Bread, Wine, Chocolate

The Slow Loss of Foods We Love

By: Simran Sethi

Narrated by: Therese Plummer

Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi explores the history and cultural importance of our most beloved tastes, paying homage to the ingredients that give us daily pleasure while providing a thoughtful wake-up call to the homogenization that is threatening the diversity of our food supply.

Food is one of the greatest pleasures of human life. Our response to sweet, salty, bitter, or sour is deeply personal, combining our individual biological characteristics, personal preferences, and emotional connections. Bread, Wine, Chocolate illuminates not only what it means to recognize the importance of the foods we love but also what it means to lose them. Award-winning journalist Simran Sethi reveals how the foods we enjoy are endangered by genetic erosion - a slow and steady loss of diversity in what we grow and eat. In America today, food often looks and tastes the same, whether at a San Francisco farmers market or at a Midwestern potluck. Shockingly, 95 percent of the world's calories now come from only 30 species. Though supermarkets seem to be stocked with endless options, the differences between products are superficial, primarily in flavor and brand.

Sethi draws on interviews with scientists, farmers, chefs, vintners, beer brewers, coffee roasters, and others with firsthand knowledge of our food to reveal the multiple and interconnected reasons for this loss and its consequences for our health, traditions, and culture. She travels to Ethiopian coffee forests, British yeast culture labs, and Ecuadoran cocoa plantations collecting fascinating stories that will inspire listeners to eat more consciously and purposefully, better understand familiar and new foods, and learn what it takes to save the tastes that connect us with the world around us.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2015 Simran Sethi (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Therese Plummer's well-tempered performance complements this book's important message about food and agricultural biodiversity.... Creating individual voices and accents for various interviewees, Plummer captures the richness of the countries and cultures that embrace the three foods she focuses on. Overall, Plummer's narration depicts the author's belief that how we eat honors how we celebrate the world and our sense of taste." (AudioFile)

Amazing

Full of science, love and interest. I love that she referenced one of my favorite women Silvia Earle.

Confectionery

Clearly well researched but the sugary prose and reading dilute the end result to 11% cocoa when I was looking for 72%

Worthy Content Flawed Presentatiom

What is otherwise an excellent view of pressing issues not only in the food world, but in life, is flawed by two distractions. The performance is overly dramatic; affected accents and more disturbingly, whenever discussing science oddly robotic. The second distraction comes from the author and a penchant to personalize and share a bit too many off topic observations. Would have loved more substance over wardrobe and the attractiveness of some of her interviewees.

There aren't just wine and chocolate or bread!

I just finished your book,the slow lost of food we love. I really enjoyed listening to it. Simran has done an extensive of research. Because of the knowledge in book it made me understand the whole ecology of food chain from the seed to people who processing them. 😊

Calms My Soul

Excellent. Her voice is calming and her research is thorough. The only issue I could imagine someone having with this book would be possibly opinions regarding trade and politics. But I am 100 percent in agreement and love her perspective.

Probably better read, not listened to.

I had to speed the narration to make this move along. The breathy overly dramatized narration was very distracting. It was read like a romance novel. This is the first Audible I was disappointed with.