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I Want People To Look At My Plate At Dinner And Go, I Wish I’d Ordered That

Like her mother Linda, she's a photographer and a committed vegetarian. She talks TV, vegan china and cooking for Ringo

The Telegraph; By Craig McLean; February 19, 2022

In her studio in north-west London, Mary McCartney is serving me her vegan very chocolatey orange cookies and her signature green and mint tea from a vegan mug. “So what do you think of the ‘grint’?” she asks, using the name we’ve just this second workshopped. “It’s nice mixed, isn’t it? It takes the edge [off] the green tea.” Delicious, I tell her, as are the cookies. No taste-free worthiness here. Their vegan credentials are ensured by the lack of butter or egg (coconut oil is doing the heavy lifting), while Green & Black’s vegan chocolate is the kitchen hack – the brand’s elevated price point justified in this case – that brings the sweetness. Because there are no calorific animal products, “you can eat as much as you like, even raw, and that’s a win”, says this 52-year-old mother of four, her elegantly youthful physique (zipped-up green Adidas tracksuit top, slim jeans) proving she practices what she eats. “Raw cookie dough is a thing, isn’t it? You can buy raw cookie dough, and people just eat it. But I’m not perfect, so I’m not one to preach…” McCartney is a near-lifelong vegetarian, a photographer, a cookbook writer and, now, all-star culinary show presenter. Her show, Mary McCartney Serves It Up! is a vegan-by-default cook-along show (showing on Discovery+) that features friends and family in the shape of guests Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and, to brighten the celebrity wattage a shade more, McCartney’s sister and dad. “But what I love to do is come up with solutions that go: ‘Right, I’m going to do a cookie, and I want it to be like a normal-tasting cookie. So what can I do?’ I like to look at it in a positive way.” The same goes for the mugs from which we’re drinking. McCartney had them made as a “test”, a limited-edition range, so limited that they’re only available here in her photography studio up a cobbled mews near Maida Vale. Fat of diameter but thin of rim, and with her signature on the bottom, their eco-credentials are burnished by the lack of bone china. “Bone china has actually got ground-up [animal] bone in it. So I was wondering: ‘What could you get made without it?’” So what are these made from? “This is porcelain.” A pause and a flicker of a smile. “I’m actually bull----ing, I don’t know what it is! But I would avoid using bone china – only because I know about it. Me and mum were hanging out in the kitchen one day and she’s like: ‘Can you believe bone china is called that because it’s actually ground-up bone?’ Until you hear about it, we don’t piece it together. I will drink out of bone china, if I’m given it – I’m not that [fundamentalist]. But if I was going to make [a cookwear range], I would look for something different.” “Mum” is Linda McCartney, the late photographer, vegetarian food pioneer and activist. Mary is the first child born to Linda and Paul McCartney (her mum already had a daughter, Heather, now 59). Her younger siblings are Stella, 50, the fashion designer, James, 44, a musician, and half-sister Beatrice, 18, her dad’s daughter with ex-wife Heather Mills. My mug bears a wraparound photograph by Mary of Linda’s hands, cradling a frog. There’s a huge print of it on the wall, too, as there is of Stella, at 24, snuggling up in bed with their mum, who died of breast cancer in 1998, aged 56. “It’s called Gently Holding Frog and is one of my favourite pictures,” says McCartney softly. “We were walking along a path and the frog was on the path, and Mum picked him up. She’s holding him very firm but kind, so he won’t accidentally fling himself and squash himself and hurt himself. I never get bored of looking at it.” For most of her professional career, McCartney has worked as a photographer, in demand for exhibitions, commercial shoots, fashion magazines and celebrity portraits. Mark Rylance as Twelfth Night’s Countess Olivia, shot on Broadway in 2013, is on the wall over McCartney’s shoulder; a partially clothed Kate Moss sits over mine. She took all the cover-art imagery for her dad’s 2020 record McCartney III, the “rockdown” album the 79-year-old ex-Beatle wrote, played entirely

