> ARRIVALS

Of consuming interest, these books consider the pleasures and perils of food. Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir, Ruth Reichl Ruth Reichl’s sixth memoir picks up in 1998 when she quits her job as arguably the world’s most powerful restaurant critic, at The New York Times, to become the world’s most powerful food-magazine editor, at Gourmet magazine, a once-great publication that had become stuffy and stiff. Over 10 years, she and her team restored it to its rightful place at the top of the food chain — until 2009, when owner Condé Naste shuttered Gourmet without warning. If you like food and magazines, this one’s for you. Tiny Hot Dogs: A Memoir in Small Bites, Mary Giuliani First, Mary Giuliani failed at being Jewish (she grew up Italian in a suburb of Long Island that was 99 per cent Jewish and claims to have attended 178 bar/bat mitzvahs in 1986 without achieving assimilation). Next, she moved to New York in 1997 and failed to make it as an actor. But she succeeded magnificently at cooking for others, and today she is a celebrity caterer. She’s funny and likable and shares many of her small-bite recipes, among them “those shiny, buttery, salty, perfect little tiny hot dogs,” a.k.a. pigs in a blanket. It’s a small-format book, so good for tucking in your purse: a snack book. The Way We Eat Now: How the Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies, and Our World, Bee Wilson We live in an age of plenty, yet never before have our diets been so deficient nutritionally. The author, a food historian and Wall Street Journal columnist, puts it this way: “our food is killing us, not through its lack, but through its abundance — a hollow kind of abundance.” Wilson describes the problem and offers solutions, concluding with ideas on how to substitute an energy-dense (i.e., sugary) diet for a healthy one. The Grand Food Bargain and the Mindless Drive For More, Kevin D. Walker The “grand food bargain” in the title is meant ironically: Our abundance of food in the West comes at a high cost to our environment and the Earth — and that’s no bargain. Walker begins and ends his impassioned book on the scorched Kalahari Desert, where he and a colleague tagged along with a bushman in search of food. No insects, birds, animals or plants in sight, they came upon a clutch of six ostrich eggs, each about three kilograms. The bushman took one egg, knowing that future food depends on the remaining eggs, even one of them, becoming an ostrich that will provide future eggs. Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself, William W. Li Reading this 400-plus-page guide is dizzying, but fascinating as the scientist-physician author considers the effect of many foods on the body’s five defence systems, including angiogenesis (creation of blood vessels), regeneration (stem cells), microbiome (our healthy bacterial community), DNA protection (which has the capacity to repair itself ) and immune system.