Sublime

The story begins with food itself, moving out to the body, the home, society, city and country, nature and time.

Food is both the substance of life and its deepest metaphor.

By working out how to feed ourselves, we have found our place in the world.

How many of us stop to wonder, for example, about food’s influence over our minds, values, laws, economies, homes, cities and landscapes – even our attitudes towards life and death?

Our need to eat once located us: it told us where we belonged. Now that link is broken, how do we find ourselves in the world? How, in particular, do we find that special place we call ‘home’?

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.

our flexible guts mean there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ human diet, just countless ways of eating better or worse.

As the naturalist Edward O. Wilson put it, we’ve got ‘Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology’.