The download date was unfortunately missed, I would be happy to re-review if it became available again. I have awarded stars for the book cover and description as they both appeal to me. I would be more than happy to re-read and review if a download becomes available. If you would like me to re-review please feel free to contact me at thesecretbookreview@gmail.com or via social media The_secret_bookreview (Instagram) or Secret_bookblog (Twitter). Thank you.

‘In Search of the Perfect Peach’ was so much more to me than just a man’s journey to rediscover lost flavors—it’s a revealing exploration of how we might fix our food system, all written with an inspiring passion for cooking and enjoying traditionally flavorful food.

Franco delivers frightening, yet factual insights into how we've manipulated food production within the span of an average human lifetime. He highlights the way our demands have outpaced nature’s ability to provide, and how, ultimately, we’ve become victims of our own appetites.

Some sections do read like a Shark Tank pitch for Natoora, but that “fact-fueled, motivation-to-action” writing style kept me hooked for all 200 pages. There were plenty of highlight-worthy moments—topics I want to explore further, thought-provoking ideas, and eye-opening facts. With the book’s slim outline, though, I did feel like my “research further” tabs were getting quite a workout.

It’s important to acknowledge that having the option to choose nutritious food is a privilege. As consumers, we also have the power (and, again, the privilege) to drive the change we want—whether that’s by demanding more flavorful, nutritious food or supporting a fairer market while combatting the market monopoly of supermarkets across the world. But because of that, I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone. It’s a great read, but in today’s world, not everyone is fortunate enough to be selective about their food or where they shop.

So, if you’re one of the lucky ones with that kind of choice, this book is especially for you.

Thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing for providing a review copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

This book is wonderful for someone who want's a practical guide and insight into the sustainable food industry and it's practices.

Not many books are this detailed and if that's something you're interested in or you're nerdy like me a love behind the scenes knowledge of businesses then THIS IS FOR YOU!

Thanks so much NetGalley, Chelsea Green Publishing and Franco Fubini for giving me an ARC of this fantastic book!

Huge thanks to NetGalley for my copy 4/5

Franco Fubini, head of food supplier Natoora, presents his ode to flavour.

Franco has made it his life’s work to find the best seasonal fruit and vegetables from around the world and bring them to restaurants and customers. He is passionate about great tasting food, and speaks of food culture and memories with tenderness and excitement.

In his deep dive into food, Franco also discovered that amazing flavour correlates with maximum nutrition. However, to get this quality, great seeds, soil and farming practices need to come together. As with all farming, working with your environment is key, and the skill and care of these expert producers is lovingly highlighted.

In our era, quality has been sacrificed for yield and ship-ability and with it our health suffers. Here’s hoping that a change is coming and we start eating and farming better for the sake of the planet and ourselves.

Star off because it’s a bit of an advert for his food company (only one tho cos I like their philosophy and I’ve tasted their tomatoes!)

2.5* rounded up. i have a lot of thoughts on this book. unexpectedly so, because when i asked for an ARC after spotting the lovely cover and intriguing title on a NetGalley newsletter, i thought it would be a quick, informative read on something outside of my comfort zone and not much more than that - just a chance to learn something new. but for me, in search of the perfect peach ended up irking me much more than i expected. part learning resource, farming guide, memoir, and investor pitch, my greatest issue with the book is that it didn’t seem to know who it was being written for, or for what purpose.

having read only the introduction, i was intrigued by franco’s key concepts - that the food system has been “broken” in the post-war era due to the introduction of supermarkets that have prioritised yield and profits from fruit and veg, at the expense of flavour, quality and nutrition. the author’s understanding of this largely comes from his experience running a food distribution company called Natoora - fine, but in the introduction he began lauding his company too much to the point where i felt he was trying to plug it to me. unfortunately, that was something that kept jumping out at me throughout the book and took me away from what should have been the main point. i’m not entirely convinced this book isn’t a not-so-subtle advert for his company.

