I want to believe that books can change lives. But I’m not quite convinced they ever do, especially those about food (Middlemarch may be a different matter). On the shelf behind me, after all, is a neat row of excellent titles about what we eat, and why – Joanna Blythman is there, and so is Bee Wilson – and yet, if I’m honest, none of these has drastically altered the way I shop or cook, even if they have affected the way I think, sometimes profoundly. Words on the page are such a puny match for modern life, so busy and tempting and perilously expensive.
But maybe I’m wrong. I’ve been reading Henry Dimbleby’s bestselling Ravenous, in which the co-founder of the alternative fast food chain Leon (and the government’s former food tsar) catalogues the catastrophic damage already done to our food systems and bodies, and tentatively makes suggestions as to how we might reverse it. And what do you know? I think this book really might be a little bit life-changing. It may want for extended onion metaphors and lyrical descriptions of sourdough (I’m joking; these are the last things I’m after). In the end, though, its concision and clarity more than make up for their absence, which may be why Ravenous reminds me so much of Maurice Hanssen’s peppy 1984 handbook, E for Additives – another bestseller, and one that had a profound impact on parents (and ultimately on policy) when I was growing up.
