If you’re thinking about your next meal, chances are it will feature an ingredient (harissa, miso) from Yotam Ottolenghi’s global pantry and be coloured in a hunger-inspiring reddish-orange hue. Food writer Ruby Tandoh’s razor-sharp All Consuming is a look at our current edible world and an inquiry into our cravings, which suggests that our appetites have not just historical precedent but also predictability. It’s an ambitious undertaking, whose breeziness befits the superfluity of its subject, playfully belying its serious research.
Tandoh investigates medieval cookbooks with the same aplomb as she does online trends, and interviews fascinating, unhyped individuals, such as Cindy Carnes, an Iowa nurse with a Banana Cake VI recipe. She connects contemporary black MMA fighter – and Tik-Tok food reviewer – Keith Lee; the white, 1950s amateur critic Duncan Hines; and Hines’s contemporary Victor Hugo Green, author of The Negro Motorist Green Book. Green Book was for a clientele excluded from Hines’s restaurants for, as Tandoh notes, having both a car and a guidebook were not just useful, but crucial to a black person travelling in segregated America.
Like porn, everything in food has been done. While once we preferred backstory, we now go for “Creamy, Dreamy, White Bean” explicit. Tandoh herself does not pretend to be a first-coming. Rather, All Consuming has deft observations that, once stated, you kick yourself for not noticing. “Diets,” she says, “start with consuming less, whereas in wellness, you start by adding on.”
She’s hysterically funny, demystifying what we find holy and deflating our culinary notions. “The food your ego wants to make,” she observes, “is probably not what your guests want to eat.” The vocabulary for food writing can feel limited to creamy and crispy, but Tandoh has a talent for language that winks at and luxuriates in the genre’s conventions. Chicken skin is “tortoiseshell” and a salad “slung . . . like a satin quilt on an unmade bed”.
Some might take issue with Tandoh’s exuberant consumerism and her disregard for environmental and ethical consequences, but I found her joy contagious. All Consuming knows it’s not a classic but instead a slyly brilliant bauble that will endure as long as the ephemeral shelf-life of the content it contains. Thanks to Tandoh, I found myself watching model Nara Smith tradwifing in Texas couture while reading The Exile’s Cookbook by a 13th-century Muslim writer. Dare I say it? All Consuming made me obsess for more.
