Fat-shaming and snooty diet advice are rightly targeted in this polemic. But Warner’s anger is oddly limited: why doesn’t he blame the food industry? I never quite knew what the word “sophistry” meant, until I read this book. I had a vague idea that it was something to do with making a false argument. But I looked the word up and saw that this wasn’t quite right. Sophistry means the clever use of arguments that seem true. In Chaucer’s time, it used to mean cunning, or craft. The original ancient Greek sophists were people, according to Plato, who were virtuoso athletes of words. Above all, sophists are plausible. That’s what makes them so dangerous. This is what came to mind reading the latest screed by Anthony Warner, who worked for many years at Premier Foods, one of the biggest food companies in Britain, which manufactures Mr Kipling cakes, Angel Delight desserts and Batchelors Super Noodles, among many other branded processed foods. Ten years ago, the Belfast Telegraph described Warner as TV presenter Loyd Grossman’s “Italian development chef” because Warner was the person who helped Grossman develop his own-brand pasta sauces. But that was before Warner transmogrified into “The Angry Chef”, the name of an expletive-ridden blog that he started writing in 2016 “exposing lies, pretension and stupidity in the world of food”. He could have called himself “The Angry Consultant to the Food Industry” but it wouldn’t have had quite the same ring. In 2017 the blog gave rise to a book, _The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating_. Continue reading...
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