From the synopsis: “Migration, politics, and the dynamics of group identity all shape what we eat, and we can learn to trace these social forces from the plate to the kitchen, the factory, and the field.”

I have a lot of thoughts, but I don’t even know where to start. I think there’s a lot going on with this book. It’s a nice short read at 200ish pages, but it lacked focus. I guess this is a jumping off point, a sort of beginners book for a super broad and historied subject.

Firstly, I learned a good few bits of things about food, like how coffee seeds are seen as beans (because of marketing), and that Han China had butchers so famous they wrote tales and sometimes poems about their butchering abilities. I also love that I learned that fruit “leathers” could be used as a snack, or dissolved in hot water to become a sweet drink.

The authors bounce from stories from ancient China to ancient Persia to Rome, Japan, South Korea, and lots of other Asian countries. The timeline went all the way back to 11,000 BCE to the first traces of agriculture but skipped over almost all of American history which has a BIG history of migration, politics, and definitely dynamics of group identity shaping what we eat. I thought there would be a more in depth chapter later on, so I kept waiting. After I noticed that Indigenous peoples were mostly mentioned only as a starting point, the focus is mostly on the colonizers and the people who took those foods as “signs of privilege,” whilst also putting the negative history on a back burner. One that isn’t on, because they have no intention of it cooking. It makes the book feel like such a shallow dive into the history of food. It might be that they wanted to cover a lot of ground, but it also lacked focus.

The authors also add in some personal experiences around food that don’t really correlate to the stories other than location. While he talks about seeing nem, a Vietnamese roll, being served at a Senegalese restaurant, he then mentions that he visited Senegal, but never ate nem there. So why bring up the trip to Senegal? 😭

There’s also a weird chapter at the end talking about Japanese knives/the history of personal knives which I’m pretty sure was added in for the author to add in their last line of the book: “The knife divides in order to share,” which sounds cool I guess? There wasn’t much of a focus on evolution of kitchen tools throughout the book, so it all just felt out of place.

I liked what this book attempted to do, but it feels like they shied away from telling hard truths. I was hoping to hear more about mentions of the Native Americans and how colonizers decimating their food sources impacted future animal husbandry or important future food sources. Nor do they mention of the enslaved people from Africa and their influences in American food culture. I don’t know, I was hoping for more of what I read in the synopsis. Yes, you get some history stories surrounding food and their origins but vivid storytelling might be a stretch.

I’ve never met a cookbook where I want to cook nearly every single recipe, but I have now?? I read most of the little blurbs, essays, and the little writings in between recipes last night, and I cooked one of the recipes for dinner the next day. 🥰 Instantly went into my notebook of recipes to add to my rotation. Garlic Peri Peri roast chicken, for those curious.

Anyways, she even includes a couple tin fish recipes (love tin fish), that I can’t wait to try out next.