Ruby Tandoh’s New Book Makes the Case That We Have Too Many Recipes Already
September 09, 2025 | Source: Eater.com | by Bettina Makalintal
When Ruby Tandoh first embarked on the project that would become her new book, All Consuming, she envisioned it with the broadest scope possible: an authoritative tome about “the whole of appetite — physiological, evolutionary, social, you name it,” she says. “I think this came from a really naive desire at the time to create something that would be beyond the trend cycle.” The problem, though, was that she hated it. “There came a point where I had to ask: What am I eating? What am I facing when I open my phone? What food am I seeing?” Tandoh says. “Starting at that point of actual relevance and timeliness completely transformed what I was doing.”
Though you might recognize Tandoh from her stint on The Great British Bake Off in 2013 and the cookbooks the popular series launched, Tandoh has spent the past decade-plus separating herself from the show’s mainstream cultural dominance, challenging cookbook norms in her 2020 book Cook As You Are, and contributing to the indie publication Vittles. With All Consuming, instead of distancing herself from trends in an attempt to transcend them, Tandoh has decided to lean closer into phenomena like the rise of TikTok’s Keith Lee, the allure of the tradwife lifestyle, the abundance of boba in the United Kingdom, the fundamental misalignments of the modern cookbook industry, and other decidedly modern hot topics in food. “You have to come closer to something in order to actually detach yourself,” she says.
Food culture is the culture; chefs are celebrities; the “foodie” is over because everyone’s a “foodie” now: These are the things we, the food-obsessed, say. But in All Consuming, Tandoh takes a less self-satisfied approach, looking at the unromantic machinations by which we all, not just readers of websites like this one, have become swayed by food culture. If food culture is everyone’s culture, then everyone has had a hand in it, not just the chefs, #FoodTok, and the people willing to wait in long lines for artisanal pastries. “Forget [the cookbook author] Elizabeth David — a lot of the biggest changes in food today are the work of people in offices, and boardroom meetings, and in furtive, sterile labs,” Tandoh writes.