3.5, rounded up because I'll read anything about food. As evidenced by the massive amounts of citations (which encompass almost half the book), this is well-researched and comprehensive in the subjects about which Siegel chooses to write. The chapters are kind of scattered, but the information contained within is interesting and, at times, darkly funny--including a horrifying bit about the USDA and FDA.

It goes quickly (see: half the book being footnotes), so pick this up if you love Gastropod and other shows, movies, and books about food.

This book had the promise of being great! I love food, I love talking about food, and I love eating food. But to me, it fell a little flat. The chapters were scattered, and I felt like jumped from one loosely related topic to another. It was really difficult for me to follow and stay engaged in. I like things that are more straightforward and linear, so this is probably just a personal preference for me. It just wasn't written in a way that I was expecting, so that made it more difficult for me to follow. For example, the "apple pie" chapter jumped from talking about random pies, to other foods, to quotes from Benjamin Franklin, all within a few paragraphs. While some might enjoy this style, it was just not for me.

On a positive note, this was a well researched book, and it was loaded with facts and tidbits of information that were fascinating! The author had a good writing style (I just wish it was a little more linear and organized), but the way he wrote both drew me in and made me laugh, at times. I felt like this book had such potential, and had so many factoids in it.

Overall, this book was just written in a way that did not click with me. The content and the facts were incredible, but the way they were put together fell short for me.

Thank you to the author, publisher and Net Galley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

I expected this to be something different, it is written in a textbook manner with interesting facts. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher. This is my honest review.

"The Secret History of Food is a rich and satisfying exploration of the historical, cultural, scientific, sexual, and, yes, culinary subcultures of this most essential realm. [Matt] Siegel is an armchair Anthony Bourdain, armed not with a chef’s knife but with knowledge derived from medieval food-related manuscripts, ancient Chinese scrolls, and obscure culinary journals. Funny and fascinating, The Secret History of Food is essential reading for all foodies."

I enjoyed this fast-paced entertaining book! Fun reading as well as educational. I learned new things about common food items, such as pie, corn, honey and vanilla. Who knew that corn is virtually in everything we eat and consume? Some of it turned my stomach as well ("New York City transit employees sprinkled chili powder on turnstile slots in hopes of keeping teenagers from sucking out used subway tokens....").

Well-researched. Highly recommend!

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. This book will be released 31 August 2021.

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Siegel offers a fun if random review of food and nutrition facts. Each chapter has a proposed focus beginning with the mechanism of swallowing, then moving into pies, cereal, corn, honey, and vanilla, detouring into a section on gluttony and one on choices, then back to food with a discussion on chili peppers, and closing with a chapter ostensibly on tomatoes but actually about US government recommendations, guidelines, and oversight. Each chapter is bursting with factoids, trivia, historical accounts, scientific explanations, and data that range all over the map. The section on corn includes a diversion about vampires, the chapter on vanilla is actually about ice cream (and its role in military campaigns), and sometimes Siegel seems to lose the thread of the chapter. There's an extraordinary number of footnotes and citations, and even the most outlandish claims appear to have some source of support. I also have to give Siegel props for (often) noting when the research is uncertain or there's reason for skepticism.

Siegel is a fun writer who keeps the information and stories flowing with occasional humorous asides and lots of memorable anecdotes. What this book lacks is any sense of structure or organization: there's no opening or introductory chapter that offers a framework for what follows, nor is there a conclusion that brings everything together. As evidenced by the chapter layout described above, the reader is never quite sure where Spiegel is going or why, and his detours sometimes go completely off track to the point that a different chapter title was necessary.

While disorganized books can be infuriating, this one isn't. The stories and facts are intriguing, so it comes across more like the class of an entertaining or absent-minded professor who has a wealth of knowledge but becomes so enamored by his teaching that he forgets what the class is about. I'll take that class any day.

Thanks to NetGalley for offering a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Food writer Matt Siegel reminds me a great deal of history writer Simon Winder. Winder’s histories of Europe are organized roughly like a travelogue. He teaches history of different regions by combining factual information with droll observations and fascinating curiosities of history. Siegel does the same with his heavily footnoted tour of food and eating.

The author begins with a quote that makes the point: “It is the absolute biological necessity of food that makes it so central to cultural history and so inclusive of all peoples in all times.”

Throughout the ten chapters of this book - short, but chock-full of information - he goes back in the history of civilization as well as the history of a human being from its pre-natal development phases, and apprises us about how choice and preparation of food has affected it all. In particular, certain foods have made a huge impact.

