I bought this book because I am very much interested in nutrition and what we should be eating in order to grow old gracefully and healthy! The first half of the book is rather disappointing, the author just rants about how bad food is in Britain and the negative attitude the British have towards food. Fair enough, I started traveling to Britain the same year this book was published so maybe things have changed but I have to say that I eat a lot better in Britain than in France where most restaurants are not good at all! There is this myth about French cuisine but it isn't anything else than a myth, believe me! Half way the book the author does start to address the subject more thoroughly and it actually gets to be quite interesting, therefore I give it 3 stars. There are also many misconceptions about food abroad: France, Holland, Portugal, etc. I think that the author has this idea that all food is bad in the UK and all food is great abroad which is not true! The Dutch, for example, don't have a good attitude towards food at all (I know what is going on quite well because I lived there for 16 years and all my three daughters still live there!). My daughters for example, think that cooking food is a waste of time and are happy enough to just buy something in a packet and heat it up or else to go out most days. They have never, ever cooked me a meal! The Dutch have always eaten sandwiches for lunch and a very simple evening meal which doesn't vary much from day to day. They used to cook it from scratch when I lived there though, but it was almost always the same. The Portuguese used to have an excellent cuisine but that too is gone. Nowadays the most important thing for a restaurant is to pay extremely low wages, therefore cooks are often foreigners who don't understand our cuisine at all! At home people don't have the time or the energy to cook and many of them will eat in front of the TV. Saying that Dutch children don't eat sweet is surely a joke! The Dutch are forever buying sweet for their children and even if you don't agree with it it is not easy to escape that culture!
The author's theories about eating low fat and avoiding saturated fats were maybe accurate in 2006 but we now know that this isn't correct! Telling people that the fault of their obesity and health problems lies solely with the industry is a bit exaggerated! Ok, they are to blame for a lot that is going on but we as adults also need to learn to make our choices! I make my own bread, my ice creams, cook most meals from scratch, etc, and I couldn't care less about how the industry wants to make money! It is true that it is sometimes difficult to know what they hide into the food so I will surely go wrong now and then but I still make my choices! As far as school meals go.... When my children were growing up there weren't any schools in Holland with cantinas. Parents were supposed to pick their children up and take them home to eat lunch, which was actually quite healthy not only because we knew what we fed them but also because they had a break away from school! Now we think that work goes above anything else... well... our choice I suppose? I could have had a lot more money but my children came first!
I could say a lot more about this book as I filled it with question marks but it would get rather boring for anyone reading the review, so I will stop here! Buy this book cheap if you are interested in its contents or else don't buy it at all, there are better books out there, I'm sure!
