Spring’s best non-cookbook food books

There is only so much time one can spend reading and cooking from cookbooks (in theory, anyway), but what can one do to remain occupied in the interim? Read other food-related books, of course! You can use Eater’s guide to the 10 best new non-cookbook food books to make your library requests or fill up your Amazon cart. 

One tome caught my attention straight away: Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky’s previous works have been filled with fascinating stories and characters, and he deftly weaves together politics, science, religion and more in telling the tale. Milk!  will definitely be going into my vacation reading pile.

If you are a fan of chef memoirs, Edward Lee’s Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine should be added to your list. That’s because Lee writes like “a culinary anthropologist”, bringing new dimension to his own personal story of becoming a chef by exploring “the diverse culinary diasporas in the North, South, and Midwest.” 

Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original is another must read. This is the first critical appreciation of Lewis’s groundbreaking work, and it features an impressive list of essayists, including Natalie Dupree, Vivian Howard, Francis Lam, Deborah Madison, Kim Severson, Toni Tipton-Martin, Michael W. Twitty, among other noteworthy writers. Lewis’s contributions to the culinary world have been overlooked for decades, but this book should begin to amend that oversight.

What non-cookbook food books are on your summer reading list?