Tyler Cowen offers a practical, informative and tasty guide to the basic economics of food, as well as how to get the most out of one's dining experience, whether in the home or out of it.
A passionate foodie, Cowen presents a simple premise: good food doesn't have to be expensive, and food snobbery won't make it taste any better. To illustrate his point, Cowen describes his experience shopping for and eating a variety of cheap, delicious foods in Nicaraguan roadside tamale stands and markets. The same experience can be had, Cowen claims, much closer to home. But before that can happen, consumers need to change their shopping routines and eating habits. A good place to start, he says, is in the aisles of an ethnic supermarket.
In one of the liveliest sections of the book, Cowen offers practical tips for finding good restaurants with excellent food. The best food to be found in restaurants, Cowen claims, is the food with which America excels--barbecue. Foodies will delight as Cowen describes barbecue in all its forms and variations in mouth-watering detail.
In the last third of this fast-paced and fact-filled treatise, Cowen turns his attention to overturning both conventional wisdom and current thinking about food as it relates to economics, the environment and health. No doubt this section will generate the most controversy as Cowen offers a spirited defense of agribusiness, which he claims has saved many more lives than it has destroyed, and debunks the value of locavorism, which he claims is often economically unsound. --Debra Ginsberg, author