If you’re looking for a whistle-stop tour through the many issues facing our food supply chain, look no further than In Good Taste: What Shapes What We Eat and Drink and Why It Matters by Mallika Basu (Nine Bean Rows, £13).
The cookbook author’s aim was to provide an “accessible, digestible dive into where our food comes from and the issues shaping our edible world”. In that, she has succeeded.
After a quick food supply chain history lesson, the book explores three core themes: players, people and planet. Then it ends with a segment on positive, practical change.
It’s a comprehensive overview to the issues facing the UK and international food supply chains, providing interesting titbits and laying out steps for consumers to bring about positive change.
Basu includes excerpts from experts and authors to add extra weight to her core topics – including Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox, and Giles SH Yeo, a University of Cambridge professor who specialises in obesity.
Basu clearly has a deep love of food, and she pulls together lots of disparate parts to provide a thorough, if basic, overview of the food system and its challenges.
However, In Good Taste fails to bring anything new to the discussion. The thrust of the issues and the author’s solutions have been trotted out time and time again in countless books of this ilk over the past five years or so.
But if you’re yet to read a book about the problems facing the food supply chain, this one is as good as any other.
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