Best Food Writing 2009 - Couverture souple

Publishers Weekly, 10/26/09
“Editor Hughes skims the cream off a year’s worth of culinary journalism in the latest annual. As with previous editions, Hughes captures the gastronomic zeitgeist in a broad range of essays...This is a sound reader for those looking to catch up on trends in the culinary world, but foodies already immersed in the culture are sure to find some overlooked gems.”

Booklist, 12/1/09
“In this collection, just about every level of culinary curiosity gets a chance to shine.”

Entertainment Weekly, 12/4/09
“With 50 delectable essays...the latest installation of the Best Food Writing series is less a literary meal than a stuff-your-face feast of gourmet journalism....all the pieces have a common ingredient: an insatiable, contagious curiosity about all things edible. And as if that weren't enough, their bite-size proportions even seem to anticipate your inevitable need for snack breaks.” 
 
Sacremento Bee, 11/22/09
“This is a book worth devouring.”

The Hippo NH, 12/2/09
“Best Food Writing 2009 is that annual collection of food lust”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 12/2/09
“The cream of the crop of food writing compilations...The 2009 selections are the best yet.”

Look past the tinge of hyperbole, and Timothy Taylor makes a good point in the opening essay to this culinary collection when he asks, Who in the Western world isn’t a foodie now? He’s not complaining about crowded elbow room in the clubhouse of the elitely palated but, rather, pointing out that perhaps more than ever the simple act of consuming fuel has become a pervasive cultural obsession, bursting forth from glossy magazines, chic cookbooks, and more TV shows than an entire network devoted to food can carry. In this collection, just about every level of culinary curiosity gets a chance to shine, from Rachel Hutton’s ode to Spam to Mark Caro’s infiltration of underground foie gras cults. It’s patently ludicrous to state, as Eric LeMay does in his piece lamenting the FDA’s death grip on pasteurization, that when you eat cheese, you mainline the uncut elixir of life, but damn if it doesn’t make you want to rush to your nearest fromager, or at least make you wish you had one to begin with. --Ian Chipman