Weekend Cooking Review: WHAT I EAT by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio

Several months ago, when I reviewed What the World Eats by Menzel and D'Aluisio, Amanda Gignac suggested I try out What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets by the same authors. Although it contains similar content--photographs of what people eat from around the world--Amanda was totally right when she said that What I Eat is a lot better than What the World Eats. It has better photographs, essays, and doesn't have as many generalizations or preachy moments.

In What the World Eats, Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio photographed families from around the world with a week's worth of food, focusing on how much each family spent. Although it was an interesting idea, the format invited large generalizations. By comparison, What I Eat focuses on individuals and what they eat during the course of one day. This is much better, because it connects food more specifically to a person's lifestyle rather than their nationality. A trucker, for example, logically gets most of his/her food from gas stations and fast food restaurants and needs something that can be eaten one-handed; a German biermeister is obviously going to drink a lot of beer!



The book is organized by how many calories each person eats in a day. I really had no idea what the average calorie intake for an individual was before I started reading this book, but it seems like most people eat between 2200 and 3000 calories per day. Below 2000 calories is mostly athletes who need to be light (my aunt, a competitive rower, once told me she limited herself to 1200 calories a day during racing season--now I know just how low that is!), extreme dieters, workaholics who don't have time to eat, or people living in poverty. Even the fashion model Menzel and D'Aluisio photographed, Mariel Booth, eats 2400 calories a day. One might think that at the other end of the spectrum--people who eat 4000 calories or more per day--there would also be athletes who need energy. But actually, this group is almost entirely made up of men who work outdoors, particularly cold outdoors--with the notable exception of an English housewife who binge eats at 12,000+ calories.

If there's one thing I've learned from this book, though, it's that how many calories you eat doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with how much you weigh, despite what we hear on television. Viahondjera Musutua from Namibia eats about 1500 calories a day and weighs 160 pounds, while João Agustinho Cardoso from Brazil eats more than three times as much--5200 calories a day--yet weighs twenty pounds less! How many calories a dish has and how much food you're actually getting through it also seems to vary wildly: even though extreme dieters Rick Bumgardener and Mackenzie Wolfson eat less than 2000 calories a day, there seems to be a lot more food in their calories than there is in Chinese student Chen Zhen's 2600.



Part of the reason, as explained in Bijal P. Trivedi's excellent essay "The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Calorie," is that all calories are not created equal. When calories were "discovered" by Wilbur Olin Atwater in the 19th century, he was basically looking for a way to measure the amount of energy a person can get from food. But each calorie is made up of different values and behaves differently depending on what you do to it (processing, cooking, etc.), so what exactly goes into a "calorie" and how it will affect your body can be extremely variable.

There are several good essays in this book, which helps to mitigate the preachy tone I didn't like in What the World the Eats and elevates What I Eat to a more serious study of how humans relate to food. Trivedi's essay and Michael Pollan's "The End of Cooking," where he talks about the irony of America's obsession with foodie television and the fact that less and less people are cooking for themselves, were my two personal favorites.

Overall I found this to be a book worth tracking down and think it should definitely be of interest to anyone who likes reading about food. It would also be a great resource if you're planning a trip to any of these countries and want to find out what a typical meal might be.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up over the weekend.

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Book Review: WHEN NIGHT FALLS by Jenna Ryan

Remember a few months ago when I begged asked for help finding two books I'd read a really long time ago? Well, this was the first book! I actually found it!

When Night Falls was published in 1993, which means I was either 12 or 13 when I first read it, and my recall of the details was actually pretty spot-on. Cassie, a crime scene photographer in London, follows a mysterious figure from the scene of brutal murder, straight into 1790. The man she followed, Anthony Lazarus Morgan, is a butler in the house of a baronet--and in his spare time, he travels through time investigating crimes. It turns out the murders in Cassie's London were committed by Jack the Ripper, who is also a time traveler, and he's now in 1790. Dun dun dun!

I'm happy to report that this book is as much fun as I remembered. Here are some of the things I heart about this book:

• The hero is a butler. Morgan isn't a lord something-or-other (not even a secret one), or someone who is rich, but a butler. Hallefreakinglujah! A hero with an actual profession, can you imagine?!?
  
• It's set in Georgian England! This is actually a little odd, because the atmosphere of the book feels very Victorian, and there are a lot of references in the book--everything from Charles Dickens to Courier and Ives--that come from the late 19th century. But I can see why Jenna Ryan pushed the setting back another century, because it gives a fresh twist to the whole Jack the Ripper plot thing.
• Mystery! Although the mystery starts to seriously drag in the second half of this novel, it's my favorite part of the book. There are tons of suspects who are all interesting, and Ryan keeps you guessing as to which one is Jack the Ripper. Even having read the book before, I was surprised when the killer was revealed.
  
