We only ever stray away from the 4 Books podcast format to bring you something truly brilliant, and this week, we have a corker of a podcast for you. Joanna Blythman, Britain’s leading investigate food journalist, is in the studio answering your questions on all things food. The good, the bad, and the truly frightening. Read more…
One of our New Year’s resolutions is to give up ALL baked goods. “IMPOSSIBLE!” we hear you cry. Well. Take a look at this extract from the all-exposing Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets from Joanna Blythman, the journalist and investigator with over 25 years of experience in a field that concerns our everyday habits. Read more…
As your till receipts will testify, the cost of food has climbed alarmingly of late. And it looks as if higher bills are here to stay, not just for years, but for decades. A series of global factors – climate change, a growing world population, shortage of oil, market speculation and a weak pound – are combining to drive up the price of food. The underlying trend is that food prices will continue to rise in real terms for the next 30 years. So we have moved into a period when food become a much more significant item in the household budget. Read more…
Morrisons’ rearguard decision to allow its farmers to use GM feed looks spectacularly ill-informed and dumb, when Carrefour labels own-label meat and dairy products as GM animal feed-free, or ‘Nourri sans OGM’. If the world’s second largest retailer can guarantee customers the field-to-fork GM-free food they clearly and consistently demand, then Morrisons can too.
The supper club has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the dinner party. Up and down the land, people are welcoming paying strangers into their homes to dine. And with Rachel Khoo’s Little Paris Kitchen airing on BBC Two, such ventures are hotter than ever.
I have received the inevitable letter from a body that calls itself Sugar Nutrition UK, from its Nutrition Communication Manager, a Dr Mary Harrington. She is perplexed by statements about the impact of sugar on health that I made in an article on breakfast cereals in the Daily Mail:
‘Joanna Blythman has one of the sanest food heads in the Western World – and this brilliant book encapsulates her admirably clear thinking in a wonderfully accessible, entertaining way. Everyone who cares what they eat and how they feed their family – that’s all of us, right? – should read it.’ Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall
I’m right behind the Meat Crusade, the new campaign to save our high street butchers. They have been haemorrhaging of late, and not because someone’s hand slipped with the cleaver.