Name: The Man who Ate Everything
ISBN: 9780375702020

Jeffrey Steingarten

Offers forty essays that recount the quest for the perfect fat substitute, the best formula for sourdough bread, and other culinary grails

And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits

The Man who Ate Everything

Laura Mauler

I don't understand this book. The premise seemed to be that the author had lots of different foods that he would not eat (kimchi, Greek food, etc.) and he decided he didn't want to live that way anymore. He didn't want to be someone whose eating phobias made it difficult for his dining companions, like vegans or those insufferable people who choose to go gluten free. So he basically gets over it. He says that it takes between 8 and 10 exposures to a new food for a child to embrace it, and that it took basically that same amount of exposure to the foods he hated for him to get over those phobias. All this in the introduction to the book. The rest of the book is a snooze fest. The first chapter is about making bread, and he does diary entries for the journey he took in trying to make his own delicious bread. This could have been interesting, but it was not. After that I skipped ahead to a random page and skimmed it to see if the book got better. The page was simply a bullet-point list of ketchup brands, their prices, and a single sentence of review of the product. I turned ahead a page, then two, and found that he literally was listing his personal reviews of 35 different ketchups. Is this a joke? I cannot tell you how little of a shit I give about ketchup brand reviews. 

In sum, it seems that someone has forgotten to tell this author that books are supposed to be interesting. Avoid.

The Man who Ate Everything And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits

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