• It's the heroine's story. This isn't the type of romance novel where it's all about the hero. The star of the show is Cassie, and it's upon her that the main action in the book hinges. She's smart, tough, quickly adaptable, and also the sexual aggressor in her relationship with Morgan.

Of course, there are some inconsistencies in the story I don't remember noticing when I was 12. Why is Morgan allowed at every crime scene and why do people keep asking his advice on how to investigate, for instance? I don't know! It's a time travel romance, maybe he altered time so that butlers are considered good crime scene investigators. It also bugged me that women of Georgian England kept being referred to as weak-willed and passive, especially when two of three Georgian-era females in this book were pretty damn bossy and clearly in charge of their own domains.

Overall, though, this is a pretty entertaining read. The romance is much more of a subplot than the mystery is, but it develops over the course of the novel and there's no instalove or -lust going on. Jack (the Ripper) also gets his own scenes, which are weirdly enjoyable because he's basically Norman Bates in the 18th century. I'm super-happy I found this book and I'm never letting it out of my sight again! Exclamation mark!



Musical Notes: There's really no logical reason for this, but "Walk Like a Man" by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons kept running through my head while I was reading this.

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Book Review: DARKER STILL by Leanna Renee Hieber

In 1880's New York City, a young girl who is mute falls in love with a painting. This may seem like an usual plot, but actually there's a long tradition of stories and fables where art either comes to life, traps a live person, or seems to be alive to the point where someone falls in love the subject. What do they all have in common? They all have something to do with sex and the gaze. They all suggest that a truth lies in the image that's hidden by ordinary life. And they're all more interesting than Darker Still.

I really wanted to like this novel. Leanna Renee Hieber was one of the first authors to connect with my blog because I reviewed her first book, and I think she's a great writer. As an art historian, I tend to read every book that has something to do with art I come across and, in a very weird coincidence, I wrote about runes in painting for my master's thesis. Also, Colette from A Buckeye Girl Reads got a copy of Darker Still signed and then mailed it to me! Wasn't that nice of her?

With all that, one might think this book and I would be sure bets--I certainly thought so--but I wound up not finishing it. Perhaps it might be because I know too much about the subject, but I don't think so. I don't expect total historical accuracy from novels, especially in a subject as obscure as the occult in art. However, I DO expect a good story, and that simply didn't happen here.

Darker Still started out okay. It's "framed" in the way novels from the nineteenth century tend to be, as part of a police file that includes the main character's journal. At first I thought this was pretty brilliant and clever, but I was quickly bothered by the fact that the "journal entries" didn't read like journal entries, but like a regular novel in the first person.

When I really knew this book and I wouldn't get along, though, was the first time Natalie sets eyes on the portrait of Lord Denbury. This is basically the meet-cute of the book, yes? Even if it's just a painting, I expected something--some spark, some chemistry, or at the very least something interesting--to happen. But alas, nada. I read over the scene three times just to make sure I hadn't missed a key word or sentence that would tell me why everyone found this portrait to be so intriguing.



To be sure, the portrait has a somewhat curious history (although nothing sensational) and the subject is handsome--or so we're told. But the problem is that as a reader I cannot see this portrait. I'm told Denbury is handsome, but the way he's described makes him sound like Zoolander. The rest of the painting was related in a very stark, bare-bones manner, and sounded like a totally orndinary portrait. Rather boring and old-fashioned, in fact; certainly nothing to cause a Madame X-level of buzz.

Furthermore, while reading about the painting I kept being distracted by inconsistencies that pulled me out of the story. For example, Natalie describes Denbury thusly: "Tiny traces between his nose and the corners of his pursed and perfect lips indicated that his mouth would grow lines of an often wide smile as he aged." First of all, that's a pretty tortured sentence (one of many). And second of all, what seventeen-year-old thinks about how a person is going to age? The whole scene is wrapped up by Natalie declaring, "And yet, there was something terribly compelling about him." UHG. Insta-love much? Not only is that the romance cliche to end all romance novel cliches, but I don't find him compelling, and there's no reason why Natalie does beyond the fact that everyone else seems to.

I kept reading in the hopes the book would improve when Natalie went into the portrait, and it did a bit, but Denbury seemed silly rather than mysterious, and the villains were cartoonishly obvious. I was laughing a whole hell of a lot, and not because the book was trying to be funny. It was because of cheesy scenes like this:

I studied the particulars of the scene. The book The Girl remained jutting out from the shelf.

