Best Food Resource Books for Cooking and Baking

Best Books about Food

In my quest to find safe healthy foods for our family, I've come across quite a few helpful books about the food we eat. While not food allergy books per se, these titles have helped me learn the lingo of food while guiding me to make the best choices for my family when we sit down at the table. Here are a few of my favorite go-to food reference books:

• "Animal Vegetable Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver follows Kingsolver's family through an entire year as they "live off the land". This means they only ate foods produced by people they personally knew. If all else failed, the family grew or raised their own food.
• How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons leads you through the choosing, care and eating of every fruit and vegetable you can imagine. It answers many questions like one of my common ones- "How do I know if that cantaloupe is ripe?". You may also want to check out his book, "How to Read a French Fry".
• I enjoy all of Michael Pollan's books, but his "In Defense of Food" really gets to the heart of things as he talks about how the more obsessed our society has become with nutrition, the less healthy we're eating. What's with that? In this book, Pollan says, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
• On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen,  Harold McGee links hard-core science with an in-depth coverage of foods and cooking techniques.
• "Cookwise" is written by chemist Shirley Corriher (also authored "Bakewise"). Corriher explains in easy to understand terms how and why things happen in cooking.

You can find any of these books at your local library and I'll also post them in the Food Allergy Assistant Store if you want to purchase any of them. Do you have any other favorite food reference books?