Elisabeth Luard
What We Eat Is What We Are
Planet Chicken: The Shameful Story of the World's Favourite Bird
By Hattie Ellis
Sceptre 320pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
The English at Table
By Digby Anderson
The Social Affairs Unit 151pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
At first glance one might think that Hattie Ellis, author of this frightening tale of Man's inhumanity to bird, and Dr Digby Anderson, a fellow with a talent for setting the fox among the chickens, are unlikely barnyard companions. Yet both put broadly the same argument.
At issue is whether we, consumers of horrible food produced in horrible ways, are prepared to change our habits and pay decent money for food which tastes the way it should. The case for chicken at the buy-one-get-one-free level – 'bogofs' in supermarket-talk – is that cheap meat is protein for the masses and anyone who argues is a toff with more money than sense.
Anderson is a man for the rapier-thrust: 'healthists' are dismissed for their disapproval of everything which actually tastes good (butter and so forth); 'environmentalists' for their desire to eliminate salt cod on the spurious grounds that the cod
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Things began to go wrong between Mr and Mrs Eliot almost immediately. Ostensibly the problem was Vivien’s mysteriously fluctuating health. It would be easy to reduce the Eliot marriage simply to a catalogue of Viv’s medical crises.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/marriage-made-in-hell
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions