You Aren't What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture

The more this book on gastronomy lays into its practitioners, the better it gets. He is brilliantly and consistently and winningly funny.

(Jonathan Meades Observer )

Steven Poole puts the eating disorders of gastroculture through the food processor of his wit and chops it into meaty little bits.

(Saga Magazine )

Fearless new book takes a blowtorch to our modern obsession with the once-simple business of cooking and eating food

(Reader’s Digest )

‘Poole is very entertaining as he mocks all manifestations of foodism, from obscure ingredient-raves to gastroporn and the chefs who take it all too seriously in Poole s phrase, bunny-broilers getting a Christ complex.’

(Alex Renton Evening Standard )

‘An overdue and well-directed acid-tipped dart at the modern obsession with food.’

(The Herald (Glasgow) )

‘Stephen Poole’s You Aren’t What You Eat rips into all aspects of foodie culture gleefully, eruditely and, as far as I can see, irrefutably. If there’s any justice, it should put an immediate end to all those incomprehensible menus, absurd claims about the ‘art’ of cooking, and to chips inexplicably served in beakers.’

(James Walton Spectator )

A feisty and inflammatory little book, and well worth thinking about in the event that your gift-giving ritual lacks either of those qualities.

(Zoe Williams Guardian, Best Food Books of 2012 )

His eye for the absurd and the hypocritical is sharper than a flashing Sabatier. Making mincemeat of celebrity chefs and food historians, Poole s pungent satire becomes more serious when he takes on the political implications of organic food or ready meals. To steal a line from Masterchef, writing about cooking doesn t get tougher, or funnier, than this.

–(Victoria Segal Guardian – Paperback Review )

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy (2000) and Unspeak (2006), a book about contemporary political language. He writes about books, music and other cultural matters for the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement and has appeared at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Bath and Edinburgh Literary Festivals, the Rotterdam Film Festival and GameHotel, as well as on BBC television, BBC radio, NPR and ABC radio. He lives in London.