Pie, he tells us, has an important place in American history, and he documents that assertion, but also explains what pies *used* to be before Americans transformed them into something more - benign - shall we say. He then segues into a history of the apple in America.

Apples, by the way, are not even free of corn, which is the subject of his fourth chapter on corn’s centrality and ubiquity.

As for centrality, he explains that “…corn is right up there with fire in terms of anthropological game changers.” “…Up until roughly ten or twelve thousand years ago corn wasn’t a thing, and neither was farming. “ Before that point, everyone who’d ever lived had survived by hunting and gathering. Farming meant staying in one place and also developing systems of trading, defense, permanent lodging, developing irrigation systems, and dealing with more free time.

And as for corn’s ubiquity, he explains that the average American consumes about three pounds of food containing corn or corn products every day, often unknowingly. Even apples, the author points out, have a layer of food-grade wax derived from corn sprayed onto them.

(“Still [he notes], human consumption accounts for only around 10 percent of the corn supply, as it’s also an industrial ingredient in basically everything” from aspirin to cosmetics to batteries, crayons, plastics, paper, fuel, soap, wallpaper, and much much more.]

My favorite chapter was of course Chapter 6, because it dealt with ice cream (and, as with his other chapters, a whole lot of other things that are in the least way related). He observes that vanilla is the world’s most popular ice cream flavor and second most expensive spice. But up to 99 percent of vanilla flavoring in foods is artificial. He writes about the importance of ice cream to morale in both world wars, and adds the most wonderful anecdote:

“In 1942, when Japanese torpedoes struck the USS Lexington, then the second largest aircraft carrier in the navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship - but not before breaking into the freezer and raiding all the ice cream. Survivors describe scooping it into their helmets before lowering themselves into shark-infested waters.”

He also includes a history of holiday feasting, a discussion of fast food, and the explosion of choices of food. (For example, he notes, “we can now choose from more than fifty types of Oreos.”)

There is so much more - too much to delineate in a review, but foodies and history buffs alike with find it all informative and delightful.

Evaluation: This quirky book that could be classified as an academic history, although it contains a lot of useful background on an important topic. Nevertheless, it is extremely entertaining, and full of factoids you will want to share with everyone around you.

Anytime you read a book about food you either, A, get hungry or B, decide you’ll never eat certain things again. This one falls into the second category on many levels. I learned so many things while reading this book! It contains facts of how certain foods or brands were invented and information on the leaders in the food industry. If you enjoy knowing what you is going into the food that you are putting in your mouth this book is for you! I really enjoyed most of it and appreciate the work that went into it. I received nothing in return for an honest review for NetGalley.

Very interesting book I learned a lot about it especially about the honey I never knew there was Psychedelic cunning that was really interesting and how we explained how that came about Also I found the corn was very interesting too how we relied on it a lot and how it caused a deficiency in people I like how he explained the history of these different foods and how it interreacted with the modern age especially in the United States You can look where how food changed through the years and I found it very interesting about about AJ Hoover during more one how he started a relief program to help people in Belgium who are starving and how we try to continue at United States I thought that was really good It shows how we can do anything we've set our minds to especially when it needs to be helping people and you did this with his own money I'm amazing

The Secret History of Food is an engaging look at food absolutely full of trivia and minutiae curated and presented by Matt Siegel. Due out 31st Aug 2021 from Harper Collins on their Ecco imprint, it's 288 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately; it makes it so easy to find information with the search function.

I love trivia, factoids, and other bits of minutiae. It's cheering to "know stuff" and pleasant to sometimes see connections between words, etymology, and history. This book is so full of facts and trivia that it's difficult to read for long without *needing* to break off to go and chase down some reference or related details.

The language is perfectly accessible and clearly written that it's understandable by anyone. The book is prodigiously annotated throughout and refreshingly accessible to non-academics. I received an ebook ARC for review and being able to click on the annotations and footnotes for more information was extremely handy.

There are certainly a number of eye-opening and startling bits of history from ancient times down to the modern day. Obviously a niche book, but highly recommended for lovers of trivia.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Thank you NetGalley, Matt Siegel and Ecco for the copy of The Secret History of Food. This is my personal review.
This was a very interesting book on how food has affected our lives and we never think about the facts and history behind food.
It was an easy book to read, and I learned a lot about and having it given with a bit of humor made it fun to read.
The book was filled with random facts and lots of food trivia. It has been fun tossing out tidbits and trivia about food when I am with friends having coffee.

