Is there anything safe left to eat?

The chapter headings alone are enough to induce a panic attack: ‘Disrepair – how modern diets harm brain health in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood’; ‘How ultra-processed food hacks our brains’; ‘How solving the last crisis in the food system caused the current one’. It’s not a new thing for books examining our food system to be doom-laden, but there has been something of an avalanche of them recently. Within the space of a couple of months we have had four, which may discuss different aspects of how our food is produced, but when it comes to the effects are as one: this is a manmade problem, and without serious intervention the future is bleak for humanity and the Earth.

It can all induce apathy, even nihilism – and it’s hard not to feel berated. I don’t need to be told yet again to eat less meat, sugar and fat and to think more about air miles, carbon footprints, farmers and animal welfare. The sheer number of such books being published feels like something between moral panic and virtue-signalling. So it’s a relief to discover that the latest tranche goes some way to absolving our individual guilt.

Ravenous is a direct result of Henry Dimbleby’s role as the author of The National Food Strategy – which was promptly ignored by the government:

The so-called ‘Government Food Strategy’ that was unveiled in June 2022, in response to my review, is not a strategy at all. It is merely a handful of disparate policy ideas, many of them chosen because they are unlikely to raise much of a media storm.

The book begins bombastically, full of emotive language: ‘You may not want to hear this,’ Dimbleby tells us, but ‘you are certainly not free… All living creatures on this planet, from the plankton in the oceans to the rulers of nations, are prisoners of the food system.’