Ever wished that you could cut down on your food bills? Artist and activist Spring Exprit (Eugenia Beirer) may have the answer. Call it Dumpster Diving, Skipping or even Freeganism - on the face of it “food salvage” is simply the practice of retrieving and eating food that others have thrown away. But it goes much deeper than that, calling in to question the workings of the entire capitalist economy. Oh, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun too.

Hattie Garlick visited New Covent Garden Market with a group of novice scavengers to learn the tricks of the dumpster diving trade. Click More below to watch her video.

 

Agnes Jekyll (1860-1937) was the supreme hostess:  her house was described as "the apogee of opulent comfort and order without grandeur, smelling of pot-pouri, furniture polish and wood smoke".  Helen Garlick reads a few of her favourite extracts...

Started in 1871, Maison Bertaux still survives in its original premises.  Such is the devotion to this wonderful pastisserie that one ex-Soho resident has been going there for over 60 years - even though he moved out of London 25 years ago.

 

Zabar's is not a building that really stands out, perhaps the mock tudor looks a bit odd on 81st and Broadway but that's about it. Yet any self-respecting New Yorker knows it...

Ace Cafe on London's North Circular Road has been serving bikers since 1938.  Hattie Garlick visited recently and learnt how, after being destroyed in an air-raid in 1940,  it became the world famous haunt it is today getting through an astonishing 7 tons of sausages a year.

But how does a vegan survive in this world of leathers and bacon sandwiches?  Hattie tracked down Vegan Biker Boy for some answers.

A man with a dark passion. At Philip Neal in London's Turnham Green can be found some of the best chocolate in town. His ambition is to change people's habits, to get them to understand what great chocolate tastes like and eventually to open the best chocolate lounge in the country. He explains both his passion and his dreams.

 

REZA MAHAMMAD, owner of the famed Star Of India in Kensington, TV celebrity and much loved personality, talks about his father’s early struggles when he arrived as a stowaway in 1937. He and a handful of friends attempted to establish Indian cuisine in England and eventually succeeded in changing the eating habits of a nation.

The two Trinity movies were the first "Comedy Westerns" produced in Italy in the early 1970s starring Terence Hill as Trinity and Bud Spencer as Bambino,  Trinity's older half-brother. Trinity has just won a large amount of money as a card-sharp and so they're taking themselves to the smart, members-only restaurant in town ... the result is ... watch and see.

Adam Gopnik, author and writer for The New Yorker magazine, came to London in late November for the UK launch of his new book. He credits Fergus Henderson for unwittingly giving him the title, The Table Comes First, and the two of them met up at St. John Hotel where the conversation ran from subjects as diverse as farting cows and the worrying proliferation of square plates in France...

 

Peter Boizot, MBE, is a Soho legend.  In 1965 he introduced the pizza to Londoners when he imported an Italian oven into the first ever Pizza Express in Wardour Street.  The popularity of the jazz club below his Dean Street pizzeria lead to the founding of the Soho Jazz Festival.  He fought the very successful Save Piccadilly campaign, was a founder member of the Soho Society and the Soho Restaurateurs Association and supported in no small measure Soho Housing Association.

We interviewed him about those pioneering days at his home in Peterborough.