The Last Supper - Taras Grescoe

Book review

I have just finished reading The Last Supper: Searching For The Future Of Food In The Flavours Of The Past by Taras Grescoe. It gave me a great deal of food for thought (pun intended), so I thought I’d write about some of it here.

Grescoe is a Canadian food and travel writer. An award winning author who is interested in the future of food, he writes about sustainability in food production and the problems of feeding a hungry planet with dwindling resources. In this book, he looks to the ancient past to divine ways into a possible future. From eating beetles to tracing the ur Wensleydale, he roves the world in search of clues, and snacks.

There are no recipes in this book. It’s an exploration in every sense of the word. Each chapter focuses on an elusive ingredient or foodstuff and Grescoe’s attempts to track it down and look at the pros and cons of reintroducing it in some way to the modern diet. As such, it is fascinating. He explores interesting ideas and I admire his gung ho attitude to trying some of the more outré ingredients out in real life at family meals.

Having said that, much of this book is so niche it felt like you needed a ladder to reach it, and when you got there, you’d be required to perch at the top and peer in, rather than immerse yourself.

Grescoe pulls no punches in describing the parlous state of the modern food industry and the massive, negative impact it is having on the land and the future of our environment. There are sections of this book which induce blind panic and for me, an overwhelming sense of doom. It’s not that I think he should be pulling punches at this stage of the game, but the book doesn’t exactly furnish the average man in the street with options when it comes to knowing what to do about it.

The first section concerns insects and how we should really be eating more of them. But we must also understand that the insect population is declining and if we are to survive, we need more of them to pollinate plants and keep the food chain robust. This is the kind of conundrum that appears time and time again in the book in one way or another. The blunt truth is that there are too many of us and not enough of any one thing to sustain us. If we all switch from eating meat to avocados it would be just as bad for the environment in a different way. Obviously, moderation and seasonal eating, plus shopping and growing local etc will all help, but when massive multi-nationals are creating monocultures and affordable food comes from companies like these, it is all rather awful.

Really, the main takeaway I got from the book was that we are doomed, which is probably true, but not great for my mental health.

Also, I’m not sure what induced him to open the book with a chapter that is basically: ‘mmmm, insects,’ because it wasn’t a strong pull to keep reading if I’m honest. I’m an adventurous eater, but when he described eating a grub as an oily burst on the tongue, I did actually heave.

In later chapters I found less distressing and sometimes delicious sounding foods that made me actually stop reading and google where I could get my hands on them. I very much enjoyed the chapter about hunting down the origins of Wensleydale cheese, not least for the descriptions of the trauma induced by a Canadian attempting to drive through the Yorkshire Dales.

The section on tracking down camas, a plant from the asparagus family, that produces roots that indigenous Canadian tribes ate like we eat potatoes was particularly interesting. Grescoe goes to British Columbia, where he grew up and talks to tribespeople about the colonisation of white people and the dispossession from their land. The land which feeds them both physically and spiritually. Camas has traditionally grown in meadowland, underneath stands of oak trees, most of which have now been claimed by incomers as the perfect places to build their homes. I was really interested in the crossover here between food as sustenance and food as part of your heritage and history. Colonisers can destroy cultures that get in their way by the simple act of denying them access to key foodstuffs. If people can no longer break bread together in meaningful ways, the family unit and eventually the society it sustains start to unravel.

Similarly, in a chapter about bread, Grescoe talks about the Roman empire’s decline. He links it to their intensive farming techniques, turning land that should have been used for native plants and farming into their breadbasket. Both destroying the land and by association the cultures they were trying to appropriate. In the end neither the colonisers or the colonised survive. It’s a zero sum game.

The places where this book works are in the long view, in showing us that we are no better than the Roman Empire, and also in the tiny, fascinating details, like the author’s quest to create the perfect garum like fish sauce at home. What worked less well for me was where I, the reader fitted into this journey. Still at the top of that nichiest of niches, wobbling about on my ladder.

