Fed, White, and Blue: Finding America with My Fork: 06/27/16

Fed, White, and Blue: Finding America with My Fork by Simon Majumdar was on the new books shelf with a couple other road trip books. As it seemed relevant to my on-going iconography of the road trip project, I checked it out. The long story short, is it wasn't.

Now if I were a cable subscriber, I'd recognize the author as a "Food Network celebrity." I don't, though, he does spend a large portion of the book gleefully reminding his dear reader of that fact. So rather than this book being a road trip book, it's a catalog of fancy meals eaten at successful restaurants from all over the United States, combined with memories of how the author and the chef or owner first met and how the restaurant got started.

Maybe a travelog can jump around locations willy nilly. A road trip, though, cannot. A road trip follows the road and the landscape and the gradient of changing ingredients as the traveler gets ever further from home.

So while the author strove to learn more about his adopted home through its food, if he did, it's not evidenced in this book. Yes, he ate a bunch of different regional dishes. Yes, he interviewed (or re-interviewed) a bunch of successful restaurant owners and chefs. But he did this out of context. The result is a dull laundry list of food and conversations.

Two stars

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