Not On the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate

In 2004 Felicity Lawrence published her groundbreaking book, Not on the Label, where, in a series of undercover investigations she provided a shocking account of what really goes into the food we eat. She discovered why beef waste ends up in chicken, why a single lettuce might be sprayed six times with chemicals before it ends up in our salad, why bread is full of water. And she showed how obesity, the appalling conditions of migrant workers, ravaged fields in Europe and the supermarket on our high street are all intimately connected.

Her discoveries would change the way we thought about the UK food industry for ever. And, when the horsemeat scandal hit the headlines in 2013, her book seemed extraordinarily prescient once again. Now, in this new edition of her seminal work, Felicity Lawrence delves deeply into that scandal and uncovers how the great British public ended up eating horses.

‘A brave examination of the calamities caused by a policy laughingly called one of 'cheap food’.‘ Jeremy Paxman, Observer, Book of the Year

'Challenges each and every one of us to think again about what we buy and eat. It’s almost like uncovering a secret state within the state.’ Andrew Marr, BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week

‘A thorough, complex and shocking insight into the food we eat in the twenty-first century … Perhaps this should be sold as the most effective diet book ever written.’ Daily Mail

‘Her expose of the costs of our year-round food cornucopia leaves no packet unscanned, and very few undamned.’ Independent