Review: Good Food Tastes Good by Carol Hart

Today, in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Good Food Tastes Good by Carol Hart. Says Leach:

Where the self-help market was once awash in love books -- how to fall in, how to fall out, how to survive or thrive, we are now deluged with treatises dwelling on another unavoidable human pastime: eating. The average reader cannot walk into a bookshop, open a paper, or log online without falling over the latest gastronomic advice. Eat organic. Eat local. Eat low-fat. No butter! Margarine is poisonous! Eat carbs. Avoid carbs. No sugar! No red meat! Eat more leafy greens, except the bagged ones contaminated by e.coli. Eat more fish, but memorize your Monterey Bay Aquarium do’s and don’ts card, lest you buy fish nearing extinction, high in mercury, or otherwise toxic.

No question about it: food is a fraught issue.

Science writer Carol Hart enters the fray with Good Food Tastes Good. She contends that Americans are conditioned to ignore fresh, tasty foods in favor of boxed, canned, ultraprocessed products manufactured by a handful of megacorporations. The evil media has drilled into us that fresh foods like spinach or peas are just plain yucky, that the fresh ham from your local farmer is bad for you (ham fat!), that life is better if you never cook at all. Off you go to Food Mart, where, ever gullible, you buy wilted, sprayed produce shipped from Chile or February’s pallid greenhouse tomatoes.

The full review is here.