Sitopia

According to its own website, Impossible’s Whopper contains: ‘Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract, Cultured Dextrose, Food Starch Modified, Soy Leghemoglobin, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E), Zinc Gluconate, Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitam

In order to enjoy life to the full, we need our wants to be postponed, rather than instantly gratified: to experience pleasure at its peak, we must work towards it and look forward to it. However, as Scitovsky notes, such postponement is the opposite of what consumerist culture is geared up to provide. We miss out on joy, because our needs are met

An era of neurotic, cheerless eating ensued, as all foods with a trace of fat – chicken skin, egg yolks, whole milk – were condemned to waste.

we each possess around 40 million olfactory cells, 50 times fewer than a dog, yet still enough to distinguish between some trillion different smells.

the Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini has pointed out, good food doesn’t have to be expensive: Italian peasant cuisine – so-called cucina povera – boasts some of the finest dishes in the world.44

Although welfare standards vary across the world (and British farms have some of the highest), few of us check to see whether the contents of our bacon sarnie came from a ‘happy’ pig.

For them home was never a building, but rather a carefully curated territory that, because of its lack of farms, fields and fences, went unrecognised by Europeans.

Home is a response to landscape formed by an idea of how to live. It is always shaped by food: if one lives by gathering berries and hunting bison, for example, one’s home is going to look very different to that of someone who farms.

As the British social anthropologist Tim Ingold has argued, this ‘show-and-tell’ form of teaching instils a particular kind of knowledge in the novice: rather than just cramming his mind with facts, it gives him a sense of ancestry and belonging.

Almost every move we make in the modern world has some distant, negative impact. Just engaging with life’s multiple dilemmas requires vast knowledge and effort, as we examine all the implications of our actions on countless people, creatures, structures and organisms, most of which we barely know exist. Needless to say, few of us are equipped for s