And then I noticed a new shift. Something else out of place. Different.

On his desk, the pristine blotter bore droplets of ink, and the quill was lying on its side rather than upright in the shaft of the inkwell. Two words seemed to scream up at me from a note that faced my direction on his desk.

Yes, you!

Haha! Denbury wants YOU! Yes, you! Just in case you thought he was telegraphing the cat. Or when Natalie finally meets this supposed 19-year-old heart-throb and he commences with the desk-pounding and exclamation-marking:

"Denbury pounded his fist on his desk in fury. 'The bloody bastard!'"

Two pages later...

"'I'd just begun to live!' He pounded his fist against the desk..."

At this point I'd started to feel like Darker Still was an adaptation of The Nutcracker and Mouse King, where a young girl becomes nonsensically obsessed with a painting instead of a nutcracker. But rather than turning out to be a prince, the guy is a bombastic octogenarian Whig; and instead of sweeping her off to an enchanted palace made of candy, he takes her to a 9x11 office cubicle with a fake fireplace. Très romantic.

On top of all this, I really hated Natalie as a character. Her personality basically IS that she's mute. That's it. There doesn't seem to be any reason for what she does beyond the fact that someone else wants her to do it, or any reasoning behind her ideas other than someone else thought it. Of course, she never really NEEDS to think, seeing as how who is good and who is evil and what exactly is going on and what she needs to do about it is all telegraphed to her, in a painfully obvious fashion. Snorz!

I heard a saying the other day that "A cat sat on a mat is not a story. A cat sat on another cat's mat is a story." This book is about a cat who sat on a mat. Everything just happens, with no conflict or intrigue to keep the reader engaged. There's no sense of atmosphere, historical place and time, characters with personalities, or stakes. And this why it read so young to me--as if it was written for 8-11 year-olds rather than teens or adults--because there's really no depth to the story at all. What you see is what you get, and that's pretty damn boring in art, life, and literature.

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Downton Abbey Season Two Episode One Recap!

Today I'm co-recapping the fist episode of Downton Abbey's second season at Edwardian Promenade. Check it out and share with us what you thought!

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Weekend Cooking Review: FED UP WITH LUNCH by Sarah Wu

You know those people who tweet about what they had for lunch? Well, Sarah Wu made a whole blog about it and then turned it into a book! Blogging "undercover" as the anonymous Mrs. Q, the elementary school teacher mobile blogged pictures of her and students' lunches every day for a year, along with descriptions of what the food was, how it tasted and looked. What did Wu learn from her Supersize Me-like experiment?

I had never visited (or even heard about) Wu's blog, Fed Up with Lunch, until this book came out; but in the interest of learning more about the author and where she's coming from, I looked over her lunch posts. I can definitely see why Fed Up with Lunch is so popular--the blog is really fun and interesting. Most of the attraction lies in Wu's photographs, which aren't professional by any means, but offer a fascinating glimpse into another world. Because most of the food is prepackaged or an appetizing shade of brown-ish, you have no idea what it is until she tells you. The writing itself is really lively and vibrant, but also short--probably about 100-300 words per post. It's said food is a window onto a culture--if that's the case, then the culture of the Illinois school system is like something out of the Jetsons. Their lunches are really bizarre and look like they came out of a space port.

Don't expect any of that from this book, though. This is a memoir of how and why Wu started the blog and her experiences with it, including meeting Jamie Oliver (she had the good fortune to start her blog just as Oliver was airing Food Revolution), being interviewed for Good Morning America, and so on. The pictures of food, which are the heart of Wu's blog, are reduced to 1-inch-square images so small you can't tell what you're looking at, and Wu actually doesn't describe the food she ate that much at all (with the notable and horrifying exception of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich).

Wu states in her book that she felt like a journalist, and I can see that on her blog, but it doesn't translate to this book. If this book is journalism, it's of the fluff variety. She says up-front she's not a food expert, which is fine, but it also shows in that the book reads more like the ruminations of a mom on how we need to watch kids' nutrition, etc. etc. While that's certainly true, as a call to action it's not terribly effective.

There was one really good chapter in the book based on Wu's experiences in the food industry. She worked for Kraft for several years (something she only bothers to mention in chapter seven?), and talks about how food corporations need to show an increase in sales to keep their stock prices up, even though food consumption naturally remains steady. That was really interesting and explained a lot about how food is produced in America.

