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snguyen96's review
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Love the different perspectives by multiple authors. Some shorts more captivating than others but appreciate the reflection in the similarities and differences between the use of foods and spices. I especially liked the insight into where certain cuisines actually come from and dispelling the myths and stereotypes of Mongolian food, and more.
danitza's review
Really loved the idea of this book and it definitely had some excellent chapters (like the fried chicken and sesame seed ones) but most of the chapters weren’t well written and fell flat for me.
jwsg's review
3.0
Chris Ying, the editor of the book, described the title You and I Eat the Same as a "personal experiment" to see if food indeed could help connect us to one another. We may not eat "exactly the same" but perhaps the similarities outweigh the differences.
One of the authors, Aralyn Beaumont, does her best to help Ying's personal experiment, contributing several essays to the collection: Everybody Wraps Meat in Flatbread explores how people the world over like to wrap meat in some kind of cooked dough as an easy to eat bundle of deliciousness. From burritos to kebabs, jianbing to injera, galettes to dosa, countries on every continent use different grains to make their version of a flatbread and eat it with meat. Then there's Leaves Make Things Steamy - on the use of leaves to cook food in in different cultures, from tamales and bak chang, to mok pla and dolmas. And finally, Cilantro is everywhere (this isn't really an essay, more like a 4 para assertion that you can put cilantro in plenty of dishes. Perhaps Beaumont ran out of steam at this point.) This theme is also picked up in Arielle Johnson's Your Fire and My Fire Burn the Same, Osayi Endolyn's Fried Chicken is Common Ground and Tienlon Ho's One Seed Rules Them All, on the sesame seed.
But the book is pretty much an eclectic collection of essays with a link to food and eating. Some of them speak of the immigrant experience and how food is a way for them to establish themselves and make a living in a new country, whilst maintaining a connection to their culture (Ben Mervis's Curry Grows Wherever it Goes on Ranjit Kaur's restaurant, Ranjit's Kitchen in Glasgow; Food is a Gateway, on La Cocina in SF which is an incubator kitchen helping primarily female immigrants to start their own food business; Food Changes on Tony Tan moving from Malaysia to Australia and getting his start working in a restaurant; Coffee Saves Lives, on Arthur Karuletwa working with Rwandan coffee farmers both as a way to confront his bitterness from the Rwandan civil war and to tackle poverty in Rwanda.) Others are on the origin stories of foods and certain terms (Luke Tsai's We All Want a Good Story on the such diverse foods as crab Rangoon, Chinese chicken salad and Mongolian BBQ; Paul Freedman's There is No Such Thing as a Nonethnic Restaurant). Then there are essays on the produce and culinary heritage of certain regions (Cemre Narin's The Good Stuff Doesn't Sit Still on chef Mehmet Gur and his food researcher Tangor Tan's efforts to uncover the best products and ingredients that the Anatolian region has to offer).
Some of the essays are pretty fascinating - like Michael Snyder's essay on a Mennonite colony in Durango, Mexico and its cheese making business. I'd never even heard about the Mennonites before this. The highlight of the book for me were the two Noma-linked pieces. Rene Redzepi's essay, If It Does Well Here, It Belongs Here, discussed the inspiration behind Noma and the movement we now know as New Nordic - the quest to explore the Nordic region and to figure out what exactly the Nordic identity was. Redzepi's essay isn't just about food and cooking, it's a meditation on identity. He describes their early efforts as being "built around a blind search for identity - not necessarily a deliberate one, but one driven by a longing to anchor ourselves to something". In the beginning, the team felt that if an ingredient didn't hail from the Nordic region, it didn't belong in Noma. But "when is an ingredient truly local? What makes it belong here? What does it take for an ingredient to be integrated to the point where you think, Now I can put it on the menu. Now it makes sense? If you go far back enough in time, you'll find that almost everything in your everyday pantry actually came from somewhere else."
David Zilber, the former sous-chef of Noma, picks up on this issue of identity and authenticity in his essay You Can Take the Shoyu Out of Japan, when he describes Noma's efforts to brew their own shoyu using ingredients found in the Nordic region - instead of soybeans and rice, they used yellow peas and barley. "The result? Delicious….[yet] for all the liters and varieties of Nordic shoyu we've produced since then, none has ever managed to make its way into a Noma recipe. Every time a chef in the test kitchen…uses a splash of shoyu to add depth to a sauce or saltiness to a marinade, the trial is inevitably scrapped…Without fail, Nordic shoyu jarringly knocks our guests out of this [Nordic] narrative, transporting them instantly from their sheepskin-lined chairs in a quiet corner of Copenhagen to a neon-lit alleyway on a boisterous Tokyo side street".
The risk with collections is that not all the pieces are equally compelling. And You And I Eat the Same was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Still, I appreciated that it was a mixed bag with some gems that provided for a couple of evenings of light reading.
One of the authors, Aralyn Beaumont, does her best to help Ying's personal experiment, contributing several essays to the collection: Everybody Wraps Meat in Flatbread explores how people the world over like to wrap meat in some kind of cooked dough as an easy to eat bundle of deliciousness. From burritos to kebabs, jianbing to injera, galettes to dosa, countries on every continent use different grains to make their version of a flatbread and eat it with meat. Then there's Leaves Make Things Steamy - on the use of leaves to cook food in in different cultures, from tamales and bak chang, to mok pla and dolmas. And finally, Cilantro is everywhere (this isn't really an essay, more like a 4 para assertion that you can put cilantro in plenty of dishes. Perhaps Beaumont ran out of steam at this point.) This theme is also picked up in Arielle Johnson's Your Fire and My Fire Burn the Same, Osayi Endolyn's Fried Chicken is Common Ground and Tienlon Ho's One Seed Rules Them All, on the sesame seed.
