Appetite | The Politics of Food

Voracious is a mythical beast. He lives on profits and is always hungry. A Midas beast, all he touches becomes a commodity. He appears in or is hinted at throughout this collection of beautifully crafted poems. In her seventh poetry collection, Karen Throssell includes poems about obesity and anorexia, agribusiness, diets and fads, the supermarket duopoly, starvation as a weapon of war, food additives, ultra processed food, gluttony and greed. So the book is about the politics of food, its transformation via the capitalist economy from produce to product, and the resultant rise in ‘pretend food’ - food which is highly addictive but has no nutritional content. The seriousness of the subject matter is lightened with the author’s characteristic quirky wit, by the inclusion of ‘odes’ to various fruit and vegetables, poems about food and family and food traditions. There is much to be discovered and much to smile at in this important and highly accessible book.