September 2025 Non-Fiction Book of the Month | Frankie recommends... All-Consuming - Ruby Tandoh

Frankie recommends... In these fascinating and intelligent essays, Ruby Tandoh discusses how food-culture has developed over the past century from newspaper clippings of recipes to recipe books to food blogs to TikTok. Tandoh is sharp, witty and engaging when writing about these different food media, and probes the question as to why and how we eat the way we do right now. A hopeful and passionate book, great for those who love scrolling recipes on Insta reels, reading about modern culture and taking and posting pictures of their food much to other people’s annoyance...

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Being into food - following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it - is no longer a subculture. It's become mass culture. The food landscape is more expansive and dizzying by the day. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, now flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels.

Ruby Tandoh's startlingly original analysis traces this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years, making sense of this electrifying new era by examining the social, economic, and technological forces shaping the foods we hunger for today. Exploring the evolution of the cookbook and light-speed growth of bubble tea, the advent of TikTok critics and absurdities of the perfect dinner party, Tandoh's laser-sharp investigation leaves her questioning: how much are our tastes, in fact, our own?