This is an interesting book about the history of food. There are many instances that I did not know and a few I may not totally agree with. Overall a good read for anyone who loves food and history.

Thank you to NetGalley for the free ARC of Matt Siegel's The Secret History of Food in exchange for my review! I enjoyed the book very much.

I would divide this book into two parts. The first part covers historical tidbits about Pie, Cereal, Corn, Honey and Vanilla. These were my favorite chapters, especially the chapter about Pie. The author was able to take topics that have been written about many times and add in enough details to make his book unique and add to my knowledge at the same time.

In the second half of the book the author goes into festivals of the past, modern food choices, foods that were considered dangerous and surprising things we might find in foods we commonly eat today. This part of the book was interesting, but I enjoyed the single food specific topics in the first half of the book more.

This book is witty, and made me smile many times. I would recommend to a friend, as well as give this book as a gift.

I enjoyed this brief history of food, courtesy of #NetGalley. I say brief because it isn’t exhaustive in its history, but dies a very effective job of whetting the appetite for diving into more about subject. The book is heavily researched with references galore. So if you want to get into the “tomato is a fruit” debate, you can do that. There’s enough snark in the writing that I found myself laughing throughout the book. Overall, an enjoyable read. Thanks again to NetGalley for the opportunity to preview the book.

A lot of interesting information included in this book. It is not my usual read, but I can imagine using the little known gems I picked up from this book as conversation anecdotes. I received it free through NetGalley.

There is a certain mental attitude characteristic of modern man that has been part of the zeitgeist since the middle of the Nineteenth Century. It's an ennui that comes with a general attitude of "primitive man good, modern man bad." Siegel while he is quick to condemn folks such as the Unabomber, unhappily has this attitude and it colors the entire book and not to its benefit.

The book seems more about complaining about the evils of modern agriculture, diet, and manners than in telling us the history of food, secret or not. If there is anything "secret" about the book, it's where the rest of this history is.

This book is chock full of really fun facts about food. I picked this up assuming it was going to be a fun encyclopedia of information about the food we eat, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The book is well written, it strikes the balance of using plenty of anecdotes from history to illustrate a point while also not distracting or over informing the reader.

It runs the gamete of foods, from potatoes to corn to honey to tea and beyond. If you’re a foodie or a lover of trivia, this book is definitely for you. If you’re not, then you probably won’t love it.

The book reads much quicker than it appears, as about half of the pages (at least in the ARC) are from the bibliography, notes and acknowledgements. Also, in some places, the author tries to illustrate a point about the abundance of flavors or varieties by naming more than 20, when a much shorter list could have sufficed.

This was a fun and interesting read about the food that we consume every day. It is interesting how food is both shaped by our culture and how food shapes our culture too. Really fun read.

This book is full of fun facts and entertaining history about our food and the ingredients we use. It was interesting and obviously extremely well-researched (nearly half the book is devoted to notes and citations!), though I found some of the chapters got just a little dry and repetitive. Despite that, I really enjoyed it, and I think this will be a must read for anyone interested in food, history, or just strange-but-true tidbits of information to drop into conversation.

I am so grateful to NetGalley and Ecco for the opportunity to read and review The Secret History of Food.

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My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Ecco- Harper Collins for an advanced copy of this food facts and much more book.

I will admit that I approached Matt Siegel's The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat with hopes that it would be slightly interesting with maybe some ideas for dinner on Sunday. Instead I found myself laughing, amazed at what I ingested, and quoting huge sections of the book to friends, family and anyone who would listen. In fact I generated some presales on the book, which is great because this book is so much more than I expected.

The tome is not long, but it is packed with information, and also with notes backing up the information. From the dedication to his parents, to the epigraphs that start the first chapter, you are off learning fun facts, history, business practices, and sometimes things any reader might feel they are better off not knowing about the food production chain. The writing is informative, and funny, as I stated. I'm being cagey with the jokes and facts, as I don't want to ruin anything, I feel bad for the people who preordered the book, as I think I might have gone on alot. I will share that you will learn the origin of green honey, and popularity of iceberg lettuce.

I really can't praise this book enough. What I enjoyed was the confidence that Mr. Siegel had in his writing. He had the research, he did the work, here is what he found that he thought others might enjoy reading about. Recommended for foodies, people who have to deal with foodies, people who like to put foodies in their place, people who love facts and people who like to laugh. Oh and the people I bothered with facts so much they had to preorder the book.

In general a funny look at the history of food. It is a short book and the trivia is very informative. I just believe that the author just too often drifts into R-rated language, sometimes without a need in the story.