Meet the people behind our Christmas campaign

Meet August

My name is August and I am a kitchen gardener. I grow beautiful vegetables for my family and I also work at a two Michelin star restaurant. The vegetables that I picked today are some squashes which I absolutely love and I think it is because you have this tiny little seed and it creates these gorgeous giant squashes and the flavour is just beautiful.

I think for me the process is just that magic of when you pick the vegetable out of your garden and you have nurtured it and then you bring it in to the kitchen and I am sure you can taste the flavour that you have grown in the garden.

I think squash is such an underrated vegetable because people think it’s just for Halloween but to me they just store so beautifully well throughout Christmas, up until March and the flavour to me is Christmas. I use them for decoration all on my work bench and I even put them on around my Christmas tree at the base just to give it a little bit of festive cheer.

Meet Dudley

I am Dudley Alden and we are at Hollands Farm in Oxfordshire. Hollands Farm has been in the family for 100 years when it was bought initially to supply the family butchers which has been based in Oxford for the past 250 years.

We raise the cattle here at Hollands Farm on a grass-based system which means that they are grazing as much as they can during the summer months and during the winter that is on the silage that we grow here so we focus on the welfare around the cattle, getting the best out of them with their natural diets.

We rear the cattle on a suckler system which means we take them through from calf, from their mothers to two to two and a half years. At which point we process them at the abattoir, and they are then further butchered at our family butchers in Oxford and from there I deliver it door to door.

I find beef at Christmas really important as it represents traditional British farming.

Meet Alfred

Alfred Enderby is a 100-year-old smoke house based on Grimsby dock.

My husband and I took over about six years ago from the Enderby family and have continued to maintain the traditional process of smoking fish.