Helena Aeberli devours Ruby Tandoh’s “All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now.”
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh. Knopf, 2025. 304 pages.
“TELL ME WHAT kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are,” the French gourmet Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in his magisterial philosophy of eating, The Physiology of Taste (1825; tr. Fayette Robinson, 1854). “You are what you eat” has survived the 200 years since that book’s first publication as common wisdom, but less quoted are its other epicurean aphorisms, from the glib (“A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye”) to the gleeful (“The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star”).
Forget giving a Victorian urchin a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, I’d like to blow Brillat-Savarin’s mind with the internet. When it comes to the discovery of new dishes, we’re living through the gastronomic equivalent of the Galilean revolution, but instead of telescopes, we have foodie TikTok. Where else could one encounter a menu of viral hits like feta and tomato baked pasta, “green goddess” salad with hot honey halloumi, and mango cloud matcha, finished with a dessert of Dubai chocolate-dipped strawberries or the now-ubiquitous Crumbl cookie?
It is easy to see food today as frivolous. Open Instagram or TikTok and you’ll be met with a rainbow smorgasbord of such improbable delicacies, carefully engineered to bypass all rationality and go straight to the pleasure centers in your brain and stomach. Even the most disciplined among us are not free from the allure. Recently, the Instagram algorithm presented me with a vision of ube blueberry muffin ice cream, from a trendy parlor in London’s Soho. The scoop was the color of my wildest childhood dreams, with just a hint of cosmopolitan adult sophistication to justify my desire and the vaguest hint of Southeast Asian “authenticity” to stoke the culinary Orientalism currently rife in the British food scene (ube, a dessert made from yams that hails from the Philippines, also does very well on social media thanks to its bright purple hue). I passed the shop a few days later on a search for late-night dessert, and it cost £8.50 for two scoops, roughly the price of a paperback book (approximately $11.50). If it hadn’t been for the horrified outcry from my friends, I’d probably have gone in. Then I could have tried the black sesame Oreo or the Hong Kong French toast flavors too, each precisely designed to activate not just the innate human desire for sweet and fatty dishes but also our herd mentality, the drive to follow trends that has us queuing for 45 minutes in the rain for a scoop of zeitgeisty ice cream we first encountered weeks before on the other side of a phone. Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you your screen time.
In her new book All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, the British baker and food writer Ruby Tandoh examines the forces shaping our appetites. What unseen cultural baggage do we bring to the table when we choose what or where to eat? Brillat-Savarin’s 19th-century aphorism suggested that we ingest our culture along with our nutrients, gifting us the cliché “you are what you eat,” but the notion has historic precedent. A 17th-century saying quoted by the physician and dietitian John Archer—“we our selves have had our selves upon our trenchers”—described the perceived physiological link between food, health, and identity. Under the early modern humoral system, eating was understood to have a transformative power on one’s character, with the constituents of food able to define and alter an individual’s constitution, an association that persisted even as its scientific underpinning faded away. Eating beef, for instance, was believed to make one strong and honest, but also violent and stupid, and was particularly associated with Englishmen. A series of 17th- and 18th-century satires contrasted the solid vigor of English beefeaters with the frog-and-soup-eating French, culminating in 1731 with Henry Fielding’s patriotic anthem “The Roast Beef of Old England,” an early example of culinary nationalism that worried about the enfeebling effect of fashionable cooking (“When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food, / It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood”). Food, the satires suggest, has always been about more than just taste, touching on issues of nationhood, ideology, and collective identity.
Today, the age-old connections between food, on the one hand, and place, identity, and community, on the other, are crumbling like an overpriced cookie. We no longer learn what we know about food “in the kitchen or at the table.” Nor do we believe that a particular food can make or unmake a person’s innate character—except, perhaps, in the caloric sense of weight loss and gain. Food remains a locus of politics, but since the end of World War II, according to Tandoh, our understanding of food has become less intimate and less social. Instead of being determined by the seasons, local availability, family traditions, and national cuisines, the culinary “balance of power has moved from countries to corporations,” the seamless, near-invisible workings of the “global food machine.” All Consuming is a critique of this system, but it is also a paean to its culinary creativity, albeit one that might make a starred chef wince; Tandoh is as at home with the McNugget as she is with the croquembouche, and equally curious about both. What led the automatic restaurants of early 20th-century New York to evolve into the globally ubiquitous cluster of fast-food chains, with their emphasis on “consistency, cleanliness, convenience, control”? Why do we so often eat those McNuggets in our cars? And, on the flip side, why are we so obsessed with hosting the perfect dinner party, complete with Nara Smith–style gowns and pearls? From supermarkets to the cookbook industry, fast-food chains to foodie influencers, in an era obsessed with tastemakers, All Consuming asks what really shapes our tastes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its inescapable influence, the answer is often the internet, which “has replaced farms or factories or supermarkets as the primary food infrastructure of the modern age.” If, 20 years ago, the average person could just about manage to follow Michael Pollan’s dictate not to “eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” today, even the way in which we learn to eat has gone online, tangled up with technology’s constant shock of the new. Your great-grandmother might not recognize your lunch, but she certainly wouldn’t recognize the Instagram Reels recipe you followed to make it, or the multinational megacorp delivery service you ordered the ingredients from, or perhaps even the ingredients themselves, imported out of season from across the globe and repackaged by savvy marketers. As numerous commentators have pointed out, often nervously and with a hint of nostalgia (not least Pollan himself), this distinctly modern food culture is about as far from farm-to-table, nose-to-tail eating as you can get. Instead, it is, in Tandoh’s words, “composite and changeable,” shaped by international trade, industrial production, marketing, and social media influence.
