The Caterer interview: Thomasina Miers, co-founder of Wahaca

17 August 2022 by

The co-founder of Wahaca is a passionate about better and more sustainable food for all, from putting chefs in schools to creating avocado-free guacamole

How do you feel about the new calorie labelling legislation that came into force earlier this year?

I honestly don't think people really look at calories. When guests come into our restaurants, they don't visit very often, maybe three or four times a year, so they don't come to look at calories, they come to have fun and drink a margarita – although it's hilarious that calories aren't even on alcoholic drinks!

There are so many gaps in the legislation, but I welcome any attempt to make positive change. I know some of the people behind the calorie move and it was a genuine wish to make things better.

Do you think the legislation will help consumers make more informed, healthier choices?

From a nutritional point of view, putting calories on a menu doesn't tell you if they are good or bad calories. We have a bean tostada on the menu where the beans are grown organically and it is incredibly nutritious, but it has quite a lot of calories. Calories on menus don't tell us what goodness is in the food and whether it's been grown in good soil or what it has been sprayed with that could potentially give you cancer. It also gives us no indication about the fibre content, because we know that our gut health is really poor, but that it's key to our overall health – it feels like medicine is going backwards.

In that case is the legislation missing the bigger picture when it comes to our health?

It highlights our total removal of what the role of food is – that it's been grown to help us survive, to give us nutrients. On one hand the conventional farming systems put so many chemicals on our crops with links to cancer and Parkinson's that it's terrifying. These chemicals were first developed in the Second World War as nerve agents to kill people, and now they're being sprayed on our crops and killing the worms and the bumblebees and the natural systems we rely on to grow our food. Conventional modern farming is catastrophic for human health because humans can't live without soil.

Wahaca's vegetarian selection
Wahaca's vegetarian selection

The government seems to have no concept of how farming can co-exist with nature. Why are we not at a stage where we're thinking the biggest crisis facing humankind is the climate, that there is massive malnutrition in the developing and developed world, that we're killing the soils, that we have a total biodiversity crisis, we're annihilating multiple levels of wildlife and nature – how can we all work together as human beings and fix these problems? I feel with this government there's an inability to ask questions, to be curious and to listen to people.

So, it's actually linked to a much wider issue?

There's such a shortsighted approach. There's a four-year cycle of government, which is probably why, but because of my role as trustee of Chefs in Schools, I've also got an insight into the food sector in terms of education. We have an obesity epidemic: we have the worst diet in Europe and one-third of our kids are obese. Half of our shopping baskets are made up of processed food that is killing us. That whole levelling up thing: it's the kids from the lower income backgrounds who are really suffering, who are twice as likely to be obese than those from affluent families.

The whole attitude to food is warped. The people who work in the industry have a love of food and an understanding of where it comes from and how it's farmed, but when the Department for Education doesn't even think that feeding kids good food is relevant to the curriculum; that it's an irrelevant luxury, that's when you have a real fault line going on.

The government is using Brexit as an excuse to sort out farming, yet they have allowed a flood of trade deals from different countries to import meat reared to far worse standards than our own farmers. We have basic child hunger – we saw how it took Marcus Rashford to convince the government it was actually important to feed kids – so how can we level up if kids don't have enough food to eat?

You touched on the biodiversity crisis we're facing – when was it that you first came across the term ‘soil degradation'?

I've always cared about the environment. My parents had little money but loved food, and they cooked with the seasons and never wasted anything. I attended lectures on soil 20 years ago when I was at Ballymaloe Cookery School, and I joined the Soil Association. We're still doing the same things we were doing then – the only difference is we're spraying ever more fungicides, pesticides and herbicides because the weeds and fungi are becoming more resistant. It's getting worse, not better, and we're accelerating soil degradation. We are killing the animals that live in the soil that keep us alive.

People talk about going zero carbon, but the soil is even more critical to human survival. It sounds dramatic, but what we're doing to our soil will kill us much quicker than the world heating up.

Fundamentally, I believe food is medicine, if you can eat a delicious, good diet, you are going to be having a lot more fun and it will be a lot more beneficial to the environment – it's all linked.

You've always had sustainability at the heart of your business and you recently introduced an avocado-free ‘guacamole'. Would you ever consider removing avocados altogether to cut down on carbon?

I don't know. Our avocado-free Wahacamole was the first step, and it's our sustainable take on guac, made with organic fava beans, coriander and lime, nuts and seeds. The pulses have been sourced from Hodmedod's in East Anglia and are full of protein and fibre and grown organically, which promotes biodiversity.

How do you think restaurants can make a positive difference in terms of sustainability?

