Panic on a Plate (Societas)
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Rob Lyons serves up a fine menu of plain common sense followed by roasted panic-mongers, garnished with fresh facts. A very revealing book. --Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
you will automatically change their behaviour, prospects and pretty much their whole lives... In this brilliant new book, Panic on a Plate, Rob Lyons busts open foodoo myths with all the glee of a mischievous child slipping a whoopee cushion under the posterior of pomposity. --Julie Burchill
you will automatically change their behaviour, prospects and pretty much their whole lives... In this brilliant new book, Panic on a Plate, Rob Lyons busts open foodoo myths with all the glee of a mischievous child slipping a whoopee cushion under the posterior of pomposity. --Julie Burchill
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The availability, range, cost and quality of food in Western societies have never been more favourable, yet food is also the focus of a great deal of anxiety. There are concerns that our current diets will mean we will get steadily fatter and more unhealthy while consuming junk food', with consequences for our quality of life, our children's behaviour and even the environment. This book challenges these ideas and places the food debate in a wider context. As the political imagination and the scope of social policy have narrowed, the focus on the personal and corporeal has filled this gap, creating an inward, individualised perspective that breeds a personal sense of vulnerability and distracts from issues of broader social importance. The book also examines the current use of food as metaphor the way that bad food and obesity, for example, have become code words for an elite disdain for the masses, implicitly promoting the idea that the consequences of poverty are the fault of the poor, and that a solution to the problems of social inequality lies in the consumption of five fruit and veg a day. The author also discusses how health fears around food are used as a lever for greater official control of our everyday lives, from lunchbox inspections and school food crusades, to endless media health advice and scientifically-dubious healthy labelling initiatives. The upshot of these connected trends is misplaced anxiety and wasted effort fixing what, for the most part, does not need to be fixed. Our modern food system allows us to be healthier than ever before, while transforming food from fuel into a source of entertainment, pleasure and choice.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you prefer your food with no added guilt - read this!!,
By Sally Millard (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder (Societas) (Paperback)
If you have wanted to shoot the television when Jamie Oliver says that giving your children three scoops of ice-cream is child abuse (I paraphrase - but only slightly), then I recommend you read this great book. It is full of amusing anecdotes as well as lots of interesting facts. For example, did you know that you get more Vitamin C for your sugar in tomato ketchup than you do in an apple? It puts todays panics about food in their political and historical context and allows you to enjoy food again. If you prefer your food with no added guilt - then I recommend you read this book.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
perfect xmas gift for anxious parents,
By
This review is from: Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder (Societas) (Paperback)
This is a kind and sensible book. Lyons wants to remove our guilt about food, and get us to relax and enjoy it.Today we worry about obesity, additives, and convenience foods. We're wary of industrially produced food, and of supermarkets. We're guilt-tripped about not buying locally. Yet our diets have never been as nutritious, varied and inexpensive as they are now. Refrigeration, better farming methods and imported foods have all made feeding a family - especially on a low income -- easier than ever before. Panic on a Plate argues that there is no technical obstacle to our being able to feed everyone on the planet. Indeed, up to a third of the world's food supply is destroyed before it ever reaches us, via poor storage, vermin, and other avoidable disasters. My gran used to guilt-trip us to clean our plates by reminding us of starving black babies in Africa. Lyons rebuts this, pointing out that food shortages today are a political, not a natural problem, for which ordinary people are entirely blameless. Lyons shows how our fears about food coincide with countless other contemporary neuroses about everyday life, Today we are inclined to fear the worst about everything, regardless of the facts. He's good at drawing together umpteen apparently isolated trends, to show the common thread of irrational paranoia and morbid distrust running through them. Panic on a Plate is particularly reassuring about obesity scares. It explains that only a tiny percentage of people are truly obese, and that there's no proof that being moderately overweight is bad for your health. Indeed it's likely that the authorities' obsession with our diets is directly responsible for the rise in food obsessions among young people. In the past, people with eating disorders were pretty much left alone to get over it. Today children are taught about anorexia and bulimia right from the off, with school lunchbox inspections and mass weigh-ins. I can't think of a better way to encourage an obsession with your weight than to stick it on the curriculum at school. My mother used to say she'd quite enjoy cooking if she didn't have to do it all the time. Parents who can now buy cheap ready meals from Aldi can celebrate the fact that feeding a family no longer involves daily slaving over a hot stove. Lyons' widowed mother was a school dinner lady, and he grew up on the sort of homemade, meat-and-two-veg meals that would tick all the right boxes today. This being 30 years ago however, it was hard work for his mum, as well as dull; thus "corn on the cob appeared like some fluorescent exotica when I was in my teens". And yet, even those of us raised on the traditional British diet of `something hot and fill up on stodge' still survived, and now we're living longer than our parents. While variety is key to a healthy diet, our bodies are surprisingly able to adapt to make the most of what they get. And nowadays it's far easier to eat a varied diet anyway. As Lyons says, "things have never been this good; let us relax and enjoy our good fortune while striving both to make things even better here and to make sure that everyone in the world can take a seat at the feast'. Significantly, he also points out that `All this handwringing about food has provided a way for governments to connect with the populace, through telling us how and what to eat.' Rather than beat ourselves over the head about food miles, we'd be better off saving our anger for the things that really matter. Top of my list would go such things as government policies which ignore real social problems - housing shortages, dreadful hospitals, unemployment, wars - in favour of trying to micromanage our eating habits as if we were naughty children.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rule by fear,
By
This review is from: Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder (Societas) (Paperback)
This is an easy to read book, though the facts Lyons gives the reader make you very uneasy indeed.We all know that there is something wrong with the dietary advice we are given by the Government and it's medical advisers, we are just not sure of the exact details of how wrong it is. This excellent book points out some of the things that are just not true, with some clear evidence to back up what the author claims. Body fat, saturated fat, salt, five-a-day and many more widely believed myths are punctured and the fears they create put into proper perspective by this book. As with so many "public panics", the hysteria over diet is shown to be a mix of vastly exaggerated risks and over-politicising of Health and safety issues which inevitably leads to distortions of the science and the growth of entire industries with a vested interest in keeping the panic going. Don't panic, relax or stress will kill you long before that sprinkling of salt on your lard-fried rump steak and butter-fried mushrooms does. Buy this book and learn to chill about the "poison on your plate".
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