4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Ian Carter had lived in Norfolk and then Devon for a while. Both were nice places to live, but they didn’t feel wild enough for Carter. This nagging feeling was not helped by trips to the West of Scotland; it is a land that is still shaped by humans, but it felt so much wilder than Devon. It took half an hour of mooching around the garden to make the inevitable decision, they were going to have to move to the west of Scotland and specifically Galloway.

They are fortunate to find a house that meets their requirements and constraints. Within a few minutes’ walk from the house, he can feel properly in a wild space. If he walks for 45 minutes, there is no sign of roads and cars and not a hint of a man-made sound. This is not a guidebook of the region, more of a story of the first months there and the discoveries that he makes.

After unpacking and settling in, he discovers that one of his favourite authors, Derek Ratcliffe, had written a book, Galloway and the Borders, and he didn’t have a copy. This omission was quickly rectified. As Carter read his new book, he learnt of Ratcliff’s passion for the uplands of the region and the pleasure he got from observing the wildlife, a similar theme to his other books.

Carter roams widely from his home, a luxury afforded to him by the progressive laws in Scotland on access to the countryside. A frequent route covered is over the burn and then heading straight up hill. The wildlife that he ends up seeing tends to wander all over the place rather than sticking just to one particular place. He dips into the National Atlas of Birds published in 1976, and it is a bleak reminder of scarce gains and massive losses that have happened in the past four decades.

Carter devotes a whole chapter to the red squirrel. He has six regular visitors to his garden, and he has learnt to recognise them. They are clinging on there, but the threat of the grey squirrels and the illness they can pass on is never far away.

Even though finding the wild here is easier than in Devon, it is still not a true wilderness. That has long gone from this country, with almost every square metre having been affected by humans at some point. It is rural, and there are lots of farms around, and they squeeze as much as they can from the land. The modern farm vehicles are huge so they can reach all parts of the fields nowadays, and there are small areas that are left untouched.

The sika plantations are cool, dark and slightly oppressive places. Carter considers them an alien eyesore on the uplands of Galloway. That said, he does recommend visiting one, though, for the assault on the senses that you get. Above these areas are places that couldn’t be planted, so they have been rewilding themselves. Carter likes this part of the landscape, though he keeps a careful eye out for adders when scrambling up.

He takes a longer trip up into the hills with an overnight stay. He is aiming to look for glow worms, but he wants to take time to look at the wider landscape and visit an ancient hillfort. It gives him time to consider the ongoing debate on what is or isn’t an alien species. He mentions The New Wild by Fred Pearce, which, if you haven’t read it, is an excellent book.

It takes him 90 minutes to walk from his home to the cliffs. These face the Atlantic and suffer the wrath of the storms that roll in each year. It is also a haven for seabirds that nest on the cliffs and fly out to the open ocean to feed. He enjoys spending time there watching them returning to feed their chicks. Just off the coast is Heston Island, and accessible when the tide is low. He spends a night there and, as well as the numerous seabirds, sees otters and porpoises.

He shares his new home with two species of bats, and their garden is host to red squirrels, badgers and pine martens and lots of different species of birds. Lots of small birds bring in the raptors, and he frequently sees sparrow hawks and peregrines passing by.

The area that he has chosen to live in has a little bit of everything. The hills in the distance are not quite mountains, but they feel like it after climbing them. Up there, you used to be able to see eagles, but they were harried and persecuted to the point of extinction in the white-tailed eagles case. Thanks to reintroductions and public opinion taking a really dim view of illegal killings of these magnificent birds, they are making a comeback.
The drystone walls here are hundreds of years old, and they have developed their own ecosystem. They are not as old as the scrap of woodland nearby. This is a remnant of temperate rain forest left over from the larger woods that cover the area.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

It is kind of fitting that at the beginning of Matthew Yeomans’ walk around Wales, it begins in a rainy gloom. He is in Cas-Gwent (Chepstow) in his friend, Andy’s, kitchen, drinking coffee and peering out the window at the rain.

