Bad Food Britain: How a Nation Ruined its Appetite by Joanna Blythman (318pp, Fourth Estate, £7.99)
The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World by Michael Pollan (450pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99)
Insatiable: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream by Jason Fagone (302pp, Yellow Jersey, £7.99)

We are obsessed with food and, currently, with books about it. So much so, that Joanna Blythman can write a tirade on how rubbish we are at cooking, eating and buying our daily meals, consuming "more junk than the rest of Europe put together", yet gamble on there being enough of us willing to read her to underwrite an advance - a contradiction as beguiling as our watching hours of Gordon Ramsay while stuffed with the very filth he imprecates. She does a fine demolition job on British pretensions to culinary sophistication, throwing into a bubbling pot of disdain our infinite appetite for potato crisps and snack foods, our inability to eat meals at the dining table (sales of which have plummeted in these Ikea years), the easy and arrogant monopoly of the likes of Tesco, and the stupid pick-and-mix of flavours demonstrated on restaurant menus up and down the land. It's a grand knockabout, most of which is true. The big question is: so what? We live longer than we ever did; we are, generally speaking, in better health; everything else is an optional extra. We might do better, we might enjoy it more, be more graceful in our habits; but we should also doff a cap of recognition to the progress we have made thanks in teensy part to the efforts of the food industry. No one, not even Blythman, should kid themselves that milk and honey used once to flow in the gutters of England.

Is eating a moral act? Should we elevate the animal to the intellectual? Blythman dismisses those who eat from "a mongrel menu that cannibalises world cuisine and spawns meals that do not gel into a coherent whole because they lack any sound unifying principle". Since when does the stomach recognise unifying principles, or any form of ethic? Food critics are prone to fallacy if they stray from the strict criteria of taste and flavour.

British food critics in particular must beware another philosophical elephant trap: the glorification of our European neighbours. All would be well, they say, if only we were like Tia Maria from Andalusia. The sorry fact is that our food habits (give or take our starting point, which in Britain was pretty far to the rear) are as much creatures of economic and social change as they are the consequence of a ready supply of paella. In France, the number of farms is plummeting daily, the proportion of agricultural workers in free fall, the time allocated to cookery in French households declining as precipitately as it has done in Britain, restaurant food is rubbish, and that little neighbourhood bistro a thing of the past (while pizza is the Frenchman's favourite street food). Each year, they get a little more like us, and Italy and Spain tread closely on their heels. Meanwhile, there is hardly a month's difference in our life expectancies.

Michael Pollan, from an American perspective, tends also to the glorification of old Europe as he explores the consequences of "the omnivore's dilemma". Unlike most of the animal kingdom, humans will eat (almost) anything. How they make their choices from an infinite larder is a learned skill (while koala bears are never taught to stick to eucalyptus). Those inheriting a strong food tradition (those pesky Europeans) will do the learning better and more quickly than deracinated Americans, thus avoiding thrall to the industrial complex that dominates US food production and supply, to the infinite detriment of the consumer. To demonstrate his thesis, he explores three models: the prairie corn grower powered by chemicals and fossil fuels; the small mixed farm, usually organic, raising animals on cleverly managed grasslands; and the hunter-gatherer obtaining his foods from the wild.

He follows their products downstream, all the way to the dining table, allowing plenty of diversions into distribution, marketing and supply. There is much to provoke thought, and not just on the iniquities of industrial food. His exposition of organic agriculture is masterly, not least the necessary distinction between "industrial" organic growers (not much better, frankly, than your average intensive, tractor-driving East Anglian) and the self-sufficient one-man-bands who now call themselves "beyond organic" and produce real food. But again, some of the reasoning seems glib. He does not address the consequences for world life expectancy and population if there had been no agricultural revolution, if we had stayed with the Slow Food model of production from the 1800s until today. Sometimes benefits outweigh what would be disaster.

These smart-alec debating points do not disguise the fact that much of what we (and the US) eat is repellent, is produced in dire conditions and contains ingredients that should be spurned. What is the solution? On the home front, it's simple: cook it yourself. Why ever eat manufactured food, almost all of which is disgusting? For the individual: develop your tastebuds. Properly schooled, they will not let you down. They will certainly not delight in Walker's crisps or Heinz tomato ketchup. And government's, or society's, chief responsibility should be to train those tastebuds.

If you want to know what happens when we get dysfunctional about food, read Jason Fagone's Insatiable. He, of course, would disagree, citing Japan (foodies' nirvana), where the subculture of competitive eating is thriving (or was, at any rate, until the untimely deaths by choking of two hapless contestants). In the course of a slightly overlong odyssey in the company of David "Coondog" O'Karma and other quixotically named professional stomachs, the reader finds out all he needs to know about this niche of trash culture. Fagone tries to extract some bigger truth, but that seems only to be that humans do some funny things to gain money, fame or satisfaction. So funny indeed, that the reader must weep.

· Tom Jaine runs Prospect Books, a specialist food imprint