Ruby Tandoh and I are standing in Purcha, a bubble-tea joint on London’s Charing Cross Road, where we’re both about to be handed gargantuan plastic cups holding Floral Xiao Zhong Black Tea—with fresh milk, 30% sugar, boba pearls, creme top, and 50% ice. I have ordered exactly the same drink as Tandoh, because that’s the whole point of today: I’m having what she’s having, as part of our tour in honor of her rather wonderful new book, All Consuming (Alfred A. Knopf).
We’re at Purcha because, well, Tandoh rates it. “You can see they’re actually making it with tea, which sounds obvious, but it really isn’t in the bubble-tea world,” she says. “Very often it’s milk based or it’s flavoring based, so it’s more like a milkshake 2.0.” And we’re also here because she has a whole chapter titled “I love bubble tea” in All Consuming. Tandoh, 33, delves into its origins, how we came to love a drink with myriad options for customization, bubble tea’s subsequent rapid assimilation into our lives—and she explains why it has become (surprisingly) part of the ever-shifting global real-estate narrative. These are things that you—okay: I—might never think about when ordering one.
“You see so many of the forces shaping food culture happening through bubble tea,” she says. “Some of that is migration patterns, and some of it is about how we learn about foods—which obviously today is more rooted than ever in the visuals of it, especially with young people, who have so much consumer power.” Well, indeed. I think back to Tandoh’s closing thoughts on bubble tea in the chapter devoted to it: “It really says something about Britain today,” she writes, “that you have to survey a bunch of white guys, mainly in the 50-to-70 age bracket, to find someone who hasn’t tried bubble tea.” I just make it into that demographic, but thankfully I’m no stranger to various bubble-tea emporia around New York City, thanks to my friend Michael, who is not 50 to 70 but is something of a bubble-tea connoisseur—so I’m going to slurp that sweet, adulterated Floral Xiao Zhong Black Tea with pride.
That comment, though, of Tandoh’s—wrily, drily perceptive; a pithy take on the historical and contemporary intersection of taste, age, gender, and status—sets the tone for All Consuming. It covers everything from hype restaurants (and the equally hype-y lines which often accompany them) to Nara Smith, Martha Stewart, Erewhon (her view in brief: a place of esoteric ingredients in search of a meal you could actually make out of them), and the importance of the food writing in the early days of Ebony magazine. It stops along the way at the relentless proliferation of online recipes (and the reasons we will never, ever use 99.9% of them), the political and cultural histories of restaurant criticism, and why we are never more than five minutes away from the release of yet another new cookbook.
All Consuming is most definitely not a cookbook, though Tandoh has already authored four of those since she was a finalist on The Great British Bake Off in 2013. What All Consuming is instead is a smart, insightful, and highly engaging treatise on why we eat and drink what we do. It’s also funny—very funny, like, laugh-out-loud funny. (Tandoh on the rise of exotically monikered desserts when she was growing up in her native Britain: “Carissima, Romantica, Sonata, and Cassata Denice—all Italianate ice cream gâteaux with the kind of names a person would use to catfish on a sugar-daddy site.”)
Tandoh writes from a place of deep love—sometimes lacing that love with just enough eyebrow-raised skepticism, which is what makes All Consuming so…consuming. As with her take on the bubble-tea phenomena, she clearly has a sharp grasp on a generational interest in what we eat and drink and how those who are busy TikToking, YouTubing, and Instagramming it all might think about it differently—and are shaping the broader food culture around the world in the bargain. Once you’ve finished All Consuming, it’s a bit like waking up hungry—to know and understand more, that is.
You might find yourself (as I did) wondering why exactly Korean fried chicken is the only fried chicken game in town these days, or what life was like before sriracha, or how food can become disassociated from its origins before you even know it. “We’re reaching the inflection point in British culture,” Tandoh says, “where in the UK more people will say pizza is American than Italian.” New Haven–style pizza, she says, is the thing in London right now. Things change so nanosecond fast, her book makes you realize, that the ascent of things like avocado toast, frosted cupcakes, and Kewpie mayonnaise feels like it all happened around the time we were learning to make fire.
All Consuming wasn’t originally the book Ruby Tandoh set out to write, she reveals as we stroll toward our next destination—the Piccadilly Circus outpost of Whole Foods. The store might have long reached the point of Starbucks-like ubiquity in the United States, but here it still has a certain rarefied, Erewhon-like status. “I had wanted to write a book about how appetite works and the biology and the emotions of it, and I went around in circles for two years thinking about that,” she says, laughing. “And then there came a point when I was on TikTok one day, and I thought, This is what I need to write about. It’s right here, it’s what’s happening in the media, in the culture, sometimes in the stupidest corners.”
We’re in Whole Foods because there’s another chapter, “Tonic waters,” devoted to wellness drinks. “These drinks promise a solution,” Tandoh writes, “to the most boring and inevitable problem we face in our pursuit of wellness: that medicine is not nice.” It’s a temple-in-a-bottle approach to hydration, which seemed to come out of nowhere to become a beast of a gazillion-dollar business. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” she says, as we take in the shelves and shelves and yet more shelves of soft drinks laced with magnesium, charcoal, fulvic acid, and soluble fiber, et al. “Looking at these…a lot of innovations in food have historically been about what ingredients can we get hold of and manipulate. All of the technologies for this have existed since the dawn of time, so this is a revolution in marketing. It needs a groundswell of people to become interested in it.” In the same chapter, Tandoh delivers her verdict: “Over the last 15 years, wellness has become one of the most successful ways to mis-sell food.”
We are on our way to our last stop, the cookery-book department of the Waterstones booksellers on Piccadilly, reputedly the biggest store of its kind in Europe. A chapter in her book, “How not to use a cookbook,” rather brilliantly deconstructs the aspiration and reality of writing something dedicated to telling us what and how and why to cook—and by implication, who we are when we do it. (“There’s the frenemy relationship between the restaurant business and the cookbook industry—two mutually parasitic parts of our food cultural world,” she writes, going on to say, “The cookbook industry. I want to stress this, because it is an industry, and an economy, a market, and a matrix of power.”)
As we’re wandering around this culinary Library of Alexandria, Tandoh asks me what I cook at home. After I run through my embarrassingly pitiful list of specials, with their equally short list of ingredients, I confess: I find thinking about choosing from the vast range of online recipes overwhelming, much in the same way I find New York’s restaurant-reservation scene, which always feels like never getting past the red velvet rope, equally paralyzing. Tandoh nods. “It’s the paradox of plenty that the more there is—the more choice—the more you’re standing in the middle of it like, What the fuck do I do with this?” she says.
It’s not lost on us that as we are talking about this—amidst a sea of reissues of the food writing of the revered Elizabeth David, as well as the celebrity-chef primers and the magnum opuses so heavy, in Tandoh’s words, “their gravity course corrects me as I try to walk past,” and (my favorite) The Diabetes Airfryer Cookbook—neither of us can find the very range of books that Tandoh wants to show me: the Mob series, which started life digitally. “They’re really interesting,” she says. “More than anything else, they capture the online recipe for me, and what recipes need to have to stand out online.” But there are none to be seen. Maybe that’s the perfect way to end our afternoon: As Tandoh’s All Consuming so cleverly posits, food today might promise so much and be omnipresent in the process, but that doesn’t mean we will always be left satiated.