They decide that waiting for fine weather might take a while, they don their waterproofs, and step out of the warm house into the rain. At the start of the trail, there is a stone monolith and a metal sculpture that Yeoman describes as being similar to a baked potato in foil. The other odd this about this coastal path is that they are two miles from the coast. Details…
This part of the coast is not renowned for its beauty, however, it is rich in history. It is rich in historic sites, and finds there have been artefacts discovered all the way back to the Neolithic.
They get wet again. They pass some guys from Bristol who are fishing, who, from what they tell them, have not had any luck catching anything. It is not long before they pass some of the locals, who are also fishing, who tell them that the other guys are fishing in completely the wrong place…

Yeoman and his friend, Jeff, are now walking in a gale (this isn’t selling a walking holiday in Wales to me!!). Approaching Cardiff, they come across a note saying that the path is closed for emergency flood defence work. A reminder that climate change is upon us and not going away. They take an inland detour, and it means that they can stop at the Royal Oak pub, one of Jeff’s old haunts.

Whilst they are in Cardiff, he explores the coastal areas and looks at what the authorities are doing to stop flooding. He walks along the canal that was built to transport bulk materials to the port for export and ends up at the enormous Bute East Dock. The barrage they have built seems to be helping, but how it will cop in the future is anyone’s guess.
It was at Lavernock Point that Marconi demonstrated to the world his radio transmission invention. They take a path with a dead end on a sign and inevitably end up walking back. Amusingly, on the back of that sign is another that says ‘told you so’. They walk through an area called The Bendricks; turns out to be a section of prehistoric cliffs dating back to the Triassic period. They are soon walking through Barry Island, best known for the sitcom Gavin and Stacey, something that I have never watched, before they head onto the Glamorgan Heritage Coast. Known for smuggling in the past it is now suffering from coastal erosion.

Port Talbot is not a place that conjures up picturesque scenes with it ominous steel works looming over the town. There are two possible routes that they can take, and they decide on the lower route. It is as grim as they are expecting, but they are assured by other walkers that it does improve. And it does.
Revisiting Rotherslade Rock brings back childhood memories. It is a place that he brought his own kids back to and watches them climb the same rock that he did as a kid. This part of Wales has a strong Anglican feel to it. This was because the Welsh often rebelled and the Norman invaders imposed a strong control on the area. Returning to Pobbles Bay Beach reminded him just how awful it was for playing cricket.

He picks his way across a salt marsh and passes Tinopolis or Llanelli as it is more commonly known. His walking companion for this stage is his son, and they embark on a very personal pilgrimage to see where his grandparents were married. They walk as far as they are able through the Castlemartin firing rang,e where the wildlife flourishes amongst the ordinance.
Pembrokeshire is a wild and beautiful place. Or it was when I visited a couple of years ago. Yeomans is there to walk part of the path conceived by Ronald Lockley, who was a guy who ended up on Skokholm and became an expert in the birds that were there. Milford Haven is the location of an oil refinery, and it was where a tanker spilt 72,000 tonnes of crude oil in the mid-1990s. Wildlife was devastated at the time, but then recovered enough to then suffer water temperatures that were 5 °C higher because of climate change. They then walk through the last place that a foreign power tried to invade.

Living by the sea brings forth stories that are, in essence, true, but are steeped in the folklore of the sea. This part of Wales is no different. There are stories of giants, lost lands, mermaids and old magic. Golf links are found by the shore, and it is thought that these will go as the sea level rises, a problem brought home when he is asked to map a new route for the Wales Coast path. The next stage of his walk passes Portmeirion and onto Port Madoc, where the cliffs are battered constantly by the waves. We will have to see how Wales and the UK cope and adapt in the coming years.
It was a fire at an RAF site that began Welsh nationalism and marked the start of the pushback against English domination. Like the West Country, Wales also has a big problem with second home ownership and locals are priced out of the market. Second homes are now being taxed more, but if this will have the desired effect and money is fed back into the local economy, only time will tell. People who want to live there now can’t, as a £20k salary isn’t going to buy a £1m house.

Yeomans is now in hill country, as he discovers as he walks up the road to Trefor; it nearly kills his legs! He is fast approaching the island of Ynys Mon. He can cross a bridge to get there now; previously, he would have had to cross by boat, and the tides are treacherous. It is the place where one of the first environmental protection laws was passed. Elizabeth the First ordered the dunes to be replanted with marram grass and to punish those who were caught stealing it.

