3 minute read
Reviving food form a horse-box
Tread ISSUE 2 REVIVING FOOD Food story FROM A HORSE-BOX
A CONVERSATION WITH ROSIE GRAY
Parked on her driveway in Kincraig
- a small rural village outside Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands - Rosie Gray runs Reviving Food her mobile micro-bakery from her bright yellow horse box. Here, Rosie bakes and sells her highly nutritious sourdough bread and delicious cakes to feed her local community.
Rosie is passionate about connecting people with their food, the producers behind it and the land we all depend on. Rosie describes what she is doing as, “quiet, gentle activism” and sees her role within the community as integral to the health of her people – both physically and mentally.
Having launched during the first UK Covid-19 lockdown, Rosie’s original intentions for her business have shifted to respond to our changing world. Originally Rosie’s motivation for being in a horsebox was to be able to move between local villages to sell her bread. Instead, the horse box has remained on her driveway and people have come to her. Rosie says, “it's been absolutely great and created a kind of place where people come and meet each other.”
Se says: “I was surprised at how many customers came my way because they had seen my yellow painted sign! It feels important not to forget the very simple ways of letting local people know about what you do.”
Underpinning everything Rosie does, is a mission to “reduce our impact on the environment whilst improving the health of individuals and creating better food systems that treat everyone involved with dignity and respect”. Having spent many years travelling around the world learning how to grow and cook food, Rosie became passionate about joining the dots between the people that produce food, and the people that eat it by celebrating their stories.
Rosie has forged close links with the grain growers, the millers, and the salt producers she relies on to bake her bread. She is committed to telling their stories and bringing the human connections alive. In the future she hopes to have the portraits of everyone involved displayed in her horsebox for everyone to see.
She has also built strong local ties with local businesses who might regard her as a threat to their custom. “Relationships are everything - It was very important to me I made friends with potential ‘competition’ to ensure I didn’t step on toes. Now the local café owner calls me ‘partner’ and we direct custom each way. He even lets me sell my bread in his café.”
Her mission is to move people’s perceptions through sparking their curiosity and inviting them to be a part of it. It would be impossible to buy bread from Rosie without also having a “good chat!”
For Rosie, it is about “moving away from expecting perfection in our food system but about gently educating people about their food, how it is grown and the imperfections that naturally result from weather and temperature fluctuations”. Sourdough is perfect for this – “it’s alive and it changes depending on the weather. I enjoy talking to my customers about the changes in the bread. Instead of being disappointed, they’re interested - it’s the quirky parts that make us stop and think and remember there is a human at the end of this!”
Rosie’s interest in sustainable agriculture and soil health have led her to work with grain growers who are practicing rotational growing. As a result, she is now selling peas and beans which are planted in between wheat crops; “the fact is, if we want to keep eating wheat, we also need to keep driving the demand for things like peas and beans, and all the other things that are growing within rotation to maintain healthy soil.”
In a normal year, Kincraig experiences huge seasonal fluctuations in visitors and often businesses respond to this and close during the lulls. Importantly for Rosie, Reviving Food will be a consistent part of the Kincraig community, “Bread is a staple and I want to be a staple for my community… the point is to feed the people that live here. This year has been probably perfect for that because of the way the lockdowns have been. It's meant that my whole core of the business working is based on local people – and visitors have just been a bonus.”
www.revivingfood.co.uk
