Salad Days: Penguin Special

In Salad Days, Ronnie Scott interrogates our current obsession with food - and asks whether it’s actually such a bad thing. Salad Days takes us via the world’s best restaurants in Noma and El Bulli, and more humble yet no less delicious restaurants and cafés in Melbourne, while also interrogating how we use food to relate to one another, the particular joy of hearing about someone else’s experience of a glorious meal (even via social media), and why members of gen Y are spending extravagantly on food when they can’t afford real estate. Scott looks at the more challenging aspects of this conspicuous consumption as well - ethical eating, sustainability, class concerns. If food offers us a ‘curious mixture between comfort and disturbance, staying put and going far’, is that something to celebrate, or to worry about?

Salad Days is a fascinating and lyrical look at a particular moment in our history and society, and an important contribution to an ongoing debate about how we eat.