Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives
By Carolyn Steel
Chatto & Windus £12.99, 400 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.39

With Walkers displaying carbon labels on its crisps and Tesco slapping airplane stickers on produce flown in by jet, consumers are being forced to think about the impact of their food choices on the planet. This is not premature. The skyrocketing price of oil, combined with competition from biofuel production and demand from the booming middle classes of China and India, who want to eat like Britons and Americans, have stressed the global food chain to breaking point.