Our Troubles with Food: Fears, Fads and Fallacies

For millennia the normal, natural, and pleasurable activity of eating has been surrounded by fear and anxiety. Religious traditions have long decreed what foods are right for their followers to eat, but secularization and scientific progress have not made the situation easier. Our present obsession with health, obesity, ethics, and science has seemingly developed from a society that is over-supplied with the necessities of life. Through modern fears and food scares such as mad cow disease to our current fascination with superfoods, "friendly" bacteria and organic farming, this thorough analysis of our changing attitudes towards food is a reminder that we are not so very different from our forebears after all.

Stephen Halliday is the author of The Great Stink of London, Newgate, and Underground to Everywhere.