Hello. We recorded this episode of Table Talk a little earlier in the year, before the current situation with COVID-19 had arisen.

So if you hear a conversation about restaurants and dinner parties with no mention of social distancing or isolation, that's why.

We hope you enjoy the podcast.

Hello and welcome to Table Talk for Spectators' Food and Drink Podcast.

I'm Lara Brenda Garst. And I'm Olivia Potts. And we're delighted today to be joined by Rory

Sutherland. Rory is the vice-chairman of Ogilvy, one of the largest and most renowned advertising

agencies in the world.

Spectator readers will also know Rory from his beloved wiki man column. And Rory's most recent book,

Alchemy, The Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense, was published in May last year. Rory, welcome to our podcast.

It's a pleasure to be on. I never thought I'd be invited on to a culinary podcast.

Well, we're delighted to have you. We will start where we always start at the beginning.

Can you tell us about your earliest memories of food?

They're not particularly inspiring, given that I grew up in the 1970s. My first memories would have been from the early 70s.

I was also cursed with a brother who was a very early food crank.

I mean, it's much, much more common now for people to have large repertoires of things they won't eat.

But my brother, he was 18 months older than me, would at one stage only eat.

I think he'd toast with marmite, frozen peas, fish fingers, cooked cold chicken and probably chips.

But that was pretty much it.

And so that rather had a knock-on effect on the rest of the household.

And that if you have one food crank in the household, it puts a bit of a kibosh on restaurant visits and exciting sort of

exploratory trips to weird culinary destinations. Not that there were that many in the 1970s.

One thing worth mentioning is in many ways how bad by comparison the quality of food, in particular food where you ate out, was overwhelmingly outside London, certainly.

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