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Curated
1825 1960 1977 1985 2006 2012 2024
Two hundred years of people telling us what was happening to food
A permanent reading list, not a rotating one. Every book here is one I have actually read, and every note says what it changed in my thinking rather than what the back cover says.
Links go to Bookpile, which shows you a bookshop near you and your local library before it shows you anything else. Nothing here earns me a commission.
Shelf 01
Before the feed, there were other forces shaping what we ate: geography, class, technology, trade, agriculture, refrigeration, fashion and culture. These books helped me see that more clearly. Reading them changed the way I think about food — and, I hope, will change the way you see your own plate.
The first great reminder that eating is about far more than hunger. Brillat-Savarin connected food with pleasure, society, status, conversation and identity. He made me realise that food culture existed long before we gave it a name. The algorithm didn’t invent the idea of eating as performance. It just gave everyone a stage.
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David taught generations of British readers to look beyond their own kitchens. But what fascinates me is how she did it. Through words, stories, places and appetite — without a single photograph demanding to be liked or shared. She made food aspirational before Instagram made aspiration visual. Her recipes travelled through imagination.
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Berry asks what happens when food becomes disconnected from the land, the farmer and the person who eats it. His argument feels remarkably contemporary: industrial food doesn’t simply change agriculture; it changes our relationship with food itself. Read now, it makes you wonder what the screen is doing to that relationship too — replacing place with platform.
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Sugar looks innocent until you understand its history. Mintz traces how a luxury became an everyday necessity — and how taste can be shaped by economics, empire, labour and power. It changed my thinking because it showed me that what feels like personal choice often has a much bigger system sitting behind it. The feed works in much the same way.
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Pollan asks one deceptively simple question: where did this meal come from? Follow the food backwards and suddenly dinner becomes agriculture, industry, marketing, science and politics. It changed the way I look at a plate because it taught me to question the story behind the food. Today, perhaps we need to ask another question: who decided we wanted to eat it in the first place?
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The fork seems trivial until Wilson shows us how technology changes the way we eat. Knives, forks, spoons, stoves, refrigerators — every invention quietly rewired our behaviour. This book became a useful lens for Eat Your Screen: the smartphone isn’t simply another piece of technology. It is becoming part of the apparatus through which we experience, choose and understand food.
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Twilley takes us inside something we barely think about: cold. Refrigeration transformed where food could travel, how long it could last and what became possible to eat. It is a reminder that food culture is repeatedly rewritten by invisible technologies. Refrigeration changed the food system. The algorithm is changing the appetite system.
Find a copy near you →Shelves 02 – 06
Five shelves still being written. Each one is read before it is listed, which is slower than it sounds.
Get told when they land →Cover images via Open Library. Rights in the cover artwork remain with the publishers.