All Consuming

AN OBSERVER, GQ, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES AND BLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2025 Longlisted for the André Simon Food and Drink Book Award 'Entertaining, alarming, illuminating, alive' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Brilliant and original' NIGEL SLATER 'Ruby is a rare and singular voice. I loved this book' ANNA JONES The iconic New Yorker and Vittles food writer asks: Why do we eat the way we eat now? Being into food - following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it - is no longer a subculture. It's become mass culture. The food landscape is more expansive and dizzying by the day. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, now flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels. Ruby Tandoh's startlingly original analysis traces this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years, making sense of this electrifying new era by examining the social, economic, and technological forces shaping the foods we hunger for today. Exploring the evolution of the cookbook and light-speed growth of bubble tea, the advent of TikTok critics and absurdities of the perfect dinner party, Tandoh's laser-sharp investigation leaves her questioning: how much are our tastes, in fact, our own? Discover All Consuming Bubble Tea | Critics | Recipes | Martha Stewart | Mob |Fast food | Hype queues | Nara Smith | Tiktok | Viennetta | Weekend supplements | Wife Guys | Cult Cookbooks | Lobster | Influencers | Wellness elixirs | Entertaining | Keith Lee | Wimpy with Ruby Tandoh this autumn.
===
Food dominates our every waking minute: Hype restaurants. Allrecipes. The Great British Bake Off. In this dazzling cultural history, bestselling food writer Ruby Tandoh (author of Cook As You Are) traces how—and why—we’ve all become foodies. “Ruby Tandoh is a genius and All Consuming is everything.” —Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal “A fascinating, sometimes shocking, eye-opener that is also brilliantly funny.” —Claudia Roden How, in the space of a few decades, has food gone from fact of life to national past time; something to be thought about—and talked about—24/7? In this startlingly original, deeply irreverent cultural history, Ruby Tandoh traces that transformation, exposing how cult cookbooks, bad TV, visionary restaurants, and new social media have all wildly overhauled our appetites. All Consuming explores: •The rise of the TikTok food critic •What makes a hype restaurant go viral •Bubble tea’s world domination •The dream of the modern dinner party •The limits of the cookbook •The history of the supermarket •Wellness drinks—and where they come from •The rise and fall of the automat Our tastes have been radically refashioned, painstakingly engineered in the depths of food factories, and hacked by craveable Instagram recipes. They’ve been pulled into supermarket aisles and seduced by Michelin stars, transfixed by Top Chefs and shaped by fads. A deep dive into the social, economic, cultural, legislative, and demographic forces that have reshaped our relationship with food, All Consuming questions how our tastes have been shaped—and how much they are, in fact, our own.