We invited Anthony Warner, development chef and food writer, who joined Dr Clare Leonard, Tate & Lyle's VP Nutrition & Health Sciences, at the recent Science of Food event in London at the British Science Museum, to share his views on changing attitudes to food science and technology.
A matter of belief
written by Anthony Warner (aka The Angry Chef)
Like most chefs, I loved Anthony Bourdain. We shared a career, shared a first name, and for many years I passed a battered copy of Kitchen Confidential around my closest colleagues, insisting that they read it. His writing somehow made a poorly paid, beleaguered and troubled group of workers stand tall and be proud of the career they had fallen into. We felt like a slightly smelly and hungover band of brothers, with Bourdain as our spiritual head.
There’s a lengthy quote from Bourdain that is often repeated on social media and even adorns an entire wall of an otherwise pleasant local eatery I sometimes visit. You probably know the one. It starts ‘Eat at a local restaurant. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint in a mostly empty bar at 4am’ going on to list some enjoyable stuff that you should probably try and do. It ends with ‘Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride’ which given Bourdain’s mental health struggles feels particularly poignant.
I have a huge problem with this quote, and not just because it has become a sort of hipster foodie version of ‘Live, Laugh, Love’. My problem is that there is seemingly no evidence that Bourdain ever said it. It’s not in any of his books, has never been found in any articles, and doesn’t appear to have been said in any of his TV appearances. Despite being his most famous words, available in a wide selection of framed wall-hangings and embroideries, they appear to have been falsely credited to him after his death. The quote has been traced back to a fan forum, originally written as a homage, but misattributed ever since.
This matters. Bourdain was a writer, and such misuse of words would surely have troubled him. Whenever I see the quote, I particularly cringe at the ‘check in on yourself’ bit, as it seems far too twee and obvious for a writer of Bourdain’s acerbic quality. For me it is sanitised Bourdain, Bourdain light. I can’t help thinking that he’d probably have hated it.
The problem is that too many people, especially those who only know Bourdain from a couple of his television appearances, this quote just feels right. People can imagine it as the sort of thing he might have said in the spirit of an epicurean adventurer, so never doubt its authenticity. There are plenty who are absolutely convinced they remember him saying it and can mentally hear it being uttered in his voice, despite no recording existing. And so, the quote is repeated again and again across murals, posters, scatter cushions and inspirational social media posts. It feels right, lots of people believe it is right, and it has become very hard to convince anyone otherwise.
As a writer, I have always been interested in this sort of persistent false belief. There are plenty when it comes to diet and health. Seed oils are ‘harmful’, coconut oil is a ‘fat burning superfood’, organic food is ‘better for the environment’, grass-fed beef is ‘sustainable’, plant lectins are ‘making us sick’, ‘MSG causes headaches’, and so on. These and about a thousand others are repeated so often that they somehow become true in people’s minds, despite there being convincing evidence otherwise. You can shout as much as you like about the evidence, no one will believe you.
In my opinion, the most pervasive and widespread bit of food misinformation is that our modern food system is terrible. 'Eat like your great grandmother' is a common refrain playing to this, and to many people this feels just as instinctively correct as the famous Bourdain quote. I know to my cost that anyone claiming different can be held as a pariah in certain foodie circles; thankfully, the sort of circles I have no interest in joining. But it has always seemed obvious to me that eating like our great grandparents, or in fact any figure from the near or distant past, is probably a really bad option.
My great grandmother had a terrible diet, with 90% of her calories from poor quality bread. There was no cold supply chain meaning that little fresh produce was available. Most meat would have been heavily salted; she may have had a small amount of cheese and butter as an expensive luxury. Food was scarce and lacking in variety, the danger of contamination, sickness and nutrient deficiency constant. In almost every way, the food we eat now is immeasurably superior.
It is a natural human instinct to believe that things were better at some point in the past and it can be very difficult to convince people otherwise. But the reality of our modern food system is that although it is not perfect, we have never had it so good. In my great-grandmother’s day, although accurate records are hard to come by, it has been estimated that around 90% of the world’s population would have regularly been hungry.¹ Today, it is thought that just over 8% are.² That’s still way too many people; around 650 million will go to bed hungry tonight, but the progress has only been in one direction.²
Today we produce nearly double the calories per person than we did in the 1960s and distribute those calories far more efficiently.³ Global deaths from protein energy malnutrition have fallen around sevenfold.⁴ In the past four decades, large famine events have been virtually eradicated.⁵ In the UK, deaths from cardiovascular disease have decreased more than five times since the 1960s.⁶ In that time, we have vastly increased our consumption of fruits, vegetables and lean protein, lowered our consumption of salt and saturated fat and largely removed trans fats from our food supply.
These improvements are largely taken for granted. The fact that most of us will never have to seriously worry where our next meal is coming from is one of the greatest miracles of our time yet rarely mentioned as an example of human progress. It is true that we must not be complacent. Millions are still hungry. The environmental and health impacts of food are still huge issues and ones we must work hard to address. But unless we can counter the pervasive myth that things were universally better ‘back in the day’, we will always struggle to move forward. It is only by recognising the extraordinary food system progress made over the past 100 years that will we be able to plot a path for the next 100. To help navigate this journey, checking and doubting our existing beliefs has never been so important. Enjoy the ride.
Explore the discussion
This article was inspired by conversations at Tate & Lyle's Science of Food event at the Science Museum, where Anthony Warner joined leading experts to discuss the role of science, innovation and nutrition in creating a better food future.
Watch the recordings from the Science of Food event at the Science Museum, London, as well as the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) webinar, to hear the discussions in full.
▶ Watch the full Science Museum recording
Sources:
¹ Enlightenment Now by Steve Pinker
² Global hunger and undernourishment figures: FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024; FAO Hunger Map 2025. These sources report global undernourishment levels, including estimates of around 733 million people facing hunger in 2023 and 673 million in 2024, equivalent to roughly one in eleven people globally in 2023 and 8.2% of the world population in 2024.
³ Long-term global food supply and calories per person: FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets and Our World in Data, “Food Supply”. These sources provide data on dietary energy supply from 1961 onwards and show the long-term rise in average calories available per person globally.
⁴ Deaths from protein-energy malnutrition: Our World in Data, “Deaths from malnutrition” and “Death rate from malnutrition”, based on WHO Global Health Estimates and IHME Global Burden of Disease data. These datasets track global deaths and death rates from protein-energy malnutrition over time.
⁵ Famine deaths and large famine events: Our World in Data, “Famines” and “Deaths from famines by country and year”, based on the World Peace Foundation famine dataset.
⁶ UK cardiovascular disease mortality: British Heart Foundation, Heart & Circulatory Disease Statistics and UK CVD factsheets; Cheema et al., “Long-term trends in the epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases in the UK”, Cardiovascular Research (2022).