Week 4 of 5
Team
Project partner: Revolut
Ayesha Saleem
Keya Bangera
Mary Mehtarizadeh
Niki Marathia
Keya Bangera
Mary Mehtarizadeh
Niki Marathia
Process
As a smaller group, we started the week by consolidating our research. Doing this helped us realise that we hadn’t yet considered where the phrase ‘eat the rich’ originated from and what it means to us (Figure 2). Coined to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau during the French Revolution, it comes from the longer ‘when the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’ (Roberts, 2020). We liked this new dimension, as we felt it worked well with our research into food poverty and social inequalities.
Figure 2. ‘Eat the rich’ origins and interpretation
Volunteering
I wrote down observations from serving food at St Paul’s Tottenham, so the rest of the team could get a better idea of where my takeaways came from. My notes:
18:15-21:00
Serving food
When I first arrived, I was greeted by the kitchen volunteers and the shift leader, Emma. She gave me a quick run-down of the service ahead. Then I was warmly welcomed by the other two hosting volunteers I was doing front-of-house with.
Food service starts at 19:00. Until then, we have time to set up the tables with cutlery, glasses, water jugs, salt & pepper, and sauces. Guests are supposed to arrive from 19:00 onwards, but some come early and wait for the food to get ready. Once people arrive, Emma instructed me to welcome them and make them feel invited. We offered orange juice, tea, and coffee soon as people sat at a table. The orange juice we served was concentrated and the coffee was instant.
When the tables were all set, we had some time to start preparing goody bags. Fresh vegetables as well as frozen food that isn’t used for the meal gets put into plastic bags and given out to people who wish to take them home.
We served 30-31 people during the course of the evening. This was surprisingly busy for a Wednesday, as 30 is the max amount this location normally gets. A normal evening would be 15-20 people. Emma said that other locations can host up to 80 guests. Many people knew each other as well as the volunteers, and were visibly comfortable within the space.
Many conversations were had and laughs were shared during the course of the evening. Guests generally appeared to be from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Some seemed to arrive hungry but were always polite and patient receiving their meal. A couple of guests were in their 20’s, but most appeared to be from 40 to 60 years old.
The space itself is a little run-down but well looked after by those who use it. The supplies and the food within the cupboards tend to be low-cost, like canned sauces and pasta.
The meal served on the night was potato and carrot wedges with dips for starters, stuffed peppers with rice and peas for mains, and carrot cake with custard for dessert. I tried the main and dessert - they both tasted good. This was reflected by guests, as many people asked for seconds during dessert. People were so thankful to be dining there that I felt like I was at a family gathering in a way. There were moments during service that I forgot that people may be facing struggles in their lives.
As the evening came to a close, people started to leave in a good mood. Guests were saying goodbyes to each other and the volunteers, with some hugs being shared. Once everyone left, we tidied up the space quickly and had a debrief with Emma. She gathered all floor and kitchen volunteers asking for feedback on the session, and whether anything may have happened that made us feel uncomfortable. She then gave us info on how we can volunteer further, or apply to be shift leaders (paid) if we wanted. I left feeling like I’d like to volunteer again.
Money talks
We decided to consult people who understood money deeper than we could within a few weeks, so that our system could reflect the different worlds we had encountered. Brian, my boyfriend, holds two master’s and a bachelor’s degree in economics. He agreed to jump on a call with us so we could speculate together on a universe where a currency was based on food. Following this, he set us up on a call with Andras, PhD in Economics and current research economist at the Bank of England. Our conversations:
MRes, Economics European University Institute
MSc, Economics Trinity College Dublin
BA, Economics University College Dublin
If you are thinking of creating a new currency, you can kind of think of yourselves as being a central bank. You are a central bank and a mint. So a mint is the place that prints the coins or prints the notes, and the central bank is the one that controls the supply of them. So the mint is just like the printer. It does this like mechanically, but the central bank is the one that decides, makes the decisions about what to print and how much currency should be in circulation.
So you could think of yourself as being a central bank and the central bank. will decide the value of your currency. So you as the central bank in this new system will decide that your currency, you know, one UAL dollar equals 1 tin of tomatoes or one steak or three potatoes or whatever you want, you know, you can decide this. Maybe you do it in calories, maybe you do it in grams, maybe you do it in volume. Those are all the kind of decisions you could take.
Central banks really care about the value of their currency. It's what they're set up, what they exist to control. So when we think about what value they care about, there's two ways to think about values of a currency.
If you pick something like vegetables, then, you know, how does everyone agree what vegetables are worth? Like if you go to your coffee shop, you say, I want to buy a coffee and he tells you it's 300 grammes of kale. then you both need to get out weighing scales and weigh out 300 grammes of kale. And then yes, you could make your kale wet so that it weighs more, and then actually it's a smaller amount, or you could use kale that's about to go off, or you could use low quality kale. There are all these kind of like complicated things about how do we measure what, you know, what 300 grammes of kale actually is. But if you have a coin, it's pretty simple. It's just a coin.
