The Way We Eat Now

The Way We Eat Now Plot Summary

Introduction

For most of human history, our ancestors faced a singular food challenge: getting enough to eat. From ancient civilizations to early modern societies, famine was a recurring specter, and hunger a constant companion. Yet in just a few generations, this age-old struggle has been dramatically reversed. Today, we face an unprecedented paradox - a world where obesity kills more people than starvation, where abundance has created its own form of malnutrition, and where traditional food cultures are disappearing at an alarming rate. This remarkable transition represents one of the most significant yet underexplored transformations in human history. It has unfolded with surprising similarity across continents, though at different speeds and with varying consequences. Understanding how our relationship with food has changed reveals profound insights about economics, culture, technology, and human biology. By examining how we moved from scarcity to abundance, and the unexpected problems this shift has created, we gain crucial perspective on addressing the global health challenges we now face - from rising rates of diabetes and heart disease to the environmental impact of our food choices. This exploration offers essential insights for anyone concerned with public health, environmental sustainability, or simply making sense of their own complicated relationship with food in the modern world.

Chapter 1: The Nutrition Transition: From Hunger to Abundance (1950-2000)

The story of modern food presents us with a striking paradox: we have never been so well-fed, yet our diets are killing us. As recently as the 1960s, approximately half of the world's population was chronically underfed. Today, that figure has dropped to about one in nine, even as our global population has more than doubled. This remarkable decline in hunger represents one of humanity's greatest achievements. For most of human history, famine was a universal aspect of existence. Harvests failed; populations starved. Even in wealthy nations like Britain and France, ordinary people lived with the specter of hunger and spent as much as half their income on basic staples. The turning point came in the mid-20th century with technological breakthroughs that dramatically increased food production. The Haber-Bosch process for creating nitrogen fertilizers and Norman Borlaug's development of high-yield wheat varieties during the "Green Revolution" enabled unprecedented agricultural productivity. Suddenly, producing enough calories to feed everyone became technically possible for the first time in human history. By 2006, a remarkable milestone was reached: for the first time, the number of overweight and obese people in the world overtook the number who were underfed. This shift occurred at different rates across the globe. In wealthy countries, the key decades of dietary change were the 1960s and 1970s, when people shifted en masse to diets higher in sugary drinks, refined carbohydrates, and highly processed foods. In developing countries like Brazil, Mexico, China, and India, the change is happening even faster - in the space of ten years or less rather than over generations. The speed of this transition is unprecedented in human history - while it took thousands of years to move from hunter-gatherer society to farming, and a couple of centuries to experience the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the shift away from traditional diets to modern processed foods has occurred within a single lifetime. The consequences of this transition have been profound. Diet-related diseases like hypertension, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and preventable forms of cancer have become leading causes of death worldwide. The primary cause of these diseases is what nutritionists clinically call "suboptimal diet" and what to the rest of us is simply "food." Our ancestors could not rely on there being enough food; our own food fails us in different ways - we have markets heaving with bounty, but too often what is sold as "food" fails in its basic task: to nourish us properly. Perhaps most surprising about this global dietary transformation is how similar our diets have become. From Mumbai to Cape Town, from Milan to Nanjing, people report living through huge changes in the way they eat compared to their parents and grandparents. Despite having access to more varied food than ever before, most humans now get the majority of their energy from just six sources: animal foods, wheat, rice, sugar, maize, and soya beans. Our supposedly varied diets are varied in the same way, with the same ingredients appearing in different combinations. There are, however, glimmers of hope. South Korea managed to navigate this nutrition transition without experiencing the same negative health consequences seen elsewhere. Despite rapid economic growth, South Koreans retained their vegetable-centric diet to a remarkable degree, thanks to deliberate government policies promoting traditional food culture. What South Korea shows is that the curve of the nutrition transition can be bent with the right interventions - suggesting that with appropriate food policies, we might yet reach a stage where we can enjoy the benefits of food security without its devastating health consequences.

