Tim Lang is a regular on British television. As professor of food policy at
Thames Valley University he is one of the first contacts journalists turn to
when a food crisis strikes. But Lang never watches TV at home鈥斺�滻 couldn鈥檛
stand the way it trivialised life,鈥� he says鈥攁nd that leaves him time to
read outside his work. 鈥淓very night, as an absolute rule, I鈥檒l read a novel.鈥�
Over the past six months he has read five Penelope Fitzgerald books, including
her latest, Innocence (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), about the emotional
shortcomings of a group of English middle-class people in Italy.
One of Lang鈥檚 favourite issues is nutrition and the importance of building it
into food safety policies. The Driving Force: Food, evolution and the
future by Michael Crawford and David Marsh (HarperCollins, 1989) documents
the role of nutrition in human evolution. 鈥淎n awesome cascade of ideas,鈥� he
calls it.