Off-taste Bee Wilson’s book The Way We Eat Now (Basic Books) offers a deep dive into food trends and their impact. A seasoned veteran as a food writer and historian, Wilson brings impressive depth and a broad perspective to the subject. The book offers a very useful bibliography.

Alas, the tone is distinctly off-putting: peevish and scolding, she finds we are all eating the wrong things, or the wrong combinations of things, or things at the wrong time (except maybe the Danes). This is a cumulative weight for her narrative and ultimately sucks the pleasure out of a deeply informative and timely work.