Newsletter Appendix A: Food books read this year

And my other favourite books of 2023

It is 2pm on the 30th of December, 2023 and as I am unlikely to finish another book by tomorrow evening, it seems safe to write about the food books I read this year and also more generally my favourite books of 2023. In 2021, we introduced an appendix to our family holiday newsletter which included a list of all the food books I read that year. Naturally, this continued in the 2022 holiday newsletter. This year, because I started writing on Substack, some of the appendix contents will move here (and maybe the newsletter will be back down to two pages! That ought to make my husband pleased). 

So here is Appendix A of Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy 2023, also known as the Annual Sherman Family Holiday Newsletter: Food books read in 2023. 

These books are listed in the order in which I read them, and the ones in bold are the ones I particularly liked and would recommend. 

• Pandora’s Lunchbox by Melanie Warner. The first book I read when I started my deep dive into ultra-processed foods. A great one to start with. 

• One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake. Felicity Cloake is the author of a number of books as well as the ‘How to Make the Perfect…’ column for the Guardian. I’ve been reading that column for years, and this book is about her adventures cycling all over France in search of the perfect croissant. She is a treasure and I loved this book.

• Milk Eggs Vodka by Bill Keaggy. A book about grocery lists that the author finds. Given my interest in groceries and food shopping, I had high hopes for this book but it was just meh. It was okay. 

• Unprocessed by Megan Kimble. Kimble spent a year eating only unprocessed foods and this book documented her journey. There are some interesting insights and she highlights how hard it really is to eat an entirely unprocessed diet.

• Twinkie Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. Ettlinger goes down a Twinkie ingredient list rabbithole and this book is about every ingredient that makes up a Twinkie. I liked the premise of the book more than the book itself. 

• Perilous Bounty by Tom Philpott. A fantastic book about farming, the food system in America, and climate change. 

• The Secret History of Food by Matt Siegel. A light-hearted and fun book about the history of different foods.

• Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake. Another food and travel memoir by Felicity Cloake — this one is her latest, which was published this year and about her journey around Britain eating the greatest of meals, breakfast.

• Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies by Seth Holmes. An ethnography by an anthropologist and doctor about farmworkers in the US. This is a beautifully written book about an important topic that deserves more attention. 

• Ravenous by Henry Dimbleby with Jemima Lewis. A good general overview of the state of the food system and its impacts, but unlike many of the books I’ve read about food systems, this one isn’t about the US and rather about the UK. 

• Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken. A fantastic book about ultra-processed foods, what it is, and what it does to our bodies. The book is well-written, engaging, and witty. If you only read one book from all of my recommendations, make it this one. 

• How to Eat by Mark Bittman and David Katz. A short and simple book that covers how we should eat. 

• The End of Craving by Mark Schatzker. I loved this book. Schatzker uses history, culture, and science to explore our modern dysfunctional relationship with food. A funny and enjoyable read, too. 

• Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. Not strictly about food but I guess this is food adjacent. This is a part memoir, part development/management/business book primarily about the restaurant industry but with lessons that can be applied to any business that involves customers (or other people). 

• Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl. An oldie but a goodie. This is Reichl’s memoir of her time as the restaurant critic for the New York Times and it’s a fabulously fun read. I love her writing, and I especially love her writing about food. It was also fun to read this straight after Unreasonable Hospitality because it was reading about the same experience (fine dining) from opposing perspectives. 

• Food for Life by Tim Spector. Tim Spector is one of the two most influential people on our eating this year (the other being Chris Van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People). He is a doctor and epidemiologist who is an expert on gut health, and listening to him on podcasts and reading his articles is why I now try and eat 30 different plants a week and started eating kimchi and kefir. 

• How We Eat by Paco Underhill. I loved this book — marketing, consumer research, why and how people buy the things they eat. It combines interests from my former life (market research and retail geography) with my current obsession with food and groceries.

• Swindled by Bee Wilson. A wonderfully fun book about the history of food fraud. I pretty much love everything Bee Wilson writes (she has a new one out, The Secret of Cooking, that I’ve heard very good things about and is currently sitting on my bedside table. I’m very much looking forward to reading it).

And because this is my Substack and I can do what I like, I’m also going to include something that isn’t strictly food related — my absolute favourite, five star, ‘everyone should read this!’ books of the year. I read 93 books this year and these are the ones I loved the most. 

• Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken. See above. 

• Exercised by Daniel Lieberman. An insightful, witty, and informative book about how we evolved to exercise (and not exercise). The book gave me Bill Bryson vibes (which is high praise; I love Bill Bryson).

• The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman. The fourth and latest book in the Thursday Murder Club series, an utterly delightful series that I adore.

• Arriving Today by Christopher Mims. I was surprised to love this book as much as I did. Who knew logistics could be this engaging and interesting? This book is an enthralling investigation into exactly how the things we buy online get to our front doors, and I really enjoyed it.

• The Bodyguard by Katherine Center. This was the year that I discovered Katherine Center and I read nine of her books. I loved most of them and this one was my favourite. 

• RecipeTin Eats Dinner by Nagi Maehashi. A cookbook that I brought back to the States from Australia (it is available for purchase in the US but the American edition doesn’t have measurements in metric). I love Nagi’s website, Recipe Tin Eats, a source of excellent recipes and tutorials, and her cookbook is most excellent. 

• This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan. I heard about this book from Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales on their Chat10 Looks3 podcast (which is where I get a lot of book recommendations, actually), and this one met the high expectations I had for it going in. This is a very funny, and very relatable, book about giving yourself permission to love what you love.

I also read a lot of Tessa Bailey’s novels, re-read all of Beth O’Leary’s books, the new releases by Jeffery Deaver (including a new Lincoln Rhyme novel which is always a reading highlight) and Harlan Coben. So there was a lot of food, romance, and crime fiction, and sprinkled amongst those three categories were whatever took my fancy. Not a bad way to read at all. 

Happy new year, everyone. I’ll be back in 2024 (a less dramatic way of putting this would be to say in the next week or two) with the rest of the appendix and maybe the actual newsletter of Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy. Cheers to you, 2023!