Felicity Cloake

Digesting the Facts

Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets

By

Fourth Estate 320pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

I must admit to finding aspects of Joanna Blythman’s investigation into the processed food industry hard to swallow. With so much cod science floating around the media at the moment on the subject of detoxes and so-called ‘clean eating’, sentences such as ‘natural ingredients in their least processed forms have an inbuilt, effortless integrity that makes them the best basis for a body- and soul-sustaining life’ ring alarm bells for me.

What exactly is a ‘natural’ ingredient? How processed is too processed? What does she mean by integrity? And, most importantly, how on earth does ‘a soul-sustaining life’ manifest itself? 

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