Well, it reads like a detective novel filled with geneticists, biochemists and endocrinologists, folks who seldom appear as characters in your standard mystery story.

But it is a mystery story, one which is partially unraveled in the course of the book, but which has, as yet, no real ending. it seems that every time scientists think they have found the gene, hormone or neurotransmitter that is the root cause of obesity, it turns out that they are only partially correct. The biological processes which controls appetite, hunger, satiety and fat storage are immensely complex, and attempts to control these processes by pharmaceutical means have all failed. I believe that this is in large part because our bodies are programmed to get fat in times of plenty, which is what we have been living in for the past several generations in the US. This programming is meant to protect humans from the stresses of an eventual famine, but since we have lacked one of those for more generations than I can count back, our evolutionary programming has led us into a serious health problem.

This makes the book sound like it is unremittingly depressing, and for some folks, I suppose it would be. But as for me–I found the narrative to be so fascinating that I could overlook the fact that much of the book is pointing out how seemingly inevitable it is that humanity will just continue to get fatter and fatter over the next twenty years, Genetics and biochemical bodily processes fascinate me, so I can get absorbed in the relatively few success stories in the book, and let the positive feelings they generate help me get past the depressing news contained in the rest of the narrative.

On the other hand–I have to say that it is somewhat comforting to me to know that some of my assumptions that body weight is in large part controlled by genetics. I have family members who have suffered and struggled with their weight over years, and not surprisingly, they are all directly related to one very obese individual–they are here children and grandchildren. Growing up seeing these kids start out at normal sizes and weights, then over time, in adulthood, gaining more and more weight, I always assumed that it was a familial trait. Especially since most of them didn’t eat that much more than the rest of us did, and some of them ate less.

All in all, it was a really interesting read, and is well worth the effort and time it takes for a layperson to get through all of the biomedical jargon.

Summertime is the time for reading.

Well, in truth, every season is the time for reading.

In the summer, you can lounge by the pool or loll on a blanket on the beach and devour a good book from behind movie-star sunglasses. Or, you can be like me as a kid, and climb up in a tree and park yourself against a good sturdy branch like a lioness sleeping off a gazelle feast and instead of snoozing, devour books that you hoisted up the tree with a basket-pulley system.

But winter is perfect for reading, too. Long, cold, snowy nights are perfect for curling up on the couch, with a mug of hot mulled cider, wrapped in a soft old quilt, engulfed in a book.

Spring is good, too–you can listen to the patter of gentle spring rain on the windowpane while a book takes your mind on journeys your body likely never will experience.

And then there is autumn–a nice cool crisp morning when the sky is brilliant cerulean and the leaves are a blaze of russet, gold and orange is perfect for sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee and a book to read while listening to the calls of blue jays and mockingbirds.

Of course, all of these idyllic images rely upon the reader having enough time to actually sit down and read–something that I find myself lacking a bit these days, but dammit–I really do intend to read this pile of books.

So, what is in my summer-reading pile?

The titles of interest to foodies (I admit to also having a few psychology texts, parenting tomes, quilting books and books of Fortean interest in my pile, but I am sparing my readers from having to hear about them) are as follows:

Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuschia Dunlop. The truth is, I have had this book forever. Ever since it came out in hardcover, and I have tried to finish it about three times now. (That’s why it is sans dustcover in the photo–Kat long since denuded the book and destroyed the fragile paper, which is a shame because the cover image of the author drinking soup is quite fetching.) And my statement that I have tried to read it three times is really unfair, because it makes it sound like the book is boring, which it most certainly isn’t. Dunlop, the author of two of my favorite Chinese cookbooks ever, is a great writer, and her remembrances of living, working and learning cookery in China are filled with the flavors, sounds and colors of that unfamiliar, but fascinating world. The reasons I haven’t finished it have more to do with me and my lack of focus than they do with Dunlop and her storytelling ability. This time, I swear I will finish it, for real, and then write a right and proper review of it here.

