That comment, though, of Tandoh’s—wrily, drily perceptive; a pithy take on the historical and contemporary intersection of taste, age, gender, and status—sets the tone for All Consuming. It covers everything from hype restaurants (and the equally hype-y lines which often accompany them) to Nara Smith, and Martha Stewart, and Erewhon (her view in brief: a place of esoteric ingredients in search of a meal you could actually make out of them) to the importance of the food writing in the early days of Ebony magazine. It stops along the way at the relentless proliferation of online recipes (and the reasons we will never, ever use 99.9% of them), the political and cultural histories of restaurant criticism, and why we are never more than five minutes away from the release of yet another new cookbook.
All Consuming is most definitely not a cookbook, though Tandoh has already authored four of those since she was a finalist on the Great British Bake Off in 2013. What All Consuming is instead is a smart, insightful, and highly engaging treatise on why we eat and drink what we do. It’s also funny, very funny, like, laugh-out-loud funny. (Tandoh on the rise of exotically monikered desserts when she was growing up in her native Britain: “Carissima, Romantica, Sonata, and Cassata Denice—all Italianate ice cream gateaux with the kind of names a person would use to catfish on a sugar daddy site.”)
Tandoh writes from a place of deep love—sometimes lacing that love with just enough eyebrow-raised scepticism, which is what makes All Consuming so…consuming. As with her take on the bubble tea phenomena, she clearly has a sharp grasp on a generational interest in what we eat and drink, and how those who are busy TikToking, YouTubing, and Instagramming it all might think about it differently—and are shaping the broader food culture around the world in the bargain. Once you’ve finished All Consuming, it’s a bit like waking up hungry—to know and understand more, that is.
You might find yourself (as I did) wondering why exactly Korean fried chicken is the only fried chicken game in town these days, or what life was like before sriracha, or how food can become disassociated from its origins before you even know it. “We’re reaching the inflection point in British culture,” Tandoh says, “where in the UK more people will say pizza is American than Italian.” New Haven-style pizza, she says, is the thing in London right now. Things change so nanosecond-fast, her book makes you realize, that the ascent of things like avocado toast, frosted cupcakes, and Kewpie mayonnaise feels like it all happened around the time we were learning to make fire.