All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh

All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

By Ruby Tandoh

Knopf 2025

At a point when truth can be warped, widowed or presidentially jeopardised, when up can be down and Cornwall can be a province of Tunisia if a person so wishes, legitimate expertise is sacrosanct. In Ruby Tandoh’s newest book All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now readers may hope to see all their shameful gustatory mini-malices explained. At last, they cry, someone shall tell us why we prefer food-esque facsimiles over proper nutrition and why we ravage entire bags of popcorn before registering the flavour. This knowledgeable and cockily erudite writer is in fact more interested in where we eat, how tastebuds hop the continental fence, and which damned TikToker we’re honouring this week. It is more cultural than dietary, more interested in food’s media than its metabolisation.

One of the many phenomena funnily foregrounded is bubble tea. Tandoh tells us how this wobbly libation enjoyed a boom in the early 2010s - “It happened because this is when Instagram, the digital conduit for all things bubble tea, launched in the UK. It happened because this is when tuition fees tripled, and universities started recruiting students from abroad. It’s strange how much of the roll-out of wild, postmodern, excellent Taiwanese bubble tea comes down to the nuts and bolts of business, tech and policy.” The faceless and academically dry factors behind the Mediterranean reddening of British food is detailed in the same way - “It was like this, really, that we got to the cultural saturation of Mediterranean foods in the eighties - not one origin event but thousands: migrant workers, lines of legislation, trade rules, holiday rental landlordism, tax breaks, employment drives, sun-seekers and subsidies.”

Shifts in salesmanship, from billboards in the last century to short form content in this one, are also outlined. “You needed [in the past] multinational megacorporations and the free market, and mergers, and acquisitions and intense industrial food technologies to give us the Twister,” Tandoh writes. “But capitalism today is weirder and more fragmented. The retail world has been totally reconfigured by the Internet.” If a criticism is to be piped atop these explanations, it must be noted how akin they are to Malcolm Gladwell’s random, preference-led gobbets. Lunging from the brilliant to the flashily invalid, neither of them are ever far away from linking lollipop sales in one neighborhood and the homicide rate in another.

What becomes obvious chapter by chapter is that All Consuming is a book for the gastronomically super-literate. Anybody who has survived on meat, vegetables, lemon drizzle cake and boiled sweets from the glovebox will be astonished by Tandoh’s advanced repertoire. “My [bubble tea] order of choice is the milk tea with roasted buckwheat - a Ceylon blend that’s rounded out with soft, nutty undertones of soba.” These odd selections keep on coming - “kir with some filled gougeres”, “jambon persille”, “blueberry streusel”, “semolina halwa and pan-fried gobi”, “a medley of pulaos”, “salpicon of celery and puff pastry allumettes.” Brought in with a straight face, it is clear Tandoh expects us to know these dishes when in fact - if this critic’s awareness is universal - most will be genuinely convinced either that the book has been translated into Swahili overnight or that neural apoplexy has begun in their silly little heads. What are us commoners of the kitchen meant to do when lamposts are sauteed and whale bladder is brought slowly to the boil?  It’s one thing to broaden the public’s culinary horizons, it’s quite another to nuke their worlds with exotica.

This quasi-Bohemian flimflam aside, readers are certain to love Tandoh’s wry, subversive, zanily astute writing style. Holding up the Stendahlian mirror to society’s fastidious recipe wars on the web, she inveighs - “You won’t see intricate methods or nerdy adventures in technique [on Allrecipes.com] - just recipes, backstories, transparently bad ideas, homespun strokes of genius, delicately Midwestern one-upmanship, and, collectively, one of the greatest archives of American food culture the country has produced.”  It is in her smaller, more acidic put-downs where true entertainment can be found: “I drank something described to me as shilajit resin - a short, vile drink with the aromatic profile of topsoil crossed with tar.” Throughout she contains this smirkful, cutting wisdom so well that the book isn’t pungent with cynicism, but is one still willing to satirise anything in the food industry from the piratical wellness sector to deliberately unsayable fizzy drink contents.

All Consuming does not proscribe or prescribe, nor does it loop in amylase or prosecute a shadowy cabal governing us through dessert. It sends up stupid queuing, it historicises supermarkets and spice, it slaps Internet verbiage on the counter, it dates our lunching habits, it fascinates as much as it flummoxes, but best of all it allows a writerly talent to excel in her field without a calorie being counted, or a guilty pleasure demonised.

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston upon Hull