There are many days when social media can seem only a venue for bad news and even worse opinions. So it is heartening when the medium shows it can be a force for good, as with the creation and thriving of Life Kitchen, the winner of OFM’s Best Ethical Food Project for 2018.
Ryan Riley, a 25-year-old food writer and stylist, launched the Life Kitchen in February to provide free, specialised cookery classes for people living with cancer. One of the first people to notice was Nigella Lawson, who lost her first husband, John Diamond, to throat cancer. She began posting about Life Kitchen to her 2.6m followers on Twitter and hasn’t stopped. “She’s always tweeting, ‘How amazing is Life Kitchen?’” says Riley. “She’s been a supporter since about day three.”
Since then, Riley has provided a masterclass in spreading the word through social media. “One day I asked two brands if they’d sponsor us and they said, ‘You’re too small,’” he says. “And I just put that on Twitter and we went from 900 followers to 4,000 in an hour. It just got retweeted and retweeted in a show of solidarity.” When he needed pro bono lawyers, Riley simply put the word out and an offer came soon after.
The main work of Life Kitchen is done face to face. Riley came up with the idea after reflecting on the experience of his mother, who was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer when he was 18, living in Sunderland, their home town. One of the side effects of the chemotherapy was a loss of taste and appetite. After his mother died, Riley, now working in the food industry, wondered if there might be a way to return the pleasure of eating to cancer patients.
The first class took place at River Cottage in Devon – as reported in the May issue of OFM – and there have since been a dozen more. Around 350 people have taken one of Riley’s lighthearted, resolutely fun tutorials (though he has studied the science, too). Venues have included Duck & Waffle, 40 floors above London, the Soho Farmhouse in Chipping Norton and a four-day retreat at a chateau in France (loaned from someone Riley “met” on Instagram).
“My dad, always the northerner, says, ‘You’re not being too luxury and show-offy are you?’” laughs Riley. “But we’re not because we’re free, we’re accessible, we never exclude anyone. The reason we can’t do Life Kitchen at any venue is because you want to give that experience. At Duck & Waffle we drank Taittinger! Our guests just love it and feel special.”
It’s been a wild few months, but Riley is just getting started. He is speaking to publishers about a cookbook and the charity is also about to start work on its first cookery school, housed in a Grade II-listed Victorian gate lodge in Sunderland, the next street over from where his mother lived. The council has given him the building for next to nothing and it is going to be kitted out – again, gratis – by architects, landscape gardeners and the white-goods company Fisher & Paykel, all of whom Riley has charmed with his enthusiasm. Riley is waiting for Life Kitchen to be given a charity number, which will allow it to apply for grants, and until then it relies on donations (plus £2 every time a spiced duck doughnut is ordered at Duck & Waffle, which has happened almost 3,000 times in the past two months).
“Everyone understands what we were doing because it is incredibly genuine, it’s from my personal experience, it’s free and it always will be free,” says Riley. “And it’s just got a benefit to it: it’s that problem that was completely overlooked, and I hear it every single day. A woman said at the last event that what she ate was the best and happiest thing since she was diagnosed. That’s a really wonderful thing.”