If you watched Oliver's Food Revolution, you're probably aware that communities' reaction to changing their school food system tends to be met with anything ranging from apathy to antagonism. This book certainly doesn't do any better job than Oliver's TV show at changing that attitude--I have to admit, I'm kind of stuck on apathy at this point. If anything, I'm less inclined to care than I was before, and Wu's really preaching to the choir when it comes to me! While feeding kids freshly-made gourmet meals in cafeterias sounds nice in the abstract, in the concrete I have to wonder if, first of all, kids will actually eat this food; and second of all, who's going to pay for it? Wu didn't persuasively address either question in this book.

If anything, this memoir is an argument for parents to take a more active role in learning about food and cooking freshly prepared meals in their own home. If a revolution begins at home, then Wu did so with her own life, and I think Fed Up with Lunch may influence other parents to do the same.

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads and is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend.

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Mystery vs Suspense in THE MADNESS OF LORD IAN MACKENZIE by Jennifer Ashley

One of the linchpins of a good story, I think, is the element of mystery, which obviously isn't the same as suspense. Mystery is more cerebral while suspense is more visceral. I think that's one of the reasons why suspense works so well in movies. You eat pictures with your eyes but you eat words with your brain, especially when those words are on paper.

In Little Women (the movie with Winona Ryder), Jo says something that has stuck in my head for years: books aren't about what you know, they're about what you don't know. You have to want to know about the characters or what's going to happen to keep reading. Unlike in movies, where information is limited to what's before your eyes, in books your mind has to be engaged. You have to wonder about something. That's why mysteries took off with the rise of the novel.

Unfortunately--I think probably because of the dominance of TV and movies in our lives now--this art of capturing one's interest and stringing it along with questions is really pretty rare in fiction these days. Most of the books I read seem to follow Hitchcock's edict that it's better to have an audience know about a bomb under a table for fifteen minutes than surprise them with an exploding bomb for five seconds. Of course, Hitchcock was making suspense movies, not writing books.

That's why it was nice to read The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie, because the author, Jennifer Ashley, does a great job of telling this story by building up the reader's questions about the Mackenzie brothers and then surprising us with turns in the story. "What is up with these Mackenzies, why are they all crazy?" you wonder soon after the story starts. Along with, "Why does Detective Fellows have it out for Ian?" The characters don't act like tropes, but like actual characters with motivation, and I loved how unconventional Ian and Beth were. Beth is a window who, through a series of unlikely events, has risen out of an East End London workhouse to become an elegant heiress. Ian, the younger brother of the Duke of whatever, probably has Ausberger's or a mild form of autism, and was institutionalized as a young boy. But he's not the only odd person in his family--all of his brothers are crazy and obsessive, and as the story unfolds we begin to understand why.

I really loved this book and can't believe I waited this long to pick it up! Even the murder mystery in the novel was very well-done and had me engaged and guessing until the end. The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie restored my belief that great story-telling is still to be had in historical romances.

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Au Revoir, Romance Month

It's January, which--the last time I checked, anyway--follows December. That means Romance Month is over. Sadface. Thank you to all the people who wrote guest posts and read along with me this month! You deserve cyber cuddles, which sounds uncomfortable but is totally worth it. {{{cuddles}}}

In case you like lists, here are all the posts for 2011's Romance Month:

• Announcement
• Review of Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James
  
• Guest post by KT Grant on Virgin Heroes
• Guest review by Maria from A Passion for Books & Real Life of Omega Mine
• Guest post by Meghan from Medieval Bookworm about Medieval Romances
• Review of The Concubine by Jade Lee
• Interview with Manna Francis
• Guest review by Margay of Persuade Me
• Guest post by Magdalen Braden on Contemporary Romances
• Guest post by Evangeline Holland on Historical Romance
• Guest review by Violet from Violet Crush of Lisa Kleypas' Hathaway series
• Review of Snowbound with the Notorious Rake by Sarah Mallory
• Guest post by Colette from A Buckeye Girl Reads on Arrogant Heroes
• Guest post by Penelope Watson on Holiday Inspiration
• Guest post by Becky from One Literature Nut on Romance Novel Covers
• The Girl Who Slept
• Review of The Thorn and the Blossom by Theodora Goss

Counting the book I'm currently in the middle of, I read five romances and chucked seven mid-way through, which aren't the greatest stats in the world. I feel like I accomplished a lot more than that! I think I've become a very jaded romance reader at this point in my life, which is why there were so many DNFs. I really wanted my interest to be engaged and to be shown something new, and that didn't happen with a lot of the books I picked up.

I predict I will read more romances in 2012 than I did in 2011, but right now there are bunch of YAs calling my name. :) I hope you all enjoyed romance month as much as I did, and thank you again to everyone who joined in!

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