This new food system is a great leveler, a democratizing force that has improved access to food in ways your great-grandmother could never have imagined, at least in the affluent West. Supermarket shelves spill over with a dizzying cornucopia of products, from imported strawberries and asparagus in the refrigerator cabinet in December to 30 different types of granola crammed onto one shelf. Just look at any Trader Joe’s or Erewhon haul video; these are glistening grottos of groceries, the vast and awe-inspiring cathedrals of capitalism where, as Tandoh puts it, we “perform our secular modern rituals.” Supermarkets, as Tandoh describes in an illuminating chapter on their history, cater “to the vast, undifferentiated middle—to everyone except the fringe movements of modern food culture.” One telling anecdote relates how, when they wanted to sell the American dream during the Cold War, the US government chose to send a 10,000 square foot replica of a supermarket to the 1957 Zagreb International Trade Fair. Complete with rows of all-American products such as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and candy dispensers for kids, the display was a wild success. “Just the thing for Yugoslavia,” Yugoslav Marshal Tito is supposed to have said about the American grocery packaging methods on display. A victory over outdated European communism, as the American press put it, sentiments echoed after Boris Yeltsin’s 1989 visit to a Randalls grocery store near Houston, following a trip to the Johnson Space Center.
It was at that moment, Yeltsin’s aide later suggested, that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” within him. It’s easy to understand why. Visiting a supermarket can be pleasurable, even comforting, no matter how vigorous your anti-capitalist politics. Like so much about modern food culture, the supermarket is “designed to work on these easily hackable circuits of the human brain,” cutting “the distance between wanting and buying to the narrowest synaptic jump.” Who among us doesn’t have a favorite aisle to browse, favorite packagings to admire, favorite products to touch and feel? My mother still refuses to order groceries online because she likes to handle each identical apple, each copy-paste bag of chips, just to pick out her own.
There’s a stone in this fruitful abundance, even setting aside the environmental impacts of industrial food (which is maybe more of a worm). As Tandoh observes, “new ways of learning mean new tastes, sometimes broader tastes, often more predictable ones.” All that choice is often simply surface-level—are those 30 types of granola really all that different once you take off the branded packaging? The internet can introduce us to new foods and spotlight underrepresented cuisines and political issues—recently, Palestinian food influencers have gained a new platform online, including 11-year-old Renad Attallah, cooking her way through the genocide in Gaza before her recent evacuation to the Netherlands—but it can also have a homogenizing effect, leading to the loss of individuality and traditional food cultures. It can even be destructive, with recent reports of a major matcha shortage, as Japanese suppliers struggle to meet soaring global demand facilitated by the trending green tea, which has a very slow, traditional production process.
Tandoh, like me, is British, but our diets are less roast beef and more—well, the same as everyone else’s. Food content, like everything on the internet, skews American, or at least American-style, the bigger-is-better mentality that has gifted or cursed us with #foodporn’s loaded sandwiches and the cheese-pull money shot. Food has become an experience, one that is discovered, recorded, documented, and reminisced about online. “The camera eats first,” as food influencers say, even if the food itself goes cold, while queues snake around city blocks for the hottest new burger. The food we encounter now is optimized for social media, and that means visuals. Not visuals like those presented in the earliest color cookbooks—practical, illustrative, and often deeply unappetizing (that inevitable parsley sprig or maraschino cherry garnish!)—but dynamic images and videos of food in motion: curls of melting butter, vivid paint splats of pesto, focaccias decorated like Van Gogh canvases. In a chapter on recipe development, Tandoh talks to Ben Lebus, founder of Mob Kitchen, which is something of an alchemist’s laboratory for viral recipes: here, the presentation of the food is a vital part of its success, all the way down to its coloring, a palette of “sunset, yolk, terracotta, mahogany, vermilion and tar that you’d find in a New York-style cheese slice.” “Orange is the colour that makes people hungry,” says Lebus, speaking of a particularly popular sausage and gochujang pasta—though he could be speaking of “Marry Me Chicken,” or chili crisp fried eggs, or the Emily Mariko salmon rice bowl. My craving for that ice cream was not a coincidence—it was a direct creation of this algorithm-driven attention economy.
