Brought to book

There are some thought-provoking food books on the publishers' lists for spring. As prices creep up, we're all wondering whether organic is really better, whether we should shop in supermarkets and so forth.

There are some thought-provoking food books on the publishers' lists for spring. As prices creep up, we're all wondering whether organic is really better, whether we should shop in supermarkets and so forth. There may be some answers to be found in The Rough Guide to Foodby George Miller and Katherine Reeve (Rough Guides, publication date March, £12.99) which offers a list of key foods and traces their journey from crop to shop. Cookery writers have been quick to pick up on credit-crunch issues: Kate Colquhoun's The Thrifty Cookbook: 478 Ways To Eat Well And Waste Less(Bloomsbury, April, £14.99) aims to teach us how to like leftovers, while in her book Love Food, Hate Waste: A Cookbook To Help You Munch Through The Crunch(Hodder, April, £16.99) Caroline Marson declares that the average family in the UK throws away a third of the food it buys, and sets out to stop the rot. Meanwhile in An Edible History of Humanity(Atlantic, May, £19.99) the business editor at the Economist, Tom Standage, looks at the bigger picture concerning food production on this planet - that is, food as a tool of social transformation, political organisation, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. It's enough to put you off your cheeseburger and chips, really it is. Finally, you'll never drink processed orange juice in any town again after reading Alissa Hamilton's Squeezed(Yale, June, $30/¤22). She reveals that even juice which proclaims itself "not from concentrate" has been heated, stripped of flavour, stored for up to a year, then reflavoured, packaged and sold. Nice glass of freshly filtered tap water, anybody?