(Note: my review copy of this book was archived before I could finish it to properly review. I ultimately waited until I could order it through inter-library loan to review it)

To know whether this will be one of your favorite books or one that does nothing for you, it's important to note what the book is. At its core, it's mostly a new age, spiritual book about ways to make your food more spiritual through things like prayers and intentions. While it calls itself a cookbook, there over 300 pages and under 50 recipes. Those recipes are somewhat random with no particular magical properties that I could see, and are gluten and dairy free (lots of salmon). They are heavy on other animal products, making them not suitable for vegans and vegetarians, and also feature ingredients like rice that will make them less suitable for paleo folks.

The book is filled with color photos and has lots of very mystical talk about everything from how your past lives influence what foods you're allergic to or don't like (a story is told about a woman who developed a walnut allergy at 42 and then used past life regression to find out she choked to death in a past life on a walnut at age 42) to how to invoke food angels to help you cook better.

Science-minded folks are likely to take issue with a lot of the claims of the book, such as the "fact" that French people don't gain weight even when they eat fattening foods because they enjoy them.

I was a little surprised that a book on mystical eating seemed to be tailored to the authors' food preferences and personal allergies rather than anything more spiritual. I sort of expected a more Buddhist slant and no meat, or maybe raw food, or at least a focus on eating local and home grown. The authors very briefly mention GMOs and whole foods, but they basically say that most people today can't grow their own foods and to look into stuff yourself.

I would argue that there actually is rather magical science about foods that they completely avoided. For instance, read Pascal Boudar's foraging books and you learn that the wild yeasts you use to ferment homemade beers and wines from wild ingredients will have unique tastes and qualities only found in that region since all yeasts have their own signatures. He keeps yeast cultures in sugar water cultures so he has the terroir (region) of all different places he loves that he can use to start homemade wines. That's pretty mystical! Or I would suggest reading Eating on the Wild Side where you learn how much of our foods' nutrition has been lost by farming and hybridizing, and how the original foods have as much as 100x the amounts of some nutrients (she doesn't go into how to forage them at all but how to find the closest things in supermarkets). Or I would talk about foraging for wild foods and how you can eat foods that were not part of any environment-crushing food system or part of some corporate farm system that takes advantage of field workers, and eat foods that many people have never even tasted that are some of the most delicious in the world. Or instead of saying that if you want to eat like Native Americans you should eat "lots of meat" (!?), teach the reader how to gather acorns and leach the tannins out to grind them into a delicious flour the way people did worldwide for thousands of years. Or focus on foods that were believed to have magical powers like elderberries (which also have those scientific powers). All of that sort of thing seemed like missed opportunities.

This will be a fun read for people who like this sort of book, but it seems like it could have been a lot more. All that said, it's full of beautiful color photos and is a fun read.

I apologize for the delay - I thought that I had submitted feedback regarding this book, but it appears that I did not. I read it a long time ago and I am sorry that I do not recall the specifics of the book. Thank you for the opportunity to read this book and I apologize for any confusion.

My apologies; if I requested this book, it appears that due to family commitments I was not able to read it before the book was archived. I'm sorry it has lingered this long.