IT’LL PUT YOU OFF YOUR FISHFINGERS

Thirteen Foods That Shape Our World

Alex Renton BBC Books €21 ★★★★★

The late Auberon Waugh, waxing satirical on the additive-rich diet of the average British child, once imagined a teenager’s typical daily intake that culminated in an evening meal of ‘seven fish fingers; half pt tomato ketchup; two btles cherry-flavoured Panda pop; nine digestive biscuits; frozen peas’.

The foreword to this book, by Sheila Dillon of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, suggests he wasn’t far off the mark, writing that about 55% of the food eaten in the UK in 2022 ‘is defined as ultra-processed,’ meaning it’s made from ‘industrial derivatives of whole fats, starches and sugars’. This diet is a major contributor to ill health and environmental ruin, all because people value food that is cheap.

In the rest of the book, Renton examines the food industry, providing multiple illustrations of culinary wrongdoing. Crimes against nutritional quality, workers’ rights, natural habitats and animal-welfare standards are all regularly committed in pursuit of low prices and fast profits.

Take the Chorleywood Bread

Process, launched in 1961: by combining high-speed mixing and baking with a ‘huge range of processing aids’ – emulsifiers, preservatives and extra salt and sugar – it created a soft, fluffy, relatively tasteless loaf that ‘kept’ for longer. The CBP method is still responsible for most of the bread we eat today.

The failures and frauds of the food industry detailed here – from the mislabelling of olive oil to the adulteration of ‘artisan’ salt – often make for uneasy reading. So does the miserable six weeks of life endured by cheap broiler chickens.

Yet there is also much enjoyment in Renton’s pithily elegant phrases and smooth blending of historical anecdote with compelling facts.

Who knew, for example, that in the mid-Victorian era Italian ice-cream vendors were key in transmitting diphtheria and typhoid?

He raises hope, too, singling out ethically concerned producers for praise although their wares are inevitably more expensive, which brings us to the book’s knottiest problem.

With an expectation of evercheaper food, and a cost-of-living crisis adding to existing inequalities, how can a better, more honest food industry ever be combined with an affordable one?