Nuance is the first victim of images’ victory over words

I have written a book about something maddeningly complicated. So complicated, I would argue, that a book is the only possible way to understand it. Ravenous (co-written with my husband, Henry Dimbleby) is an attempt to explain the entire food system, from farm to fork. It is a behind-the-scenes tour, examining how the vast, complex machinery of food production and consumption is shaping human behaviour, making us fat and ill, and doing terrible damage to our planet.

The food system is full of subtleties and surprises. Things that seem obvious turn out to be nothing of the sort. Simple, ideologically pure solutions are disappointingly hard to find. Intensive livestock farming, for instance, is miserable for the animals involved – but can have a lower carbon footprint than kinder, free-range farming. The “alternative proteins” that look set to bring vegan food into the mainstream will mostly turn out to be junk food: just as bad for our bodies as their meat-based equivalents, but fantastic for the environment.

Writing about such a sprawling and nuanced subject is like doing a giant, philosophical Rubik’s Cube. You have to keep turning and turning it, looking at all the different faces, clicking the pieces this way and that, until they start to come together into something that makes sense. Sometimes, as we laboured over the book, I felt we were attempting something weirdly old-fashioned: using words (plenty of them) to make a complex subject comprehensible to anyone.

We live in the age of the image, not the word. The cultural weapons of our time are visual: memes, selfies, reels, TikTok videos and YouTube shorts. Reading is in sharp decline, as the screen supplants the book. Only 23 per cent of under-17s in this country regularly read for pleasure, down from 38 per cent in 2012. Writing – even in its most basic form – is on a similar trajectory. The messages my children send on their phones are 90 per cent gifs, pictures or recorded “voice messages”; the remaining 10 per cent consists almost entirely of baffling abbreviations.

Does it matter if we forget to use our words? Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, thinks not. “People have always been visual – our brains are wired for images,” he argues. “Writing was a hack, a detour. Pictorial languages are how we all started to communicate – we are coming full circle.”

Personally, I don’t find this terribly comforting. Cave paintings are okay, but words are immeasurably better. Language – especially written language – is the most effective method we have for conveying ideas from one human to another.

Success depends, of course, on the quality of the writing. But a book is by definition a slower, more detailed, more contemplative medium than a video. The process of reading allows more scope for thought than merely watching. Each of us reads according to our own internal rhythm. We can go back to double check, slow down to untangle or savour a particular sentence, look up and gaze into space while a new idea beds down in the brain.

The decline in reading is almost certainly exacerbating – to some degree causing – the polarisation and lack of nuance in debate. Books are the personal trainers of the mind, keeping us supple and curious. The less we practise following long trains of complex thought, the less patience we have with complexity itself.

‘Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape’, by Henry Dimbleby and Jemima Lewis, is published by Profile and available via the Telegraph bookshop