My China: A Feast For All The Senses by Kylie Kwong Yeah, I’ve had this book forever, too. It is a gorgeous, oversized coffee-table tome of a cookbook, and is filled with photographs conveying the sights, sounds and flavors of China as seen through the eyes of Australian chef and restaurateur Kylie Kwong. I have drooled over the pictures and scanned the text, but have I read it or cooked from it? No. A situation I am bound and determined to remedy.

Serve The People: A Stir Fried Journey Through China by Jen Lin-Liu Yes, this is another memoir/travelogue/eatalogue of an individual who goes through China, seeing it through the eyes and stomachs of her people. Do we detect a theme in Barbara’s reading for this season? I think that we do. Right now you must be thinking that I have a one track mind, but that just is not so. As I noted before, I am also reading about child-rearing, quilting and Bigfoot, so you cannot say that I just want to read about other people traveling to China and eating their fool heads off and writing about it and am living vicariously through them. I resemble that comment, thank you very much. No, seriously, this looks like a fun read from a Chinese-American journalist, born of Taiwanese parents who spends years living and working in Beijing and Shanghai, and while there finds a love for Chinese food and culture. What’s not to like, really?

Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe This book just came out, but it looks good to me. It is so new that there are no customer reviews for it on Amazon, so I have to admit I bought it just because I have read Coe’s writing in Gastronomica and liked his writing style. That, and I am fascinated with the subject matter, which will most likely include the development of the Chinese restaurant as a mainstay of American food culture–a story which I find endlessly fascinating, in large part because I have spent plenty of time eating and working at such establishments.

The Food and Cooking of South China by Terry Tan I just got this book yesterday, and boy is it a keeper! The photographs are enticing to say the least and there are recipes for delicacies I have never heard of before–including pork and nut dumplings–how can that be bad–and steamed chicken with ginger wine. Again, how can this be bad? Look for a full review with recipe presentations later in this month or next for this book–it is definitely a keeper.

So, there is my foodie reading for the summer.

What books are in your stack of foodie reading for this season? I need to know so I can add even more books to my pile!

If you are at all a fan of Chinese American restaurant food, and if you have ever wondered about the fact that no matter how small a town you visit in the US, you are likely to find at least one Chinese restaurant there, you should pick up a copy of Jennifer 8. Lee’s book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.

The book opens with the statistical anomaly of the 110 second-place Powerball winners from the drawing of March 30, 2005. Even though only 3.5 second place winners were likely, the lottery officials were stunned to see 110 winners listed the next day–so stunned that they wondered if somehow lottery security had been breached.

It turned out that all 110 winners had played numbers they had gotten from fortune cookies–fortune cookies that had all been made in one factory and then shipped across the nation.

It was a strange case of cross-cultural luck in action, and it makes the perfect opening for a book on the cultural ubiquity of Chinese restaurants in the United States, which outnumber all of the McDonalds, Buger Kings and KFCs combined.

Filled with fun facts, fascinating stories, mysterious tales (such as the much-disputed origin of fortune cookies) and written in a light, conversational tone, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a really easy, illuminating read.

But all is not sweetness and fluff.

Lee shines a light into the dark truths surrounding the difficulties, dangers and struggles of Chinese immigrants to the US, bringing into focus the harsh realities of how others make profit on the backs of other human beings who come to the United States in search of a better life. She moves from the cold facts of the statistics on how many Chinese restaurant deliverymen, many of whom can barely speak English are murdered in New York City for paltry sums of cash and a takeout meal, to focus on the intensely personal and painful problems encountered by a Chinese immigrant family who leave New York to buy a tiny restaurant in rural Georgia. The racism and discrimination faced by Chinese immigrants is highlighted, pointing to a sad reality of life in the US, where often times Asians are invisible and are treated as if they are interchangeable.