There’s a multisensory sensuality to the language with which we talk about food too. Ingredients are never just ingredients; they’re crunchy, creamy, crispy, chewy. Dishes are juicy, herby, saucy, cheesy, beany, buttery, spicy, and so on. There’s something a bit silly about this adjectival cooking, and something a bit samey, a recognizable “assault of umami, salt and sweet” drawn from a “weirdly placeless pantry of ingredients” that could only ever be available to the truly globalized cook, “everything from sriracha to miso and cumin.” This was once a radical way of seeing food, pioneered by London’s Ottolenghi deli, run by the chefs Yotam Ottolenghi, who is Israeli, and Sami Tamimi, who is Palestinian (the two bonded over their shared upbringing in Jerusalem and desire to bring the flavors of the Levant to cold and gray England). Ottolenghi food was fusion food, a “mix-and-match methodology” dedicated to the pursuit of taste. Such high-impact, hybrid recipes do particularly well online, yet so does simplicity, something Ottolenghi and Tamimi—innovative chefs and pioneers at introducing condiments like rose harissa and pomegranate molasses to a ketchup-loving British public—aren’t known for. Lay cooking today, of the Bon Appétit magazine or Mob Kitchen kind, is quick, easy, five-ingredient, one-tray, and when it comes down to it, like the supermarket granola, even if it’s good, it often all tastes the same.
Elsewhere, though, genuine innovation is king, as Tandoh finds in a delightful chapter on bubble tea. First invented as a cold milk tea in postwar Taiwan, with tapioca boba added in the 1980s, bubble tea has taken the West by storm in the past decade. Unlike, say, matcha, with its sophisticated taste and ceremonial role in Japanese society, Taiwanese bubble tea has always been “fun and unserious,” a drink for kids and students that is increasingly loved by adults. This, along with its quirky, syrupy flavors, makes it perfect for social media—it is literally “engineered to look great,” kaleidoscopic colors of bouncy boba pearls popping in a frame of translucent plastic spark desire and curiosity. But, as in the case of ice cream, or adaptogenic wellness drinks, or any of the other foods explored by Tandoh, the craze for bubble tea “was never just about taste.” It had as much to do with timing (London’s Bubbleology store opened the year before the launch of Instagram, in a decade when young international students from East Asia were entering the UK in record numbers thanks to tuition fee hikes), and the “bigger, colder forces” of business, the economy, and import costs. Bubble tea is cheap and quick to produce, with inexpensive machinery and no need for trained chefs. It’s easily franchised, and easily marketable, and as bubble tea hits the mainstream, smaller, diaspora-run businesses benefit too—at least until they’re pushed out by chains who can afford the climbing urban rents. This is a booming market, but as Tandoh finds, “much of the roll-out of wild, postmodern, excellent Taiwanese bubble tea comes down to the nuts and bolts of business, tech and policy.” Bubble tea, like so much of our modern food culture, is just the culinary superstructure of a deep economic base—the cherry on the icing on the capitalist cake.
Whether we’re queuing together for the latest viral treat or chefing up a three-course meal for our friends, food unites us, but it can also divide. Betrayal is baked into the original dinner party, as Judas counts his silver at the Last Supper’s long table. Or, as the scholar and former food critic David Goldstein has written of the many scenes of eating in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, “[W]e are the only primate that shares food while sitting around in a circle, making eye contact, exposing our teeth […] The dining room is still a site of potential violence: we are still dangerous when we bare our teeth.” As I write this, the news is full of stories of teeth bared over food. UN-backed bodies confirm a man-made famine in Gaza. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seeks to “make America healthy again” with counterintuitive policies such as the replacement of seed oils with beef tallow. And the Italian restaurant association Fiepet Confesercenti goes to war with a British cooking website for including butter in its recipe for cacio e pepe, a reminder that not everyone loves fusion food.
But food can be a personal battle too. In the past, Tandoh has been candid about her teenage experiences with anorexia and bulimia. Eating disorders are their own kind of “all-consuming,” sometimes generating an obsessive, anxious “food noise,” or inability to stop thinking about food. It’s hard not to wonder if we’ve created a kind of cultural food noise, if all the #foodporn, mukbangs, viral recipes, and grocery store hauls are just the shadow side of a deep unease about eating, which is so essential yet so freighted with biological and social risk, particularly in an age of climactic instability. Women especially are trained to fear food from a young age, or at best to regard it with ambivalence. We are dangerous when we bare our teeth, but we are vulnerable when we open our mouths.
Tandoh obviously knows all this, and while All Consuming only alludes briefly to her eating disorder, it feels in part like a way for her to reclaim her appetite, to release herself and her readers from those moralizing internal voices—is this ultra-processed snack bar bad for me? what are the calories in that pizza? should I be scared of seed oils?—and rejoice in the weird and wonderful. With its invitation to examine our appetites with “curiosity, rather than judgement,” this is a delectable antidote to the Ozempic era of shrinking portions and “thin is in.” Tandoh revels in the anarchic delight of modern food culture even while acknowledging its flaws. A light touch belies a depth of research and practical culinary know-how, but it is evident—as it has been ever since her time as a contestant on The Great British Bake Off, back in 2013, only a few years after she was treated for her eating disorder—that Tandoh really cares about food. Not as something to be optimized for health or longevity or weight loss, but food as food—delicious, ridiculous food. This is a feast of many flavors; pull up a chair, and tuck in.
LARB Contributor
Helena Aeberli is a writer and researcher from London, based in Oxford. She is currently working on a PhD on early modern eating disorders.
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