When it comes to food, we have more choice and more information than ever before, but diabetes and heart disease are on the rise. An exploration of the hidden forces behind what we eat, The Way We Eat Now explains how the food revolution has transformed our bodies, our social lives, and the world we live in.
... clear and vital reading. This is the book that connects the dots between climate change, shrinking biodiversity, the global rise of the agro-industrial food complex and our nutrition, eating habits and evolving diet ... an authoritative and brilliantly compelling description of the economic, political and emotional issues around our food ... [Wilson] is mercifully non-judgmental.
If readers are hoping for an easily digestible snapshot of our relationship with food, they will be disappointed. As the extensive bibliography and list of references at the back demonstrates, this is more of a scholarly work and you have to put in the hours to winkle out the many intriguing nuggets. The epilogue...has the feeling of having been bolted on. Nevertheless, there is an intellectual generosity to her writing ...
...[a] seriously thought-provoking book ... Wilson deftly sketches four stages of the human diet ... Wilson is not snobbish about the delights of fast-food, the pleasures of a Big Mac over a piece of dried cod head ... the impact of technology, time poverty and loneliness is threaded through The Way We Eat Now ... Wilson deftly moves from the big picture to her own relationship with food ... She paints a picture of the staggering inequality where a Deliveroo biker can get a single chocolate crepe to the desk of a city trader on a whim while thousands of families in the same city are forced to use food banks. She is scathing about superfoods and clean eating, and less so about food substitutes like Soylent ... Wilson is hopeful for a future where the arc bends back in a healthier direction. For this reader the glaring gap in the book is the question of whether humans can get to that utopian stage five before the plenty is reversed by climate change, much of it caused by vast food systems marching across the globe.
