Here are 100 books that The Greatest Table fans have personally recommended if you like
The Greatest Table.
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Growing up, my family was a meat and potatoes family. The food was good but it was never really about the food. It was about eating together. When I got older, I ventured beyond the world of meat and potatoes, made more friends to eat with, and learned more and more to enjoy the little things in life. My two books are about food but also not really. They're community books. Family books. Adventure books. Same thing with the 5 books on my list. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
Ah! This book is so rich and wonderful! The illustrations are unique, textured, impactful, and balanced. The story is warm and fun, and I appreciate how it turns it around with the people sharing with Omu at the end.
The illustrations tell me, "Hey, this is a really good book!" and they do not lie. It deserves the awards it won. I just love how the story and illustrations are so simple yet so full. It's a classic.
A generous woman is rewarded by her community in this remarkable author-illustrator debut that's perfect for the Thanksgiving season, perfect for fans of Last Stop on Market Street.
Everyone in the neighborhood dreams of a taste of Omu's delicious stew! One by one, they follow their noses toward the scrumptious scent. And one by one, Omu offers a portion of her meal. Soon the pot is empty. Has she been so generous that she has nothing left for herself?
Debut author-illustrator Oge Mora brings a heartwarming story of sharing and community to life in colorful cut-paper designs as luscious as…
I am a children’s author who loves to eat and bake and cook and gather with others around a table. My writing somehow always has details about people coming together around favorite foods and drinks, enjoying the company of family and friends. Is it any wonder these are the sorts of books I love to read, as well?
How To Make an Apple Pie and See The World is a whimsical book that starts by asserting that making apple pie is the easiest thing in the world. All you do is get the ingredients at the market then mix, bake, and serve… But what if the market is closed? In that case, adventure ensues! One travels the world to procure the ingredients—Italy, France, Sri Lanka, England, Jamaica, Vermont—and then you mix, bake, and serve.
The last spread of this wonderful picturebook features a round table and a gathering of friends eating apple pie—is there anything better?
Bake a delicious apple pie--and take a trip with this culinary global adventure!
An apple pie is easy to make...if the market is open. But if the market is closed, the world becomes your grocery store. This picture book takes readers around the globe to gather ingredients for a delicious apple pie. First hop a steamboat to Italy for the finest semolina wheat. Then hitch a ride to England and hijack a cow for the freshest possible milk. And, oh yes! Don't forget to go apple picking in Vermont! A simple recipe for apple pie is included.
I am a children’s author who loves to eat and bake and cook and gather with others around a table. My writing somehow always has details about people coming together around favorite foods and drinks, enjoying the company of family and friends. Is it any wonder these are the sorts of books I love to read, as well?
Rebecca Estelle hates pumpkins—and this is something kids can hardly imagine. (Certainly, the gorgeous art makes you wonder how anyone could hate pumpkins!) But Rebecca Estelle had a chapter in life where pumpkins were pretty much all she had to eat and so she is sick of them.
However, when she accidentally grows an enormous pumpkin patch, Rebecca Estelle has to deal with the loathed pumpkins. And deal with them she does—pies and muffins and tarts and cookies and roasted seeds come out of her kitchen. She carves fabulous jack-o-lanterns (a magical two-page spread!) and her neighbors show up. “We thought you hated pumpkins!” they say. And Rebecca Estelle presses pumpkin treats and seeds into their hands.
Rebecca Estelle has hated pumpkins ever since she was a girl when pumpkins were often the only food her family had. When an enormous pumpkin falls off a truck and smashes in her yard, she shovels dirt over the pieces and forgets about them. But those slimy pumpkin smithereens sprout up in autumn, and Rebecca Estelle finds a sea of pumpkins in her garden.
A heartwarming classic for more than twenty years, this story shows what happens when one thrifty gardener figures out how to make other people happy with the squash…
I am a children’s author who loves to eat and bake and cook and gather with others around a table. My writing somehow always has details about people coming together around favorite foods and drinks, enjoying the company of family and friends. Is it any wonder these are the sorts of books I love to read, as well?
This rollicking, rhyming picturebook is so much fun to read. A little girl and her mother are making the traditional Korean dish of bee-bim bop. The book starts in the grocery store and ends at a table with three generations gathered to eat. It’s basically a recipe—bee-bim bop can actually be made by reading it, and it is delicious. This is always a crowd-pleaser during storytime. Kids can join in on the refrain of bee-bim bop! The energy level escalates as you go!
