Book Recommendations

If LSC and Tony Bourdain got together to write a book, it might be the one I am currently reading:


It's about food but also about what makes some foods and drink (and smokes) legislated--what makes them "evil." It is fun and educational with a wonderful style of writing. Sample quote (from the chapter about Epoisses, the famously smelly, French raw-milk cheese):

"When a nation holds a food close to its collective heart, it will usually find a way to spare it from an outright ban. Though hamburger meat has brought bloody and excruciating deaths to hundreds of children in the United States, nobody ever considered a total prohibition on two-all-beef-patties. Instead--and in spite of the protests of the protests of the beef industry--the USDA took the sensible step of labeling supermarket ground round with cooking instructions designed to kill E. coli 0157:H7 and other pathogens ubiquitous in American ground meat. Informed consumers could then decide whether the risk of bloody diarrhea outweighed the pleasures of a summer barbecue. Given the trail of corpses it has left behind, the hamburger, had it been invented in and imported from France, would have been banned in North America long ago."

Anybody else have any good book recommendations? BESIDES Harry Potter, I mean.

Anything by Robert D. Kaplan.

Butt-puckering scary stuff.