Part of Off the Shelf Festival of Words 2025
In conversation with Jake Hall.
Being into food has become part of mass culture. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels. Ruby Tandoh traces this extraordinary transformation over the past 75 years by examining the social, economic and technological forces shaping the foods we hunger for today. Exploring the evolution of the food landscape this investigation leaves her questioning: how much are our tastes, in fact, our own?
Ruby Tandoh is a food writer who has written for the Guardian, Elle and Vice. A finalist on the 2013 Great British Bake Off, she has published Eat Up!, a book about the pleasure of eating, as well as three cookery books, Crumb, Flavour and Cook as You Are.
Guest curated by Jake Hall.
