Joanna Blythman - Swallow This - Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets

I honestly didn’t set out to put you off eating anything that comes in a bottle, jar, packet, tin, tube, carton or polystyrene container, but when you read about certain practices and procedures used to make some of our most popular foods, this might somewhat dull your appetite for a few products. My message is not the comfortable one that the UK Department of Health wants to convey with its ‘eatwell plate’, which conspicuously promotes many popular processed foods and drinks – sweets, biscuits, cake, cornflakes, baked beans, flavoured yoghurts, sliced white bread, even a can of cola, and crisps – as part of a ‘balanced diet’. Nor are the sentiments that run through this book in tune with the ‘Don’t Cook, Just Eat!’ campaign so loudly promoted by purveyors of fast food, with eye-grabbing posters in the windows of takeaways up and down the land. Their self-styled ‘anti-cooking manifesto’ urges us to ‘liberate’ ourselves from its ‘tyranny’ by letting ‘professionals do the work’.

Leave food to the professionals? Once you have digested the information in the pages that follow, you may understand why I am unable to oblige. Somehow, I feel more affinity with the message of the mysterious graffiti artist in Cologne who superimposes his or her own home cooking recipes on fast-food billboards, so that instead of seeing a Big Mac advert, for example, passers-by will spot the ingredients needed to make spaghetti with meat sauce, or a courgette rice casserole. These days, cooking is a powerful political statement, a small daily act of resistance that gives us significantly more control of our lives.

PART ONE

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