Once upon a time, when organic carrots were just called carrots, people ate seasonally-available, locally-grown food and the most popular fast food was a ploughman’s lunch: a time before “The Clown, The King, and The Colonel”.

This was a time when people went to bed with the sun and midnight really was the middle of the night. People toiled in the fields. There were very few who sat at a desk all day and none that spent their evenings on the sofa watching Netflix.

Things have changed (some for the better) and our resulting post-Henry Ford, food landscape has become a little more complicated. For many, the fresh produce aisles that mark the perimeter of supermarkets are now their only contact with agriculture. These increasingly home-brand dominated temples to processed, packaged, and shelf-stable products with “added value”; many adorned with on-trend labels such as low fat, antioxidant-rich, high in omega3, cholesterol-lowering and gluten-free.

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what all those molecules were and you didn’t need a label to know where to get the good stuff? Say, understanding what free radicals really were and how you can minimise your exposure to these bad-ass molecules? I’ll wager that everyone has heard of antioxidants and that virtually no one knows how they placate free radicals or what can happen if those free radicals are left to run amok.

Once you understand that the scenes are all played out at a cellular level by molecules, you will want the good guys to outweigh the baddies.

Our food landscape has changed immeasurably over the last hundred years or so. Understanding the historical context and the advances that have been made in science and industry can help us to understand those changes and how we got to where we are today.

Once you understand the basic mechanisms that govern our metabolism, you will realise that the art of eating well is not complicated.