PRECIOUS CARGO: How Foods From the Americas Changed The World by Dave DeWitt looks at how tomatoes became essential to Italian cooking, paprika remade Hungarian cooking, maize and peanuts became African staples and potatoes became a valuable food source everywhere.
Most of this was interesting but the Asian section bogs down; it’s not a history of how the foods spread as much as an overall survey of Peppers In East Asian Cuisine which is not the same thing. That dragged down some of the fun of the book.
AN OBSESSION WITH BUTTERFLIES: Our Long Love Affair With a Singular Insect by Sharman Apt Russell is one of those nature books looking at thetile topic from every angle: how butterflies sense, feed, reproduce, grow, survive their attackers and human connections such as the network of breeders that supports butterfly houses. Not the best such book I’ve read, but good and informative.
NIGHT RIDERS IN BLACK FOLK HISTORY by Gladys-Marie Fry looks at oral history accounts by former slaves and their descendants of how the South used not only brute force and the threat of force to control them but also urban legends—abolitionists would take you from the plantation so they could sell you to Cuba, Canadians would eat you, the “night doctors” in Northern cities would bodysnatch you for dissection, etc. Interesting but it feels vaguely lacking; part of that, I think, is that I’d like these beliefs put in the context of white superstitions in the same era.
#SFWApro. Tomato image by JLPC, butterfly by Erin Silversmith, both via Wikimedia Commons.