Smuggling was rife back in the 18th century; illicit goods would be shipped from the Isle of Man. It was lucrative and dangerous and could be deadly. One group of smugglers used the power of their women, who were believed to be witches; a curse from them would deter most people. It was a shipwreck here that gave us the Met Office and the beginnings of weather prediction.
Yeomans has finally reached the last leg of his walk. He thinks about the parts that he has enjoyed walking through, even though he has only covered about half of the full 870 miles. It is enough to see the havoc that climate change will bring to this coastline.

This was an enjoyable book in lots of ways. His account of the places that he walks through and descriptions of the things he sees are really good. He brings to life the richly layered history of the country. The other focus of the book is the grim realities of climate change, rising sea levels and coastal erosion, which, while we need to know about it, makes for less enjoyable reading. I live fairly close to the coast and it makes for sobering reading. I like Yeomans’ writing, it feels like a conversation in a pub garden, overlooking the sea whilst the sun goes down. He is not confrontational about climate change, just exasperated that governments are still dithering while it accelerates. Well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Immigration is in the news constantly at the moment. But the facts are often obscured by the various agendas that particular news agencies wish to push.
This story is about a group of Africans who are hoping to cross the straights of Gibraltar into Europe with the hope of making a new life there.

The narrator and his cousin are waiting in a café, and Red is crapping himself, so much so that the trafficker is threatening to leave him behind. They are an eclectic group of people, including one guy who has been deported three times from Europe, is still waiting to go back again. It was hard to say if it was nerves or the anticipation that was driving them.

Reda had a troubled upbringing and then suffered the tragic loss of his mother. It was to affect him deeply for the rest of his life.

Nura is bringing a baby with her, and the baby keeps crying, which worries the trafficker. They put both of them under an upturned boat, and the baby calms. She is hoping to find her husband in Europe; he has been there for a year now, but she has heard nothing from him. If she were to find him, she would give him the news that he was a father.

Yussef was waiting in the café because of a tragedy of his doing that had befallen his family. There was nothing left for him in Africa and no reason to stay.
The man mountain that was, Pafadnan, seemed calm and serene. Now he was suffering from some sort of seizure or panic attack, which was worrying to say the least. He is calmed by another member of the party.

Yarge had been employed by the rich white men and was working in a privileged position. Until one day, he wasn’t. He had saved all that he had earned to be able to make this trip.

For the group, waiting to travel is worse than travelling. The anticipation is cut short by the fear of being caught or the boat getting into trouble at sea. The narrator has time to look back over his past life, reliving the memories that were seared into his mind.

They are a snapshot of the people in Africa who are desperate enough to want to leave their present circumstances behind and who have been seduced by the promise of a better life in Europe. However, what they see in the media and online is utterly unlike the life that they will have should they make it across the straits. The moment comes, and the trafficker moves them into the boat. They are all holding onto that promise they made themselves about that new life in Europe.

This is a poignant book in lots of ways. It highlights just how desperate some people are to leave their current situation for all manner of reasons. They see the life that they could have in Europe, focusing on the good parts and ignoring the rumours and the bad stories that they hear. To make that change is to take an enormous risk at great cost. Not just financially, but emotionally, leaving behind a life they knew for one that holds all sorts of perils.

Quite how the author manages to portray all of this in such a short book is quite astonishing. In all this drama, he writes with compassion and empathy; we know this is one ending of their lives. He makes the tension palpable; I felt that I was waiting with them on the beach; their back stories add context and show us the reason why they have made this choice. But their fear of the unknown is evident in all the characters, too. It is a chance they would regret not taking. Well worth reading and can recommend reading it alongside We Came By Sea by Horatio Clare, which is real-life stories of boat people and the individuals they deal with as they try to settle in this country.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

The network of English footpaths is not only extensive, but it is a walked record of human history in these isles, going back thousands of years in some cases. I have walked along some of the holloways in West Dorset, and not only are they spectacular, but they are a record of human movement going back hundreds of years. And in the case of Shutes Lane and Hell Lane, it wouldn’t surprise me that they had their origins deep in the past.

Whilst paths are nowadays seen as second or third rate in this age of the motorcar, Taplin wants to rediscover their literary heritage. She draws on the works of John Clare, William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, John Cooper Powys, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas and others. She is intending on trace the relationship of the literary path to the actual paths.

