Book Club

We’re on summer vacation! No formal book clubbery until September, since we’re too busy gardening, eating ice cream, playing with our friends’ new babies, and cooking. Oh, and working. Sigh. In the meantime, if you read anything great, let us know — we’ll add it to our to-read list!

Become a virtual member of our book club! You won’t be able to get any of our snacks, but you will have the satisfaction of reading a bunch of food-related books about everything from national food policy to chef confessionals.

For May, we read Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. Why we will eat more M&Ms from a multi-colored bowl than a mono-colored bowl? If I served you a great French wine but told you that it was made in Oklahoma, would you love it or hate it? Does the kind of music playing in a restaurant’s dining room influence how much you’ll eat? Would you be more likely to order Chilean sea bass or Patagonian toothfish — even if they’re the exact same thing? Wansink, a food psychologist, explores the subtle physical, social and psychological factors that influence our food intake  — and how we might consciously combat those factors.

For March, we read Frank Bruni’s Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater. From 2004 to 2009, Bruni was the restaurant critic for the New York Times. Born Round, as best I can tell without yet having read it (my copy’s en route to my preferred Chicago Public Library branch!), is the story of Bruni’s lifelong struggle with binge eating, bulemia, and weight issues.

Past titles include:

• Animal Vegetable Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver

• Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, by Mark Winne

• Farm City by Novella Carpenter

• Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon

• Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, by Mark Bittman

• Real Food: What to Eat and Why, by Nina Planck

• A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table, by Mollie Wizenberg

(Just fyi, in most cases, links will send you to the book’s or author’s website directly rather than to an online-mega-retailer.)