ruby tandoh

🏆 delighted to win this for a book that nearly ruined me from stress. this means a lot!

200 years ago, the first true food writer – and to this day the horniest food writer we have ever had – died. Since his death, which came just a couple of months after he published The Physiology of Taste, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin has become something of a patron saint of the genre. He has inspired some of the best writers and enabled the worst. He has been misunderstood: venerated where he should have been treated as a harmless old uncle, skimmed over where we could have learned something from him. His aphorisms remain a scourge. And in recent months I have spent a lot of time with him and grown to love this strange, delusional guy. For @vittlesmagazine I've written an essay about who Brillat-Savarin really was, at his most ridiculous, and how he came to invent the job I do. The photos here are from an amazing and very rare edition of PoT that I consulted in the British Library - the M.F.K. Fisher translation, but illustrated by Wayne Thiebaud(!) It's unreal. By the way – people will tell you that the MFK Fisher translation is the best, which it is not. But the footnotes, in which she argues with Brillat-Savarin and quibbles and loves and disputes, over a hundred years at that point after the book was first published – that's the magic. The link is in my bio!

never eaten so well, and so badly, as over the last couple of years while @jonathandnunn has been researching and writing his 99 best London restaurants list. Just the best restaurant list I have ever read, not to mention a beaut portrait of food in London right now. It was a truly insane thing to take on as a man with but one stomach, and even wilder in its ambition considering how young Vittles is. I've been dragged as an extra mouth (along with @newmiyamoto and many other casualties) to every corner of the city, sat through hours of turgid dinners but also a) eaten so much sparkling excellent game changing food across every imaginable restaurant type and price point and b) even more importantly, seen Jonathan turn a madcap idea into a huge and incisive list that will change the way you see london food. Plus, crucially, it is some of his best writing - lyrical, tender and funny and, as his digestive health would attest, every word extensively backed up with eating research. anyway the list is now almost entirely up on Vittles (@vittlesmagazine ), all numbers 99 thru 2, with the #1 spot announced tomorrow

a few listening notes, audiobook and podcast recs from 2025, unsolicited: thanks largely to my ongoing relationship breakdown with words on pages, i didnt do all that much reading this last year. however - every walk, every bathroom clean, every stint at the kitchen sink has been soundtracked by words and stories and it's been a perf reset. nobody asked, but here are a few of the stand outs among the things i listened to this year. oh plus a cautionary note that Emma Thompson's rendition of Turn of the Screw is the single worst audiobook i have ever listened to. 1 + 2: Signal Hill (@signalhillfm ) an audio magazine of sorts, is back with their second issue. this is excellent news cos their first issue included a feature called Caterpillar Roadshow and was one of my favourite listens of the year. 3: sometimes when a book is very, very long, any attempt to get through it becomes about breaking it down, making it more manageable or speeding things up. This is all wrong. Middlemarch (the version narrated by Juliet Stevenson) runs to 35 hours and I kind of sunk into it over a period of weeks. Where I would've ordinarily been skimming, it had no choice but to surrender to its pacing, and it was great. 4. I do a lot of listening-while-walking and cannot stress enough just how well Mrs Dalloway lends itself to this, especially if you live in Woolf's London. Another Juliet Stevenson narration btw, which is always good news. 5. Nobody read their own work with as much life and tenderness as Toni Morrison. I actually wouldnt want to hear the books from any other mouth. Sula was a predictably harrowing ride but it's stayed with me all year, the feeling of it. 6. Recently, lots of people have been refinding 24 Hours at The Golden Apple - an episode of This American Life from 25 years ago. The kids are saying it's a snapshot of life pre-smartphones, which is sweet, but more importantly it captures a pivotal moment in American history when two people could sit in a diner talk about this new show, they're like women in new York, they're dating - and you realise they're discovering Sex and the City in real time. ++++continued in comments

