Can You Trust What You Are Eating?

In his latest book John McKenna asks the question, what is good food? It’s a simple and important question, but the answer is somewhat complicated. Yes, it’s natural foods as opposed to processed foods but it’s also much more than that. Good food comes from healthy soil farmed and prepared in an ethical way. Changes to farming methods and increasing political control of the food industry means we must ask the question, can you trust what you are eating?

The western diet has undergone a revolution in the space of just a few decades, and not all for the better. Here McKenna examines the negative role processed food plays in shaping our diet and health. He contrasts a primitive African diet he experienced while working there and the Irish diet he grew up on with a typical modern diet, and draws links between the latter and common diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. He also shows how simple dietary alterations have been proven to reverse such diseases.

Good Food examines cooking methods, food processing, farming methods and soil analysis and also spreads its tentacles into the murky world of politics, corruption and the genetic modification of seeds. John McKenna wishes to convey a message of self-reliance where food is concerned: trust in nature, take control of your diet and move it slowly away from packaged food to food that grows in the fields, and you and your family and local community will reap the rewards.

McKenna’s hope is that, if everyone takes these small steps, supermarkets will be forced to change, farmers will abandon chemically treated crops for traditional methods and parents will spend more time preparing fresh food for their children. Good Food will convince readers that for the sake of our families, our global families and the planet we live on, we must demand good food.

Good Food will be published by Gill Books on 27 September, priced at €14.99.

For further information contact Teresa Daly, 01 500 9521, 086 838 3559, tdaly@gill.ie.