Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Even calorie counts, which I believed to be the most basic and indisputable of food-related facts, are shown to be hardly more than estimates, as well as largely irrelevant when it comes to their effects on individual consumers. Not only is it hard to carry out long-term nutritional studies on human subjects with any degree of accuracy, but our responses are so different that Spector is able to call the ‘assumption we are all identical machines’ the ‘most prevalent and dangerous myth about food’. This is, however, where Spector is able to offer a glimmer of hope for the future, in the form of a project he’s working on with a commercial nutrition company to develop personalised products for the consumer market. Although I appreciate and share his excitement, by the fourth or fifth mention it does begin to feel like little more than a plug. The other minor quibble I have with this otherwise impressively digestible book is the unquestioning use of terms like ‘artisan’ and ‘quality’ to mean healthy. Spector understands the importance of making good food options more attractive and accessible to those with limited resources, yet sentences like ‘I think heavy and binge drinking should be targeted, not those relaxing over a leisurely meal with a fine glass of wine’ risk coming across as both blinkered and entitled. Yet though Spoon-Fed unapologetically raises far more questions than it answers, this survey of the ‘known unknowns’ of nutrition reads like a clarion call for change, as well as for better standards in science and its dissemination. If diet is indeed ‘the most important medicine we all possess’, this book should be available on prescription. For People Who Devour Books

Spector, a professor of genetics at King’s College London and author of The Diet Myth, says: “I have been astonished to discover how much of what we are told about food is at best misleading and at worst, downright wrong and dangerous to our health.” Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’