What to Eat?: 10 Chewy Questions About Food

Description

Deciding what to eat is no longer a simple matter of instinct and appetite. Every choice we make about the food we put on our plates is complicated. Is meat good or bad for me? Is buying local always best? Is organic worth it? WHAT TO EAT? asks all these questions and more: some are specific, going back to the nature of particular foods such as milk, meat and fish. Some are more general and challenging, examining the green and the good at a time when money is short and choices matter. The book also offers answers. This is a refreshingly practical guide to the stuff of every day living, from the ingredients up: the cereals for breakfast; the cheese and tomato in a high-street sandwich; the sausages for supper. Journeying through science, nature and the dark arts of the food industry, Hattie Ellis exposes the myths and unveils the truth about how food is produced, what gives us most value for money, what it does to us, and what we have done to it. By the end of each chapter, and of the book as a whole, we find solutions to each of our food dilemmas, and discover a way to feed ourselves that is good -good value, good for the planet and, of course, good to eat.

Hattie Ellis' Planet Chicken won the Derek Cooper Award for investigative writing, 2008; her Sweetness & Light: the mysterious history of the honeybee covered the natural and social history of food; the research for Best of British Fish (Winner, Guild of Food Writers' Award) taught her about fishing and marine ecology, and Eating England took her into social history and farming. She has also investigated diets of all sorts for TV, and worked for the Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres, exploring the connections between food and health. She writes for newspapers including the Saturday Telegraph, the Guardian's G2 food pages, the Times magazine, FT Weekend, Time Out, Waitrose Food Illustrated, Kew Gardens magazine and also online for the BBC and others.

It's rare to see a book about food politics so well researched, so current, spanning so many issues and so clearly well informed... an excellent book by one of the county's leading food writers and thinkers - Guy Dimond, " Time Out" [Ellis'] arguments are highly relevant and helpful... the book feels as much a record of a personal journey as a didactic exercise - Mina Holland, "Observer" "