A Korean American girl celebrates food and family in this cheerful book about cooking a special meal by Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park.
In bouncy rhyming text, an excited and hungry child tells about helping her mother make bee-bim bop: shopping, preparing ingredients, setting the table, and finally sitting down with her family to enjoy a favorite meal.
The energy and enthusiasm of the young narrator are conveyed in the whimsical illustrations, which bring details from the artist’s childhood in Korea to his depiction of a modern Korean American family.
I have spent close to thirty years researching and teaching about questions of inequality and change. Most of my focus has been on the Global South, with a particular focus on India. I've written about intersecting class, gender, and caste inequalities. I've pursued this research agenda through extensive field research on labor politics, democratization, and the politics of economic reform in India. My interest stems from my background. I am originally from India and have lived and travelled extensively in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I'm an author, public speaker, and consultant and have been a professor for three decades at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, The University of Washington, and Oberlin College.
Climate change will pose great challenges to people across the world – especially for poorer communities and less privileged nations. These challenges will require new policy approaches that address food security. This will be especially critical when the imbalances produced by economic growth and climate change intensify demands on water. This book makes us think about how we need to change agricultural practices. Land, water, and food are connected and we will need to grapple with these connections in new ways in the context of climate change.
This book is the first comprehensive effort to bring together Water, Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture. Apart from looking at the role of water and sanitation for human well-being, it proposes alternative and more locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from the local to global levels against a backdrop of growing uncertainties.
The authors challenge mainstream supply-oriented and neo-Malthusian visions that argue for the need to increase the land area under irrigation in order to feed the world's growing population. Instead, they argue…
I want to live in a future where all life can thrive. Toward that end, I spend my days teaching and writing about how we can solve the problems we face in our communities and world and build such a future. No surprise then that I read extensively about solutions to problems, looking for those that are visionary while being practical and which truly strive to do the most good and least harm for everyone. As a systems thinker, I’m always looking for books that recognize how interconnected our political, economic, production, food, legal, energy, and other systems are and that offer ideas that will have the fewest unintended negative consequences.
When I read nonfiction books about the challenges we face in our communities, nations, and world, I want to know not just what the problems are but how to solve them. In other words, I want the book to be solutionary.
This book begins by articulating the problems with our agricultural systems, but the lion’s share of the book is about how we address those problems effectively. Monbiot’s ideas are both visionary and practical. I found myself thrilled to read someone so powerfully explore the steps we can and must take to build a regenerative future.
The Sunday Times bestseller *Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize* A New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year
'This book calls for nothing less than a revolution in the future of food' Kate Raworth
From the bestselling author of Feral, a breathtaking first glimpse of a new future for food and for humanity
Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing…
I am an author, American Sign Language interpreter, librarian, and signing storyteller. I write picture books, children’s nonfiction, middle grade, and young adult fantasy, and resource books for educators, librarians, and parents. In my books, I highlight strong female characters, both fictional and from real-life. Here I am sharing 5 of my favorite fantasy and sci-fi books with female characters who – by the end of their journeys - absolutely do not care what you think of them.
Set in Australia a few decades in the future, this compelling novel presents a world dependent on a food substitute. Our heroine is Piper, who has grown up as an oral deaf person, relying on hearing aids and speechreading. In the midst of economic collapse and food shortages, Piper falls for a handsome CODA (child of a deaf adult) and is introduced to Auslan (Australian Sign Language) for the first time. She meets his Deaf mother and learns about growing food in the earth and growing a sense of identity and language in her soul. She joins the wild food revolution, converting the public space on her street into a thriving community garden and announcing herself to the world as a proud Deaf person.
Part coming of age, part call to action, this fast-paced #ownvoices novel about a Deaf teenager is a unique and inspiring exploration of what it means to belong.
Set in an ominously prescient near future, All the Words that Matter is the story of Piper: sixteen, smart, artistic, and rebellious, she’s struggling to conform to what her mom wants—for her to be ‘normal,’ to pass as hearing, and get a good job. But in a time of food scarcity, environmental collapse, and political corruption, Piper has other things on her mind—like survival.
