Lots of foods have their own day but pizza is so special it gets an entire week — and we happen to be enjoying that week, the second week in January, right now. After enjoying pizza for dinner last night (my son had basketball practice so it was the perfect night for a quick meal), I’m following up today with a book that uses pizza to tell us all about the journey food makes from the wild to farms to stores to our dinner tables and even to the history books!
Who Wants Pizza? The Kid’s Guide to the History, Science and Culture of Food
Author: Jan Thornhill
Nonfiction: Ages 9 and up
Paperback: 64 pages
Publisher:Maple Tree Press (September 7, 2010)
Synposis:
From Maple Tree Press:
Using one of the most common foods that kids eat — pizza — as a jumping off point, and, using the same bold, graphic approach employed in I Found a Dead Bird and This Is My Planet, Thornhill takes an extraordinary and comprehensive look at some of the following topics:
- Why we eat and why we eat what we eat
- How we moved from eating the raw flesh of animals to becoming sophisticated consumers of food
- How producing food has changed over the years and how tastes have changed, too
- How food is produced for an ever-growing population
- How the food choices that every one of us makes can have an effect on the future
Review:
Those who think this book will be the history of pizza will be disappointed. Instead it uses the pizza connection (sometimes tenuously) to explore humans’ relationship to food. How did we first decide to try different foods, how have humans adapted as new foods were introduced to their diet, how have our food choices affected the envirnment and more. This book really looks at the BIG PICTURE.
This book includes enough illustrations, quirky facts, and tidbits of information to make this large subject easier to…ahem, digest. This book can serve as a jumping off point for a variety of discussions not just about food but about have-have not countries, environmental responsibility, and more. It provides no hard and fast decisions or opinions although it does lean toward the organic, vegetarian side of the menu. Meat and potato lovers beware 