My love affair with the Guardian began 20 years ago when I subscribed to Guardian Weekly for cultural and political sustenance during my two-year stint as a VSO volunteer in Belize. These days the food section feeds my insatiable appetite for all things foodie. I graduated in food science and I’ve worked in the food industry ever since my first Saturday job in a cheese shop.
I’m now the managing director of farmer-owned Fairtrade nut company Liberation Foods. We supply the vast majority of Fairtrade-certified nuts in the UK. Our shareholders are co-operatives of small-scale nut producers from Bolivia, El Salvador, Kerala, Malawi and Nicaragua – a politically passionate group who heartily approve when they find a copy of the Guardian lying around in our London office. The farmers invariably turn to the business section first, closely followed by the sport.
I’m from a small market town in Lancashire. I’m 46 and have a four-year-old son, Colby, with my partner Gareth. Gareth is from Belize and we met there 20 years ago. It turned out we’d both been at university in the UK at the same time and we’d both become Guardian readers on leaving our respective homes and going to uni. I’m sorry to say I do not come from a family of Guardian readers – my mum is an avid Telegraph reader and my sister buys the Daily Mail – I must be one of those apples that falls far from the tree.
In any spare time I get I run and swim and have taken part in races all over the country from 10ks to marathons with a few triathlons thrown in too.
Huge bias notwithstanding, my all-time favourite Guardian article came in 2008 with Allegra McEvedy’s “peanut renaissance” piece – a subject close to my heart by one of my food idols in the only newspaper that could do the subject justice.
The Guardian has become particularly important to me all over again in the last six or so months as a sanctuary of sanity, reason and social conscience in an increasingly divided world.
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