This episode of Table Talk is sponsored by J-Food-O, dedicated to sharing the best Japan has to offer.

Over the next few months, J-Food-O and a selection of London restaurants will create seafood and sake pairings for spectator listeners to help develop your knowledge and enjoyment of the drink.

The pairing will focus on the concept of umami, which in Japanese means the essence of deliciousness. Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast.

I'm Laura Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts.

And today we're delighted to be joined by Rory Stewart.

Rory has been an academic, writer, adventurer, politician and diplomat.

After time in the army and the diplomatic service, he tracked across Afghanistan,

was appointed a fellow at Harvard and wrote a number of books before entering Parliament.

He was a cabinet minister and also made his bid for the Tory party leadership.

He's now a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he

teaches politics and international relations. Rory, welcome to Table Talk. Thank you. Rory,

we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you, what are your earliest

memories of food?

Earliest memories of food are bacon and egg sandwiches on a bamboo raft in the Malaysian

jungle of my father. So every weekend morning, he would wake me up at 6th of the morning

and we'd take bacon and egg sandwiches wrapped in silver foil and we'd get on a homemade raft.

Sometimes to make it from bamboo, sometimes you'd tie a couple of cart tires together.

And then we'd go floating down a river and we'd stop on ashore and we'd eat our bacon and egg sandwiches.

And you were born in Hong Kong and moved to

Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur before returning to the UK. How big an influence was that on your

early life when it comes to food? Huge influence. I think that partly because of that,

...