What I found most interesting about the book was that Lee explains how Chinese restaurants arise even in the smallest areas of the United States, and how workers are supplied for these restaurants through a national network of employment agencies. This is an ingenious way to both supply workers for specialized restaurants which cannot always get workers through an existing population of Chinese immigrants (how many Chinese immigrants live in rural Georgia, for example?), as well as giving opportunities for workers to settle in places they may never have otherwise known about.

Years ago, when I was a waitress in a Chinese restaurant in Huntington, West Virginia, I got to see this system in action. The China Garden was unusual in that the owners hired American servers, dishwashers and prep cooks, but the cooks were all Chinese immigrants, many of them quite recent. I knew that the owners kept an apartment or two upstairs from the restaurant for the cooks, all of whom lived together, and I remember asking once how they found them. I was told that they called an employment agency in New York City and that they would get the names of several possible cooks and they would choose one or two as needed, and then the cooks would hop on a bus and appear a day or so later. This wasn’t the only way that cooks were hired–family members were brought from China at times, and now and again, a Chinese student from the nearby University was hired, (a medical student and nursing student were among them) but many of the workers came through the exact agency Lee writes about in this book.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is a fascinating read, giving a well-balanced view of the history and current reality of Chinese restaurants in America. It is well worth reading, and if you want to know more about the book, or the author, you can visit the book’s official website where Lee has a blog.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is Michael Pollan’s follow-up to his immensely popular and influential book,The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which documented his own personal journey as he discovered the ins and outs of various food systems in the United States, including corporate agriculture, confined animal feeding operations, small pasture-based livestock farms, foraging and hunting.

I have to be up front and say that I, like nearly everyone else in the known universe, loved The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Not only did I think that the points Pollan makes throughout the book are valid and useful, and I am thrilled to see it as widely read as it has been and continues to be, but I was also vastly entertained by his personal ruminations on his research, as well as the way in which he related his experiences in various settings. As a former farm girl and all-around country mouse, I was particularly amused by his thoughts and feelings as he did some of the nastier work involved in food-raising and gathering such as butchering chickens and field dressing a wild hog. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the city feller’s antics, but even as I snickered, I was cheering him on in his discoveries as he pushed his personal limits and stretched the boundaries of his life farther and farther in the search for a more authentic and honest relationship with food.

That said, I have to very sadly admit that I didn’t think much of In Defense of Food.

I appreciate that it is meant to be a more practical book that deals with the question raised by many readers after they finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “What, then, do we eat?” Pollan answers this question in seven simple words. “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” right at the beginning of the book, and then goes on to expand upon that statement for the next two hundred pages or so.

And that is fine and good. I agree with Pollan on that point. We should eat food, which he defines as whole foods which would be recognizable to our grandmothers, and we should eat less than we do, and we should eat less meat than we currently eat, though it is not necessary to give up all of it if we do not want to.

He advocates eating local, sustainably grown and produced foods, preferably organic, and I can’t say that I disagree with any of that.

In fact, the reason why I didn’t love this book has nothing to do with whether I think Pollan is right or wrong; I happen to agree with him on most of his major points.

It has to do with the fact that the book is not cohesive and reads like two separate smaller books melded together into one longer book.

Or, more accurately, it reads like two long, investigative magazine articles (which is where his seven-word thesis statement first appeared–in an article published a year ago for the New York Times Magazine, which I read when it came out) somewhat clumsily edited together. The truth is, the other theme of the book, that America’s dietary issues are part and parcel of the ever-changing nutritional advice we are given by scientists, a practice which he calls, “nutritionism,” is also from the same article in the New York Times Magazine. (In fact, for the first couple of chapters, I kept thinking, “I’ve read this before. Where?” By the third chapter, I figured it out. and looked it up online and found the article in question.)

However, in the article, these two themes were more elegantly woven together into a cohesive whole.

When the ideas were expanded into this small book, however, the weaving began to unravel, and what could have been a deftly written, fascinating look at why American’s obsession with health and nutrition may not in fact be healthy, and what to do about it, becomes instead a clumsy, rushed attempt to get a sequel to The Omnivore’s Dilemma out to the reading public as fast as possible.