as i moved through the chapters, i began getting frustrated in a different sense. within the first third of the book, i had gotten my head around the main message - supermarkets deprioritised flavour and we need to bring the focus back to that. this had been told to me, rather repetitively. absolutely nothing wrong with the message, but once i was this far into the book what i wanted was some practical tips for how a person like me can begin to follow his ethos. there was some discussion on eating in line with the seasons; not seeking out peaches in the middle of winter, so to speak. but there was a lot of information to wrap my head around. it seems that it’s not just about eating seasonally, but you have to know that different varieties will be available at various times, and you have to understand that each variety has an early, peak, and late season (EPL). perhaps it’s just me, but i feel like for someone who is not used to eating seasonally at all, it felt a bit like “where do i start?” there’s not actually much practical advice on offer. so i suppose the solution is to head to google and figure it out yourself. at this point, i started wondering whether i was not the target audience and whether this book is better suited for someone who works in the food industry (like a chef or a restauranteur) who might be able to grasp these concepts with less guidance.

this was a recurring pain point; there was a frustrating lack of practical ways to implement change as an everyday consumer. franco’s main advice was just to seek flavour, but how? from his viewpoint, it’s an impossible feat to find flavour (i.e. quality produce) in a regular supermarket. so what are the alternatives? where do we go? farmers’ markets, perhaps? or directly to Natoora? (i honestly am not sure where else you would go.) however, the author then brings up other complexities, such as you can never tell whether produce has been farmed responsibly using healthy soil. or that you can’t assume local produce is going to be better. so it felt like there was no clear starting point for learning to change one’s habits without hitting some type of pitfall.

in one of the last few chapters we finally get some solid(ish?) advice - that we should simply pay more money for better quality produce. while there is a passing remark that maybe some people can’t afford this change, he also comments that you should be willing to divert your funds away from other things in your life, like your hobbies, to afford more expensive and better quality fruit and veg. um. it felt very dismissive. but also misguided. the majority of people rely on accessible and affordable supermarkets like ASDA (which he takes a shot at) to get by. the idea that large-scale change needs to come about as a result of change at the food industry level, but also while heavily relying on the few who can afford to shell out more for food doing so, doesn’t make sense. it feels like the change needs to be top-down - from supermarkets, food suppliers, farmers, restaurant chains, etc. which then begs the question of whether the little advice given to us in this book is that impactful.

i feel like by the end i hadn’t gotten much from this, and that this book was not truly directed at the everyday consumer. i do think that this was better aimed at those within the food industry, and, i suppose, the minority who can afford to make significant changes in their buying habits (and given the types of clients he and his company work with, i feel like this was probably the case). as a book for this group, perhaps it worked fine. for readers not in the know, i think the whole thing probably needed some reworking. the one thing i did get from this was eating seasonally, and that’s something i will have to do much more research on on my own to get to grips with making what is a fairly big change in eating habits.

if you are someone who fits into the category for whom this book might work, by all means, give it a read. if not, but you are interested in eating consciously and sustainably, i suspect there may be better resources out there than in search of the perfect peach.

massive thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review!

Fubini makes some good points in this book. We do need to look more closely at where our food comes from. We do need to think about how we buy as well as what we buy. Seasonality, flavour and provenance are all important as is soil health and good farming practices. Having said all that, I was disappointed in this book. Fubini is the founder of Natoora, a company which practices what the book preaches. A lot of this book read like a 200 page advert for shopping with Natoora. There was a great deal of explanation and emphasis on the importance of supply chains and how to create and maintain them. I appreciate that this is key to Fubini's business practice, but for the reader, not very interesting. I asked to review the book because I thought it would be about the search for great tasting, environmentally friendly produce, but that was actually quite a small part of the book.

I would also argue that Fubini is preaching to the choir here. If you can afford to shop at Natoora and places like it, you probably do that already. If you can't, then the message this book sends is frankly quite despairing in that to grow, produce and market products like the ones Fubini highlights costs a great deal of money. No matter how much shoppers have power, they only have it if they can afford to change their buying habits and in this current economic climate I'm not sure how many people are in that privileged position.

A manifest for the flavour revolution!

Like the author, I come from a country(or from a time) when we would only eat seasonally, with flavour in mind and nothing else would do justice to our plates. When I've moved from East to West it was a food shock! For many year I've thought fruits and vegetable were tasteless! Nowadays things are either improving or I've got used to no taste hahaha. While I am not totally behind seasonality, I completely understand where the author is coming from. I have taken steps to not buy certain things when they are very out of season only base on the absence of taste rather than the concept of seasonality, but I do agree it is something to consider, especially if you are a person that wants to make conscious decisions when it comes to food.

