It’s 2024, which means everyone is knee deep in new year’s resolutions. Some folks are trying to get outside more or pick up a hobby of embroidery or spend more time with their family. But if learning more about food, farming, and cooking is on your list, bookmark this page as you’ll want to read all these books about food before the year is over.
Now, this list doesn’t contain any cookbooks or works of fiction (but here’s our list for the best cookbooks and the best fiction and memoir food books, ICYMI). The collection of books below are all nonfiction, informative works that will teach you where ingredients came from, the deep science behind cooking, the stories behind regional dishes, endangered foods, cultural cooking and so much more. Think of this as your reading list for a class on food, culture, and science,
For The Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food by Klancy Miller
At Spoon, we love Klancy Miller’s book that spotlights Black women in the food industry, from farmers and chefs, to historians and mixologists. In fact, we wrote a whole article on it.
The Ark of Taste: Delicious and Distinctive Foods That Define the United States by Giselle Kennedy Lord and David S. Shields
If you want to learn more about the regional foods found in pockets across the country, get this book. It comes from the Slow Foods USA organization and catalogues over 6,000 heritage food across the country. Think New York’s Cayuga duck, Florida’s Tupelo honey, Kansas’s Turkey Red wheat and South Carolina’s Carolina Gold rice. You’ll learn about the origins of these foods, who still cultivates them today, and how rare, unknown, or endangered they are.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
Despite what you may have been told, I don’t consider this book a cookbook. It’s more like a textbook, but way more exciting. You could be brand new to cooking or a seasoned home chef, you will get so much out of this book. It’s like a roadmap for flavors, science, and cooking sans recipe.
Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods by Sarah Lohman
Did you know there are foods indigenous to the United States that are endangered? Food historian Sarah Lohman writes about the American food traditions that are at risk of being lost, like Texas Longhorn cattle and date palms from California.
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
In this 15-year-old (but still very relevant) book, food writer Michael Pollan argues that in the western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, that in the search for health, real food has been lost. He explores food choices, what it means to be “healthy,” and how to find joy in eating.
The Rice Book by Sri Owens
If you want to know the ins and outs, up and downs of rice, this is the book for you. Food writer Sri Owens spent years researching this staple crop, traveling the world trying biryanis, risottos, pilafs and paellas. She put all her research into this book over 30 years ago, and it’s still considered one of the most thorough books on rice.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee
If you want to dig into the food science of cooking and learn about exactly where food comes from, consider this your bible. This book is for the lovers of the technical, those who use the word molecular gastronomy, and anyone who enjoys highlighting and marking up what they read. The writing is a bit dense — most of the book looks more like a science textbook than a book on food — but you will definitely learn about science in the kitchen.
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
It might sound weird to describe this book as a biography on a type of fish, but that’s exactly what it is. Mark Kurlansky explores how cod was the reason that Europeans could sail across the Atlantic and how it was a staple in Medieval times. It’s the journey of a how a humble fish could truly keep the world turning at times.