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Loading... Bad Food Britainby Joanna Blythman
   None No current Talk conversations about this book. 1   mstrust | Jan 22, 2012 |   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 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! (  ) elliepotten | Jan 18, 2009 | no reviews | add a review
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. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)641.30941Technology Home and family management Food And Drink FoodLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.75)
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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. (