Chapter 2: The Rise of Ultra-Processing: Redefining Food Itself

The most profound change in human eating habits over the past century isn't about specific ingredients or cuisines - it's about processing. Ultra-processed foods - industrial formulations containing ingredients rarely used in home cooking - now dominate the food supply in high-income countries and are rapidly gaining market share worldwide. This shift represents not just a change in what we eat, but in the very nature of food itself. Ultra-processed foods emerged in the aftermath of World War II, when governments around the world became obsessed with ensuring their citizens had enough to eat. Farmers were paid subsidies for the sheer volume of food they could produce, prioritizing quantity over quality. Between 1950 and 1990, world output of wheat, corn, and cereals more than tripled. The calories available to the average American increased from 3,100 per day in 1950 to around 3,900 by 2000 - about twice as much as most people need. This overproduction created an opportunity for food manufacturers to add value to cheap raw ingredients. Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian nutrition professor, developed a classification system that helps us understand this transformation. He suggested that food now belongs to one of four distinct groups, depending on the degree of processing. Group 1 consists of whole foods such as fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Group 2 includes processed culinary ingredients like butter, salt, and oils. Group 3 comprises simple processed foods like cheese or canned tomatoes. Group 4 contains ultra-processed foods - "basically confections of group 2 ingredients, typically combined with sophisticated use of additives" - including ready-to-heat meals, carbonated sweetened drinks, cereal bars, and most supermarket bread. What distinguishes ultra-processed foods is not just their ingredients but their disconnection from whole foods recognizable in nature. They typically contain five or more ingredients, including substances not commonly used in home cooking: hydrogenated oils, modified starches, protein isolates, emulsifiers, colorants, and flavor enhancers. These products are designed to be hyper-palatable, precisely targeting our evolved preferences for sugar, salt, and fat in combinations rarely found in nature. A 2019 randomized controlled trial found that people consumed about 500 more calories per day when eating ultra-processed foods compared to unprocessed foods, even when the meals were matched for calories, macronutrients, sugar, salt, and fiber - suggesting these foods may override our body's natural satiety mechanisms. The economic forces driving ultra-processing are powerful. These products offer food manufacturers much higher profit margins than minimally processed foods - while whole foods generate profits of around 3-6 percent, ultra-processed foods can yield profits of around 15 percent. A box of breakfast cereal might sell for ten times the cost of the raw ingredients, while the markup on fresh produce is typically much lower. The global concentration of food manufacturing - with just ten companies controlling most of the world's food brands - has accelerated this trend. The health implications are increasingly clear and concerning. Multiple large-scale studies have linked higher consumption of ultra-processed foods to increased risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. A 2018 study from France found that a 10 percent increase in consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with a 10 percent higher overall cancer risk. In the United States, 57.9 percent of calorie intake now consists of ultra-processed food, while in Canada, ultra-processed foods made up around a quarter of the average food basket in 1940 but form more than half today. The ultra-processing revolution represents a fundamental shift in our relationship with food. Traditional diets were built around recognizable ingredients combined through cooking. Ultra-processed foods invert this relationship - they're formulations designed by food scientists to deliver specific sensory experiences, with nutrition as a secondary consideration. This shift has profound implications not just for physical health but for food culture, cooking skills, and our very understanding of what constitutes food.

