Foodists: Writing About Eating from the London Review of Books

‘Food, like sex, is mostly in the head,’ John Bayley writes in the piece that gives this anthology its title. Sure enough, in the LRB’s pages, food has often been a medium for thinking about other things: history, literature, art, cultural criticism, philosophy and – in the second half of the paper’s lifetime – more political concerns, too, such as agro-industry, ecology and inequality. This changing emphasis is salutary, but these essays also remind us that food is fun, and nothing about it is ever completely new. As his 1980 piece about vegetables makes clear, E.S. Turner, a contributor born when Edward VII was king, knew that avocados were a ‘cliché’, and that it was hard work pretending to like kale.Featuring: John Bayley, Joanna Biggs, Angela Carter, John Lanchester, James Meek, Emma Rothschild, Steven Shapin, Adam Smyth, E.S. Turner, Margaret Visser, Bee Wilson and Francis Wyndham.