The Foodie File: Tracing the Fate of Food; Last Chance to Eat
Gina Mallet does a good job of tracing the fate of food and showing how food is a link to our cultural and well being in her book Last Chance to Eat.
Over the last fifty years we have seen a shift in the developed world from locally produced food to large-scale farming enacting grave effects on our diets, our environment and our culture. Mallet shows how in the last fifty have gone from loving food to fearing it.
Food is a fundamental link to our cultural and well being. In my mind I quite often compare the knowledge of food akin to the knowledge of language. Imagine if the ability to communicate was taken away from us all, or most of us. We have evolved our culture to be food illiterate at a detriment to us all.
Last Chance to Eat is part of a new food literature currently in vogue that is trying to bring the language of food back and show us where we lost it. As language evolves so does our food culture, it will never again be what is was but a new enlightenment may raise our literacy so we can decide collectively to make informed food choices.
It’s a good read that brings the situation to light in an accessible way.
Douglas Adams wrote a book, Last Chance to See, in 1991 which was about endangered species, and then revisited the same places in another edition in 2001 to see how these animals were doing. I imagine Gina’s is the foodie rendition of Douglas’ books?