Readings

We have become obsessed by food: where it comes from, where to buy it, how to cook it and—most absurdly of all—how to eat it. Our televisions and newspapers are filled with celebrity chefs, latter-day priests whose authority and 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 and class status? An excerpt from our latest Hazlitt Original, Steven Poole's You Aren't What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture.