Between Two Waters opens with a phone conversation that took place not long after Pam Brunton opened her restaurant Inver, when a potential customer called to check the menu and was bewildered by a lack of ‘normal Scottish food, like lasagne’.   

‘This book came from a disjoint between the way people see Scottish landscapes and the way they think of Scottish food,’ explains the chef, voracious reader and former student of philosophy and food policy. She cites Inver’s ‘classic West Coast setting’, which leads to guests asking things like ‘why don’t you serve fish out of the loch?’ She then has to explain that there aren’t that many fish in there and defend her decision to prioritise fishing methods and stock sustainability over proximity. ‘The vast majority of the Scottish fishing fleet is industrial, which means it’s very destructive and most of the profit goes overseas or to extremely rich people.’

The book unpicks huge themes: the influence of big agriculture (‘organic food isn’t expensive, rather non-organic food is artificially cheap’) and commodification of what should be shared resources; colonialism and Scotland’s place within the Atlantic slave trade; modern-day slavery in industries like cocoa. Her clear-eyed, accessible analysis is unflinching around some of our most-loved ‘food traditions’ (for a nation that prides itself on making tablet, sugar doesn’t actually grow here). 

But she’s also completely clear on where blame lies. We talk just after a general election campaign where few, if any, words were uttered about food. ‘Government food policy defaults to “leave it to the supermarket", because supermarkets have found a way to present us with adequate and cheap food,' she says. 'But they do it by externalising the cost; by nailing farmers, drenching fields with pesticides, perpetuating unequal relationships across the globe, extracting as much as they can from communities and fields and animals, so that prices are completely skewed and we all end up paying the clean-up costs elsewhere in our taxes. That is not being discussed.’

Yet Brunton remains optimistic: ‘You have to be, everything else just plays into the status quo.’ She firmly believes in our collective power to make change. ‘Food is my story, it’s how I’ve chosen to interact with the world. I’m acutely aware of issues of accessibility, but we can all teach ourselves where food comes from. Find different places to shop: most cities have communities from different cultures with great grocery stores. Teach yourself to cook something, anything. Put a seed in a pot, it doesn’t need a garden.’ Returning to the election, she adds that shopping, cooking and eating is like ‘voting every single day, multiple times… and when you learn to read the story in your own shopping basket, you get to choose your own result.’  

Pam Brunton: Between Two Waters is out now published by Canongate; Inver Restaurant, Strathlachlan, Strachur; main picture: Mark Cameron.