How have we come to fear our food? Author Rob Lyons says that, contrary to popular belief, there are no harmful foods, there are no healthy foods and diets don't work. While we may applaud Jamie Oliver for doing something that he believed in, he addressed a problem of bad food that does not exist.
Until very recently in history, the vast majority of people worried about whether they had enough food. Since antiquity, elites, rulers and aristocrats have tried to make themselves healthier through dietary advice from doctors. A Roman emperor would have had people taste his food for poison while taking advice from his Greek doctors.
Now that we all have enough food, we seem to have adopted a paranoid attitude to what we eat that rivals that of the emperor Claudius. A vast amount of nutritional and dietary advice is aimed at us from government, the medical profession and the complementary medicinal industry, much of it about as scientific as that of Hypocrites.
In Panic on a Plate, Rob Lyons questions the assumptions we make about our food and how dangerous it actually is. He examines how we have come to expect so much from what we eat and how we have come to equate being a little overweight with having one foot in the grave.
To Learn more about Panic on a Plate visit www.PanicOnaPlate.com
Rob is deputy editor of spiked. His topics of interest include science and health issues, particularly the panic about obesity, debates about the environment - particularly what to do about waste - and the moralisation of everyday life.
To read more about Rob visit www.robertlyons.co.uk.
Dan is the Director of the Brighton Salon and has has written extensively about the Criminal Records Bureau checks on volunteers working with children and other problems facing competitive sport in the UK. Dan has published several articles and has had numerous Televison and Radio appearances in the UK and around the English-speaking world on the interplay between sport and society. He has also campaigned against public drinking restrictions and is currently writing a book on the decline of elite distance running and mass participation in time for the London Olympics. He has been a tennis coach for many years and runs a digital marketing firm.
