Caroline Walker

Caroline Walker (12 June 1950 – 22 September 1988) was a British nutritionist, writer, author and campaigner for better food, who died from cancer aged 38. After her death, the Caroline Walker Trust was established with a mission to "improve public health by means of good food". At the 2019 annual Evening of Celebration for Walker and of the trust held at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, speaker Felicity Lawrence of The Guardian, a friend and colleague of Walker, said "She was the lodestar for campaigning around food and social justice that has guided me, and influenced countless others, ever since… She had a unique combination of erudition and academic ability with human warmth, and a gift for popular communication. She was a great phrase-maker, and a witty story-teller… She could simplify to communicate because she had such deep understanding of the science behind her subject. That was rare. And precious". Early life and education Caroline Walker was born in Liss, Hampshire and educated at Cheltenham Ladies College. In 1972, she graduated with a BSc degree in biology from Queen Elizabeth College (now part of King's College, London) and then did a postgraduate degree in human nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where her supervisor was John Waterlow. Her MSc thesis, completed in 1978, rated first class with a distinction, was on the relationship between poverty, food and health. Early career In 1968–69, for a year after she left school, she was a teacher at the Convent of Nazareth, Haifa, Israel, living with Arab families. In 1973–75 she worked as an editor at Elsevier Scientific Publishing in Amsterdam. In the period immediately before and during the 1973 October War she went back to Israel and became committed to the Palestinian cause.