This is what came to mind reading the latest screed by Anthony Warner, who worked for many years at Premier Foods, one of the biggest food companies in Britain, which manufactures Mr Kipling cakes, Angel Delight desserts and Batchelors Super Noodles, among many other branded processed foods. Ten years ago, the Belfast Telegraph described Warner as TV presenter Loyd Grossman's "Italian development chef" because Warner was the person who helped Grossman develop his own-brand pasta sauces. But that was before Warner transmogrified into "The Angry Chef", the name of an expletive-ridden blog that he started writing in 2016 "exposing lies, pretension and stupidity in the world of food". He could have called himself "The Angry Consultant to the Food Industry" but it wouldn't have had quite the same ring.
To begin with, many in food writing circles considered Warner a breath of fresh air. I was one of them, going so far as to write a blurb for the book, welcoming it as a "bracing and funny tirade against the nonsense and harm done by food fads". I liked the way he skewered the quackery of alkaline diets and the absurd overuse of coconut oil and other so-called superfoods. I knew that Warner worked for the food industry, but I didn't feel that this had an undue impact on his arguments. Maybe there was an element of "my enemy's enemy is my friend" in my liking for Warner's writing. Over the course of my life, too many people close to me have developed eating disorders and when Warner attacked the restrictive rules and "nutribollocks" of the clean eating trend, his anger seemed righteous.
