IT’LL PUT YOU OFF YOUR FISHFINGERS

Thirteen Foods That Shape Our World Alex Renton BBC Books £16.99

The late Auberon Waugh, waxing satirical on the additive-rich diet of the average British child, once imagined a teenager’s typical daily intake that culminated in an evening meal of ‘7 fish fingers; half pt tomato ketchup; 2 btles cherry-flavoured Panda pop; 9 digestive biscuits; frozen peas’. The foreword to this book, by Sheila Dillon of Radio 4’s The Food Programme, suggests he wasn’t far off the mark. ‘About 55 per cent of the food we eat in the UK in 2022 is defined as ultra-processed,’ she says, meaning it’s made from ‘industrial derivatives of whole fats, starches and sugars’. This diet is a major contributor to ill health and environmental ruin, all because we value food that is cheap.

In the rest of the book, Renton examines the food industry, providing multiple illustrations of culinary wrongdoing. Crimes against nutritional quality, workers’ rights, natural habitats and animal-welfare standards are all regularly committed in pursuit of low prices and fast profits.

Take the Chorleywood Bread Process, launched in 1961: by combining highspeed mixing and baking with a ‘huge range of processing aids’ – emulsifiers, preservatives and extra salt and sugar – it created a soft, fluffy, relatively tasteless loaf that ‘kept’ for longer.

The CBP method is still responsible for 90 per cent of the bread we eat today.

The failures and frauds of the food industry detailed here – from the mislabelling of olive oil to the adulteration of ‘artisan’ salt – often make for uneasy reading. So does the miserable six weeks of life endured by cheap broiler chickens.

Yet there is also much enjoyment in Renton’s pithily elegant phrases and smooth blending of historical anecdote with compelling facts. Who knew, for example, that in the mid-Victorian era Italian ice-cream vendors were key in transmitting diphtheria and typhoid? He raises hope, too, singling out ethically concerned producers for praise, such as the chicken farmer Linda Dick and the Fairtrade chocolate brand Tony’s Chocolonely. But their wares are inevitably more expensive, which brings us to the book’s knottiest problem.

Britain now has some of the cheapest food in the world. Yet with the costof-living crisis adding to existing inequalities, feeding a family is already proving difficult for many. The question that haunts this fascinating compendium is how a better, more honest food industry can ever be combined with an affordable one.