Chapter 3: Global Homogenization: The Standardization of Diets Worldwide

One of the most striking aspects of the modern food revolution is the unprecedented homogenization of diets across the globe. Never before has such dietary change happened on such a scale and simultaneously across most of the planet. It is as if the color of the sky morphed from blue to green, but before we could protest that something was not right, our eyes adjusted, and we carried on as normal. In the past, it was a fundamental fact about human beings that people ate different things in different places. Food was not one thing but many, varying according to local crops, ingredients, and cultural preferences. Now, wherever in the world you happen to live, you will have access to much the same menu of core ingredients as someone who lives a thousand miles away in any direction. This phenomenon, which researchers call the "Global Standard Diet," represents a radical break with the past. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 percent of what we eat comes from just thirty of them. The average global eater gets the bulk of their daily calories from just six sources: animal foods, wheat, rice, sugar, maize, and soya beans. The Cavendish banana exemplifies this dietary monotony. Despite being far from the most delicious variety, it has become the tenth most consumed food of any kind in the world. Every Cavendish banana is an exact genetic clone of every other, creating a monoculture of unprecedented scale. There are more than a hundred varieties of bananas in existence, yet you wouldn't know it from the selection in most shops, where bananas come in just one variety. This standardization extends beyond individual foods to entire meals and eating patterns. A study of more than seven thousand nine- to eleven-year-olds across twelve countries found remarkably similar patterns of eating. Whether the children were in Australia or India, Finland or Kenya, they knew and consumed much the same things: french fries, fizzy drinks, doughnuts, chips, cakes, and ice cream. The homogenization of the global diet has been driven by several factors. Economic liberalization in the 1990s allowed multinational food companies to enter new markets with unprecedented ease. The World Trade Organization, founded in 1995, aimed to end unfair subsidies and remove trade restrictions, but the new liberalized global markets were not necessarily any fairer than the system that came before. Rules on investing in food markets of poorer countries were radically liberalized, leading to a huge wave of foreign investment from companies selling highly processed foods. From 1990 to 2000, the amount of total foreign direct investment into developing countries grew sixfold, from $200 billion to $1.4 trillion. When it came to food, the vast majority of this money went into companies making ultra-processed items. Mass media has also played a crucial role in this homogenization. In China in 1989, only 63 percent of households owned a TV set. By 2006, 98 percent did, allowing direct marketing of novel processed foods, particularly to children. Almost all food advertised on TV globally is what nutritionists call "noncore": inessential sugary or salty snack foods rather than those served for a main meal. In Brazil, Nestlé employed thousands of door-to-door saleswomen to bring branded processed foods right into individual homes in poorer regions. Items such as chocolate pudding, sugary yogurts, and heavily processed cereals are sold to consumers who may believe they are doing the best for their families by buying these products, which often boast that they are fortified with vitamins and minerals. The standardization of the global diet has had profound consequences for human health and the environment. Our diets have become higher in calories, sugar, and refined oils, but lower in fiber and micronutrients. The loss of dietary diversity has also meant a loss of cultural diversity. Traditional food knowledge and cooking skills are disappearing at an alarming rate. In Iceland, for example, people once had 109 words to describe the muscles in a cod's head, reflecting their intimate knowledge of this staple food. Now, such specialized vocabulary is being lost as diets converge on the global mean.

Chapter 4: Economic Forces: How Markets Reshape What We Eat

Behind the choices an individual makes about food, there are economic circumstances that none of us asked for. Much of what we consume is virtually pushed down our throats by forces of supply over which we have no control and of which we are only dimly aware. On all sides, our food choices are shaped and constrained by economics. One of the most dramatic yet hidden changes to our global diet over the past fifty years has been the rise of refined vegetable oil. In absolute terms, the availability of sunflower oil has gone up 275 percent in fifty years while soybean oil has increased by a staggering 320 percent. This far outpaces the growth in sugar and sweeteners, which increased by just 20 percent over the same period. Refined vegetable oils, with soybean oil at the top, have added more calories to the world's diet than any other food group, by a wide margin. Unlike sugar, which we actively seek out for its sweetness, oils are stealthy ingredients that do not advertise their presence. They plump up muffins, give crispness to fried chicken, and sneak into our mouths almost without us realizing. Soybean oil has become the seventh-most-eaten food in the world without anyone ever really desiring it. Its widespread use started in the United States in the 1940s precisely because its variable flavor quality made it significantly cheaper than its main rivals, peanut and cottonseed oil. The rise of soybean oil can be traced to economic policy changes in countries like Brazil. From 1990 to 2001, soybean oil production in Brazil increased by two-thirds and exports doubled. Now, most Brazilian soybean oil is consumed by people in China and India, where middle-class incomes and populations have grown. As the price of cooking oil came down and incomes rose, suddenly it was something cooks would use more generously than before. The economics of modern food has also changed our relationship with staple foods like bread. Economists refer to bread as an "inferior good," meaning it is valued and desired less as people become richer. In the nineteenth century, an average British farmworker spent more than twice as much on bread as on rent. Now, it's possible for a family to spend less each month on bread and butter than on mobile phones and Wi-Fi. Bread's lowly status can be seen from the fact that so much is discarded - in the United Kingdom, bread is the single most wasted food, with 32 percent of all loaves purchased thrown away. Meanwhile, as countries become richer, consumption of meat increases dramatically. In India, despite deep-seated religious taboos against meat, chicken consumption is rising rapidly. Market projections suggest that by 2030, Indian cities will be consuming 1,277 percent more poultry than they did in 2000. Globally, poultry production has more than doubled since the 1970s, and in 2013, chicken became the second-most-consumed meat on the planet, after pork. The shift away from staple foods toward meat has had great environmental costs. A diet based on wheat uses one-sixth of the land required for the meat-rich diets eaten by most people in the United States and Europe. It has been calculated that if Spain could return to its traditional Mediterranean diet, its greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 72 percent and land use by 58 percent. Another major economic force shaping our diets is the profit margin disparity between whole foods and processed foods. Ultra-processed foods create much bigger profit margins than whole foods. While whole foods generate profits of around 3-6 percent, ultra-processed foods can yield profits of around 15 percent. This economic reality helps explain why these foods are so widely available. The actual raw cereal in a box of breakfast cereal is almost worthless - what adds value are flavorings, sweeteners, and marketing. Only 10.5 percent of the US food dollar goes to farmers, while 15.5 percent goes to food processing. The economics of food also explains why healthy diets have become increasingly unaffordable for many. Over the past thirty years, the cost of fruits and vegetables has risen dramatically compared to processed foods. In the United States from 1980 to 2011, fresh produce became more than twice as expensive relative to sugary beverages. This price gap creates a situation where the most nutritious foods are often the least affordable, particularly for low-income families. The true value of food goes beyond price, and once we collectively start to realize this again, the challenge will be for policy makers to build food environments that encourage people to make better food choices rather than berating them for making bad ones.

