Children's Book
Learn how food reaches our plates with our children's book—showing young readers the social and environmental impacts of intensive food production.
This children’s book opens a window to the wider world, combining lively illustrations with an engaging story that encourage kids to ask questions, think about fairness, and understand different ways of life—all in a gentle but thought-provoking narrative.
Encourage children to ask questions and discover how everyday choices affect people, communities, and the environment, helping them understand the world around them in a thoughtful and engaging way.
Introduce children to different traditions, foods, and daily lives around the world, helping them appreciate diversity and understand the experiences of people from many backgrounds.
Extend the story beyond the pages with creative exercises and discussion prompts that help children reflect, explore, and deepen their understanding of the book’s themes.
Check out our resources below to discover more about the book and how to get involved.
Want to have books for your class and school library?
Apply to become a partner school!
Access resources to help you teach
the book to your class.
Have your children responded to the book? Please do send photos of artwork or writing here.
Email us"The Salmon and the Tomato is a genuinely lovely piece of work. Making commodity chains legible to young readers without flattening the complexity is hard to do, and you've pulled it off."
Academic, journalist, activist and writer
"A powerful and important tool for educating young readers about the complex interconnections of global food systems and their impacts on people and the environment."
Greenpeace Africa
"The [children's] book introduces the topic in a sensitive and thought-provoking way that would appeal to a wide age range of children, whilst emphasising opportunities for positive change."
Naturalist and television presenter
"This is a very important [children's] book, and will make a valuable contribution to developing our children's understanding of where their food comes from, and how everything is connected in our globalised world. We consider this to be a very worthwhile endeavour and fully support its publication."
Scotland Director, WildFish
Commensality is a participatory recipe book shaped around shared tables, improvised kitchens, and food made under pressure. It brings together cooking, memory, and community, showing how meals become acts of care, dignity, and connection within systems that depend on invisibility.
The recipes are offered as they are cooked: approximate, adaptable, and meant for sharing. Measurements shift, ingredients substitute, and food is often eaten from shared dishes. They reflect kitchens built from what is available, where cooking is collective and meals are made to be eaten together, not perfected.
Running through the book are personal accounts of daily life and migration. These stories sit alongside the recipes, allowing moments of warmth and intimacy.
Ingredients and dishes carry longer trajectories of movement. Spices, grains, and methods appear as travellers, shaped by trade, colonial routes, and migration. History emerges quietly through use, showing how food knowledge survives by being practised, altered, and passed on.
Beneath the warmth of shared meals lies the reality of intensive agriculture. The contributors cook with vegetables grown through exhausting, often exploitative labour. This context is not foregrounded but ever-present, revealing commensality as a form of survival and agency within a food system built on precarity and powerlessness.
Support this project by ordering your own copy of this beautiful recipe book - perfect for any kitchen or coffee table, and the ideal gift!
Buy the book