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Review: The World in Your Lunch Box
The World in Your Lunch Box: The Wacky History and Weird Science of Everyday Foods by Claire Eamer. Illustrated by Sa Boothroyd. Annick Press. 2012. Reviewed from copy from NetGalley. Nonfiction, middle grade.
It’s About: Typical lunches are used to explore the history of food.
The Good: As you may remember from my post about The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, I love learning about the history of food.
Aimed at a middle grade audience, The World in Your Lunch Box is to the point, providing quick facts and history. It’s a clever way to organize the information; instead of alphabetically, or by types of food, by typical lunches. I imagine the author had fun as she decided on what lunches to use! It’s quite interesting just how many foods are found in a week’s worth of food, and how much history can be learned, and how many cultures are represented.
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The food covered ranges from ham to chicken, macaroni and cheese to peanuts, pita to chocolate. While some of it I knew, such as cheese, others were a surprise to me, such as mayonnaise. Eamer explains that it was first created in 1756 to celebrate the capture of Mahon on Minorca. Or sometimes things were phrased in a whole new way; I had never thought of honey as being bee vomit.
The World in Your Lunch Box has full color illustrations, making it a fun and vibrant read. I read it on my Nook Tablet, and I was impressed with how it looked.
For readers wanting more information, Eamer provides both further reading selections as well as a selected bibliography (alphabetical by author). There is also a very extensive index. My only quibble is how that bibliography is presented; I would have preferred either footnotes in the text or for the sources to be listed by chapter.
Be warned: this book will make you hungry!
Filed under: Reviews
About Elizabeth Burns
Looking for a place to talk about young adult books? Pull up a chair, have a cup of tea, and let's chat. I am a New Jersey librarian. My opinions do not reflect those of my employer, SLJ, YALSA, or anyone else. On Twitter I'm @LizB; my email is lizzy.burns@gmail.com.
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