himself and recorded on his Sussex estate early in the pandemic. “Dad asked me if I would do some pictures, so I became his lockdown photographer,” she says. She shot some “Magritte-y” images of Sir Macca on horseback – Clan McCartney are big horse lovers – and then they headed to his recording studio. “But when I got there, he’d come up with an idea [for a song], and he was genuinely recording something. And I was like: ‘I’ve come down here to take pictures of you! And he was like: ‘I don’t want to kill the moment though!’ In the end, I said: ‘You have to give me half an hour.’ I had to be a little tiny bit bossy with him. It was fun. Then he would come home from the studio when we were in lockdown. He was recording, and I was testing the recipes for the cooking show, and he’d play the songs. So it was quite an interesting time!” As she describes it: “I’ve always just done the food thing more as a result of growing up in a vegetarian family. And then I got offered this TV show, and now I’m merging food and photography, my two passions, and embracing it. It’s a really exciting time.” The McCartneys are the first family of vegetarianism. As well as the pioneering and ever-growing Linda McCartney Foods range, founded by her mother in 1991, Mary, Stella and Sir Paul launched the Meat Free Monday campaign in 2009. When I accompanied the musician on tour in Japan for the Telegraph in 2014, I was astonished at the catering provided for the musicians and crew. Normally that’s food as fuel – carb-heavy nosh for a rock ’n’ roll army marching on its stomach. But backstage at the Tokyo Dome, I’d never seen such a smorgasbord of high-class vegetarian options. “That was because Mum had worked with the amazing caterers. I was with Mum a lot – I used to work with her on her food things and cookbooks. And she was like: ‘If we’re going to make this meat-free, it has to be really satisfying.’ These are big riggers that you’re feeding. So she worked with the food caterer and they had a good time with it. It wasn’t just a chore.” Sir Paul pops by on Serves It Up!, and Stella’s on, too, although according to her elder sister, the fashion designer doesn’t need any tips. If Mary is a 10 as a chef, so is Stella, insists the family’s “professional” cook. “She’s really good. We all grew up talking about food. When we became a vegetarian family, we were talking about filling that gap on the plate. And I’m always adamant that I don’t want someone to look at my plate and think: ‘Oh, I’m glad I don’t eat veggie.’ I want them to look at my plate at dinner and go: ‘Oh, I wish I’d ordered that.’ That’s how I base my food style.” As for her other guests on the show: Reese Witherspoon, Zooming in from America, “was really funny. She had genuinely texted a few months before, saying: ‘I need you to show me something,’ because she’s not a big cook. She was like: ‘I want something family-style that I can cook and put on the table for the kids and everyone will like it.’” The actress and producer is, it seems, very fun to hang out with. “For me, the kitchen is the centre of the home. Most people hang out in the kitchen more than anywhere else. So guests come into the kitchen, even if it’s a transatlantic version of that. It’s how I like to socialise.” What about Oprah? How was it flipping the table? Very daunting, admits McCartney. “But then, when I knew what we were going to cook together and I felt confident about it, the rest followed. It brings me back to how food and memories… make you feel good. That’s where the [idea for] whole show came about.” Surprised to hear that Winfrey had never made a dip, McCartney got creative. “I love Bloody Marys. And I thought: ‘What if you made that into a dip?’ So I tested it with passata, olive oil, and then what you would put in a Bloody Mary: bit of vodka, celery salt, Worcestershire sauce, and heated that through. “It was more like entertaining Oprah, asking her: ‘What do you like to do? How do you like to greet the guests at a party?’ And she said she likes to meet people at the door with a little shot of good

