All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

by Ruby Tandoh Narrated by Ruby Tandoh

Overview

Food dominates our every waking minute: Hype restaurants. Allrecipes. The Great British Bake Off. In this dazzling cultural history, bestselling food writer Ruby Tandoh (author of Cook As You Are) traces how-and why-we've all become foodies.

“Ruby Tandoh is a genius and All Consuming is everything.” -Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal

“A fascinating, sometimes shocking, eye-opener that is also brilliantly funny.” -Claudia Roden

How, in the space of a few decades, has food gone from fact of life to national past time; something to be thought about-and talked about-24/7?
In this startlingly original, deeply irreverent cultural history, Ruby Tandoh traces that transformation, exposing how cult cookbooks, bad TV, visionary restaurants, and new social media have all wildly overhauled our appetites. All Consuming explores:
¿The rise of the TikTok food critic
¿What makes a hype restaurant go viral
¿Bubble tea's world domination
¿The dream of the modern dinner party
¿The limits of the cookbook
¿The history of the supermarket
¿Wellness drinks-and where they come from
¿The rise and fall of the automat

Our tastes have been radically refashioned, painstakingly engineered in the depths of food factories, and hacked by craveable Instagram recipes. They've been pulled into supermarket aisles and seduced by Michelin stars, transfixed by Top Chefs and shaped by fads. A deep dive into the social, economic, cultural, legislative, and demographic forces that have reshaped our relationship with food, All Consuming questions how our tastes have been shaped-and how much they are, in fact, our own.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

All Consuming is extraordinary. In masterful prose, Tandoh shows us who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going through what we eat—and also what we say we’re eating, and what we’d like to eat, and what we refuse to eat, alongside everything in between. But All Consuming is just that—all of it—in the expansiveness of Tandoh’s vision, through the humor and knowingness of her craft. Ruby Tandoh is a genius and All Consuming is everything.” —BRYAN WASHINGTON, author of Family Meal

“Ruby Tandoh’s sharp, insightful investigation into our evolving mass food cultures—the influences and drivers, weird excesses and absurdities—is a fascinating, sometimes shocking, eye-opener that is also brilliantly funny.” —CLAUDIA RODEN, author of Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean

“I loved this book. Witty and profound, informative and original, no one could write with more insight than Ruby on the question of our appetites, and what it is that we are really searching for when we google what to make for dinner.” —BEE WILSON, author of Consider the Fork

“Ruby Tandoh is a charming, knowledgeable tour guide through the culinary traditions so deeply embedded in our culture that most of us hardly bother to think about them. Her voice is lively and her research thorough, calling to mind that one extra cool history teacher we all wanted to impress.” —RAX KING, author of Sloppy

“A brilliant and engrossing investigation of what really shapes our desires when it comes to food. By following the shifting currents of restaurant criticism, the explosive rise of bubble tea, and the ‘delusion economy’ of wellness drinks, Ruby Tandoh offers a sharp riposte to culinary romanticism.” —FUCHSIA DUNLOP, author of Invitation to a Banquet

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-06-28
British baker and cookbook author Tandoh dives into the world of food and predilection.

Most of us live in a world of abundance, and there’s a problem there, writes Tandoh, in the paradox of plenty: “The more we have, the less we seem able to enjoy it.” That gives rise to diet fads, and “weird culinary nationalism,” and a certain unbending devotion to certain foods at the expense of others. That plenty comes in information as well as food, with recipes available everywhere and with food trends (one, she notes, being smashburgers) spread worldwide thanks to the internet. Even so, she adds, most home cooks will tend to “cycle through the same couple of dozen recipes for the rest of our lives.” Part of Tandoh’s evident purpose is to shake those cooks out of complacency and try something new, even playful—for which she praises fellow cookbook writer Yotam Ottolenghi—and fun. One possibility: sausage and gochujang pasta, the latter being a Korean chili paste that renders an orange sauce—and orange, says one chef, “makes people hungry.” Tandoh is a great explainer with a gift for a memorable turn of phrase, as when she renders judgment on bubble tea as representing a story “about displacement, ruin and growth,” noting along the way that bubble tea is dominated by corporate chains because the machinery to produce it is expensive, lending a certain sameness to bubble tea shops. As to home entertaining, Tandoh says, smartly, “Delusional thinking transcends class,” meaning that any such gathering is likely to blow any budget and produce entirely too much food, procured from the surfeit of massive supermarkets around the globe: “So many temples, and just one god.” Tandoh’s knowing classification of the three types of cookbooks is worth the price of admission alone.

An entertaining, endlessly instructive look at why we like what we do in our “anarchic web of desire.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193132318
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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