Both animals and man make paths. Where people have walked and not followed the neatly laid out and prescribed asphalt are called desire paths. Animals make similar routes across fields and through hedgerows, finding the most suitable routes to where they want to get to.

Paths that had been used for hundreds of years were taken from the commoners in the state-sanctioned theft of the commons by the landed gentry and the aristocracy (bastards), or as we are taught in history, the enclosure acts. Paths that anyone could and did walk along were now private property. The great and the good (such an inaccurate and misleading title) conspired to then ensure that the footpaths were blocked both legally and illegally.

The paths weren’t just a functional route for one place to another, they had a vital use for villagers to court and socialise after a days toil on the land. There were some landowners who were sympathetic to the plight of those wanting and demanding access, but a lot were concerned that they would mar it.

People have always enjoyed the right to walk through the English Countryside, and they have always done so for pleasure as well as business. In an age of greater material prosperity, our spiritual needs increase: we need the quietness and sweet variety that paths can offer.

Some paths had lots of traffic, others were scarcely used. Some Paths, as written in ‘Still Glides The Stream’ were the first stage in every journey, and others became important hubs at churches and pubs.

The distances that some folks had to walk were large; it wasn’t uncommon for people to walk six miles each way for school or to their place of employment. There was always a path that people travelled along on the final journey to the place they would be interred.

Walking out was seen as a part of courtship, and being seen together was part of a claim, a declaration of intentions. The gentry walked their private paths had the luxury of a carriage for other jaunts. Howitt says they may as well be born without legs… He felt they were missing out on ‘wild sounds and aspects of earth and heaven’.

The paths were public, so you would almost be seen by people who know you. But certain paths would allow some privacy, hence why you still find paths called Lovers Lane.

In a time without pervasive light pollution, paths could take on a more sinister feel. The echoes of folklore could be felt on a moonless night. Dark nights were perfect for those who wished to move around without the authorities’ gaze.

Walking can be a cure for the black dog, and a number of writers in this book have used it for that very purpose. Helen Thomas mentions in her autobiography (I have a copy of this that I really must read) that the act of walking, placing one foot in front of the other, is a balm for many people. This is being proved by modern science too.

Immersion in the natural world is good for our very soul. In the chapter, Sounds, Scents and Seeings, Taplin explores how her chosen writers revel in listening to the things they experience when walking. Taking the time to be in the natural world is important to all these writers.

To venture off the well-trodden path is often an act of trespass, which is ironic given that the chinless wonders had stolen it from the common people in the first place. Though they don’t seem to have a problem riding roughshod over various other landowners’ property in the pursuit of the fox.

Things changed after WW1, feudalism waned somewhat, and things changed in society, sadly, though, not always for the positive. Those in power were not particularly keen to give it up and to an extent, they still have that power. It has taken a further 100 years to get to this point, and it still isn’t over.

Is life a journey? This is the question that Taplin poses at the ned of her book and heads to the library to find references for it. I think it partly is, even though there are a vast number of curve balls that seem to have come my way on this path!

This is a lovely book about the pleasure of taking a walk along an English footpath. I liked the way that she has grouped the literary references together, and added her own take on the chosen writers’ thoughts. The way to keep these footpaths is to keep using them. It stops them from being blocked or falling into disrepair. Organisations like Slow Ways are doing a fantastic job of mapping and recording them. This is a very gentle read about the importance of keeping them alive.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Good Night Melancholy – Xia Jia
This story took a little while to get into, but once I had got my head around what she was trying to do, I thought it was really well done. The questions she poses about machine learning and the Turing Test are really quite poignant. Plus, there is a parallel story of Lindy, a modern robot who is there as a companion for the narrator and the way she explores the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.

Moonlight – Liu Cixin
A man takes three calls in one evening. Each caller knows exactly who he is because they are calling him from the future. In each call, his future self says that he is going to send him details of a technology that his future self says will change the world and give a greener future. I thought that this was a really neat time travel book that sounded utterly plausible.

Broken Stars – Tang Fei
This begins as a coming-of-age story of a girl at school who is undertaking exams. There is a pale woman in this girl’s life who has given her advice based on the stars. I won’t reveal any more but I thought this was quite a disturbing short story!

Submarines – Han Song
A strange story about a Chinese peasant class who live in small submarines on or in the Yangtze River. I did feel that this wasn’t over sci-fi in feel, more alternative history vibes.

