First up on Wednesday’s show I interviewed Daphne Lambert who is crowdfunding a book called Living Food: A Feast For Soil & Soul on Unbound. There was some general chat about seasonal food, healthy food, environmental awareness and so on. Possibly the most interesting thing that came up, however, was the enormous amount of pumpkin flesh that gets wasted every year in the UK at Halloween. 18,000 tons of the stuff, according to The Independent. I shudder to think how much goes wasted in the USA.

Daphne was accompanied by her friend, Elizabeth Winkler, who provided that little titbit. For the second half hour Paulette took over and we had a bit of a feminist rant, in particular about how the UK has fallen down the international league table, as explained here by The Guardian. The fact that we rate 26th is bad enough, but to drop from 18th to 26th in just the past year is very worrying.

You can listen to the first hour here.

Next up, Judeline took over the microphone to interview our friend Sabitha (sorry love, don’t have your last name written down and don’t want to mangle it). This turned out to be mainly about the growth of racism in the UK in recent years.

And finally, we were delighted to welcome Shilpi Choudhury, the wife of Bristol’s last Lord Mayor, Faruk Choudhury. Her story of how a young couple of Bangladesh came to the UK to study and ended up as Bristol’s first citizens was tremendously encouraging after the somewhat negative tone of the past two segments. Also the deli that Shilpi has opened, Chai Shai, sounds very interesting. (And I note that the finding for the deli came via Outset, the organization that I talked to Amy Morse about a few weeks back. Paulette ran this one.

You can listen to the second hour here.