The Lost Supper by Taras Grescoe review: eat like a caveman

If you have dreamed of eating neolithic bread while feeling a combination of existential terror and nostalgia, this is the book for you. The Lost Supper is the Canadian food writer Taras Grescoe’s account of his search for the food we used to eat, and his writing is so detailed and obsessive I forgive him the religious-themed title. He travels a burning world, noting its destruction – dried lakes dotted with the carcasses of baby flamingos, the dying olive trees of southern Italy, the arid monocultures of north America – like a Cassandra who can’t stop eating.  

It’s not a cheery read. We feed eight billion people nowadays and the payback is, as Grescoe says, “pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, overfishing, soil degradation and habitat destruction. Industrial monocultures are polluting the soil, water, and air. The global standard diet is wrecking our health, and our hunger for resources is leading us to encroach on the world’s last remaining patches of wilderness, unleashing global pandemics”. Grescoe has a novel, though obvious solution. What if we ate the food of the past? 

We meet him in the ruins of Catahoyuk, Turkey, an 8,000-year-old city whose inhabitants slept on the skeletons of the dead, looking for emmer grain. He wants to know what it tastes like: in some ways he

is a food critic projecting himself onto the whole of human history, and encouraging us to live by the lessons he gleans from the past – like a man who went to a farmers’ market and liked it so much he tried to globalise it. 

What did Viking biscuits taste like? It’s not a bad question. Neolithic man was as greedy as we, he feels sure: “I’m pretty certain that often the reason we bothered going over a hilltop, or to the far side of the river, was to discover how things tasted over there”. That’s Grescoe too: Neolithic Man, c’est moi. 

This book is a combination of greed and dust. He goes to South Carolina to find the pigs we ought to eat – rare breeds, well-kept – and loiters near a slaughterhouse that houses the pigs we really shouldn’t eat. Here, his prejudice leaks out. He couldn’t be more respectful to a native Canadian as he seeks the lost tuber camas, but when he meets a southern pig-farmer he wonders “about the advisability of following a pig farmer named Tank down a dirt road in rural South Carolina. Over platefuls of sausages at a picnic table, talk turned to how pig farms were meant to be good places to dispose of a corpse”. But Tank is a sport. “No Dude,” he said, “Pigs will leave the bones and shit out the teeth. That’s evidence. Better way is to dump it in the ocean wrapped in chain link fence”. If Tank then winked at Grescoe, he doesn’t say. 

Much of it is fascinating. I didn’t know that 90 per cent of milk comes from “freakishly productive Holstein Friesian cows all of whom are descended from only two bulls,” or that “half our calories come from only three grasses” or that it takes 6,400 gallons of water to produce a pound of British lamb. (Sheep are demonic here. I will never look fondly on them again). Danish Iron Age man, in contrast, had 60 different plants in his stomach and a functioning biome, and if he had other woes, that is not Grescoe’s business. 

He travels to the Yorkshire Dales to write about what is probably, judging by the prose, his first love: cheese. A Sharpham Cremet “is like the stanza of an amorous Shakespearean sonnet”; a Baron Bigod is a “Falstaffian limerick of a cheese”. He invokes fellow obsessives: one calls the impact of pasteurisation, starter cultures and hygiene “a Holocaust” of raw milk microbes; another says, “to bake the bread I wanted I needed a whole different civilisation”. 

Grescoe is an idealist: I don’t think subsistence farming – “the dream of finding a patch of land of one’s own, to devote to honest toil and a quiet life” – is as much fun as he thinks it is. But he is ambitious for solutions. The answer is not eating high-protein, low-impact insects, though he tries, solemnly concluding that “after massacring the megafauna on every continent and fishing our way down the oceanic trophic chain to the realm of jellyfish and plankton” we must now consume “the vermin that barnyard fowl peck on”.

The answer, rather, is the sort of small-scale, mixed farming found everywhere until the middle of the 20th century: he offers a bucolic small farm in Switzerland as evidence. “Diversity confers resiliency. Agriculture need not be the problem.” I am open to Grescoe’s vision, particularly since I have learned than you can have McDonald’s delivered to your house. I am not sure how practical he is, but I am not sure how practical what we have is. No civilisation that normalises McDonald’s by Deliveroo deserves to survive, and he strongly insinuates that, like the flamingo chicks of the dustbowl, we won’t.

The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past is published by Graystone at £19.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books