... 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.
...astute, wide-ranging ... What Wilson brings to the table is a big-picture global synthesis ... Wilson brings bountiful sources to her economic, sociological and medical brain food. And she makes it surprisingly palatable through her self-deprecating humor, relatable recollections of her own binge-eating and colorful globe-trotting examples ... She writes like the busy mom that she is, caught up as we all are in the whirlwind schedules and demands of modern life.
The world tour Wilson undertakes can be full of the joy of learning about new foods and how to savor and cook them. She does get around to describing some of that, but making us want to come along on that trip is a trick that Wilson, who too often sounds like a born scold, has trouble pulling off. She is shocked, shocked at the terrible state we have come to ... readers should persist. Wilson is a reformer at heart, and she earnestly wants to lead us to the constructive optimism she offers at the end of her book ... both useful and informative, thoroughly and enterprisingly reported. When she isn’t hectoring, Wilson presents a remarkable array of data, often in unusual and striking charts, and delivers numerous surprises.
Wilson makes a point of acknowledging both versions of the food revolution, the beneficent as well as the disastrous, and it’s true that for those who can afford organically raised beef and like trying new varieties of chard at the farmers’ market, culinary life has never been more bountiful ... Her own extensive reporting indicates persuasively that the most effective way to counter a toxic food system is with government regulation.
All this is fascinating. Nevertheless, part of me can’t help but wonder what Wilson’s book is for. For one thing, she has relatively few answers when it comes to effecting change ... A much bigger problem, though, is that books like this preach only to the converted. Nobody who disagrees with the essence of what she has to say is likely to pick it up – and even those who are on her side, as I broadly am, cannot read her in isolation. The din coming from elsewhere is simply too loud ... Wise as she is, she only has her finger on the dam.
