Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The Jacobs' book What the Great Ate: A Curious History of Food and Fame is packed full of fun food stories. I'm not a foodie, but I quite enjoyed it.
In a casual writing style the authors bring together anecdotes from around the world. These are tiny morsels rather than a five course narrative meal, so the book would be perfect for very light beach reading (despite being a little over 250 pages, it only took me a couple of hours to breeze through), or better yet, something for the teenage kids (anecdotes appear in two or three paragraph sections--about one page a piece). Some parents might appreciate its reinforcement of messages about avoiding dangerous behaviors. For example, there is a story about Robert Downey Jr. "kicking his illegal drug habit" after a tragic visit to Burger King.
Although it is basically a collection of food-related trivia, the authors generally do a commendable job of introducing a wide range of figures, explaining their historical significance, and relating their relationships with food in an interesting way. Readers looking for critical engagement with the dietary quirks (what rationale did John D. Rockefeller come up with for preferring milk from "wet nurses" to that of cows?), or parents who want to avoid some of the potentially uncomfortable conversations that will inevitably result from all of this talk about food (bouts of diarrhea, cannibals, dog eating, and so forth) will probably want to look elsewhere.
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What was eating them? And vice versa. In What the Great Ate, Matthew and Mark Jacob have cooked up a bountiful sampling of the peculiar culinary likes, dislikes, habits, and attitudes of famous—and often notorious—figures throughout history. Here is food • As code: Benito Mussolini used the phrase "we're making spaghetti" to inform his wife if he'd be (illegally) dueling later that day. • As superstition: Baseball star Wade Boggs credited his on-field success to eating chicken before nearly every game. • In service to country: President Thomas Jefferson, America's original foodie, introduced eggplant to the United States and wrote down the nation's first recipe for ice cream. From Emperor Nero to Bette Davis, Babe Ruth to Barack Obama, the bite-size tidbits in What the Great Ate will whet your appetite for tantalizing trivia.
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