Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 24 May
8:15 PM - 9:30 PM
The original Ten Commandments provide clear direction on murder, theft and adultery. But God was light on detail when it came to instructions on the most pressing issue of the modern age: how and what to eat now.
Lacking culinary guidance for millennia, we’ve blundered wildly – ingesting many strange substances from beaver’s tail to tinned spaghetti and protein shakes. The 21st Century has seen a spike in the public appetite for snake oil, too, with many of us gulping down pseudoscience and suspicious ‘superfoods’ in the quest for vitality.
Fortunately – and finally – legendary food critic Jay Rayner has stepped in to lead us to the edible promised land, with his new book, The Ten (Food) Commandments. Rayner is the Observer’s brilliant and acerbic London-based food columnist as well as a UK Masterchef judge and a sworn enemy of the hemp seed. He will set us all on the non-righteous path to delicious eating.
At his upcoming appearance with the Wheeler Centre, Jay will take us through his commandments, with a little help from some audio-visual whizz-bangery and a few biblical robes. He'll explain why thou shalt eat with thy hands, why thou shalt worship leftovers plus a whole load more besides. Be there, or thou shalt be a spiced compote of goji berry and supercharged heirloom pear.
This event will be Auslan interpreted.
Featuring
Jay Rayner
Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster with a fine collection of floral shirts. He has written on everything from crime and politics, through cinema and theatre to the visual arts, but is best known as restaurant critic for the Observer.
For a while, he was a sex columnist for Cosmopolitan; he also once got himself completely waxed in the name of journalism. He only mentions this because it hurt.
Jay is a former Young Journalist of the Year, Critic of the Year and Restaurant Critic of the Year, though not all in the same year. In the 2014 British Press Awards he was shortlisted for both Critic of the Year and Specialist Journalist of the Year.
Somehow, he has also found time to write four novels and five works of non-fiction. Following the success of his 2013 book A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How (almost) everything you thought you knew about food is wrong, his most recent book is The Ten (Food) Commandments.
He chairs BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and is a regular on British television, where he is familiar as a judge on Masterchef and, since 2009, as the resident food expert on The One Show. He likes pig.