What a relief to find ourselves in a non-faddy cook book year. We are not being encouraged to chew only plants, ferment everything, grow burgers in labs or devour insects. It’s not that I don’t look for answers to how we should eat to survive the future, but I know a thing or two about the human appetite and no scheme seems any more sustainable than the way the West eats now.

The answer is there – and always has been – but it’s adrift. In The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavours of the Past (Greystone Books, £19.99), Taras Grescoe identifies the crucial ingredient: diversity. The most successful species owes much to its ability to eat anything, to being omnivorous, but for the past century it has existed on a monoculture of grains and a few types of protein. There is so much more out there, urgently needing to be found.

I cheered when I read this nicely compact book, a series of lyrically descriptive essays telling of the author’s interesting journeys to find the world’s forgotten foods. It is beautifully persuasive. If we stop forcing farmers to produce such a limited range of nourishment, our grandchildren might have a fighting chance.

Cooking also plays its part in diversity. A delegation of dieticians from an American university made a study of eating habits in Burgundy and found that the low rates of cardiovascular disease there – despite extreme butter consumption – was not just due to the range of ingredients consumed seasonally but to the even larger repertoire of recipes for each one. Cooking in this way is also endangered, though perhaps not lost, so we can look at new cook books while holding Grescoe’s in the other hand.

Blanche Vaughan has made a collection of home recipes that revert to a simple philosophy: cook the right thing at a certain time. In A Year in the Kitchen: Seasonal Recipes for Everyday Pleasure (Mitchell Beazley, £35), she follows her instinct to make use of what is there. You do not need deep pockets to put her food on the plate – try her boiled eggs in tamarind sauce or gratin of greens and glazed miso aubergine. Her ideas cross the world for pleasure-giving standards such as kedgeree with a poached egg and chicken with sweet wine and grapes. Every recipe has an explanatory introduction, and this is an extremely pretty book.

Comfort and love in these endlessly difficult times is what we need, and they are the themes of many of this year’s cook books, including Skye McAlpine’s A Table Full of Love (Bloomsbury, £26). The author studied ancient love poetry at university, and her chapters follow love-related themes. So in place of the usual breakfast, lunch and dinner sections of many ‘comfort cooking’ books, we have (along with ‘Comfort’) ‘Seduce’, ‘Spoil’, ‘Nourish’ and ‘Cocoon’ – the last devoted to cooking for one. I always like this theme, since it can be very difficult to cook interestingly for oneself.

McAlpine’s recipes are usually founded on memories – a chicken soup that encouraged her gravely ill mother back to appetite or others that began in flirtation and which she and her husband still nostalgically follow (‘Anthony’s Special Pancakes’). Her cheese and Marmite soufflé is an invitation to make something many of us are terrified of – and it works. The ‘Nourish’ section includes many come-hither recipes for children. All in all,  A Table Full of Love overflows with tender, scrumptious ideas.

The first chapter of Grace Dent’s witty Comfort Eating: What We Eat When Nobody’s Looking (Guardian/Faber, £20) revolves around a recipe for beans on toast with crushed Wotsits – so we’re not taking the McAlpine approach here. Dent hosts the popular podcast also titled ‘Comfort Eating’, and her book is an analysis of her most successful interviews, where she might discuss fried bread sandwiches with Jo Brand or ‘butter-pepper-rice’ with Russell T. Davies. She recognises that her life is extremely weird, sampling complex tasting menus at gastronomic temples or on Masterchef while her sofa meal in front of the telly could be dipping oven chips into Bisto. (I’ve long suspected that viewers of competitive TV cooking programmes may have these awful habits, and thank her for providing the evidence.) But this is a gift to those who need to laugh in grief and like to eat what the hell they want.

Of course we can’t always have what we want. In Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain (Atlantic Books, £22), Pen Vogler points out the double meaning of the word ‘stuffed’ in relation to eating. When food is plentiful, we stuff ourselves; when it runs out, we’re stuffed. The narrative goes that the survival of the human race owes much to how the food supply is organised by those in power,  in times of feast or famine. Vogler’s book is divided into the histories of different foods – each telling of supply and demand falling into the right or wrong hands. The stories span pre-Enclosure times to the recent pandemic. They are deeply unsettling and anger-provoking, and it’s a book that those who have influence over what we eat should read.

How did China undergo such an extraordinary period of social change in the past century yet retain a food culture of amazing sophistication? Fuchsia Dunlop helps us understand. She knows more about Chinese cuisine than any western food writer, and is the author of all my favourite Chinese cookbooks. Invitation to a Chinese Banquet (Particular Books, £25) has already been hailed a masterpiece. For every tale of cooks and communities, from the grandest to the humblest,  you know she has been hovering curiously in all their kitchens, and her sheer love of the dishes is infectious.

Without fridge freezers there would no such thing as the modern cook. You can read all about the invention of the fridge and the infrastructure behind the provision of the element that has done so much for civilisation in Fred Hogge’s Of Ice and Men: How We’ve Used Cold to Transform Humanity (Pegasus, £20). It is an astonishing story. Food forms only a part of the plot: do not expect ice cream recipes. Hogge’s conclusion is indeed chilling – so pause for thought when pouring a Christmas cocktail (but make a comforting toast when you do).