As difficult as it may be to believe, there was a time when Britain was not obsessed with food. Rewind to 1984 and this phenomenon was so new that in The Official Foodie Handbook journalists Ann Barr and Paul Levy were poking gentle fun at (as Levy later wrote in the Guardian) a new breed of “perfectly sane people” who “had suddenly become obsessed with every aspect of food”.
The book was not alone in identifying the foodie. By 1980, the New York magazine restaurant critic, Gael Greene, was observing the behaviour of “serious foodies”, too. But Barr and Levy, then working at Harper’s & Queen magazine, certainly popularised this depiction of ardent hobbyists who bonded over artisan cheese, travelled widely to eat, dug for organic self-sufficiency or studied food’s interaction with art and literature.