I can understand the appeal of this approach. When Pollan wrote his New York Times Magazine article, entitled, “Unhappy Meals,” he made a concise, cogent argument that we should stop listening to the nutritional advice of the experts who use reductive science to study foods, which result in a plethora of theories which seem to be adopted and then discarded with dizzying speed, leading to great confusion on the part of consumers. He said we were better off ignoring any processed food which had health claims on its packaging and should instead go back to eating whole foods, which we cook for ourselves. He advocated ignoring the center aisles of the grocery store as much as possible, and only shopping on the edges, where the produce, dairy, meat and eggs are displayed, and we should reject any food which our grandparents would not recognize. (Of course, the problem with that advice is that all of the very traditional Chinese food I eat would have been a mystery to my grandmothers–but I am sure that a Chinese peer of my grandparents would recognize my Cantonese and Sichuan foods readily. Thus, I figure I can “grandfather” those foods into my diet and still follow the spirit, if not the actual words of Pollan’s dictum.) (And yes, that pun was intentional.)

That was a great article, and I can understand why Pollan would want to get those words out to as many people as possible, not just the folks who read the New York Times.

The problem is that he had to expand on that article to make a whole book, and that is where he got into trouble.

I don’t think that the expansion was very well done. I think it was rushed, and he ended up putting too much emphasis on the evils of nutrition science and its ties to the food processing industry, and wrote too little about what it is we should be eating instead, with practical advice on how to change the typical American’s lifestyle, shopping and cooking habits. The fact is, he could have made his point about “nutritionism” in one chapter, and then spent the rest of the book formulating answers for the difficult question of exactly how one is to change everyone’s relationship to food when not everyone has access to farmer’s markets and inner city folk don’t even always have access to real grocery stores.

To me, these are more pressing issues, although I will admit that I may be a special case in that I have been reading critically about nutrition science for quite some time, and have always been somewhat cynical about such spurious claims like margarine being more healthy than butter. (Which, of course, it isn’t: artificially hydrogenating liquid vegetable fat to make is solid introduces trans-fats which are more unhealthy than naturally solid animal fats.)

In other words, all through the majority of the book, where Pollan reiterates his indictment of “nutritionism,” I was bored to tears.

Also, I noticed that while he tells us to eat less, he makes little to no mention of exercising more. Much like Nina Planck in her book, Real Food, Pollan mentions that humans can exist on any number of diets: all meat, mostly meat, some meat, all plants, mostly plants, no plants. However, like Planck, he tends to downplay the fact that in human societies where people eat these rather extreme sounding diets, they always are more physically active than we modern Americans are.

I am of the firm belief that it is as much our couch-potato/desk-jockey lifestyle which contributes to our expanding waistlines and declining health as it is the typical processed crap food American diet.

To have both Planck and Pollan downplay this rather large elephant in the room is curious.

The other thing I missed while reading In Defense of Food was Pollan’s personal touch. This is a much less personal work, and so there are no engaging stories and anecdotes about Pollan’s discoveries and adventures. Those are my favorite parts of all of his books, and in this one, they were completely lacking.

But it need not have been that way. If he had spent longer researching this book, rather than rushing it to press, he could have done more exploration on the question of how to get more fresh, whole food to more people in this country, and I think that the book could only have benefited from that treatment.

That said, while I don’t really like the book–I think it has many good solid points.

However, all of those points are available online in the better written, more concise, “Unhappy Meals,” which is free, instead of being $21.95.

And then, you can dash off to the grocery store or farmer’s market and spend that cash you saved on some good food that someone’s grandma somewhere would recognize as wholesome and tasty.

I know that quite a few of you don’t have babies or children of your own.

But you may well have nieces or nephews, or a number of friends who have decided to procreate, or heck, maybe even a neighbor or co-worker is about to have a baby.

