All Consuming

All Consuming is not a book about recipes, dieting, or how to eat “better.” Instead, it is an excavation of how desire itself is produced in modern food culture. Ruby Tandoh approaches food not as fuel or personal preference, but as something continuously shaped, nudged, and remodeled by systems that surround us—technology, commerce, media, labor, migration, and power. What we think of as hunger or craving is rarely spontaneous. It is learned, rehearsed, encouraged, and monetized.

The book challenges the comforting idea that there exists a clean boundary between authentic appetite and artificial desire. Tandoh dismantles the notion that there is a “pure” way to want food that exists outside marketing, platforms, and cultural influence. From supermarkets to TikTok, from cookbooks to dinner parties, the modern eater is surrounded by prompts that suggest not just what to eat, but how to feel about eating it.

Rather than condemning pleasure, the book takes pleasure seriously. It treats joy, craving, and indulgence as legitimate human experiences while exposing the mechanisms that exaggerate, exploit, and distort them. The result is a cultural history of eating that feels both intimate and structural: deeply personal, yet unmistakably collective.

Appetite as a Social Construction, Not a Private Instinct

One of the book’s foundational arguments is that desire is not born in isolation. Taste is acquired through repetition, imitation, and shared context. From childhood onward, people learn what to crave through family routines, school lunches, office norms, advertising, and peer behavior. Preferences feel personal, but they are built from countless external cues absorbed over time.

This means that the distinction between “real” and “fake” appetite collapses under scrutiny. A craving for a branded snack, a viral dish, or a nostalgic flavor is no less sincere than hunger for a home-cooked meal. Both arise from exposure and reinforcement. The difference lies not in authenticity, but in who benefits from the craving once it exists.

Historically, food knowledge traveled through proximity—between neighbors, relatives, and communities. Recipes were transmitted through shared labor and local conditions. After the Second World War, this balance changed dramatically. Power over food shifted away from households and toward corporations with the ability to scale, standardize, and distribute taste at unprecedented levels.

Restaurant chains, supermarkets, industrial farming, frozen food, delivery apps, and global logistics did not merely respond to demand. They actively shaped it. The eater became less a participant in food culture and more a consumer navigating choices designed by others.

Modern food culture, as Tandoh presents it, is not fragmented but composite. It is a constantly updating blend of branding, tourism, nostalgia, aspiration, and algorithmic suggestion. Recipes no longer circulate quietly; they arrive relentlessly. The sheer volume of options creates a strange anxiety: abundance without clarity. Choice becomes overwhelming rather than liberating.

Digital Media and the Engineering of Craving

Different technologies do not simply carry food culture—they transform it. The shift from print to television, from blogs to smartphones, and finally to social media platforms has changed not just how food is shared, but what kinds of food are rewarded with attention.

Online platforms favor ...