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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast. I'm Olivia Potts.

I'm Laura Prendergast. And today we are delighted to be joined by Jonathan Drory, CBE.

Jonathan's a trustee of the Eden Project in Cambridge Science Centre, an ambassador for WWF,

and was for nine years a trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens Q and the Woodland Trust.

In a previous life at the BBC, he was executive producer of more than 50 primetime science

documentaries and

popular series, but he is now also the author of Around the World in 80 Trees, and the more

recent, around the world in 80 plants. Jonathan, welcome to Table Talk. Thanks for having me on.

Jonathan, as listeners will know, we always start this podcast in the same place with a question,

what are your earliest memories of food? My parents came to London via Scotland, and their parents

came from Eastern Europe. So I had this sort of funny mixed-up food life as a child. Some of the

things I remember in these sort of very, very noisy meal times

were the Scottish angle was always porridge for breakfast, generally with salt rather than sugar.

And I remember you had Ian Rankin on recently, and he had the same experience, I think.

And then my lunches, which were often made by my dad, were sort of peanut butter and honey,

which he thought would pack me with the maximum amount of nutrition, this from someone

whose family had come as refugees from Eastern Europe. It was all about packing in the calories.

And then when I came home from school, my mum would make these fantastic sort of,

I don't know really what to call them, but they were kind of drop pancakes. So pancakes, but not as

we know them. They were batter that was dropped into boiling oil rather than into a sort of thin

amount of butter. And so they were quite greasy but crispy.

...