In her studio in north-west London, Mary McCartney is serving me her vegan very chocolatey orange cookies and her signature green and mint tea from a vegan mug. “So what do you think of the ‘grint’?” she asks, using the name we’ve just this second workshopped. “It’s nice mixed, isn’t it? It takes the edge [off] the green tea.” Delicious, I tell her, as are the cookies. No taste-free worthiness here. Their vegan credentials are ensured by the lack of butter or egg (coconut oil is doing the heavy lifting), while Green & Black’s vegan chocolate is the kitchen hack – the brand’s elevated price point justified in this case – that brings the sweetness. Because there are no calorific animal products, “you can eat as much as you like, even raw, and that’s a win”, says this 52-year-old mother of four, her elegantly youthful physique (zipped-up green Adidas tracksuit top, slim jeans) proving she practices what she eats. “Raw cookie dough is a thing, isn’t it? You can buy raw cookie dough, and people just eat it. But I’m not perfect, so I’m not one to preach…” McCartney is a near-lifelong vegetarian, a photographer, a cookbook writer and, now, all-star culinary show presenter. Her show, Mary McCartney Serves It Up! is a vegan-by-default cook-along show (showing on Discovery+) that features friends and family in the shape of guests Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and, to brighten the celebrity wattage a shade more, McCartney’s sister and dad. “But what I love to do is come up with solutions that go: ‘Right, I’m going to do a cookie, and I want it to be like a normal-tasting cookie. So what can I do?’ I like to look at it in a positive way.” The same goes for the mugs from which we’re drinking. McCartney had them made as a “test”, a limited-edition range, so limited that they’re only available here in her photography studio up a cobbled mews near Maida Vale. Fat of diameter but thin of rim, and with her signature on the bottom, their eco-credentials are burnished by the lack of bone china. “Bone china has actually got ground-up [animal] bone in it. So I was wondering: ‘What could you get made without it?’” So what are these made from? “This is porcelain.” A pause and a flicker of a smile. “I’m actually bull----ing, I don’t know what it is! But I would avoid using bone china – only because I know about it. Me and mum were hanging out in the kitchen one day and she’s like: ‘Can you believe bone china is called that because it’s actually ground-up bone?’ Until you hear about it, we don’t piece it together. I will drink out of bone china, if I’m given it – I’m not that [fundamentalist]. But if I was going to make [a cookwear range], I would look for something different.” “Mum” is Linda McCartney, the late photographer, vegetarian food pioneer and activist. Mary is the first child born to Linda and Paul McCartney (her mum already had a daughter, Heather, now 59). Her younger siblings are Stella, 50, the fashion designer, James, 44, a musician, and half-sister Beatrice, 18, her dad’s daughter with ex-wife Heather Mills. My mug bears a wraparound photograph by Mary of Linda’s hands, cradling a frog. There’s a huge print of it on the wall, too, as there is of Stella, at 24, snuggling up in bed with their mum, who died of breast cancer in 1998, aged 56. “It’s called Gently Holding Frog and is one of my favourite pictures,” says McCartney softly. “We were walking along a path and the frog was on the path, and Mum picked him up. She’s holding him very firm but kind, so he won’t accidentally fling himself and squash himself and hurt himself. I never get bored of looking at it.” For most of her professional career, McCartney has worked as a photographer, in demand for exhibitions, commercial shoots, fashion magazines and celebrity portraits. Mark Rylance as Twelfth Night’s Countess Olivia, shot on Broadway in 2013, is on the wall over McCartney’s shoulder; a partially clothed Kate Moss sits over mine. She took all the cover-art imagery for her dad’s 2020 record McCartney III, the “rockdown” album the 79-year-old ex-Beatle wrote, played entirely

himself and recorded on his Sussex estate early in the pandemic. “Dad asked me if I would do some pictures, so I became his lockdown photographer,” she says. She shot some “Magritte-y” images of Sir Macca on horseback – Clan McCartney are big horse lovers – and then they headed to his recording studio. “But when I got there, he’d come up with an idea [for a song], and he was genuinely recording something. And I was like: ‘I’ve come down here to take pictures of you! And he was like: ‘I don’t want to kill the moment though!’ In the end, I said: ‘You have to give me half an hour.’ I had to be a little tiny bit bossy with him. It was fun. Then he would come home from the studio when we were in lockdown. He was recording, and I was testing the recipes for the cooking show, and he’d play the songs. So it was quite an interesting time!” As she describes it: “I’ve always just done the food thing more as a result of growing up in a vegetarian family. And then I got offered this TV show, and now I’m merging food and photography, my two passions, and embracing it. It’s a really exciting time.” The McCartneys are the first family of vegetarianism. As well as the pioneering and ever-growing Linda McCartney Foods range, founded by her mother in 1991, Mary, Stella and Sir Paul launched the Meat Free Monday campaign in 2009. When I accompanied the musician on tour in Japan for the Telegraph in 2014, I was astonished at the catering provided for the musicians and crew. Normally that’s food as fuel – carb-heavy nosh for a rock ’n’ roll army marching on its stomach. But backstage at the Tokyo Dome, I’d never seen such a smorgasbord of high-class vegetarian options. “That was because Mum had worked with the amazing caterers. I was with Mum a lot – I used to work with her on her food things and cookbooks. And she was like: ‘If we’re going to make this meat-free, it has to be really satisfying.’ These are big riggers that you’re feeding. So she worked with the food caterer and they had a good time with it. It wasn’t just a chore.” Sir Paul pops by on Serves It Up!, and Stella’s on, too, although according to her elder sister, the fashion designer doesn’t need any tips. If Mary is a 10 as a chef, so is Stella, insists the family’s “professional” cook. “She’s really good. We all grew up talking about food. When we became a vegetarian family, we were talking about filling that gap on the plate. And I’m always adamant that I don’t want someone to look at my plate and think: ‘Oh, I’m glad I don’t eat veggie.’ I want them to look at my plate at dinner and go: ‘Oh, I wish I’d ordered that.’ That’s how I base my food style.” As for her other guests on the show: Reese Witherspoon, Zooming in from America, “was really funny. She had genuinely texted a few months before, saying: ‘I need you to show me something,’ because she’s not a big cook. She was like: ‘I want something family-style that I can cook and put on the table for the kids and everyone will like it.’” The actress and producer is, it seems, very fun to hang out with. “For me, the kitchen is the centre of the home. Most people hang out in the kitchen more than anywhere else. So guests come into the kitchen, even if it’s a transatlantic version of that. It’s how I like to socialise.” What about Oprah? How was it flipping the table? Very daunting, admits McCartney. “But then, when I knew what we were going to cook together and I felt confident about it, the rest followed. It brings me back to how food and memories… make you feel good. That’s where the [idea for] whole show came about.” Surprised to hear that Winfrey had never made a dip, McCartney got creative. “I love Bloody Marys. And I thought: ‘What if you made that into a dip?’ So I tested it with passata, olive oil, and then what you would put in a Bloody Mary: bit of vodka, celery salt, Worcestershire sauce, and heated that through. “It was more like entertaining Oprah, asking her: ‘What do you like to do? How do you like to greet the guests at a party?’ And she said she likes to meet people at the door with a little shot of good