Chapter 5: Time Scarcity: The Disappearance of Communal Meals

Time scarcity is one of the great underexplored reasons why modern food habits differ from those of previous generations. A lack of time - or a perceived lack - hovers over most of our modern food habits, thwarting our desires and forcing us into compromises we never quite intended. There is evidence that when someone feels lacking in time, they will cook less, enjoy meals less, and yet end up consuming more, especially of convenience food. Yet there is something paradoxical in our perception that we have too little time to cook or eat properly. By absolute objective measures, most of us have far more free time on average than workers did a hundred years ago: nearly a thousand more hours a year, in fact. In 1900, the average American worked 2,700 hours a year. By 2015, the average American worked just 1,790 hours a year and owned a kitchen containing time-saving gadgets their ancestors could only dream of. When we say we lack time to eat well, what we often mean is that we lack synchronized time to eat. Our days and weeks are broken up with constant interruptions, and meals are no longer taken communally and in unison but are a cacophony of individual collations snatched here and there. This disruption of communal mealtimes can be seen in time-use data from across Europe. In countries like France, Spain, and Italy, eating still occupies clear and distinct peaks of time that push work and rest away for a while. But in the United Kingdom, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, and Norway, eating has become a continuous ribbon throughout the day, with no clearly defined meal periods. In these countries, you are as likely to be eating at 4:00 p.m. as at 8:00 p.m. A sign of how little we value eating is that lunch breaks have stopped being a normal and expected part of the working day. The lunch break, if it exists at all, is often used for other activities, such as shopping or exercising or just more work. The individualism of modern eating affects both how we feed ourselves and how we are fed by others. In the near-infinite array of modern food choices, we can be as fickle as we like, and the idea of a fixed mealtime with a single shared main dish can seem like an absurd imposition. But this erosion of social obligations cuts both ways. Fixed mealtimes used to operate as a kind of contract between eaters and feeders. Now, especially in the world of work, it can feel as if no one really cares whether we eat or not. In hospitals, nurses who once had subsidized staff dining rooms with hearty two-course lunches now grab snacks from vending machines between patients. The lunch hour has been replaced by what one advertisement called "the new 45 minutes" - barely enough time to eat, let alone relax. This loss of communal eating time has consequences for our health. A study of Japanese men in California in the 1970s found that those who maintained Japanese cultural practices, including traditional mealtimes, had significantly lower rates of heart disease than those who had adopted American eating patterns - regardless of what foods they ate. The heart health of these men was affected by factors that seem completely irrelevant, such as whether they spoke Japanese to their children or socialized with other Japanese people. This suggests that how we eat is as important for our health as what we eat. Our collective obsession with not wasting time has also contributed to the rise of snacking. According to Datamonitor, snacking now accounts for half of all "eating occasions" in the United States. Around a third of all calories consumed by the average American adult are now made up of snacks, amounting to more than six hundred daily calories for men and around five hundred calories for women. Where once there were taboos on eating in the street, such behavior has become normal. When researchers asked low-income mothers in Philadelphia about their feeding practices, many described using snacks as "holdovers" to manage children's behavior when there wasn't time to prepare a proper meal. The changing rhythms of life have affected our eating in profound ways, and a sense of time pressure leads us to eat different foods and to eat them in new ways.

