In the collection All Consuming (Knopf, Sept.), food writer and The Great British Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh traces how culinary tastes and trends—Allrecipes, bubble tea, TikTok restaurant critics, wellness drinks—have been shaped by economics, legal regulations, demographics, and more. Tandoh spoke with PW about drawing unexpected connections and finding hope in contemporary food culture.
In what way is this book in conversation with your cookbooks?
It’s an evolution of the way that I feel about food media and creating within food culture. I got to a point of kind of exhaustion after my last cookbook where I was like, Do we need more recipes? I certainly don’t have any more recipes within me. This book is an attempt to work through how we got to this point where we just have this proliferation of food content without any kind of structures for understanding it.
How did you go about your research?
It was intense—a lot of libraries and archives. One of the things I uncovered was that the sources that are most useful to understanding food history are not always the ones that you would think are. Cookbooks, whilst interesting as documents, are not particularly useful for seeing how people used to eat. But when I turned to, for example, old diagrams of automats from the New York Public Library, I saw what was actually selling and the numbers being sold. The more boring the document, the more fertile the material for research.
What surprised you in developing these essays?
Like so many people, when I see something clickbaity online, I get a knee-jerk feeling of how far our culture has fallen. But the more I looked into this stuff, the more I found it to be engaging and not a completely new thing, but an evolution of other ways that we’ve dealt with food and understood food in the past. Mega-influencer Keith Lee feels so new, but there’s so much in common between his work and the work of restaurant guidebook writers in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Take Duncan Hines. Like Keith Lee, he was just some guy with a car, without any particular food training or expertise. But in an anti-elitist coup, he became the most prolific restaurant influencer of the postwar years. Millions of people bought his guidebooks, written by and for an everyman. I was already a Keith Lee fan, and finding those parallels made me understand the depth of his work and that lineage.
What’s your takeaway for readers?
I hope it inspires people to take a step back from the trend cycle and have a sense of being part of a food culture system rather than a top-down food chain. There are huge problems in food—climate change, labor—but there’s also creativity in places that you wouldn’t expect. I hope it provides a view that isn’t so pessimistic and asks where we might find some kind of regenerative energy to guide food culture in the right direction.
