigerator”.

Brunton is head chef and co-owner of Inver, an award-winning restaurant on Loch Fyne which holds Scotland’s only Green Michelin star. Between Two Waters, Brunton’s first book is published this month, but anyone hoping for her kitchen secrets and recipes will have to keep waiting . . . this is a very different kind of book.

“It’s a food book,but food is never just food,” she says. “Writing this story using food as a lens is helpful because everybody eats, everybody has food habits and a food culture they’re part of, and you can use that to understand how our lives are enmeshed with each other and the rest of the world.” 

Brunton centres her book on her restaurant, its place in the landscape, and her own family history, and in doing so tells a story of Scotland that interrogates food cultures, land access, and how Scotland has benefitted from the dark history of colonialism.

The romantic idea of rural Scotland as a remote, untouched landscape is, “actually quite a problematic way of thinking”, says Brunton. “Everything is in some way touched by an intervention and in the same way we have been shaped by nature and landscapes. There was this increasing disconnect between what people seem to be seeing when they came to the restaurant and what I felt was actually going on looking at the landscape myself.

Guests say: ‘‘Wow it’s so wild here, it’s so unspoiled and natural!’, and I’m thinking: ‘Well, that’s a spruce plantation, that’s a salmon farm.’ The picturesque castles across the bay tell stories of political turmoil, and changes in attitudes to land use and the landed gentry.

“I’m a person of great integrity. I struggle with anything that glosses over the truth. Otherwise I was just buying into romantic propaganda about this restaurant and this location and ultimately Scottish history and identity, and it started to rankle”.

Brunton’s book is out on September 12

Brunton’s food stories are inherently personal. She uses food to trace her family history from colonial Zimbabwe and fields of sweetcorn to post-war Angus and the soup pot. By interrogating food habits, she pushes readers to consider what really informs their own choices.

She says: “Maybe your food choices aren’t actually so intensely personal. If you zoom out a bit, you realise the context in which you’re making all these choices has been shaped for you. If we can get a bit of distance, maybe we won’t end up defending the wrong things – like my right to eat high-fat, salty, sugary snacks. It’s a very difficult conversation to have because food choices are so emotional.”

Improving the food landscape requires both personal and government-level decision making. Brunton encourages readers to remap their local area, getting to know diverse local producers and suppliers. 

Brunton doesn’t shy away from calling for political and structural changes to improve food within the UK: “Food policy is land policy, land policy is food policy. You can’t extricate the two.” 

Agriculture policy should “reward the things we need and discourage the things we don’t” says Brunton. 

“We also need redistributive taxation that prioritises the people that need it the most, and gives access to food growing initiatives.” 

For Britain’s colonial legacy “we need a realistic discussion of reparations. I think all Southern Hemisphere debt needs cancelled because we’ve already benefited enough.”

A proportion of the author’s proceeds from the book is being donated to LION, ‘Land In Our Names’, a UK-based organisation that addresses land inequality and strives to give black and ethnic minority people better access to land for food growing purposes.

“I could have written a book that said, ‘yeah, haggis, neeps and tatties, and haggis bonbons, this is the modern Scottish way.” Instead Brunton offers alternative, more hopeful directions for Scottish food culture. “Telling these stories is the start to making them real,” she says.

Between Two Waters: Heritage, landscape and the modern cook, by Pamela Brunton is published on September 12 by Canongate.
inverrestaurant.co.uk