Ruby Tandoh’s guide to how we eat now

Investigating the love and hate involved in feeding ourselves and each other, the uneasy relationship of the food industry and the domestic kitchen, the discussion of culinary identities and exoticism, it’s easy to forget that all humans must eat. Tandoh remembers this, and promises that, when it comes to the question of why you want what you want, “you won’t find the answer in your own stomach”.

Tandoh turns first to the “searchable, compound-noun recipes” of Instagram and TikTok, which draw from a strangely “placeless pantry of ingredients” and “evolve along increasingly weird vectors to one-up the recipe that came before.” It’s hard to write durable cultural criticism of one’s own moment, but Tandoh’s sense of the differences between cookbooks and online cooking is convincing. As she says, there’s little evidence that most people have ever followed cooking instructions in any medium, but books “add up to more than the sum of the recipes inside them”, while free-floating recipes, which succeed through likes and by going viral (who wants viral food?) become harder and harder to distinguish from one another. Everything is at once oozing, crisp – or worse yet crispy – salty, creamy, sweet or hot.

Tandoh offers a rapid, trenchant review of 20th-century British food history, not so much taking down the sacred figures of Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Claudia Roden as revealing the obsequiousness that surrounds them: “There are few loves as great as that of a person for the cookbooks they never actually use.” You can’t really claim, she says, that with A Book of Mediterranean Food, David’s famous rationing-era hymn to ingredients unavailable in Britain at the time, the author “transformed British cooking. But she did transform British cookbooks … she re-imagined cooking literature as exactly that – literature, which you could interweave with quotes from classic novels, and vivid descriptions of places far away.” Meanwhile, “you could say Jewish food – as a coherent entity, as a totality – didn’t really exist until Claudia Roden wrote it into life.” She’s right, of course: in postwar London, “Roden had access to the combined knowledge of representatives from just about every diasporic Jewish group”, and was thus able to make a seminal encyclopedia of food from the cities of Mitteleuropa, the steppes, the Levant and the Mediterranean, which had not previously been understood as a cohesive cuisine. There’s no judgment here, no nostalgia for scholarly cookbooks or scolding of those who rely on social media. Roden is different from, not better than, Ottolenghi. Ideas about “authenticity”, always dubious, have no weight. Tandoh is delightfully curious about her own and others’ pleasure, insistent on the moral neutrality of bodies and appetites.

There is, inevitably, the possibility of a problem with the “you” she uses so breezily, the second person being no more straightforward in food writing than in fiction. The reader invoked by this “you” shares much of Tandoh’s experience, both online and in the kitchen. The chumminess of Tandoh’s writing is part of the delight of reading her, blended as it is in such precise balance with intellectual acuity and cultural literacy. (Her similes have an apt neatness that give much literary fiction a run for its money: “The algorithm brought these videos to me tenderly but insistently, the way a cat drops a dead mouse on the carpet”; the queues for second-rate food popular on TikTok “worked like a murmuration of starlings – the crowd following a logic that nobody inside of it fully understood”.) But if the reader is, to take a not-random example, a generation older than Tandoh, not a user of social media and someone who learnt to cook from her mother and grandmother, this book is frequently a window into an alien world. I would have liked a little less about the internet and the history of Wimpy in Southend, and more about gender politics and globalisation – but that’s because she’s good at all of it, and I wanted more of Tandoh’s thinking about what interests me.

Perhaps this is why I found the chapters on supermarkets and wellness most engaging. The postmodernity of supermarkets is not a new idea, but Tandoh’s cheerful seriousness is refreshing. “The awe axis in a cathedral is vertical; in the supermarket it’s horizontal,” she writes. I don’t think Pierre Bourdieu made any such observation, but if he’d spent more time grocery shopping he might have done. “Every supermarket is an American supermarket,” Tandoh argues – circling, again, the idea that choice and freedom are really not the same thing at all, possibly even antithetical. And then, thinking about a facsimile American supermarket set up north of Moscow in 1959, she remarks: “If a supermarket works, then maybe capitalism works, and democracy works, and consumerism works.”

When Tandoh’s attention shifts to wellness, she takes it down in a few briskly paced pages: “You can turbo-charge hydration with protein and minerals and energy-boosting sugar, if you want, or you could just have a glass of milk.” She’s particularly good on the relationship between dieting and wellness, which has been the focus of much recent dismay for scholars of feminism and diet culture: “The main difference between dieting and wellness is that diets start with consuming less, whereas in wellness you start by adding on … This small shift of perspective has turned something that you conceivably do for free (eat less) into a mega-industry that makes everyday living into an extreme sport.”

It will not surprise readers of Ruby Tandoh’s previous books that she is a clear, swift writer. This is a nourishing, energising and well-written book – a joyous blend of curiosity, intelligence and generosity.

All Consuming: Why We Eat The Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh is published by Serpent’s Tail (£18.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17.09. Delivery charges may apply

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Sarah Moss’s books include the novel Ghost Wall and the memoir My Good Bright Wolf

Photography by Eve Pentel