Learn about Food on National Read a Book Day

This coming Friday, September 6, 2019, is National Read a Book Day and we have an interesting option for you. All of the books we cover on this blog include chocolate in some way. Cookbooks are the obvious books but we've also covered fiction where cocoa or chocolate plays a role in the plot or the background of the characters. We also cover non-fiction that looks at chocolate in society and culture. Today, I want to share an amazing book that has joined my reference shelves in my personal library. This book has 118 categories of foods and Cacao is one of those given several pages of space. The Story of Food: An Illustrated History of Everything We Eat is from DK, an imprint of Penguin Random House. I got it for free through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a fair and honest review on their website; this article is a bonus for them. No other form of compensation was received.

The 10 Chapters in this book include:
Nuts and Seeds
Vegetables
Fruits
Meat
Fish and Shellfish
Grain, Cereals, and Pulses
Dairy and Eggs
Sugars and Syrups
Oils and Condiments
Herbs and Spices

Each chapter has a lot of images including drawings, photos of works of art and advertising, as well as dishes including the food. There are also sections about how foods of the general category of each chapter are used in society.

But we want to focus on the Cacao Section for our blog.

Cacao is part of the "Nuts and Seeds" chapter. This hopefully won't surprise many of our readers but if it does, that is okay. Part of what we try to do here is educate. Cacao beans are really the seeds from the Cacao tree, if the pods just dropped and the sweet white pulp around them decayed, the seeds could grow into other trees. 

The section on Cacao in chapter 1 is the largest covering pages 26-29. But chocolate and cocoa show up in other places in the book in the photos about other types of foods and mentioning of how those foods are used and enjoyed worldwide. In these pages we get a brief introduction to how the seeds might have have been discovered by humans, processed, and how they are processed and used today.

If you know someone interested in foods or you are yourself but you just want a general introduction, this is the book for your personal library. While you may not be able to read the entire book on National Read a Book Day on the 6th, you can certainly find several entries to enjoy. Please check it this book out using our links and if you buy using them, our founder, TammyJo, and this blog will get a bit of money in return. Please leave us a comment and let know if you are interested in this book or have read it yourself. 

We want to hear from you!

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