Who Killed Healthy Eating in Britain?
by James Fergusson Portobello £12.99, pp264 You can’t help liking the author of this first-person attempt to dig up – figuratively – the English bodies in a notorious 55-year-old French murder case and to find out whodunit. His heart is in the right organic place. But you can’t forgive James Fergusson or his publishers for muddling up the attempted solution of the triple murder of Jack Drummond (1891-1952), his wife Anne and their 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, with musings about how Fergusson and his wife become paranoid about their own food. Inside this bloated book, there struggles to wriggle out a substantial pamphlet about the murder of Britain’s best-known nutritionist and apostle of wholemeal bread, who, early in the Second World War, became adviser to the Ministry of Food and collaborated closely with Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food. Despite shortages and rationing (still in force when Drummond was killed), they gave Britain a diet that was actually healthier than before t
