What we eat is what we talk about. Red meat v. non-red, all meat v. no meat at all, GM v. organic, long haul v. local, dirty v. 'environmental' and so on; how we prepare a dish, how Heston Blumenthal does it. What makes these conversations possible is the abundance we're now accustomed to: plenty is the medium in which our anxieties, our pleasures and even our 'ethics' thrive. So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.

LRB 13 May 2010 | PDF Download