Bee Wilson’s excellent new book is a disquisition not just on food but on our entire way of life. As Wilson observes, obesity has replaced hunger as the problem for most people, but how we eat has changed as much as what we eat. We now have a diet that is based on perpetual ­plenitude, and more and more of us don’t so much eat as graze.

The Way We Eat Now
BEE WILSON
(Fourth Estate, 400 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Bee Wilson’s excellent new book is a disquisition not just on food but on our entire way of life. As Wilson observes, obesity has replaced hunger as the problem for most people, but how we eat has changed as much as what we eat. We now have a diet that is based on perpetual ­plenitude, and more and more of us don’t so much eat as graze.

“For centuries”, says Wilson, “eaters have marked high days and holidays with moreish fried foods such as fritters and doughnuts. Only in modern times, however, could a person buy a stackable carton of fried crisps made from a slurry of dried potatoes and wheat starch seasoned with barbecue flavouring and sit on a sofa eating them not for a celebration, not even out of hunger, but just out of a mild feeling of restless boredom. Only [now] could another person – in the same mildly bored state – be eating exactly the same crisps at the exact same moment on another sofa somewhere in the world.”

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