Bubble tea, ‘trad’ wives, and the CREAMIEST pasta you've ever tasted; no food-adjacent trend gets past Ruby Tandoh without warranting careful examination. The food critic and Great British Bake Off alumna has spent much of her career joining up the dots between the food we eat and the world we live in, whether unpacking food snobbery or decoding the messy relationships between food and our bodies.
Here, she speaks to GLAMOUR about the aesthetics of ‘food porn’, the politics of queueing, and being part of the “food culture macroverse”, as well as sharing her tips for hosting a successful dinner party.
GLAMOUR: In All Consuming, you write that "Every time something changes in society, it changes on the plate', what's the biggest lesson food has taught you about the world we're living in?
Ruby Tandoh: Anyone of us can pick up our phone right now, open TikTok, and post a video – about a sandwich, a restaurant or a craveable recipe – and have it potentially go viral. Food culture is more democratic, more participatory than it's ever been. Even a single generation ago, this would have been unimaginable. This shift really reflects how our broader lives have changed in the internet age: we're now all creators of culture, not just consumers, but with all these dissenting voices, we're also living through a kind of chaos era.
What are the best and worst foodie dishes you've ever queued for (and how long did you wait?)
The worst thing was hands down a sandwich pop up event by a well-known influencer. The fewer identifying details I share, the better, but what I will say is that the sandwich had five different iterations of beef in it, and it had a taste – if you can call it that – that I pray I never encounter again in my life. Anyway, I waited an hour and a half for the pleasure. The best thing I ever waited for was almost certainly the ice cream at Folderol, a minuscule ice cream shop and wine bar in Paris. It blew up online last summer, but I would like to smugly throw in that I knew it before the hype. (Aren't I the worst?) It's always busy, but always worth it.
Olives, sardines, cheese, fruit, you name it.
How do you navigate being "part of the food culture macroverse" while simultaneously critiquing it?
I've felt ambivalent about food media for as long as I've been in it. Even when I was writing recipes and cookbooks, a tiny part of me was always wondering – Why? In a world of infinite recipes, most available at a click, why would I add more to the noise? While I was writing my new book, that quiet ambivalence deepened into a really eager curiosity about food culture, its abundance and my role in it. I see this book as a half-step back, an opportunity to not just add to the conversation, but also to ask why the food discourse is so all-consuming in the first place.
I'm interested in your thoughts on 'food porn'. You write that the visuals of modern food content "have been engineered to bypass rational thinking and go straight to the pleasure centres of the brain." Why do you think we have such an appetite for this sexy food content? What does it say about us?
Well to a certain extent, we've always been horny for food. The beautiful erotics of eating – this is as old as time. But in recent years, food has become even more seductive. It started in the 1990s, when cookbook photography shifted from focusing on settings (such as French country tables and wicker baskets) to emphasising the zoomed-in textures and colours of the food itself. And then when recipes began to migrate online, things got even more out of hand.
Online, a recipe has to really sell itself – to deploy adjectives like 'crispy' and 'creamy' to reel you in, to have the most craveable photo or video to stand out against the millions of other recipes out there. Food porn has gone from being just an umbrella term for aspirational food content to a weirdly apt term for the hyper-sensual food that fills our social media feeds.
Move over, M&S strawberry sando. There's a new subversive sandwich in town.
So much food content, particularly on Instagram and TikTok, is about excess and triggering our cravings. As you write, "‘Crispy, sticky, creamy,’ former Mob developer and cookbook author Sophie Wyburd told me, explaining the methodologies behind viral recipes. ‘People love those words.’" How does this cravable content fit into a world where diet culture reigns supreme? Particularly in an age of Ozempic, which some people have praised for helping them to switch off their 'food noise'?
The thing is, there's no incompatibility between diet culture and the craveable abundance of food culture right now. These things are two strangely symbiotic parts of a single system. It's a paradox of plenty: the more dizzying choice we have about what and how we eat, the more anxiety that can breed. Diets need plenty. Wholefoods don't make sense without the idea of "junk food", and vice versa.
How do you feel about the term 'domestic goddess'? Has the recent surge in 'trad wife' content impacted how you think of it?
The person who really popularised the term domestic goddess was Nigella Lawson, and I'm pretty sure she did so in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way and never meant for it to become A Thing. So I'm reluctant to reference it in the same breath as the tradwife revival, which is an unsettling and sincere ideological stance. But there's definitely something in the culture right now about food and families, and food and motherhood specifically. In the US right now, the Make America Healthy Again movement is directly connected to right-wing moms. Meanwhile, online, we're seeing a rise in ragebait-y tradwife revival content. When you see this stuff, it's a reminder that food discourse reflects bigger power struggles – we can fall prey to the fearmongering, or we can find small, joyful ways to subvert it.
We're jumping on the cookie craze.
If you're ready for more, here are Ruby Tandoh's top tips for hosting a dinner party, extracted from her new book, All Consuming: Why We Eat The Way We Eat Now.
Firstly, delusional thinking transcends class. You do not have to be in the striving middle class to entertain. The beginning of any dinner party is making an unrealistic budget that you’ll definitely overshoot. You can do this at any price point.
There must always be too much food. This isn’t right but it’s true.
Adjust the lighting. Nobody wants to eat under The Big Light. And besides, how else will people know it’s a dinner party? Candles are cute, and fairy lights are even better.
Everybody will be happy to see you bring out a tray of hot sausage rolls, and even happier if you haven’t made them yourself.
Better to turn to novels and films for inspiration than to cookbooks. Cooks get caught up in practicalities, but novelists live in a dreamier state, and this is exactly how you want your guests to feel. It’s this contempt for practicality that makes Martha so mesmerising. She cites D. H. Lawrence as an influence – the magic of the picnics in Women in Love, with that ‘large broad-faced cut ham, eggs and cresses and red beetroot, and medlars and apple tart and tea’. To this end, I can also vouch for Brian Jacques’ Redwall books.
Dress up.
Entertaining is an invented and avoidable problem.
Nobody is making you do this. If you’re not enjoying it, almost nobody else will, and you'll hate the one person who does.
The easiest way to get visual contrast is simply to cook things very slightly too high, and for very slightly less time than you think. (With the help of a meat thermometer, please.) This way the outsides get crisp and conditions are met for chiaroscuro skins and deep tan crusts, and saves you the trouble of scattered herbs.
You can’t do ‘natural cornucopia’ without money. I’m sorry. Platters of strawberries and fresh whipped cream are romantic when the Instagram girls do them, but if you’re working with Teflon strawberries and Elmlea, an ice cream sundae is a smarter way to go.
Nora Ephron wrote about the rule of four. Often dinners are organised around a trinity – meat, starch and veg. But you should add a fourth thing, she said, something fun, something to unbalance the composition. This makes things interesting. ‘A shallow dish filled with tiny baked apples,’ she suggests. ‘Peaches with cayenne pepper.’ Later, she went on to concede that better than the rule of four is the rule of five, or even six. She is right. These unnecessary additions should be weird. A jellied tureen. Clam bake for thirty. A simple croquembouche. Of utmost importance: this thing, whatever it is, contributes nothing to the menu as a whole.
Condensed and extracted from All Consuming: Why We Eat The Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh (Serpent's Tail, £18.99).
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
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