Describe where you live and work and what is it you do.
I live in an apartment in Pimlico, London, with high ceilings and large windows. It is a calm space despite the busy road outside.
I work here too; I love not having to leave the surroundings I enjoy and I am lucky that I don’t have to.
Work is anything and everything to do with food. Cooking for family and private events; designing recipes for books, magazines or client events; photographic styling for books and magazines; demonstrating how to prepare, cook and serve food and collecting cookery books, old and new.
Within the last month I have launched a new business, with the intention of combining all these elements, called The Food Room and Library.
Jane Gifford, founder of The Food Room and Library, London, England
Is your work part of what defines you as a person? If so, why?
Very definitely. I don’t separate “work” from the rest of my life. Helping people feel relaxed and confident in cooking while encouraging them to be simple and elegant in their presentation, is a concept I feel passionately about.
I am saddened that care and consideration are sacrificed in the name of convenience and that expense becomes the excuse for paying no attention to detail and attractiveness in what we can make in the kitchen.
Does your work allow you to feel a connection to life and its sustainability, not just through the product you provide but by how you acquire it and work with that product?
I only use food that is seasonal, fresh and of good quality. I will not buy ready-made dishes, nor food that contains hydrogenated fats or MSG.
I think there is still a huge political element to decisions relating to foods and that the explanations are less than transparent.
What connects me to the product and its sustainability is the support I give to local producers in what I choose to buy and also to consume a broad range of foods - both to create a balance in our own consumption and as a sort of insurance policy. After all, who knows what the next banned or dangerous substance might prove to be?
It has been said that modern day, conventional farming on a large scale no longer involves the intelligent input of the farmer as everything comes out of a packet for maximum yield and uniformity of shape and size. How involved are you in the process of what you do and provide?
Farmers, and their livelihoods, have been threatened by many irrational laws and false claims about the safety or otherwise of their produce. Maximum yield and uniformity of size have become an economic answer in a commercial world to something that was originally a means of supplying people with enough to eat. There may be dishonest and disreputable farming practices being carried out, but many of these practices will have evolved as a result of previous laws and subsidies, thought initially to be appropriate. It is the same with other sectors of the food industry; some will have improved dramatically for the benefit of the consumer, whilst other areas will be deplorably maintained, against the interests of the public, rather than for their protection.
I can only do what I know now to be safe practice and to adapt if and when I learn otherwise.
What makes you happy and content? How do you spend your moments of leisure if there are any? What do you give thanks for?
I love feeding people with food that cheers them. I am thrilled that my four children - all students - cook for themselves and their friends and are always experimenting, inventing and calling me to tell me of their latest successful adventure.
I give thanks for having close friendships with everyone in my family as well as having a few very important friends. And for having the good fortune to enjoy what I do. If I can create a successful business from it too, then I shall be even luckier.
