Welcome to food. I'm Kate Bitman. I hope you've been enjoying the show. If you'd like to engage with us more,

please check out bitmanproject.com, our internet home, where we offer you more than 1,500 recipes

and food writing that runs the gamut, policy, cooking, how-toes, and personal essays from some of our

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markbitman.com. Cornflakes Cornflakes are relatively simple by the standards of modern breakfast cereals.

Apart from the added vitamins and minerals, the most famous brand has only four ingredients,

maize, barley malt extract, sugar, and salt. Yet when you think of everything that's needed

to be in place, for you to be able to eat it, you uncover a tangled, complicated

story. Imagine what's involved in your total weekly shop. Picture a map of the world with places

and routes lighting up whenever and wherever some part of this process of making and selling

cornflakes is taking place. You would see a kind of spider's web of flickering filaments

and nodes. Now imagine the illuminated web for another food stuff. If every food's earthprint

were superimposed on one image, all detail would be lost and almost the entire world would be glowing.

This incredibly complex network is usually called the food system, which is difficult to clearly define, let alone describe.

What you just heard is a passage from the philosopher and journalist Julian Baguini's new book,

How the World Eats, a global philosophy. In his book, Baggini dies deep into the

best and worst food practices in different societies past and present. He looks at cutting-edge

technologies like new farming methods, cultured meat, genetically modified, and astronaut food,

and the ethics of health around junk food and aquaculture,

and he takes a hard look at the effectiveness of our food governance and more.

Think of it as a guide towards a food system that we deserve.

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