ABSTRACT
The relentless advance of obesity sends out an unmistakable message: most of us are putting away far more food than we really need. But is there any reason, if you’ll forgive the pun, to ‘make a meal’ of this fact? There certainly is, because the problem goes much deeper. Nutritionists have been telling us for years that we eat too much, and, more importantly, that we eat all the wrong things. Food-lovers have registered their own complaints, helping to popularize a telling concept that is all the rage in France: the notion of ‘malbouffe’, loosely translatable into English as ‘badnosh’. The aptness of this term propelled food journalist Jean-Pierre Coffe to media stardom, as with stinging Rabelaisian verve he proceeded to make mincemeat of such monstrosities as limp lettuce and tasteless tomatoes. But he also convened panels of experts who, albeit in more conciliatory language, came to much the same conclusions: there is definitely something amiss in our kitchens. Consumers themselves, meanwhile, have become thoroughly confused about the whole issue. They fall eagerly upon anything that labels itself ‘traditional’ or a return to ‘oldfashioned home cooking’, and yet they are not, deep down, convinced by the slogans. They are uncomfortably aware that they don’t know what they’re eating any more, and this anxiety came violently to a head during the early 1990s, with the outbreak of mad cow disease.
