A choice of this year’s cook books

What a relief to find ourselves in a non-faddy cook book year. We are not being encouraged to chew only plants, ferment everything, grow burgers in labs or devour insects. It’s not that I don’t look for answers to how we should eat to survive the future, but I know a thing or two about the human appetite and no scheme seems any more sustainable than the way the West eats now.

The answer is there – and always has been – but it’s adrift. In The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavours of the Past (Greystone Books, £19.99), Taras Grescoe identifies the crucial ingredient: diversity. The most successful species owes much to its ability to eat anything, to being omnivorous, but for the past century it has existed on a monoculture of grains and a few types of protein. There is so much more out there, urgently needing to be found.

I cheered when I read this nicely compact book, a series of lyrically descriptive essays telling of the author’s interesting journeys to find the world’s forgotten foods. It is beautifully persuasive. If we stop forcing farmers to produce such a limited range of nourishment, our grandchildren might have a fighting chance.

Cooking also plays its part in diversity. A delegation of dieticians from an American university made a study of eating habits in Burgundy and found that the low rates of cardiovascular disease there – despite extreme butter consumption – was not just due to the range of ingredients consumed seasonally but to the even larger repertoire of recipes for each one. Cooking in this way is also endangered, though perhaps not lost, so we can look at new cook books while holding Grescoe’s in the other hand.