I wrote for @newyorkermag on a topic I swore I would never write about: the Great British Bake Off. It's been 12 years since I was on the show, and in the years since it's become not just a giant of food pop culture but one of the most influential unscripted shows of the century so far. Bake Off has transformed what competition shows can look like, pioneered a wave of ambiently watchable TV and also radically changed who gets to be an authority in food. It has also introduced us to some of the most loveable un-reality-TV reality-TV stars of all time. This essay is a longread about the outsized cultural legacy of the show, the gentle hubris of competitive baking, and - crucially - what it's really like behind the scenes. I would never have written it for anyone other than @marellapixiedreamgayla - dream editor always. The link is in my bio 🩷

talked for days; still found the strength to share some goss after ࣪˖ ִֶָ . *:･ this is a contractually mandated All Consuming audiobook PSA for the audiobook heads, preorder it bitches it's linked in my bio and i'm good at reading

swipe 4 🔥 (also, fondant fancies comeback soon 🔮 .𖥔 ݁ ˖)

for the first time in five years i have zero writing deadlines. now (ab)using this headspace that life has so kindly gifted me to share some throwbacks from last year's writing retreat in Lopud, ft. photos by and of @kadrikoop @studiojohnmurray and @drashko ✨️ big big @vittlesmagazine project about cookbooks and their place in the culture dropping this sunday btw, ft. an essay by me, among many other things

for the last four years, I've been researching and writing a book about modern food culture and this week i handed in the last of my edits. All Consuming is about how food culture and its many discourses have blown up. much has been written about how in the last 75 years our food systems have transformed, but this is about how the ways we learn about food have mutated and expanded too - from cookbooks to marketing, TikTok critics and hedonic circuit-hacking Instagram recipes. It's about how many of us have more choice in our food than ever - and the question of whether our appetites are ever truly ours. anyway, here are some pictures from my adventures in the culture. scroll through for a cover reveal. All Consuming is out 4th September in the UK btw and the preorder link is in my bio

🍲 There is so much more to food than cooking and eating. --- #UALShowcase collection ‘Culinary Contexts’, curated by food and culture writer Ruby Tandoh [@ruby.tandoh ], looks behind the plate, around the plate, sometimes at the plate itself to convert the endless discourse into shapes, solutions and materials that might make sense of our food systems. 🥘🥗 --- From ceramics to packaging, furniture to film, discover how the graduate projects in this collection reveal how food is subjective, diverse and ever-changing. 🥟🍚 --- 🔗 Check out the full collection on UALshowcase.arts.ac.uk Image credits: 1 📸 568ml A Pint Please, Ruth Tomlinson, 2024 BA Graphic And Media Design, London College of Communication 2 📸 -OSE, Marlene Haindl, 2024 MA Industrial Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL 3 📸 Beyond the plate: Reconnecting with food, Li Tong Nicole Tan, 2024 BA Product and Industrial Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL 4 📸 Food in Disguise, Larisa Oancea, 2024 BA Graphic Communication Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL 5 📸 Gorsey, Yumeng Wang, 2024 BA Product and Furniture Design, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL 6 📸 Within, Sensual Eating, Juliana Lua, 2024 MA Design: Ceramics, Furniture, Jewellery, Central Saint Martins, UAL Graduates selected for this collection not featured here include: Daisy Price Lin Chen | @linchxn Yuqing Pan | @pannyum Kishita Nayyar | @kishinayyar Agassiz Chan, Katy Thompson, Yoyo Wang | @yoyow.mp4 @itsagassizchan @moontape for @tomatoeggzine Niki Dimova | @nikdimova Jinghan Li | @jhli666 Felix McCrossen-Sadler | @felix_mccrossensadler Fergus Main | @fergusmaindesign

For the last few months I've been researching Allrecipes.com. If you've searched for any trad American recipe in the past 25 years, you've probably ended up on Allrecipes at one point or another. This thing has existed since the early days of the internet, where it was founded as a crowdsourced repository of everything from cookie recipes to apple pie tips and Midwestern culinary arcana. Today, it's a vast, unruly collection of 113k recipes and could make a claim to being America's biggest cookbook. I talked to the founders of the website and the people who use it, to try to figure out what happens when we circumvent cookbooks and authority, and set recipes free in the wild. I really loved working on this. The best thing was that as I talked to everyone, they started emailing me recipes, and I sent recipes back, and in this tiny filament of internet bandwidth the spirit of Allrecipes lived on 🩷 As always, dream editor @marellapixiedreamgayla is the best! Link in bio etc etc etc

for better or worse, it's strawberry season - i wrote about it for the New Yorker. ft the fruit whisperer @nicole_rucker , @blackforager and a lesson on how to positively metabolise disappointment in the kitchen. illustration by @linamueller_illustration anddd link in bio