Hello and welcome to Table Talk. I'm Olivia Potts and I'm Naraprindigast. Today we are joined by Tom Parker Bowles. Tom is a restaurant critic, food writer and broadcaster. He has published seven books about food ranging from his experiences seeking out culinary extremes around the world, to authoring the official Fortimer Mason Cookbooks.

Tom, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me. I can't believe I'm sitting in the spectator's office, 12 years of intrigue and brilliance, obviously.

Of course. Of course. Tom, can you start by telling us about your memories of food from childhood?

Gosh, I think a whole career of mine has been built on having a very nice, I'm really bucking against a trend here.

I'm supposed to have a miserable, horrible life and blame everyone for everything.

But I had an incredibly happy life growing up in the country in Wiltsch with my mother and father.

Until age about seven and

half, as happened to a lot of my generation of my friends, we were sent off to prep school

in Oxford, very comfortable. It's called Summerfields. Nothing legally dodgy here. It was very, very fine,

you know, seven and a half, eight, and not so running around in sports and I was rubbish at sports and all the rest of it.

But the one thing I remember was that the food was just absolutely disgusting.

Like anyone in the 70s and 80s who'd been to any sort of institution, whether it was a hospital or a school or whatever, the food was absolutely debaunched and debased.

It was really, really genuinely disgusting.

And I just remember hunger, not real hunger,

but just remember being hungry the whole time and just thinking, God, the food was so nice.

And all these words you have like local and seasonal and organic and all these happy, hippie

words that you have these days were very normal. My father was a really good gardener and a good

shot and my mother was a good cook. So all these sort of, you know, it was all very sort of merryberry. Actually,

it was a bit more visceral than Mary Berry. Not no disrespect to Mary Berry, obviously. But yes,

and at school you suddenly come across a processed and an awful world of absolute disgusting institutional cooking.

So there'd be mints in every different kind, grey, grisly, greasy,

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