ReviewHow knock-off olive oil kills, fish are faked and Americans saved pie from the British
- In ‘The Secret History of Food’, author Matt Siegel packs the pages with true, sometimes horrifying stories about what we eat
- He mocks Britons’ love of pie, despite its historically ‘nightmarish’ contents, while saying US food labelling is so opaque as to be meaningless
The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat by Matt Siegel, pub. Ecco
For someone who knows two things about food: a) that it comes in a can and b) that it may be eaten, reading The Secret History of Food was a journey of self-discovery – from caveman to pie-munching imperialist via a fast-food dalliance and an unwavering appreciation of ice cream.
Food and beverage consultant and ex-professor of English Matt Siegel begins his meticulously researched, wittily offhand and often mortifying study of the stuff with which we mindlessly stuff our faces with a variation on the theme of the familiar aphorism “you are what you eat”.
This is rendered in the words of 18th century, French fellow food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote: “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” (And even if he hadn’t written it, his place in gastronomic history would still have been assured because he has a cheese named after him.)
So please allow me to introduce myself: I’m dimethylpolysiloxane, silicon dioxide, Solanum lycopersicum, potassium sorbate, nordihydrocapsaicin and innumerable other inscrutable menu items or ingredients, most bewildering, many downright menacing. And now brought to one’s attention by an author who could be on a mission to improve food standards, at least in the United States and Europe, which provide much of his enlightening material.