But the book is pretty much an eclectic collection of essays with a link to food and eating. Some of them speak of the immigrant experience and how food is a way for them to establish themselves and make a living in a new country, whilst maintaining a connection to their culture (Ben Mervis's Curry Grows Wherever it Goes on Ranjit Kaur's restaurant, Ranjit's Kitchen in Glasgow; Food is a Gateway, on La Cocina in SF which is an incubator kitchen helping primarily female immigrants to start their own food business; Food Changes on Tony Tan moving from Malaysia to Australia and getting his start working in a restaurant; Coffee Saves Lives, on Arthur Karuletwa working with Rwandan coffee farmers both as a way to confront his bitterness from the Rwandan civil war and to tackle poverty in Rwanda.) Others are on the origin stories of foods and certain terms (Luke Tsai's We All Want a Good Story on the such diverse foods as crab Rangoon, Chinese chicken salad and Mongolian BBQ; Paul Freedman's There is No Such Thing as a Nonethnic Restaurant). Then there are essays on the produce and culinary heritage of certain regions (Cemre Narin's The Good Stuff Doesn't Sit Still on chef Mehmet Gur and his food researcher Tangor Tan's efforts to uncover the best products and ingredients that the Anatolian region has to offer).
Some of the essays are pretty fascinating - like Michael Snyder's essay on a Mennonite colony in Durango, Mexico and its cheese making business. I'd never even heard about the Mennonites before this. The highlight of the book for me were the two Noma-linked pieces. Rene Redzepi's essay, If It Does Well Here, It Belongs Here, discussed the inspiration behind Noma and the movement we now know as New Nordic - the quest to explore the Nordic region and to figure out what exactly the Nordic identity was. Redzepi's essay isn't just about food and cooking, it's a meditation on identity. He describes their early efforts as being "built around a blind search for identity - not necessarily a deliberate one, but one driven by a longing to anchor ourselves to something". In the beginning, the team felt that if an ingredient didn't hail from the Nordic region, it didn't belong in Noma. But "when is an ingredient truly local? What makes it belong here? What does it take for an ingredient to be integrated to the point where you think, Now I can put it on the menu. Now it makes sense? If you go far back enough in time, you'll find that almost everything in your everyday pantry actually came from somewhere else."
David Zilber, the former sous-chef of Noma, picks up on this issue of identity and authenticity in his essay You Can Take the Shoyu Out of Japan, when he describes Noma's efforts to brew their own shoyu using ingredients found in the Nordic region - instead of soybeans and rice, they used yellow peas and barley. "The result? Delicious….[yet] for all the liters and varieties of Nordic shoyu we've produced since then, none has ever managed to make its way into a Noma recipe. Every time a chef in the test kitchen…uses a splash of shoyu to add depth to a sauce or saltiness to a marinade, the trial is inevitably scrapped…Without fail, Nordic shoyu jarringly knocks our guests out of this [Nordic] narrative, transporting them instantly from their sheepskin-lined chairs in a quiet corner of Copenhagen to a neon-lit alleyway on a boisterous Tokyo side street".
The risk with collections is that not all the pieces are equally compelling. And You And I Eat the Same was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Still, I appreciated that it was a mixed bag with some gems that provided for a couple of evenings of light reading.
leylses's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
i really like the premise of this book, and there are some really stand-out essays. i particularly liked "much depends on how you hold your fork," "if it does well, it belongs here," and "food is a gateway." at its best, this book is reflective and deeply passionate about the way food connects people across cultures and borders.
on the other hand, at times it feels ... strangely curated. one of the essays is simply a list of foods people eat. another is half a page long and ends abruptly and without a clear thesis. one just ... describes the chemical process by which fire burns? i get what these authors were going for but it just missed the mark.
i would say that this is definitely worth a read but if by the third paragraph you don't see yourself genuinely drawn to someone's story, maybe move on to the next essay.
on the other hand, at times it feels ... strangely curated. one of the essays is simply a list of foods people eat. another is half a page long and ends abruptly and without a clear thesis. one just ... describes the chemical process by which fire burns? i get what these authors were going for but it just missed the mark.
i would say that this is definitely worth a read but if by the third paragraph you don't see yourself genuinely drawn to someone's story, maybe move on to the next essay.
girlnouns's review
4.0
You and I Eat the Same is a collection of essays explaining how food connects everyone together. While I agree with the previous reviews that the quality of the essays vary, this books has highs through the essays "Food Is a Gateway", "Food Changes", and "Coffee Saves Lives" about individuals that gained power through their work in their food industry. In all, this is a great example of thoughtful and important writing about food.
jazzreads's review
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
You and I Eat the Same was interesting and informative no doubt. My favorite stories were: "Mennonite Cheese Is Mexican Cheese," "Food Is a Gateway," and "Coffee Saves Lives." I thought the theme was well-taken—There is more that we have in common than what separates us. Some of the stories felt half baked, but overall, I really enjoyed this read.