Chapter 6: Health Consequences: Bodies Struggling with Modern Diets

Many of our most profound problems with eating stem from our inability to fully adapt to the new realities of the nutrition transition. While our food has radically changed in our lifetimes, our bodies and food culture have not changed quickly enough to keep pace. We are living in a world of perpetual feast but with genes, minds, and culture that are still formed by the memory of a scarce food supply. This biological mismatch is dramatically illustrated by the "thin-fat Indian baby" phenomenon discovered by Dr. Chittaranjan Yajnik in the 1990s. Studying babies born in rural villages near Pune, India, Yajnik found that compared to British babies, Indian infants were smaller and lighter but surprisingly had higher body fat percentages, especially around the center of the body. These babies had higher rates of prediabetes hormones in their bodies than their British counterparts. Through the new science of epigenetics, we now know that a pregnant woman's body sends signals to her unborn child about the kind of food environment they will be born into. An underweight pregnant woman eating a scarce diet signals to her child that food will always be scarce, triggering physiological changes that prepare the baby for a life of deprivation. But when these babies grow up in an environment of improved transportation, electricity, labor-saving machinery, cheap cooking oil, and rising incomes, their bodies are maladapted to this new reality. Their metabolic programming, designed for scarcity, clashes with an environment of abundance. This mismatch helps explain why India currently has more patients with type 2 diabetes than any other country in the world, with around two-thirds of the adult population in large cities like Chennai either diabetic or prediabetic. The dilemmas faced by these "thin-fat" individuals are an extreme version of problems facing millions worldwide. Every human baby has an inbuilt preference for sweetness, which didn't matter when sugar was a luxury but becomes problematic in a world of cheap sweeteners. We have a natural inclination to conserve energy, which served us well as physically active hunter-gatherers but doesn't work in cities full of cars. Even our separate mechanisms for hunger and thirst create problems - we can drink almost any amount of sugary beverages without feeling satisfied. By 2010, sugary drinks were the single largest source of energy in American diets. Scientific studies show that people have a weak satiety response to clear drinks regardless of how many calories they contain - meaning they don't fill us up as much as equivalent calories taken as food. When we have a large sugary drink, there is faulty communication between our gut and our brain, and somehow we don't get the message that we have just ingested hundreds of calories. This helps explain why liquid calories have been particularly problematic in the nutrition transition. The health consequences of our modern diets are severe and widespread. Diet-related diseases like hypertension, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and preventable forms of cancer have become leading causes of death worldwide. In the United States, poor diet is now the leading cause of premature death, having overtaken smoking. The global burden of these diseases falls disproportionately on lower-income populations, creating a vicious cycle of poor health and economic disadvantage. Perhaps the cruelest aspect of our current food culture is the stigmatization of those who are overweight or obese, despite the fact that they now represent the majority in many countries. Weight stigma is now more socially acceptable, severe, and prevalent than racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. Yet making people feel awful about themselves is unlikely to spur them to change their diets. To the contrary, people who feel stigmatized by obesity are more likely to avoid healthcare settings, and feeling victimized is very stressful, with cortisol, the main human stress hormone, encouraging overeating. Until there is collective recognition that obesity is not a lifestyle choice but largely a consequence of our food environment, the prevalence of obesity is unlikely to be reduced.

