Picky

Food is never just food. It is freighted with our upbringings, our heritage and our sense of self. It carries memories, both happy and sad; it transports, anchors and transforms.

Jimi Famurewa spends his days hunting out the very best food London has to offer and writing about it. But as a child, he hid gobbets of mash in his pocket at school, refused all vegetables and looked forward to Happy Meals in the back of a steamed-up car after late night football practice. He spent weekends in crowded flats at parties, watching his family preserve their Nigerian roots through jollof and suya, as well as grow new shoots through American delights like Aunt Jemima's pancake syrup, furtively hidden in suitcases. But what happens when he grows up, stretching beyond the joyful chaos of his mother's kitchen and into the uncharted territory, unfamiliar flavours and overlapping identities of the adult world?

With enough fast-food nostalgia to satisfy even the most fat-hardened foodie arteries as well as glorious dollops of nostalgia, Picky is a hymn to the gleam of the golden arches and the soft shine of worn formica as well as opulent marble and tweezered micro herbs. It is a generous, warm look at a life built around food: what it can mean, what it can stand for, and why you should always pay attention to what someone is eating.