A former Catholic, raised in the restaurant business, becoming a Franciscan, and with a passionate love of art, they collectively integrated and came to define my life. I was sent to culinary school. Suffering from a chronic lung condition and obesity, I learned that an animal-based diet was the primary cause and became a vegan in October 1976, regaining my health. Vegan culinary art, as my life’s passion, led me to compete in the International Culinary Olympics five times in Germany, winning Seven medals, including gold, writing for magazines, authoring four books, and working with the United Nations to help humanity improve its health with a plant-based vegan diet.
This was a ground breaking book at the time and makes the case from a food security and sustainability perspective as to why humans should embrace vegetarianism as a lifestyle change. It is the second book on food, after Food is Your Best Medicine, that led me to becoming a vegetarian.
Discover a way of eating that revolutionized the meaning of our food choices and sold more than 3 million copies—now in a 50th-anniversary edition with a timely introduction plus new and updated plant-centered recipes
“Frances Moore Lappé is one of the few people who can credibly be said to have changed the way we eat—and one of an even smaller group to have done it for the better.”—The New York Times
In 1971, Diet for a Small Planet broke new ground, revealing how our everyday acts are a form of power to create health for ourselves and our planet. This…
I’ve always been interested in food, even as young as 3 years old I remember wanting to taste everything, and I found the process of cooking fascinating. But I really got interested in food as a topic for research during my time studying Greek culture for my PhD thesis. People on the island of Kalymnos, where I’ve conducted research for 30 years, made a strong connection between food and memory, but it was a connection that few scholars have written about until recently. So I’ve been excited to participate in a new field reflected by all of these books, and hope you will be as well.
This book tells the story of the transmission and learning of cooking knowledge and skill in Morocco.
What makes it stand out for me is not only the focus on multisensory experience, but the way the author provides an account of her own process of learning to cook, and learning to know what cooking is, as part of her apprenticeship to Marrakchi women.
Graf takes us into the lives of three Marrakchi women and their families, illustrating their struggles and the power that they deploy through cooking. Food and Families in the Making thus makes for a moving account of sensuous scholarship.
Even in the context of rapid material and social change in urban Morocco, women, and especially those from a low-income household, continue to invest a lot of work in preparing good food for their families. Through the lens of domestic food preparation, this book looks at knowledge reproduction on how we know cooking and its role in the making of everyday family life. It also examines a political economy of cooking that situates Marrakchi women's lived experience in the broader context of persisting poverty and food insecurity in Morocco.
I’m an urban designer, author, and host of The Life-Sized City urbanism series - as well as its podcast and YouTube channel. I’ve worked in over 100 cities, trying to improve urban life and bring back bikes as transport. I came at this career out of left field and am happily unburdened by the baggage of academia. I've famously refrained from reading most of the (probably excellent) books venerated by the urbanism tribe, in order to keep my own urban thinking clear and pure. My expertise stems instead from human observation and I find far more inspiration in photography, literature, cinema, science, and especially talking to and working with the true experts: the citizens.
I read Scarry’s city books as a child and I read them with my children when they were young. The detailed descriptions of the richness of urban life remain impressive. It’s all spelled out. Economics, food security, circular economy, neighbours, small businesses, diversity (of animals). For fun you can compare older versions with newer ones and see the number of female characters increase, rightly ousting the Patriarchy from various jobs as the publishers responded to societal developments.
It is still a relevant cautionary tale about our car-centric, fossil-fueled reality. All those drivers crashing - “silly motorists!” and creating havoc. Coal mines happily illustrated without comment. Pigs eating pork hotdogs. My kids both noticed the shocking lack of bikes, but then again, they’re Copenhageners. If you dig this recommendation, then watch one of the best films about urbanism: Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Richard Scarry's classic book that takes readers all around town!
Join Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, and other beloved characters for a day in Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy Town. Visit the school, the farm, the post office, and many more fun and exciting places in this classic book that teaches little ones all about what goes on in their very own communities.
A beautifully produced Faber-Scarry publication.
Praise for Richard Scarry: 'Awe-inspiring.' Dapo Adeola 'Treasure troves of detail.' Chris Mould 'A delight.' Sara Ogilvie 'What a talent.' David Tazzyman 'One of my favourite illustrators.' Allen Fatimaharan