What is the perfect gift for a foodie to give to a baby in order to open new eyes to the world of food?

Well, other than a ringside seat in the kitchen with the highchair pulled near the stove so that the scents, sights and sounds of cooking enter their consciousness from day one? And other than a taste, smell and touch of every ingredient in your kitchen? And other than a personal guided tour of all of your coffee-table cookbooks with lavish photographs of food in exotic locales?

I think the perfect gift for any food in training (pants) are the little picture board books of Amy Wilson Sanger in her “World Snacks” series.

Sanger is a paper collage artist, and her work is filled with color, energy and a vivacious joy that is irresistible to kids and adults alike. The first of her books I ever saw were Yum Yum Dim Sum, and My First Book of Sushi, which were at one of the gift shops at the Smithsonian when we had gone back to visit a few years ago. I was pregnant at the time, and so we bought them along with a pair of tiny child’s chopsticks and a little rice bowl decorated with painted kittens all over it. I was heartbroken, of course, when that pregnancy ended in miscarriage, but while the sight of the little bowl and chopsticks were too much for me to bear, the rhymes of those two little books still made me smile, if a bit wistfully. (My very favorite rhyme is from My First Book of Sushi: “Miso in my sippy cup, tofu in my bowl/Crab and avocado fill my California Roll.”)

So, even though I wasn’t sure if I would ever get pregnant again, I kept those two little books on my shelf, little testaments to the hope that one day I would have a chance to share them with a little one of our own.

In the meantime, I bought other copies of them, along with the other titles in the series, and sent them along to my nieces when they were born, and to Zak’s newly born cousins. Let’s Nosh, which introduces such Jewish delicacies as gefilte fish, noodle kugel, and hamentaschen, was a great favorite among them, though I, myself was partial to A Little Bit of Soul Food, which features southern goodies like fried chicken, collard greens and biscuits and gravy–the food I grew up on.

When Kat was born, I was thrilled to round out the collection with Hola Jalapeno! which covers delicious Mexican foods like enchiladas and turkey mole, and Mangia! Mangia!, which tells all about Italian favorites such as spaghetti with polpettini (meatballs), risotto and gelato. I also cannot wait for the release of the newest in the series, Chaat and Sweets, which will cover the foods of India.

I think that we can all agree that reading to babies is important; it helps them develop a love of language, learning and reading if they are read to from picture books (and other books–I used to read to Morganna from Tennyson and Tolkien when she was a baby) from a very early age. The sound of written language, especially poetry, helps babies learn to recognize and try to emulate the rhythms of spoken words. Kat shows this when she looks at these books, and babbles, her voice naturally taking on the sing-song, up-down rhythmic quality of the rhymes she has heard us repeat for these books over and over.

Recognition of colors, shapes, and representational art are all important developmental stages assisted by reading to babies and toddlers from picture books. They learn to understand drawings and photographs as representing something else, and they learn to recognize and vocalize colors by having physical representations shown to them from an early age. With the many shapes and colors of the foods presented in these books, babies are exposed to a myriad of forms which is not only stimulating aesthetically, but intellectually as well.

Not only do Sanger’s books, like all picture books, help with literacy development, and intellectual stimulation, they also help introduce worldwide cultures through the foods typical to that culture. They introduce both the diversity of food and dining habits, but also the universality of them. They give children an imaginary taste of foods and ways of life that may at first seem very different to them, but after being read these books over and over, what once might have been strange will seem familiar and comforting.

In a rapidly shrinking global community, where the United States is even more of a melting pot than it ever has been before, I think that this introduction to culture via food is extremely important and valuable, and I only hope that more parents use these books to help their kids become good global citizens from an early age.

I just wonder what Sanger’s next project in the series will be? French food? Scandinavian? African?

How about Arab foods? Personally, I think that the last choice, while it might be seen as too controversial, would be quite welcome and useful in helping to dispel some of the untrue stereotyping of Arabic culture that the US media has perpetuated over the past several years.