Salinger and the Koreans -Han Song
This is a short story about the North Koreans inventing a device called the Quantum Reambiguator and taking over the world with it. When they have conquered America, they want to find the home of the reclusive author, JD Salinger, one of their heroes and turn up there unannounced… Quite an imaginative and amusing story.

Under A Dangling Sky – Cheng Jingbo
A haunting beautiful story about a woman who is searching for singing dolphins. To find them, she is listening though a strange hydrophone that a professor left her, but one day she hears something most unexpected…

What Has Passed Shall In Kinder Light Appear – Bao Shu
I liked this story a lot. It is a bit of a love story between two people who are caught up in world events. But the clever thing is that these events are real things that have taken place, but as the order is completely different, I found it to be a quite unexpected take on history.

The New Year Train – Hao Jinfang
A very very short story about being lost somewhere in the space time continuum. I almost inhaled it it was that short, but it is very good though.

The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales – Fei Dao
This is a strange story, it feel like an older type of Hans Christian Anderson story, but this one has a robot in it. This robot is commanded to travel the Kingdom and tell as many tall tales as possible so he can out bullshit the King. Really enjoyable story!

The Snow of Jinyang – Zhang Ran
Ancient Chinese culture mees steampunk meets and a time traveller from another dimension. What is there not to like about this combination? I thought it was really good too. There is not much character development; it is not really long enough for that, but there is plenty of intrigue and tension in the story.

The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe: Laba Porridge – Anna Wu
A strange story about a writer who wants to have the abilities from five different authors from Earth, a playwright, a poet, a science fiction author, a suspense writer and a classical scholar. However, absorbing their skills and abilities has a great cost. Quite strange and dramatic!

The First Emperor’s Games – Ma Boyong
A short but innovative story about the first emperor of China, who was an avid gamer. The games he plays are a pastiche of the actual things that he should be doing as an Emperor. I.e. the game Civilisation where conquering all the countries around you has a knock on effect. I thought it was very well done.

Reflection – Gu Shi
Another very short story about a clairvoyant. She has no memory of the past, rather, her memories are of events that are yet to happen. I thought there were a couple of flaws in the premise, but I did like it.

The Brain Box – Regina Kanyu Wang
An implant called the brainbox keeps the previous five minutes of all the thoughts you have just had. These can then be read and imparted into anyone else’s mind. If you know you’re going to die, what would go through your min,d and what would you actually want anyone else to know?
Zhao Lin’s thoughts were recorded, and Mr Fang is just about to learn what they were!
I thought it was an excellent story

Coming Of The Light – Chen Quifan
An interesting concept of blending the high-tech world with the Buddhist religion. A monk blesses a light in an app and then the people who use the app start to tell of cures and miracles. I didn’t feel the ending was that strong, but it was nicely written.

A History of Future Illnesses – Chen Quifan
An interesting collection of short stories about various maladies that have affected a future human race. They vary from a reliance of on iPads, fragmented personalities and the arrival of a second moon whose tidal forces affect humans and pople who can master team. Of all of the stories in here, it was this one that made me think the most.

Essays
The three essays at the end f the book add some context into the universe of Chinese scifi. I has ebbed and flowed for a while and almost disappeared at some points in the past. However, with two Chinese authors winning the Hugos in consecutive years, it is approaching the mainstream at warp 10.

I thought that this was a very interesting collection of stories. As usual, there were some stories that I liked more than others. It was good to read another cultures perspective on sci fi. Some of the themes and tropes that they write about were familiar, but there were lots in here that were refreshingly different. If you are scifi fan then I would highly recommend this as a good entry point for Chinese scifi.

5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Until the 1950s, agriculture had followed a similar pattern year after year. Some technologies had improved the way that the farmer worked the land, tractors for example, but mostly it was the same. But it all changed in the 1950s. This was the time that the first supermarkets began to open, and it was their rise in buying power that changed the farming landscape and made industrial farming a thing.

Gone was the attribute of flavour; instead, supermarket buyers wanted standardisation, robustness when being transported and cheap prices. It had taken 12,000 years, but the desire for flavour had gone, and since the 1950s, nutritional values in foods have declined dramatically as these policies have mostly taken over the food system. The ubiquitous availability of all foods all year round means that we have lost all notion of seasons.