Either you have your currency literally be food like tin tomatoes, or you have a currency that is actually backed by food. So there's food represented by it and the price of food influences. Essentially notes are an IOU. They're a note that says this money is worth something, and if you take it to somewhere else, you can get the value of that redeemed to you.
So instead of literally, you know, you instead of literally your currency being food like tinned tomatoes or something, you could have a currency that is still notes. So you'd still have a note just like you have today, except it would be backed by a food.
And this means that your note becomes an IOU. It becomes something that tells everyone, if you take this to somebody, normally a central bank,
They will give you the value of this note in whatever it's whatever it's backed by.
And the most, this kind of system of currency, the most famous example of this is the gold standard.
But then if you think of notes, these can be like an abstraction. So it becomes even, I don't want to say better because it's not necessarily better, becomes even more abstract. It's not about what it is anymore. It's really just a commitment by your central bank that this is worth something.
PhD, Economics University of Amsterdam
MPhil, Economics Tinbergen Institute
BA, Economics Corvinus University of Budapest
Money can mean, money can mean several different things, or money has different functions, and valuation that that that you mentioned is is is one of those, but there are other reasons for having money in our society, like this, not just valuing things, but also storing.
But the same goes on in the prisons where instant ramen noodles are sort of used as a medium exchange and to store wealth.
Oh, I guess, I mean, in concept too, there are different, there's not, there are many sort of these local currencies circulating, like the Scottish have their own Scottish pound and a lot of... Uh, these regions that try to have some autonomy, uh, experimented, uh, with this, um, as far as I know. It depends what your goal is with it, but the premise that it returns value to the community, I don't see how that's the case. So what is the value that's being returned here?
Food currency is defined in terms of grammes or calories. Because one problem is with, I don't know, if you just use chickpeas, cannels of chickpeas or whatever is a currency that is not divisible. So you can't, you know, if something costs, so you cannot break it down, like, for example, with pounds there, they are invisible, but with cans of, you cannot use water can of tuna. A quarter can of, yeah, I don't know if that makes sense.
While with food, you only have so much food as it was being produced, or the same with the gold standard, you only have a certain amount of fixed supply in circulation. So if people start hoarding it, there won't be enough money or currency to help.
So far, they seem not to have replaced currency because these three intrinsic...Or industry. criteria that money has to fulfill. These cryptocurrencies are not really fulfilling. They're not a reliable store of wealth because they're very fluctuates A lot. They're not a good medium exchange because it helps them not to accept bitcoins. And yeah. But I think these local currencies that are not backed by a central bank, they are in some cases, you can still see that they sort of in circulation with more or less success. But I think they did because they are backed or like there's some entity that promises that it will swap them to.
So that was the problem with also with the gold standard that there are certain episodes, crisis episodes, where people are become very, very risk averse and they start hoarding money to as a precautionary saving and that can push itself. So even if there's no... fundamental crisis out there. Once people start becoming very risk averse and start hoarding, scaring from, I don't know, whatever, that will mean that there's going to be a shortage of money out in the economy for circulation. And this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, sort of. And that's not the case with fiat money or the money that we have currently in circulation, because there's not a fixed supply of money, but money can be printed.
I mean, I guess you can think of maybe some role of the government can have of like building a large strategic reserve where it can, if it sees that the economy is short on money, then it injects a bit of that into circulation.
Fround
These money talks helped us devise our food-backed system. We decided that its currency would be the Fround, or fresh pound. We put our thoughts into a flow chart, examining how the currency would work on a macro and micro level:
Figure 13. The Fround, our speculative currency
Creative toolkits
We wanted to involve people in the design process of our banknotes, so we could learn from their perspectives about food and poverty. We developed a creative toolkit workshop where we first asked our classmates to design a banknote that exposes food scarcity in the UK. This felt successful, as people engaged with the topic and produced interesting results. We decided to run the workshop at Hackney City Farm with people who work there next, to see what could arise from those who are closer to food production and distribution than we are. Like back in the studio, people at Hackney City Farm engaged with topic and brought their insights forward into their artifacts. The analysis of the outcomes was led by Ayesha.
in class
Participant 1
Participant 2
Participant 3
Participant 4
Participant 5
Hackney City Farm
Participant 6
Participant 7
Participant 8
Participant 9
Sources
Roberts, K.E. (2020) Eat the Rich: The Evolution of a Slogan. Available at: https://wearethemutants.com/2020/02/13/eat-the-rich-the-evolution-of-a-slogan/ (Accessed: 3 Mar 2026)