Courtauld wonders if pork tastes good with apple sauce because pigs like eating windfall apples. Rose Prince in The Savvy Shopper shows how few pigs get a taste of windfall apples as 70 per cent of British pigs are, she tells us, reared indoors on such fodder as industrial biscuit waste, GM soya and fishmeal. Her introduction provides a pithy summary of food’s big issues: food miles, bird flu, genetic modification, fair trade, additives and chemical residues. These topics have been aired in such books as Charles Clover’s The End of the Line which tells of the depletion of our seas, Shopped by Joanna Blythman on the pernicious power of the supermarkets and Not on the Label, Felicity Lawrence’s shocking revelation of what happens to our food before we buy it. The problem has been that, alerted to these concerns, most of us have not known where to shop for safe and ethically produced food. Prince takes 74 shopping basket items, from asparagus to vegetable oils, baby food to yoghurt, and answers the questions of concerned shoppers, summarises each supermarket’s practice and recommends stockists of the good, wholesome version of each foodstuff. Many of her facts are worrying: far from being ripe for the Harvest Festival, there are apples on sale in our shops which have been preserved for up to a year, stored in cold rooms or shipping containers pumped full of a potentially carcinogenic gas. Rose Prince occasionally cooks The Spectator’s legendary lunches; her book is a sign that the magazine can look forward as well as back.
Elfreda Pownall is Food and Interiors Editor of Stella magazine at the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.