Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan · 450 pages

What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer · 341 pages

After spending much of his life shifting between various omnivore and herbivore eating habits, the author presents a thought provoking look at why and how humans choose their diets. Delivering the pros and cons of eating meat, he invites readers on an insightful exploration into the many facets of food. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work,

Happy Snacking, Don't Die!: Foraging and Vegan Recipes with Black Forager (A Cookbook)

Alexis Nikole Nelson · 272 pages

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, Camille Kingsolver · 384 pages

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat."As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begi

The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

Dan Barber · 486 pages

"Renowned chef Dan Barber introduces a new kind of cuisine that represents the future of American dining in THE THIRD PLATE. Barber explores the evolution of American food from the "first plate," or industrially-produced, meat-heavy dishes, to the "second plate" of grass-fed meat and organic greens, and says that both of these approaches are ultimately neither sustainable nor healthy. Instead, Bar

Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms

Eugenia Bone · 358 pages

The Feast Nearby: How I lost my job, buried a marriage, and found my way by keeping chickens, foraging, preserving, bartering, and eating locally (all on $40 a week)

Robin Mather · 266 pages

"A charming ode (with recipes) to eating well and locally, on $40 dollars per week, from a recently unemployed food-journalism veteran. In 2009, Robin Mather found herself unemployed. She consequently moved to rural Michigan, where she committed to eating three home-cooked, seasonal, and local meals a day. In essays that chronicle a year of her ambitious project, Mather explores the confusion su

Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love and the Perfect Meal

Ava Chin · 245 pages

Chin, who writes the "Wild Edibles" column for the New York Times, goes looking for love, blackberries, and wild garlic in this wildly uneven, yet warmly exhilarating memoir. Trekking through Central Park and other urban beaten paths and backyards, Chin leads us on a journey of discovery as she searches for the tender shoots poking through cement cracks and hardy wild plants resisting winter's bit

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

Novella Carpenter · 276 pages

Urban and rural collide in this wry, inspiring memoir of a woman who turned a vacant lot in downtown Oakland into a thriving farmNovella Carpenter loves cities—the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can’t shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents’ disastrous mi

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

Kristin Kimball · 276 pages

When Manhattan writer Kristin Kimball arrived to interview an organic farmer called Mark on a Pennsylvanian farm, she was wearing high heels and a crisp white shirt and had been vegetarian for thirteen years. That evening, she found herself helping him to slaughter a pig. By the next morning she was tucking into sizzling homemade sausages drizzled with warm maple syrup, and within a few months she

The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America

Michael Ruhlman · 305 pages

Just over a decade ago, journalist Michael Ruhlman donned a chef's jacket and houndstooth-check pants to join the students at the Culinary Institute of America, the country's oldest and most influential cooking school. But The Making of a Chef is not just about holding a knife or slicing an onion; it's also about the nature and spirit of being a professional cook and the people who enter the profe

Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair

Carlo Petrini · 262 pages

Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love

Simran Sethi · 350 pages

"Bread, Wine, and Chocolate, part journey to six continents in pursuit of delicious and endangered tastes, part investigation of the loss of biodiversity from soil to plate, tells the story of what we are losing, how we are losing it, and the inspiring people and places that are bringing back the foods we love. Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi travels from wild coffee forests in Ethiopian to

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Anthony Bourdain · 288 pages

The long-awaited follow-up to the megabestseller Kitchen ConfidentialIn the ten years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business—and for Anthony Bourdain.Medium Raw explores these changes, moving bac

Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine

Rene Redzepi · 354 pages

Milk skin with grass -- The perfect storm -- René's diary -- Portrait of a Nordic chef -- Time and place -- The weather recipes -- The raw materials -- Everyone at Noma.

The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I kept the patio, lost the lawn, and fed my family for a year

Spring Warren · 335 pages

Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage

Molly Wizenberg · 241 pages

"When Molly Wizenberg married Brandon Pettit, she vowed always to support him, to work with him to make their hopes and dreams real. She evinced enthusiasm about Brandon's enthusiasms: building a violin, building a boat, and opening an ice cream store--none of which came to pass. So when Brandon started making plans to open a pizza restaurant, Molly felt sure that the restaurant would join the lis

Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste

Bianca Bosker · 450 pages

A tech reporter describes her introduction to the world of master sommeliers and her in-depth investigation into the source of their interests and skills, an effort marked by work with elite tasting groups, encounters at exclusive New York restaurants, visits to California winemakers and more.--

Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer-And What You Can Do About It

Karl Weber · 321 pages

From the Publisher: Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "more than a terrific movie-it's an important movie." Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front

Joel Salatin · 345 pages

The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America

Langdon Cook · 296 pages

"In the dark corners of America's forests grow culinary treasures. Chefs pay top dollar to showcase these elusive and beguiling ingredients on their menus. Whether dressing up a filet mignon with smoky morels or shaving luxurious white truffles over pasta, the most elegant restaurants across the country now feature an abundance of wild mushrooms. The mushroom hunters, by contrast, are a rough lot.

Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

Taras Grescoe · 326 pages

Dividing his sensibilities between Epicureanism and ethics, Taras Grescoe set out on a nine-month, worldwide search for a delicious--and humane--plate of seafood. What he discovered shocked him. From North American Red Lobsters to fish farms and research centers in China, Bottomfeeder takes readers on an illuminating tour through the $55-billion-dollar-a-year seafood industry. Grescoe examines how

Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

James McWilliams · 273 pages

We suffer today from food anxiety, bombarded as we are with confusing messages about how to eat an ethical diet. Should we eat locally? Is organic really better for the environment? Can genetically modified foods be good for you? JUST FOOD does for fresh food what Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) did for fast food, challenging conventional views, and cutting through layers of myth and mis

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant : Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone

Jenni Ferrari-Adler · 280 pages

A delightful and unexpected collection of pieces by writers, foodies, and others-including Nora Ephron, Marcella Hazan, and Ann Patchett-on the distinctive experiences of cooking for one and dining alone.If, sooner or later, we all face the prospect of eating alone, then Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant provides the perfect set of instructions. In this unique collection, twenty-six writers an