When Ruby Tandoh first embarked on the project that would become her new book, All Consuming, she envisioned it with the broadest scope possible: an authoritative tome about “the whole of appetite — physiological, evolutionary, social, you name it,” she says. “I think this came from a really naive desire at the time to create something that would be beyond the trend cycle.” The problem, though, was that she hated it. “There came a point where I had to ask: What am I eating? What am I facing when I open my phone? What food am I seeing?” Tandoh says. “Starting at that point of actual relevance and timeliness completely transformed what I was doing.”
Though you might recognize Tandoh from her stint on The Great British Bake Off in 2013 and the cookbooks the popular series launched, Tandoh has spent the past decade-plus separating herself from the show’s mainstream cultural dominance, challenging cookbook norms in her 2020 book Cook As You Are, and contributing to the indie publication Vittles. With All Consuming, instead of distancing herself from trends in an attempt to transcend them, Tandoh has decided to lean closer into phenomena like the rise of TikTok’s Keith Lee, the allure of the tradwife lifestyle, the abundance of boba in the United Kingdom, the fundamental misalignments of the modern cookbook industry, and other decidedly modern hot topics in food. “You have to come closer to something in order to actually detach yourself,” she says.
Food culture is the culture; chefs are celebrities; the “foodie” is over because everyone’s a “foodie” now: These are the things we, the food-obsessed, say. But in All Consuming, Tandoh takes a less self-satisfied approach, looking at the unromantic machinations by which we all, not just readers of websites like this one, have become swayed by food culture. If food culture is everyone’s culture, then everyone has had a hand in it, not just the chefs, #FoodTok, and the people willing to wait in long lines for artisanal pastries. “Forget [the cookbook author] Elizabeth David — a lot of the biggest changes in food today are the work of people in offices, and boardroom meetings, and in furtive, sterile labs,” Tandoh writes.
Tandoh spoke to Eater about what she sees as a “really reactionary moment in food media,” her ambivalence around her own cookbooks, and why she doesn’t trust food writers to predict the future of food culture.
Eater: I’d love to know more about your research process for All Consuming, especially considering that you started this project with such a massive scope. For instance, in the chapter about [TikTok food critic] Keith Lee, how did you end up seeing a through line between him and the guidebook writers Duncan Hines and Victor Hugo Green?
Ruby Tandoh: I started off like, Where did Keith Lee come from? — both him and his story — but also, When has this happened before? I realized at some point that few things are new, even when they feel very novel. I spent a lot of time reading old Craig Claiborne articles and going through that lineage of criticism. [I might have realized the connection] in a Pete Wells article that mentioned Duncan Hines — it’s always some footnote in a text somewhere that completely changes everything. You dig and dig and it’s usually in the most unromantic documents or the most stripped-back technical things where you find the richest detail about how people were eating.
Right — even when you’re writing about boba, you’re largely talking about migration patterns, which is not necessarily what most people would think of first.
The [All Consuming] chapter about Allrecipes was published in the New Yorker first. Midway through writing that particular story, I was like, Hold on, this isn’t a story about food culture in and of itself. This is a story about tech. It’s a story about the way the internet evolved. Food writers are always saying, “There’s always a food angle.” I always work in the other way. We’re starting with the food; what’s the other thing? What does this come back to?
“There is a world beyond food media.”
You make this argument that food writers are not moving the culture forward in a particularly meaningful way compared to these bigger systems. As a longtime food writer, how did you square that argument with feelings of purpose around writing this book, or even writing for Vittles, which publishes recipes and food writing?
I do think that food writers change things, and I think that [food media is] an important body of work, cumulatively what we all do to make sense of the culture. It’s also about keeping a record — and that itself is valuable. But when food writers write about the history of food, so often, it’s confined to the history of food writing. It’s cookbooks, it’s critics, and so on.
I wanted to kind of say, Look, other people shape the food system in often more powerful ways. They’re seldom the people you would think. It’s some guy drawing up migration legislation. These are the really, really big shapers of our food system, and then downwind of that, you have the food. We give so much airtime to food people and the cluster of people who create most of food media, but there is a world beyond food media.
As someone who got your start writing cookbooks and doing food television, did it feel cathartic to you to be able to unpack these bigger systems in the format of this book?
One hundred percent, especially because I’ve always felt ambivalent about the cookbooks that I have written. Obviously there are things about them that I’m very proud of, but I felt ambivalent about creating more recipes in a culture, and especially on an internet, that is so saturated with recipes. There were many points where I was like, What is the point of this?
Would you ever go back to recipe writing or writing another cookbook?
I’m so pleased that people do it, and I’m fascinated with how the recipe as a format is changing. But Jesus, no, absolutely [not].
In what ways is the recipe changing?
Every time that the dominant media mode changes, recipes change. A recipe on television is very different from one in a cookbook. As they become kind of shaped by this social media feedback loop, by SEO, by algorithms, and by the nature of search engines, you get the adjective economy: the “crispy, chewy, crunchy, cheesy” kind of thing. That’s not just a way to sell existing recipes; it is now a logic by which new recipes are being created.
To illustrate that point, you write about Mob Kitchen, which is part of a school of new British recipe developers who make this very compelling food that, as a viewer in the U.S., goes against our stereotype of British food — very much the “creamy miso leeky beans” vibe. How do you feel social media has reshaped the perception of British food abroad?
To a certain extent, British people feel we have a point to prove in terms of our cooking. The writer Navneet Alang uses this phrase “the global pantry”; in the U.K., in particular, we have so fallen into that in the last 20 years, in a way that has really refreshed British cooking. British cooking is [historically] very stuck on types. You have a shepherd’s pie, you have a cottage pie, you have a chicken pie; these are discrete, rigid things. Having this mix-and-match global pantry thing helped break us out. Ottolenghi was a huge player in that and now more people on the internet are taking it even further, plus they’re adding this algorithmic craveability.
“We’re seeing a flattening, but I think it will be followed with a new creative boom.”
You write in the book that you can’t trust food writers to predict where the culture is headed. But on that note, I am curious where you think food culture is going next.
Food media was, for a time, really taking food seriously, looking at it with curiosity and with a degree of cultural intelligence. I think that there were some people who felt that this was really taking it too far, that food’s not that deep. A lot of what we’re seeing in food media now is a reaction along those lines. We’re seeing more recommendations engines. We’re seeing people like [the controversial London chef] Thomas Straker really rising to the top. It makes me feel a little pessimistic. Five years ago, I would have said it’s amazing how many smart and curious people are getting into food media and I don’t know if I could say the same anymore.
That said, there are periods of activity and then regression in the evolution of any new media. We’re seeing, at the moment, this populist drive. There are younger people there, especially teenagers on TikTok and on Instagram, who are finding a path through this reductive mess and who are going to start to create really, really interesting, really niche food content in their own right. So we’re seeing a flattening, but I think it will be followed with a new creative boom.
I feel like there’s a bit of anti-intellectualism happening in food right now that seems representative of the larger mindset outside of food as well.
Anti-intellectualism is it in a nutshell, though sometimes I think, Hold on, was I taking things too seriously with some of this stuff? There is something there, too. There’s always a little nugget of truth in the middle of all of this, in that we do need to allow food room to be fun and enjoyable alongside everything else, [all] the analysis and so on.
It’s something I tried to foreground in the book. What are the exciting things? How does it feel to be in a food culture that’s more varied and more overwhelming than ever? Because I think food media, in order to maintain its relevance but also its depth, needs to also be able to speak to the excitement.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now is available for purchase at Amazon, Bookshop, and other retailers.
