On the Food Network, there is a show called "The Next Food Network Star." It's a fun reality show; the competitors are portrayed as charming, interesting, and genuinely likable people. When they compete on the show, they're sometimes told things like "you made my mouth water when you described the food, that's a true talent." Unfortunately, they're often also told that they sound unenthusiastic, or pedantic on camera. When I read Simon Majundar's book, I felt like a judge on "The Next Food Network Star." This book shows moments of brilliance, but is uneven, unpolished, and unprofessional.
"Eat My Globe" is a book about a set of trips that Majundar took around the world, trying to sample many different dishes from many different cultures. The book gives a lot of facts: names of people he met, restaurants he visited, places he ate. It reads a little like a calendar: he tells you where he ate at breakfast (and what he ate), where he went next, what he ate for lunch, etc.
I found this book very tedious and difficult to read. Sometimes he'll describe in detail what he ate at a specific meal (for example, BBQ in Texas), but other times he'll just throw out the name of a dish and not describe the flavor, texture, or aroma. Majundar manages an unusual trick: he has written a book that is both too long and too short. He provides too much detail in the book about the minutia of his travel planning. However, he spends far too little time talking about the people, places, and foods that he encountered.
Worse yet, Simon is a terrible writer. As an example, here is what he writes about a woman called Tina, a stranger who invited him to Thanksgiving dinner via email: "I took the plunge and wrote back saying I would be delighted to join her for Thanksgiving and, over the next six months, we swapped regular e-mails so, by the time it came for me to pick up my rental car and make the short drive from San Francisco down to Santa Cruz, I already felt like I knew her and knew I would like her." Yes, this is an overly complicated, run-on sentence. But worse yet, that is almost all that Simon tells us about this woman. He doesn't tell us how she was dressed, where she was originally from, what her house looked like, what she did for a living, why she liked food, what type of accent she had. This happens again and again in the book: Simon says "I met this wonderful person and liked them a lot" and then doesn't tell the reader anything about the person.
Even worse, he does the same thing with food: he doesn't tell us how dishes are prepared, where the ingredients come from, when they were developed, why they were eaten. And, I have a sneaking suspicion that he was eating a lot of tourist food. Outside of the western world, meat is still an expensive luxury. I think that Simon ate meat for three meals a day for most of his trip.
I was very disappointed by this book. Simon clearly knows and loves food, and spent a year of his life going to interesting places and eating interesting things. But it's a shame that he only managed to turn that journey into a 264-page book. I didn't learn anything from this book, and I didn't walk away from this book wanting to go anyplace he went, or eat anything he ate. It has brief moments of brilliance, where he does a great job capturing a specific meal. But on the whole, I can't recommend this book.