The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think, by Julian Baggini, review If you go to a Michelin-starred restaurant and have a cup of coffee, there's a strong chance that it's a Nespresso, or some other coffee sealed in a capsule and slotted into a machine. It turns out to be hard to beat on taste. As Julian Baggini explains in a book that does all it can to upend what we know about food and drink: "Making good espresso is difficult and things can go wrong at every stage." Readers might be saddened to learn that if you want proper coffee, you need to hand the process to a multinational and a machine. And then, what a shock to find that, of all multinationals, it's Nestlé, those people we boycotted as students. It might feel wrong, but is it? Baggini's mission is to make us think about our food: to learn more about it, and consider the ethical stance we take when choosing it. One consequence of this is to make us wonder if McDonald's is really a committed planet-plunderer - it has Compassion in World Farming's Good Egg Award, because all its eggs are free range. This is so unsettling that you'll be reassured to read, a little later, that the chicken a McDonald's patron eats is not quite so free range. Among other orthodoxies Baggini wants to challenge is the Protected Designation of Origin labels that make us think a product is traditional. In fact, they make mass production easier, by standardising, say, how much fat should go into Parmesan. And then there's tradition itself: why stick to an ancient recipe if it isn't any good? Not to mention the whole practice of recipes, which are prescriptive and stop us from using our own taste. Taste is the subject of this book, and not just in the sense of taste as a sense (if that makes sense). He argues that the way we taste has a lot to do with other factors. He cites Brillat-Savarin's observation that the pleasures of the table are not the pleasures of eating. We are less likely to enjoy our Nespresso, he suggests, if we know how it was prepared. This leads us to another level of taste: the sort we use when we express distaste at another's ethics. He doesn't use the word in that way, preferring to talk about "judgment" when urging us to make our own decisions about what to cook. As a philosopher, he feels the need to give us some criteria with which to make these assessments, and urges a balance between mind and body, arguing that food tastes better when we've thought about it. I wanted to agree with this, and we all know that the right food, cooked with the right advice and eaten in the right company, is as good as food can be (Baggini makes a case for eating with strangers, as Sikhs do with visitors to their gurdwaras). His preaching of moderation is sensible, and he's frank about the impossibility of knowing where all food comes from. But readers might need more convincing about how one moral consideration outweighs another. A product that is organic and good for the environment might not be so good for livestock if they're denied antibiotics. Finally, I wasn't sure about his understanding of pleasure, which is something about which philosophers argue with the kind of passion that can only come from subjectivity. But Baggini's open-mindedness in the face of received opinion suggests he won't mind our objections: if his mission is to make us find out more about food, and to reflect on those findings for ourselves, then The Virtues of the Table will be a great success. The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think by Julian Baggini 301pp, granta,Telegraph price £12.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £14.99, ebook £10.34)