Food Reads

We love food books.  Once, when reading Heat by Bill Buford on vacation, we couldn’t agree on who got to finish the book first.  So we sat side-by-side and read it at the same time, bursting into simultaneous fits of giggle at his stories of kitchen triumphs and disasters. Here are some of our favorites that will also make you laugh, cry, want to get up and do something or want to make you change the way you eat. Mostly though, we hope they will make you very hungry…

(links, descriptions, photos, and many more books to come)

Fascinating Food Memoirs and Autobiographies

Heat, An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany,  Bill Buford

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, Judith Jones

My Year in France, Julia Child and Alex Prudhomme

How I Learned To Cook: Culinary Educations from the World’s Greatest Chefs, Kimberly Wetherspoon

Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home, Kim Sunee

Books on Sustainability and Food Production That Everyone Should Read

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

Food Non-Fiction

The United States of Arugula: The Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Dark-Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution, David Kamp

Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky

Eating England, Hattie Ellis

The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard W. Wrangham

Cookbooks with Worthwhile Reading Bits

On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee

Homegrown: Food Champions of England’s Northwest

A Taste of the Country, Jimmy Doherty

Momofuku, David Chang and Peter Meehan