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    Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite
    Unavailable
    Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite
    Unavailable
    Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite
    Ebook310 pages5 hours

    Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite

    By Joanna Blythman

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    About this ebook

    Award-winning investigative food journalist, Joanne Blythman turns her attention to the current hot topic – the state of British food.

    What is it about the British and food? We just don’t get it, do we? Britain is notorious worldwide for its bad food and increasingly corpulent population but it’s a habit we just can’t seem to kick.

    Welcome to the country where recipe and diet books feature constantly in top 10 bestseller lists but where the average meal takes only eight minutes to prepare and people spend more time watching celebrity chefs cooking on TV than doing any cooking themselves, the country where a dining room table is increasingly becoming an optional item of furniture. Welcome to the nation that is almost pathologically obsessed with the safety and provenance of food but which relies on factory-prepared ready meals for sustenance, eating four times more of them than any other country in Europe, the country that never has its greasy fingers out of a packet of crisps, consuming more than the rest of Europe put together. Welcome to the affluent land where children eat food that is more nutririonally impoverished than their counterparts in South African townships, the country where hospitals can sell fast-food burgers but not home-baked cake, the G8 state where even the Prime Minister refuses to eat broccoli.

    Award-winning investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman takes us on an amusing, perceptive and subversive journey through Britain's contemporary food landscape and traces the roots of our contemporary food troubles in deeply engrained ideas about class, modernity and progress.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateApr 11, 2013
    ISBN9780007382118
    Unavailable
    Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite
    Author

    Joanna Blythman

    Joanna Blythman is Britain's leading investigative food journalist. She has won four Glenfiddich awards for her writing, a Caroline Walker Media Award for 'Improving the Nation's Health by Means of Good Food', and a Guild of Food Writers Award for The Food We Eat. In 2004, she won the prestigious Derek Cooper Award, one of BBC Radio 4's Food and Farming Awards. She writes and broadcasts frequently on food issues.

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    • 4/5
      Blythman is an investigative journalist specializing in food. Here she examines the state of food and eating in Britain, exposing the national food revolution as a publicity scam to end the country's reputation for badly cooked, tasteless food. Instead, Blythman says that the U.K. has stopped cooking at all and is now living on ready-made meals, frozen foods, snacks and takeaway. The state of school lunches and home economics are particularly dire, with cooking being removed from the agendas in favor of "food technology" classes where students learn how to create eye-catching packaging but never touch a stove.This book was published in 2006, so perhaps some things have improved, but not by that much. As a regular reader of magazines like Bon Appetit, I was really surprised by Blythman's evidence that London's food revolution, the one that's been going on for the last 10-15 years and has put London as a major foodie destination after years of ridicule, is a fraud. She states that restaurants in the capitol are having their food supplied by the two major catering suppliers in the country. Ready-made and frozen, so that the restaurants are using their kitchens for heating, not cooking.Lots of surprising information that will have you packing your own lunch for a couple of days.
    • 4/5
      Following on from the glittering tour de force that was ‘Shopped’, this is a wider attack on the food industry, not only on supermarkets but on the food companies, the government, schools and families that have turned British food into the homogenized, fatty, effort-free laughing stock that it is today.Blythman skilfully compares our current food culture not only with contemporary European trends and American junk food, but also with our own history – we may have been less fat, and have cooked more and passed on vital culinary knowledge but, she argues, even fifty years ago we were favouring fatty traditional food and packet mixes over healthier meals cooked from scratch. The comparison of our eating habits and values with those of our European neighbours is devastating, particularly relating to family values around mealtimes and healthy eating, and the way school meals are approached here compared to France, for example.Though the book doesn’t try to beat the reader over the head and inspire them to turn their entire lifestyle around the way ‘Shopped’ does, it is still very relevant, thought-provoking, and extremely accessible. Perhaps despite our lack of a real British food culture, Blythman can offer some inspiration to us to try to eat fresher food, cook simple, wholesome dishes, and enjoy our meals instead of accepting our Bad Food and letting the decline continue!