This is a book for obsessives and enthusiasts. This is a book for people who have time and patience and most importantly, money. In the chapter on Wensleydale, Grescoe talks about the cost of the cheese. I looked it up. You can buy it here, from Neals’ Yard in Covent Garden. The smallest amount you can buy is 245g for £15.70. It is, by nature of the way it is made, only produced in small quantities and is seasonal, so there are some times when you can’t buy it at all.

It’s not that I think anything is wrong with that. I get it. Grescoe visits Stonebeck Farm and it sounds idyllic. Hard, back breaking work, but idyllic nonetheless. Happy cows, biodiversity, flourishing meadow, plant and insect populations and a way of farming that puts back more into the land than it takes. I grew up in the countryside, surrounded by farms. My best friend is a farmer. I know what it takes to make something like this work and I don’t begrudge them a single penny of what it costs to buy that cheese. But that doesn’t change the fact that for so many of us, it is not affordable. So much of what is good for us is out of reach for so many of us. Knowing that the way we shop and eat is bad for us, doesn’t suddenly make it possible to do anything different. Poverty isn’t called a trap for nothing.

There are many moments in this book where Grescoe describes the process of learning about something, creating garum or later in the book, exploring bread making. He talks about trialling various dishes and his sons’ reaction to them, whether it’s eating crickets or testing sourdough. It made me think about my own family and our adventures in food and the vast gulf between his experiences and mine.

I must admit here, to being somewhat resentful of him in these moments. It isn’t that I never had the opportunity to create my own fermented fish ketchup. I can hand on heart say that it isn’t something I feel I’ve missed out on, no matter how delicious it might be. I once dropped a bottle of fish sauce on my kitchen floor and it took a week with all the windows open and twice daily moppings with Zoflora to eradicate the smell. It’s that he has the time to do things like this and that the people he was responsible for feeding were willing to eat his experimental offerings.

When my children were small I dreaded every meal time, of which there seemed to be about twenty a day. No sooner had you ladled breakfast into them than they wanted to know what we were having for dinner. The constant badgering for snacks to stave off imminent starvation, coupled with a flat out refusal to eat ‘that’ because ‘that touched that’ or ‘I liked that yesterday but I don’t like it today.’ The picking my way through the minefield of foods that they loved, foods they loathed and foods they would tolerate if the wind was blowing in from the east. The determination that they were not going to die of rickets on my watch. The need to coax them into trying foods that weren’t chicken nuggets whilst at the same time trying not to instil food weirdness in them that might later blossom into an eating disorder (I did not do well with that one, did I?) The concerns about textures, colours, mixtures and flavours. At one stage it seemed like all I ever thought about until I actively dreaded thinking about food at all.

It’s not that I didn’t try. God loves a trier etc. We grew fruit and vegetables. They hated it. I ended up with forty pounds of courgettes and a small but perfectly formed mutiny. They all despise courgette cake to this day, thanks to the great courgette glut of 2009. Let’s not even discuss the sad fate of Mr. Butternut, who will haunt me until the day I die.

We made bread. Before pandemics were even a thing, we had a sourdough starter called Pablo. When Pablo died, the whole house went into mourning for a week. Pedro fared no better. It was a time of funerals and stickiness. We made pasta. It took six hours to make ten strands of what can only be described as lumpy, grey rope. I ate it. They refused. It took a week to scrape the ruinously expensive 00 flour out of the kitchen tiles.

Then there was the time we went in for fancy cake decorating, when I decided that I would give up on health and go for something we could all get behind. That was the day that Oscar rolled £15 worth of fancy cake putty into PVA glue and I had a nervous breakdown.

None of this gets a mention. Not that it should, because it’s not my book and goodness knows, Grescoe is doing the Lord’s work here. I’m writing about it though, because I think we need a bit of balance. I think we need to remember that it’s ok to do the best you can with what you have, and if what you have is a defiant surge of small children and a lot of Lidl pasta, that will have to do. You can save the world later.