From Financial Times: Refined dining (except Bloomberg's NYC, I guess)

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3488898c-b553-11e1-ad93-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1xtPN9PpX

June 15, 2012 7:53 pm

Refined dining

By Stephen Cave

Shaped in an age of scarcity, our appetite for sugar, fat and salt now torments us. But there is hope

The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food, by John S Allen, Harvard University Press, RRP£19.95/RRP$25.95, 266 pages

Taste Matters: Why We Like The Foods We Do, by John Prescott, Reaktion Books, RRP£20/RRP$30, 224 pages

Taste What You’re Missing: The Passionate Eater’s Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Good, by Barb Stuckey, Free Press, RRP$26, 416 pages

"Thus the old problem of food – how to get enough – has been replaced by a set of new problems with which we are ill-equipped to deal. One is that we eat too much of it: a report issued last month said two-thirds of adults in the US were overweight or obese, costing the healthcare system an annual $190bn; while in the UK, a comparable 61 per cent of adults had excessive waistlines. Another problem is that we do not even appreciate this abundance but, instead, spend our time guiltily obsessing about our choices or shoving functional processed food into our mouths while checking our smartphones on the way to the next appointment."

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