How to Taste Tomorrow

Our tastes have been hijacked. A trailblazing food-policy expert shows us how to reengineer them for a healthy, sustainable future.

How do we change our food habits? We all know that the way we’re eating is leading our health, the environment, labor conditions, and animal welfare to ruin. What the many books that discuss this avoid, though, is the much harder question of what w e can do about it. People like the way that they eat, even when it’s catastrophic for them and the world they live in. How do you get consumers to change their behavior?

Brilliantly argued and meticulously researched, How to Taste Tomorrow is an exposé of how our tastes have been engineered for us by companies with vested interests in keeping us hungry for bad food. But Raj Patel makes a clear and forward-looking case that they can be changed back for the good.

Braiding together the hidden histories of how companies cultivate appetites for ultra-processed foods with eye-opening insights into how consumer behavior works, Patel has created a groundbreaking exploration of how we perceive taste, and a stunning account of how we arrived at our current food crisis. But unlike so many other books, he does the crucial work of exploring how this damage can be undone. With reporting from a cooperative farm in South Korea to a grassroots hunger-relief program in Malawi, and far beyond, How to Taste Tomorrow shows a groundswell of community-minded work from visionaries around the world who are working hard to reclaim our taste for the good, the just, and the delicious.