Table Talk

What is it that drives Harriet Lamb, the woman behind the Fairtrade movement and current CEO of WRAP? It is the first question we ask in this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, and the answer is a chastening one. "I was researching why bananas are so cheap in our shops and I went to Costa Rica," she says. "I was met by Carlos, who drives me for miles through plantations of bananas, beautifully green, absolutely silent because so many pesticides have been used that there is none of the normal animal life.  "Carlos was one of the tens of thousands of Latin American men who was made sterile as a result of spraying those chemicals. But he took me to meet a woman, Maria, who suffered a worse fate. "She gave birth to a baby whose head was swollen like a huge balloon, with no eyelids, with no lips. She said the worst thing was that her baby was in constant pain.  "Even when she scooped him up to comfort him, which is of course your instinct as a mum, it only made the crying worse. And there was nothing s