"Where has all the good food gone? This is the question at the heart of Gina Mallet's account of the fate of food. In the last fifty years, we have gone from loving food to fearing it, frightened by food science and spooked by medical doctors, and so old familiar foods and recipes, the threads of community, are being lost." "Lingering over every sensual memory of forgotten taste, Mallet traces the vicissitudes of five popular foods, their history and their predicament: how the egg that made the souffle supreme has been brought near to extinction by science and a pathogen; how the war against bacteria is widening the cultural gulf between Europe and America and endangering raw milk cheese, an emblematic food that has emotional roots in the old world; how beef, the symbolic food of the Anglosphere, has now been humbled by disease; why we can't grow a hundred varieties of peas the way the Victorian gardeners did, and why the tomato is surviving technology while the apple is dying in the Western Hemisphere; and how, ironically, fish are vanishing - before humans ever got to know them."--BOOK JACKET.