Review by Booklist Review
Drawing on his own broad experience, Cowen steers his audience through the contemporary world of eating and drinking. Like many staunch foodies, he respects the local. He much prefers the tamales from a roadside vendor in Nicaragua to those offered in a tourist restaurant. Not only does the roadside vendor produce a tastier product; the food is also less processed and less depleting of energy spent on transportation. Cowen finds that, despite what logic may suggest, the most expensive food is not necessarily the best. And he reveals that the same principle holds true in urban America as well as in the Third World. He expands this insight with a survey of barbecue restaurants in the U.S. His contention that Thai food in America has become too sweet and thus inferior will provoke discussion. Cowen offers more anecdotes and fewer metrics here, remarkable for a book written by an economist.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Enlightened consumerism, not ideology, is the surest path to tasty and responsible dining, argues this yummy gastronomic treatise. Economist and restaurant critic Cowen (The Great Stagnation) takes readers along as he eats, shops, and cooks in a diversity of spicy settings, including a Nicaraguan tamale stand, the greens aisle at the Great Wall supermarket chain, backwoods barbeque pits, and his own kitchen, where he wrestles with Mexican cuisine. He focuses on how the interplay between creative suppliers and demanding customers produces good, cheap food, an approach that yields offbeat insights into, for example, why the menu item that sounds the least appetizing usually tastes great and why you should never eat in a place filled with beautiful people having a great time (that restaurant's specialty, he reasons, is the scene, not the food). Cowen also offers a telling contrarian critique of high-minded food orthodoxies that extols agribusiness, debunks the environmental benefits of locavorism, and toasts genetically modified organisms. Cowen writes like your favorite wised-up food maven, folding encyclopedic knowledge and piquant food porn-"the pork was a little chewy but flavorful, and the achiote sauce gave it a tanginess"-into a breezy, conversational style; the result is mouth-watering food for thought. (Apr. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Part In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and part Roadfood, this is a culinary coming-out party for Cowen (economics, George Mason Univ.), who up to now has been known for more standard economic works like The Great Stagnation. This latest book combines economic and environmental messages, all written in a highly entertaining and informative style-often with a counterintuitive twist. The real story, though, is the author and his techniques for finding and eating delicious, inexpensive food from all over the world. Thus, we get tips on how to obtain good Chinese food from local, not-so-authentic places; which strip malls are likely to have the best restaurants (who knew they were in strip malls to begin with?); using Google to turn up unexpected restaurant gems; and why places filled with fun, laughing, drinking people often don't have good food. An entire chapter is devoted to barbecue, and another provides specific suggestions for eating well in numerous countries. -VERDICT A fun and informative book that environmentalists, economists, and (most of all) foodies will enjoy. Recommended for all. [See Prepub Alert, 10/7/11.]-Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Food and economics meet in this entertainment by celebrity economist Cowen (The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, 2010, etc.). A celebrity economist? Yes, for Cowen is widely hailed for his smarter-than-freakonomics, libertarian-inclined economics blog Marginal Revolution on one hand and his D.C.-centric blog Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide on the other. Here he blends the best of both those worlds. If you've heard of the free-rider problem in economics, where leeches benefit from the productivity of others, then here's a twist: "the wealthy and the myopic are the friend and supporter of the non-drinking gourmand." In other words, the knowing customer may well choose to avoid drinking anything other than water, knowing both that the markup on alcohol and soda is astronomical and that those who buy such things effectively lower the tariff on the price of a meal, where the margins are slimmer. In economic terms, this "price discrimination" favors the teetotaler, and with nary a hint of moralizing. Cowen stops short of formulas and equations, but there's plenty of hard, old-fashioned economic thinking in these pages--e.g., the power of immigration to improve cuisine and the bewildering array of food choices we have today as one of the blessings of free-market capitalism. Cowen is also prepared to go into the fray as a mild-mannered version of Anthony Bourdain. He writes that one shouldn't Google "Best restaurants Washington" but instead "Washington best cauliflower dish" if one wants to escape the awfully ordinary, and he counsels that the best barbecue is to be found in small towns in joints that open and close early. The narrative gets a touch repetitive at points, but if you're a foodie with a calculator, this is your book.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
