International Women's Day 2026

Dr Emily Leeming PhD MSc RD is a microbiome scientist, registered dietitian, former chef, TEDx speaker and author of Genius Gut: The Life-Changing Science of Eating for your Second Brain. She is a Research Fellow at King’s College London with multiple academic publications on nutrition and the gut microbiome, writes for The Daily Mail and frequently appears in the media including Vogue, BBC Radio, The Sunday Times, Women’s Health and The Telegraph. She joined us in the Food & Drink Studio in January last year for a delicious meal and illuminating talk about how the food we eat impacts our brain health and happiness. 

After training at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, Kali Jago discovered just how exciting plant-based cooking could be. On her return to East London, she founded Palm Greens – who provide catering as well as residencies and pop ups, drawing on her experience in New York, along with her Greek-Australian roots. She can currently be found at The Sanctuary in East London. Palm Greens is driven by the belief that plant-based food should be exciting, accessible, and full of personality as well as good for you. Kali regularly organises networking dinners for women in hospitality. 

To celebrate the fact that National Butchers Week and International Women's Day coincided last year, we invited butcher and supper club chef Flossy Phillips to join us in the Food & Drink Studio for a nose-to-tail lamb dinner. At a time when consumers are often quite detached from their food, Flossy believes in understanding where your meat comes from, respecting it and ensuring that none of it goes to waste. Alongside a live lamb butchery demonstration, Flossy put together a multi-course meal showcasing how every cut – and we really do mean every – could be turned into something delicious. 

Noor Murad is a British-Bahraini chef who moved to London in 2026 to head up Ottolenghi's Test Kitchen. Over the years spent working there, she developed recipes and co-authored cookbooks. Since leaving Ottolenghi, she has gone on to write a cookbook of her own, Lugma. Her Bahraini roots have a strong influence on her cooking, with Arabic, Persian and Indian flavours making a prominent appearance in her recipes. Yet she says, "there’s so much to celebrate about the Bahrain I grew up in but also so much to wrangle with, especially in a world where identity politics is everywhere and I'm often too Arab or not Arab enough." In spring last year, she joined us for a deeply personal dinner in the Food & Drink Studio, exploring the themes of identity and displacement. 

Marie Mitchell is a British-Caribbean cultural practitioner who works with words, and food, adopting a considered approach to discuss social and political themes in spaces of nourishment. Community is at the heart of her work, and she can be found weaving history, geography and contemporary ingredients into her menus. Her debut cookbook, Kin: Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen was published with Particular Books (Penguin Press) in the UK in June 2024, to much acclaim, winning the Debut Cookery Award at the Fortnum and Mason awards 2025, named best new voice by Waitrose, and second in the top cookery titles of 2024 by Observer Food Monthly. She’s a regular guest chef on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch and has written for The Guardian, The Observer, Ocado, Waitrose and Sainsbury's amongst others. For one night only Marie Mitchell joined us in our Food & Drink Studio to host a summer party, with music and food that pulls on the energy of carnival. We celebrated, we danced and - most importantly of all - we ate. Think steel drums, patties, roti and rum punch!

Niki Segnit’s background is in food and drink marketing. Since her best-selling debut, The Flavour Thesaurus appeared in 2010, she has published Lateral Cooking (2018), described in The New York Times as “hundreds of pages of pure, informative delight” and prompting Nigella Lawson to call her “a one-woman Larousse.” After The Flavour Thesaurus: More Flavours came out in 2023, Elizabeth Luard called her “the real thing – a genuine, gold-plated sui generis.” Niki’s books have won numerous international awards, including the André Simon Prize, and have been translated into 15 languages. Once a classic dish with a fairly tight set of ingredients, Tiramisu has recently been turning up as a flavour and some of the interpretations are pretty loose. There are Tiramisu Lindor balls, Ice Creams, Biscuits and Starbucks Frappucinos. Niki Segnit hosted an event where we turned our Food & Drink Studio into a courtroom to consider the case for and against. This involved tasting the components of the dish, hearing from some experts, and, naturally, some forensic tasting. At the end of the session, the audience (the jury) made the final decision. 

Dr. Vanessa Kimbell is a renowned UK-based expert in the field of sustainable farming, botanical blend flour, environmentalism, and the connection between bread, gut microbiome, and mental health. As part of her work, she has created a number of flour blends that taste delicious, support the environment and your gut health. The blends aim to mimic a meadow (not the monocultures that have come to dominate our landscape, but a riotous blend of colours, smells and textures: wheat, barley, lentils, oats, nettles and more). The flour not only supports the British farmers producing these grains, pulses and botanicals through low-input, sustainable farming methods, but profits allow GPs to prescribe sourdough lifestyle medicine courses to their patients, along with some of the flour to get them started. Her work is supported by a network of medical professionals, scientists, wheat breeders, nutritionists, specialist bakers, researchers and academics. In an in-depth masterclass at Fortnum's she hosted, Vanessa guided guests through the sourdough making process, imparting her vast knowledge as she goes.

Caroline Bennett founded community interest company, Sole of Discretion, which works directly with small-scale fishers to supply consumers with ethically sourced fish, caught on vessels under 10 metres in size through low-impact methods. She joined us at Fortnum's as part of a panel discussion chaired by Slow Food UK, exploring how revisiting the wisdom of our ancestors – at every step of the food supply chain – can offer solutions to the challenges brought on by the industrialisation of food.