tequila. So more than work, the show is asking, ‘What’s it like at home with you?’” As for what it’s like at home for McCartney, she and her second husband, director and screenwriter Simon Aboud, have two young sons, Sam, 13, and Sid, 10. From her first marriage she has two older sons, Arthur, 22, and Elliot, 19, both of whom are off at college. All her boys are vegetarian, she says. Really? No cheeky McDonald’s? “They get the Beyond Meat burger,” she says of the chain’s recently introduced vegan option. “I think that’s been good. Prior to that, I don’t think they were [going to McDonald’s]. But if they were, I wouldn’t have had to go at them. But my tactic is like my mum’s tactic: to make the food as satisfying at home as possible.” She is, then, always good at making the effort to cook dinner, even if it’s been a knackering day at work. Well, like most of us, she mostly is. “I always will want to,” she begins with a sheepish grin. “But I don’t always. And actually, the thing when my kids would push back is: ‘Can we get a takeaway? Or delivery?’ So, Honest Burger does a really good [veggie option]. “Or we’ll do pizza, or sushi – we’ll just have avocado and cucumber rolls, vegetable tempura rolls. So that’s their way of [rebelling], by eating junk and sweets. “And I’m always trying to push vegetables. I’m like, eat something green!” When the boys were younger, that found form in another kitchen hack. “I’d do baked beans and put frozen peas in with them!” A green and orange mush, yum! Thanks, Mum. “No!” she exclaims. “It’s actually quite nice. And then if they don’t want to eat it, you put it all on one piece of toast and you’re done. That was when they were very little, though – and if I wanted to cook something in three minutes! “The big joke is that my husband says I’m a vegetarian that hates vegetables. I think that’s another reason why I make salads or things with dressings, and soups – ways of eating vegetables where I’m going to enjoy disguising them. Some people love just to eat steamed broccoli.” She wrinkles her nose at the unappetising thought. “I’m like, no. Really good for you, but I’m not that person.” Serves It Up! has been renewed for a third series, so McCartney is currently developing another batch of recipes. What about guests? “Do you have any ideas for me?” she shoots back. I suggest Stephen Graham. One of our finest actors, and now with added professional kitchen experience: he’s sensational as a harried chef in the recently released, award-winning film Boiling Point, shot in real time in a real restaurant, Jones & Sons in east London. “He’d be great. And he’s Scouse! I like a Scouser! I like Jody Comer as well. Maybe we should just do it all around Scousers. Who else is a Scouse?” Um, apart from your dad? “Yeah. I don’t think Ringo will do it,” she muses of her dad’s old Beatles buddy. “He’s not a big foodie; he doesn’t love food. He’s allergic to onions, and garlic. But he likes a baked potato, and asparagus. He likes hard goat’s cheese! I don’t know how I know this!” she hoots. “But I would be able to cook for him.”

Mary McCartney’s plant-based cooking show Serves It Up! is now available on Discovery+

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