Fake and Forgotten Foods

The future is on our minds. And the future seems fraught. Lenore Newman’s Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food and Benjamin R. Cohen’s Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food bookend a growing anxiety about eating while modern: What do we really know about what we consume? How did we get to a state that some call Big Food? What have we lost along the way — perhaps irretrievably? And, above all, can we keep this up?

Both books begin with butter. Lost Feast opens in Iceland, at a table set, improbably, with butter but no guilt. (Icelandic milk is high protein, low fat!) Pure Adulteration starts in a courtroom, hearing of historic crimes of dairy deception. (Margarine was first billed as “science butter”!)

Newman holds a Canada Research Chair in food security and environment, at the University of the Fraser Valley, and her Lost Feast is buzzy, compelling, and genuinely...