Hello and welcome to The Bunker.

Your Need to Know on News and Politics five days a week.

I'm Emma Kennedy.

There are two meanings of the word stuffed.

One suggests an extreme feeling of satisfaction, where you've dined

so well and so magnificently that you can barely move for the gluttonous bloat. The other is far darker,

a sense that you've been given the short straw, that your opportunities have been pulled away from

you, and that you're powerless to do anything about it.

This tension between the haves and the have-nots is what lies at the centre of Penn Vogler's new book,

where she takes us on a journey through history where those two tables, one of plenty,

and the other of meagre scraps, reveals how privilege and control begins in the kitchen.

Joining me now is Penn Vogler, author of the book Stuffed, a political history of what we eat and why it matters.

Hello, Penn. Thanks for joining us.

Hi, Emma, thank you. And thank you for that perfect summary.

You begin the book with the moment when two opposing views opened up when Marcus Rashford,

the Man United Forward, ran his famous campaign to feed school children in the holidays.

I did, and I was writing the book. I'd been thinking

about it for quite a long time when we all fell into the pandemic and those two opposing views

seem to crystallise these ideas, the two ideas of stuff that you talked about so kind of eloquently at the beginning,

Marcus Rashford was trying to get people to take responsibility for feeding school kids in the

holidays, in fact. It was a kind of small detail. And Kate Green, who was the shadow education

secretary at the time, said it is the government's responsibility to feed hungry children.

...