Profile buys Dimbleby and Lewis' 'urgent' food manifesto

Profile Books has acquired Ravenous: Why our appetite is killing us and the planet, and what we can do about it, a timely and compelling call to action for urgent change in food, farming, diet and health, by Leon co-founder Henry Dimbleby and journalist Jemima Lewis.

Mark Ellingham, editor, acquired UK and commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown, to publish March 2023.

"Ravenous responds to the critical need to balance the interconnected demands of the environment, health, the cost of living and food security – something Dimbleby became even more acutely aware of when he was pulled into the pandemic task force that kept food on the shelves at our most crucial hour," the synopsis reads.

"It’s an urgent conversation that embraces everything from land use to education, to levelling up and trade. The book takes you behind the scenes to show the mechanisms that act together, accidentally, or otherwise, to make us eat what we eat. It explains why the food system has created a global crisis of diet-related disease and environmental destruction. But not only that – it also shows that these outcomes are not inevitable; that we do not have to continue with this broken and damaging system."

Ellingham said: "All of us at Profile see this as an important and urgent book. We are hugely impressed by the clarity Henry and Jemima bring to such a complex subject and how they join the dots – this is a book about the future of food and farming, about both food poverty and the obesity crisis, and climate change and sustainability. And they are all related."

Dimbleby is the director of The Sustainable Restaurant Association. In 2013, he co-authored The School Food Plan, which set out actions to transform school meals and food education in schools, and worked with DEFRA culminated in the National Food Strategy policy proposal. His work has been praised by figures including Yotam Ottolenghi and Sir Partha Dasgupta. Lewis is a journalist and columnist for the Telegraph, and the former editor of the Week.

"The food system is by far the biggest cause of the destruction of nature and of avoidable disease," Dimbleby said. "And the second largest cause of climate change after energy. If things continue as they are, health services will collapse, climate change will spiral out of control and vast ecosystems will be destroyed. People don’t understand why that is and what to do about it. That is what this book explains, and there couldn’t be a better publisher for it than Profile."