If you’re still looking for books to round out your summer reading list and you like reading about food, the New York Times has a condensed review of a bunch of food books (many focused on ethical eating choices and the carbon footprint of your dininer) – Eating the Environment: A Literary Kitchen Cornucopia. The reviews include:
Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee
A Moveable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization by Kenneth F. Kiple
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table by Russ Parsons
The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink edited by Andrew F. Smith
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg
The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket by Trevor Corson
An excerpt:
Marks & Spencer, the British department-store chain, recently started putting a new symbol on its packaged foods. The store already labels its food with the country of origin and often the name of the farmer. But shoppers who buy strawberries and beans, for example, now see a white airplane on a black circle with the words “air-freighted.” This means that the food in question was transported by airplane, leaving a big carbon footprint in the sky. In other words, go ahead and eat the beans, but you have been warned.
Thanks for the recos. You might want to check out Food Fight by Daniel Imhoff which I’m reading now. It would fit nicely with the others in your list.