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? 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Peters was unashamed and evidently unshamable, an impostor who wholly inhabited his fabrications and who indignant… ,
    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    • 'A modest and retiring man, Thompson spent his life describing apple varieties and recommending the best – Ribston… ,
    • 'Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palae… ,
    • 'Some scholars attribute Shakespeare’s pre-eminence to four centuries of propaganda and not to the fact that Hamlet… ,
    • RT : We would appreciate any retweets ,
    Follow Us