CULTURE / Books

Recipe for a well-fed world

Sorghum farming in Zambia: The authors of two books on food agree that putting up the money and taking down the trade barriers to enable African farmers to be as productive as Americans would be a good start toward food security. | BLOOMBERG

By Alex Renton
The Observer

Jun 2, 2013

Food got bigger than DIY about a decade back, but publishing took a while to hoist its tired old frame on to the bandwagon. Now the food books tumble out, unstoppable, in a startling range of sub-genres. There's the cookbook with jokes. The memoir with recipes. The polemic about food system apocalypse. The cookbook (with gardening tips) for that apocalypse. The part-time vegan diet book with anti-capitalist polemic, recipes and jokes (just reviewed that one, actually). And all of the above, with celebrity attached.

A GREEDY MAN IN A HUNGRY WORLD, by Jay Rayner. William Collins, 2013, 288 pp., $15.99 (paperback)

FEEDING FRENZY: The New Politics of Food, by Paul McMahon. Profile, 2013, 320 pp., £12.99 (paperback)

Recipe for a well-fed world

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