It's about thinking about the supply chain. If restaurant businesses start buying more from food producers who are doing the right thing, more farmers will get on board because they will make more money this way. Restaurateurs and chefs have so much power at their fingertips, but it is quite hard as a consumer to understand what is the right thing to eat. I think veganism has muddied the water a bit – it should be about eating whole foods grown on your doorstep, occasionally peppered with the odd avocado, pineapple or mango.

How do you educate your guests about the climate impact of what they are eating?

Every time we make a dish we look at the impact of the ingredients we use. I like the idea of meat and cheese being used as a seasoning to food which brings life to grains, so for example, we only use a sprinkling of feta.

We know the carbon cost of our ingredients and on our menus we have a leaf symbol that informs customers if a dish is low, medium or high in carbon. I think this is more important than having calories on the menus.

Mark Selby and Thomasina Miers Wahaca co-founders
Mark Selby and Thomasina Miers Wahaca co-founders

But equally, if we just look at carbon, it doesn't capture the whole story, it doesn't tell you that if you buy a whole chicken that it's also been reared in a shed by the river which means the river is no longer safe to swim in.

Carbon statistics don't tell you if what you are eating has been grown locally or if it has been sprayed with chemicals.

How do you stay positive when there are so many huge problems we still need to solve?

I'm an optimist and if you work in food there's a sense we can make a change, and that's why I love the work we do at Wahaca. There's a tide of people wanting to get into farming and food production and there are businesses from Marks & Spencer to Nando's that are acknowledging they can make a difference. Food is the most political option we have these days, but the government is slow and, frankly, we don't have time.

The positive news is that nature comes back so quickly – when farmers stop spraying their crops, nature comes roaring back. The big picture stuff is quite heavy and can be depressing, but we need to remember that food is about celebration, fun, enjoyment and pleasure and we lose that at our peril. Food can make us feel genuinely happy, it fulfils wellbeing and our mental health, and that's why I stay hopeful, because every day I'm feeding people and giving pleasure.

Miers on Chefs in Schools

Chefs in Schools is a charity set up by Henry Dimbleby and Nicole Pisani, with patrons including Prue Leith, founder of Leiths School of Food and Wine, and Yotam Ottolenghi, co-owner of Ottolenghi and Nopi.

The charity's aim is to "fuel the future by transforming school food and food education, training kitchen teams to serve great school lunches". Miers has been a trustee since the programme's inception in 2018. "I know Henry very well and, like me, he was fed up of the food served in many schools, so we all sat around in Wahaca about four years ago and decided something had to be done," she says.

"I didn't have the headspace to take it on myself at the time, so Nicole and Henry set it up and I stayed on as a trustee. It's now operating in 65 schools and we're just opening a new chapter in Cornwall.

"The model has stayed the same: we put a trained chef into a school kitchen, who then trains the entire school how to eat healthily. It's key to turning around the whole school approach to food – it even encourages teachers to sit down with the kids.

"It works out at 50p per pupil less per day than the big contract caterers, so that saving goes into the salaries of the school cooks. These school cooks, rather than unseen faces that come into the building via a second entrance, become the heroes of the school, and we're creating a training system for all school cooks – whether they're contract caterers or not.

"We're lobbying food standards, so people recognise how dire this is – a third of kids are obese and while alcohol and smoking is taxed and is known to be bad for you, ultra-processed food is not. How can kids that aren't being fed nutritious food possibly keep up with their richer counterparts – how can they level up?"

For more information visit chefsinschools.org.uk

About Wahaca

  • Wahaca was co-founded in 2007 by Thomasina Miers, the first winner of MasterChef in 2005, alongside chief executive Mark Selby.
  • The Mexican street food chain now has 13 sites – 10 in London, as well as sites in Brighton, Edinburgh and Cardiff – feeding up to 42,000 customers per week.
  • Its spin-off brand, DF Tacos, has five sites across London – three restaurants and two kitchens in Market Halls locations.
  • Nearly 200 ingredients are used every day in the restaurants.
  • The business serves more than 29,000 portions of tacos every week.
  • Wahaca was the UK's first carbon-neutral restaurant business.
  • Wahaca employs 700 people. Any member of staff who has been in the company for two years is given a plane ticket to go and visit Mexico to experience first-hand the street food that inspired Wahaca.

Meat-free Mexican

Miers has recently released her eighth book, Meat Free Mexican, published by Hodder & Stoughton.

In it she shares more than 125 Mexican-inspired vegetarian and vegan recipes celebrating fresh, seasonal vegetables, earthy pulses, subtle herbs and bold spices.

Dishes include the likes of chargrilled courgettes with whipped feta and blackened chilli-lime dressing; chipotle-tamarind baked sweet potato gratin; and summer poblano peppers with crunchy cauliflower salad and wild herb mole.

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