You Arent What You Eat

Product Description

We have become obsessed by food: where it comes from where to buy it how to cook it &
- most absurdly of all
- how to eat it. Our televisions & newspapers are filled with celebrity chefs latter-day priests whose authority & ambition range from the small scale (what we should have for supper) to large-scale public schemes designed to improve our communal eating habits. When did the basic human imperative to feed ourselves mutate into such a multitude of anxieties about provenance ethics health lifestyle & class status? & since when did the likes of Jamie Oliver & Nigella Lawson gain the power to transform our kitchens & dining tables into places where we expect to be spiritually sustained? In this subtle & erudite polemic Steven Poole argues that were trying to fill more than just our bellies when we pick up our knives & forks & that we might be a lot happier if we realised that sometimes we should throw away the colour supplements & open a tin of beans.