Understanding our planet and remembering our connection to nature is essential if we are to see the seasons as a precursor to us.

Fubini set up his company, Natoora, after seeing a lady who walked into a food store one December demanding peaches and could not understand why they didn’t have any available. He specialised in providing top-quality fruit and veg to high-end restaurants with the emphasis on flavour. And with flavour, you get nutrients, animals instinctively know what minerals they are deficient in and will look to find a plant that has those, and will eat it until their internal balance is restored.

It is as much the locality as it is the variety that determines the flavour, hence the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). Fubini writes about oranges and olives that come from a specific area of Sicily that can trace their origins back to the 8th or 9th century bc. I learn about the Cuore Del Vesuvio, a tomato from Naples. The variety is actually a Cuore de Sorrento, but she renamed it as it is grown in a slightly different region. The tomato is a really old species, and the families that grow it keep the seed year on year. It is thin-skinned and scars easily, but the flavour is another level, hence why it is grown still. This is a tomato that has never seen hydroponics…

Consumers, even in Italy, sadly, see supermarket ‘perfection’ as a desirable quality. Food that can be moved around the modern transport system is durable; it has few other qualities. Innovation does not replace flavour; the best tomatoes make the best pizza; the oven almost doesn’t matter.

He delves into the biological magic that is the relationship between fungi, bacteria and plants. The key is healthy soil that has all the ingredients, as healthy soil equals healthy and nutritious plants. He finds a farm that still uses horses, and the spinach that they grow and he gets to eat was the finest spinach that he has ever had. It is the same with onions that he finds in a tiny 2km square plot. It is the particular makeup of the soils that gives the onions their incomparable flavours from this place in Italy. When people have tried to grow them elsewhere, they have never tasted the same.

He is very scathing of the modern organic system. Modern industrial farming has done its thing and it is sadly no guarantee of quality; unless you know the farmer or smallholder, we are being deceived. One way to get a better-tasting crop and to add flavour is to stress the plants as they are growing. A Sardinian farmer does this by watering his tomatoes with slightly salty water and his tomatoes are deeply flavoured and flawed.

Modern farming likes to add lots of water to crops as this increases the weight and dilutes the flavour. There are crops though, that like lots of water, one of which is watercress. He visits a farm just outside Chichester that farms it in the old way, using the water from the chalk of the South Downs. The water itself is delicious, and the crop it produces is equally wonderful.

The industrial farming method revels in uniformity, but by mimicking the way that crops grow in the wild brings many more benefits in terms of flavour and sustainability. The roots of agriculture go back thousands of years, and this new system meant that societies and civilisations could grow. People developed methods that, because they worked, are still in use today. In Mexico, it’s called Milpa, where they plant three different crops together because they benefit each other.

Immigrants to new countries often leave their native languages behind, but they do hang onto their food traditions. Our childhood memories of food are deeply ingrained in our hippocampus, and even though the industrial food system is decades old, there is still time to embed food memories in our families.

He visits a Sicilian radicchio grower and sees the care and attention they put into growing the best crop they can. This method though, has a cost and Fubini’s solution to this is that we have to pay more for the food. It will sustain these methods and keep that link to the natural world that a lot of food production is missing. With his company Natoora he targets chefs who want the best-tasting ingredients they can get.

So, how do we go from where we are at the moment to where we want to be? We are told to eat local, too, but is this the case? Fubini doesn’t think that this is exclusively the case and he expands on some of his theories and reasons as to why this is the case; it comes down to how the food is grown, not where. Changing the system will mean pushing back against big corporations with powerful vested interests and deep pockets to ensure that the law is on their side.

At its heart though, this is a book about a search for a white peach that came from the Campania region of Italy. He had not other clues other than that, but it would be the craziest search that he would embark on trying to find the farmer who grew them.

The current food system is geared towards bland uniform food. What Fubini wants to do is make the artisan producer able to compete with the mainstream producers and win every time on flavour. One way on improving the system is education, teaching kids what seasonal food is and why foods with flavour is better for you.

This is an excellent book and is well worth reading alongside Ultra-Processed People. In that, van Tulleken lays out how bad the modern food system is for us. In here, Fubini lays out a way for us to get much better and tastier food onto our plates. Well worth reading.