Chapter 7: Countercurrents: Reclaiming Traditional Food Wisdom

Amid the seemingly unstoppable tide of food industrialization and dietary deterioration, countercurrents are emerging. Around the world, individuals, communities, and even some governments are working to reclaim traditional food wisdom while adapting it to contemporary realities. These efforts suggest possible pathways toward a healthier, more sustainable food future - what nutritionists sometimes call "stage five" of the nutrition transition. South Korea offers perhaps the most compelling example of a country that has successfully navigated the nutrition transition while preserving core elements of its traditional diet. When economic development accelerated in the 1970s, Korean health authorities recognized the potential health threats posed by Western dietary patterns. They responded with a comprehensive strategy to preserve traditional Korean food culture, including intensive public education about the health benefits of kimchi, brown rice, and other traditional foods. School lunch programs emphasized balanced Korean meals, while a network of community food educators taught traditional cooking methods to young people. The result has been remarkable: despite rapid economic growth, South Koreans retained their vegetable-centric diet to a remarkable degree, and the country maintains significantly better health metrics than would be predicted by its economic status. On a smaller scale, similar efforts are emerging worldwide. In Brazil, new national dietary guidelines explicitly recommend minimally processed foods and traditional cooking methods while warning against ultra-processed products. In Mexico, a groundbreaking sugar tax implemented in 2014 reduced soda consumption by nearly 10% within two years, with the greatest reductions among lower-income households. In Amsterdam, a comprehensive childhood obesity program combining nutrition education, physical activity, and environmental changes reduced overweight and obesity rates by 12% between 2012 and 2015. The revival of cooking represents another promising trend. Contrary to popular belief that cooking is in terminal decline, research suggests a more nuanced picture. While overall cooking time has decreased since the 1960s, the percentage of Americans who cook regularly has stabilized since the 1990s. More significantly, male participation in cooking has increased substantially. In 1965, only 29 percent of American men cooked regularly; by 2008, 42 percent did. The amount of time male cooks spend in the kitchen has also increased. After all these centuries of mothers stirring pots, others are finally taking a turn. New technologies like meal kits and electric pressure cookers are making home cooking more accessible to time-pressed households, while cooking shows and food blogs have sparked renewed interest in culinary skills. Farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture schemes have created alternative food networks that prioritize local, seasonal produce. The slow food movement, which began in Italy in the 1980s, has spread globally, promoting local food traditions and defending regional cuisines. Even in the heart of globalized food culture, people are seeking out distinctive flavors and authentic culinary experiences. Chefs and plant breeders are working together to develop vegetable varieties optimized for flavor rather than shelf life or appearance, demonstrating consumer willingness to pay more for better-tasting produce. Perhaps most fundamentally, there's growing recognition that food quality matters as much as quantity. For decades, global food policy focused primarily on increasing yields and calories to address hunger. Today, there's increasing emphasis on nutrient density, dietary diversity, and food sovereignty - the right of communities to define their own food systems. This shift acknowledges that the solution to modern dietary problems isn't simply eating less of everything, but rather reclaiming the diverse, minimally processed foods that sustained human health for generations. These countercurrents face formidable obstacles. The economic forces driving food industrialization remain powerful, while time pressures and convenience expectations continue to shape eating habits. Yet the emergence of these alternative approaches suggests that the current food paradigm is neither inevitable nor irreversible. By combining traditional food wisdom with modern knowledge and technologies, we may yet find a path to food systems that nourish both human and planetary health.

Summary

The story of modern food reveals a profound paradox: we have solved the ancient problem of scarcity only to create new forms of malnutrition and disease. This nutritional transition has unfolded with remarkable consistency across cultures and continents, as traditional diets based on diverse plant foods give way to industrialized diets dominated by refined carbohydrates, added sugars, vegetable oils, and animal products. The resulting global standard diet has delivered calories in abundance while often failing to provide adequate nutrition, leading to the unprecedented coexistence of obesity and nutrient deficiencies within the same populations and even the same individuals. This transformation has been driven not primarily by consumer preferences but by powerful economic, technological, and social forces. Agricultural policies favor a handful of commodity crops that form the backbone of processed foods. Time pressures push consumers toward convenience foods and away from traditional cooking. Marketing shapes food desires from an early age, while the design of our food environments makes unhealthy choices the path of least resistance. Yet understanding these forces also reveals potential leverage points for change. The examples of South Korea, Amsterdam, and other success stories demonstrate that dietary deterioration is not inevitable. By reclaiming cooking skills, preserving culinary traditions, designing healthier food environments, and reconnecting with the pleasures of whole foods, we can begin to chart a different course - one that retains the benefits of food security while recovering the wisdom embedded in traditional ways of eating. The future of food lies not in returning to an idealized past but in creating new food cultures that combine ancestral wisdom with modern knowledge, making truly nourishing food accessible to all.

About Author

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Bee Wilson

Beatrice Dorothy "Bee" Wilson is a British food writer and historian. Wilson is married to the political scientist David Runciman and lives in Cambridge. The daughter of A.N. Wilson and the Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones, her sister is Emily Wilson, a Classicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

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