Honestly, for me personally, so far things have been pretty easy. Lockdown has been a breeze. I had a little trouble buying potatoes, and we came dangerously close to running out of ketchup last week, but otherwise everyone at Angry Chef towers is safe and well fed (the ketchup thing was a dark time, but I am confident we can rebuild). Within my tiny corner of the world, perhaps the hardest part has been an acute awareness of my own privilege, yet this is clearly no hardship at all. Although no ..read more

When the wellness industry was all about selling useless shit to rich people, I didn’t care that much, I just enjoyed poking fun. The reason I dedicated so much of my time to debunking dietary fuckery was that I felt it to be representative of a darker, deeper malaise. The undermining of expertise. The retrograde idolisation of the past. The false conflation of natural with good. The rejection of scientific advance in favour of home spun truth. Over the years writing this blog, I have dropped ..read more

In my New Year’s post, I mentioned that the world does not need more balanced books, but it does need more balanced debates. With this in mind, I have written the following to try and create some balance in the debate about diets and nutrition. I am sure that it will upset some people and many will disagree, but I hope that does not mean that we stop talking.  Who Funds Angry Chef? I am frequently told that I am an industry shill, working for the dark forces of ‘Big Food’. Readers will have ..read more

I am not sure if it makes me an environmentalist, but in my youth I spent quite a bit of time working for a couple of different conservation groups. Not the ones that protested against nuclear power or tore up GM crops throughout the 90s, the sort that went around doing useful shit like planting trees, building walkways and protecting native fauna. This was quite a few years ago, long before it was cool, when global warming was a background issue of concern and the real environmental worry was ..read more

The Life and Death of an Angry Chef I apologise for not posting much recently, and also for my lack of activity on social media. If you have been in touch and I have failed to respond, I can only say sorry. I am going to attempt to resume normal Angry service throughout 2020, including a load of unanswered Angry Chef emails.  It has been an odd time for me recently, as I try to work out what exactly I am doing with my life, and which direction I want to take my writing. I started the Angry ..read more

Recently, whilst publicising her latest diet book, unbearably smug radio personality and all-round irritant Fearne Cotton revealed that she had secretly suffered from bulimia for around 10 years. She said that she was ‘no longer afraid’, and hoped that in speaking out she would encourage others to do so. I suppose her honesty at opening up should be praised, and certainly the reaction has been generally positive. But in truth, I have struggled with this story and the media response to it ..read more

I’ve finally finished writing book number three. This one has been tough, perhaps the toughest of all. But it’s good, and it’ll shake up the world of food at least as much as the other two, probably even more. Yay. Go us.  What are we going to do now? Fuck knows. But as we emerge blinking into the light for the third time, it’s worth considering for a moment how odd it is that this funny little blog has led to a trilogy of books, which have so far been translated into 15 languages. The ..read more

I have been a little off the grid recently, for which I apologise. Whatever. Guess you are too busy shilling for Big Food to be writing a free blog, just so more famous food writers can copy and paste it into national newspapers.  There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, I am writing a new book, the third in the Angry Chef series. Yay! Go us. Even if those Guardian food columnist types think we’re evil corporate puppets, someone’s still paying us to write books. We must be part of an evil ..read more

The earliest fossils on earth date back nearly four billion years. Quite a lot has happened since then. If we could travel back to the time when these now fossilised structures were being formed, then we would quickly die. Back then, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere for us to breath. It took the action of cyanobacteria to change that, somehow conjuring life out of water, carbon dioxide and sunlight, expelling unwanted oxygen as a by-product. Our very existence depends upon our ability to ..read more

Apart from ‘why are you so angry?’ the question I am most often asked in interviews is why, as a chef with absolutely no writing experience, I randomly started a blog in my mid-forties. Although the real answer is almost certainly ‘mid-life crisis’, the story I most often relate is the one that I opened my first book with.  For those that haven’t read the book… What? You mean that there are readers who have never bothered to buy one of the excellent value Angry Chef books (link, link). Tight ..read more