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.
Anxiety-inducing as the book is, it’s the chapter about ultra-processed foods that has had the biggest impact on me. Dimbleby’s straightforward approach here is very smart. Aware that a roll call of ingredients tends not to distract us when squeezed into a tiny paragraph on the side of a packet, he tries a different tack. Having bought a “handmade” egg sandwich on a train, he organises its ingredients into a vertical list, as if he were about to try to shop for these scientific-sounding things. The visual effect is startling and chastening. Each column – there are two – is preposterously long, for the sandwich has no fewer than 32 ingredients, most unknown to a domestic cook. Eggs, for instance, come in at number 22, just after potassium sorbate.
The fun doesn’t stop here. Dimbleby then looks at how one of the more natural-sounding of these ingredients – rapeseed oil – is made, a complicated business that takes up two pages and involves a technical vocabulary hitherto unfamiliar to me. (This is not, you understand, the golden, cold-pressed stuff beloved of TV chefs.) Only after all this does he finally step in to explain that any alarm or egg-sandwich aversion you might by now be feeling is perfectly justified (natural, remember, does not necessarily equal good). In Britain, he tells us, we eat an awful lot of highly seductive, hyper-palatable, ultra-processed food – it comprises 57% of our diet, a figure higher than anywhere else in Europe – and it makes us hungrier, or less satisfied, than we should be, with the result that we eat more of it, and put on more weight. Such a diet also correlates to an increase in cancers, depressive symptoms and the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Perhaps because I can so easily picture it in my mind’s eye, Dimbleby’s list has stayed with me. Ever since, I’ve found myself flipping packets, the better to peer at what has been used to make their contents. This doesn’t mean I’m forgoing all my usual temptations. I’ve just eaten a hot cross bun that contained, among other things, two emulsifiers, the aforementioned rapeseed oil and some palm oil – and very delicious it was, too, attached to a tub of butter (ha). I expect to have another tomorrow. But I also sense a small shift. Though I’m not someone who cuts things from my diet – I’ll always be an enemy of faddishness – I am trying to eat more food that contains relatively few ingredients. Or better still, no added extras at all. And I see this as a good start, not to mention an act of resistance. I may not yet be headed firmly in the direction of a crisp- and biscuit-free universe, but the possibility that such a realm may exist is suddenly fierce in my mind.