I must confess that at first I was not convinced. I've found myself thinking this book is a bit slim, a book for rich people who can afford the best of the best! But slowly he won me over! I think what really got me on his side was the false locality (when eating local does more hard than good) and misleading use of organic labels, things I've been thinking for a while but not found anyone voicing this concerns before! He got me on his side to the point where I really understood the concept and also agreed: If we can find new markets, where consumers have the economic means to value the product correctly and allow it to stand out from the competition, I believe it is worth the extra mile to get it there. If targeting the best of the crop to people with means, means that we will keep this products and those farmers prospering, so be it! Maybe in time, through scale economics, the like of myself will be able to afford tasty vegetables and fruits!

So let the revolution start! Flavour for the masses, please!

In search of the Perfect Peach

Think for a moment about the most memorable meals you’ve had. That sandwich with the best tomato you’ve ever eaten, that side salad where the greens were so good it didn’t need dressing, that fruit tart that made you stop and savor every morsel. Did you ever stop and think “How is this possible? Why can’t I experience this every meal?”

In Search of the Perfect Peach seeks to answer what made that food so good and how can we improve food systems in order to improve flavor, nutrition and sustainability of ingredients.

This book will take you on a journey from seed and soil to plate and culture. With the energy of a perfect dinner party guest, Franco Fubini, avails the reader with delectable descriptions of fruit, veg, and landscapes. Tells us stories of ingredients, and takes us into the world of food sourcing and what he sees as the future.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the state and future of our food systems. To anyone who works within the food industry. And lastly to anyone who eats food.

At times the organization of these chapters reads as a textbook making it a fairly slow read. Other times Fubini sweeps you away with loving descriptions and anecdotes.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this book!

Rating 3.75/5

Franco Fubini, a professor of sustainability management is also the founder of Natoora which is about finding the best flavors in food. He travels the world from Mexico to Sicily and beyond to find the best peaches, apples and more. Grow, shop, eat. Wonderful, informative book.

Please note that I have an undergraduate degree in food studies. I was disappointed in this book 25 pages in. While I wholly believe in the principle that flavor is a necessary component of a healthy diet, Fubini doesn’t introduce anything new to the literature. There are far too few citations for the claims he makes. There’s a very concerning lack of rigor for a nonfiction book, which makes this more akin to a vanity project than anything else.

For example, he claims that housewives were “sold” convenience without interrogating the postwar labor structure or how much labor it actually took for a woman to cook a meal, with or without assistance from “the help”. This is a rehash of many of the takeaways from the slow food movement, which is dominated by deeply obnoxious men.

I was done when I read his bizarre, unscientific statement that produce peeled and chopped in a factory is somehow less nutritious than the same process done at home— with no science to back the claim.

Also, while Fubini slams the Green Revolution he has neglected to mention that fewer people are now food insecure globally because of it, at least in what little I read. There is no option for a de-industrialized food system on a planet with 8 billion people. Honestly, I’m not sure what I expected from a CEO.

Really interesting and it seems so basic but we have forgotten what is in season, and why it matters ... It would not just be tastier but also better for the environment. Nicely written and accessible.

What a fantastic book. Common sense applied on a bigger scale. Working with local producers for seasonal products. Taste sensation at core but reaping so manual other benefits for every part of the supply chain and the environment.
When you grow your own fruit and vegetables you work with the season and the produce is nothing you buy off the supermarket shelves.
This book just reaffirms that we need to go back to basics and not want everything all the time.

I really wanted to enjoy this book as the subject sounds so attractive. Alas, it is written in such a way that reminds me of a lecture. I couldn't finish it. Such as shame as the author is obviously very well versed in his subject.

The author uses experience from starting Natoora, a wholesaler, retailer, and producer of seasonal food, to explore our food system. It explains how true flavor is made and why it matters for health and soil. With personal stories and food history, it gives a new look at food from growing to eating. I find this book as a wake up call that reminds us to appreciate real flavor and value healthy food.

3.5★

"In Search of the Perfect Peach" delves into the significance of flavour in transforming our food system and the way we source the foods that sustain us. Through engaging narratives and expert insights, the book highlights the crucial role of taste, advocating for a return to flavourful, nutritious foods that will, in turn, enhance both our health and our environment.

Special recognition to Chelsea Green Publishing for admirably standing behind their editorial mission by putting it into practice, from using vegetable-based inks in the printing of their books when possible, to using paper sourced from responsibly managed forests.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Chelsea Green Publishing, and Franco Fubini for the opportunity to read and review “In Search of the Perfect Peach” prior to its publication date.