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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Henry Dimbleby who until very recently

was the government's food saw and his co-author and wife the journalist jemimaim and Lewis

their new book being ravenous how to get ourselves and our planet into shape now

gas bezal ask you since we've got what you deplore in the book as a buy one get one free offer in having both of you here as co-authors,

how the process of putting this book together was.

I mean, among other things, working with your partner is a high-risk activity.

Yes.

A lot of people have asked us how we manage this and also have expressed their own

incredulity and said that they would kill their husband or wife if they had to work

with them.

But actually, I think the best working partnerships usually happen where one person is much better

at one thing than the other and vice versa.

And in this case, I'm a better writer than him, but he's a much better thinker than me.

And so it worked out rather well. There was a clear division of duties. He's a good, he's not a bad writer, actually. He's a good writer.

She described my writing at the book launch as serviceable.

That's one for the anniversary party.

But he writes the way he thinks in a great sort of unerated kind of torrent of thoughts, tumbling over each other very dense and he he he

because all this knowledge is in his head he doesn't sort of he doesn't pull it out and leave it to air

the way highly calerific you know highly calerific whip it into a meringue i mean canary canary

dense the thing that i think is really interesting about for me i mean it was it highly calerific. Whip it into a meringue. I mean, canary, cannery dense.

The thing that I think is really interesting about, for me,

...