What a relief to find ourselves in a non-faddy cook book year. We are not being encouraged to chew only plants, ferment everything, grow burgers in labs or devour insects. It’s not that I don’t look for answers to how we should eat to survive the future, but I know a thing or two about the human appetite and no scheme seems any more sustainable than the way the West eats now.
The answer is there – and always has been – but it’s adrift. In The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavours of the Past (Greystone Books, £19.99), Taras Grescoe identifies the crucial ingredient: diversity. The most successful species owes much to its ability to eat anything, to being omnivorous, but for the past century it has existed on a monoculture of grains and a few types of protein. There is so much more out there, urgently needing to be found.
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