The Taste of Tomorrow Book Review by ChristineMM

Title: The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food

Author: Josh Schonwald

Genre: Nonfiction, Project Memoir

Publication: Harper Collins, April 2012

My Star Rating: 3 stars out of 5: It’s Okay

Summary Statement: Mildly Entertaining Beach Read Project Memoir for Foodies but If He’s on the Opposite Side of Food Politics from the Reader It’s Not a Fun Read After All

I’m interested first and foremost about health, and when food interferes with health, I have an issue. I’m interested in not ruining the Earth either, nor do I want to help deplete the world’s supply of a wild food such as certain breeds of fish. I thought this book sounded interesting, with the marketing description of “lively and fascinating” and “he doesn’t shy away from controversy”. This is not a straight nonfiction book. The author is a journalist and this is a project memoir, which is a term I like to use for a book where a person who is interested in a topic goes out to interview subject matter experts and to see things in the field in order to inform them, and the journey is documented. An important element of a project memoir is it is full of opinion and observations which differs from traditional journalistic reporting which is supposed to report facts and hopefully will present both sides of the story.

My first realization that this was perhaps not quite what I’d hoped was the statement in the prologue that said that his intention was not to write a controversial book about food politics (note the opposite claim in the marketing materials). Second he explains that this does not have a wide span of topics, he researched only what interested him. I have no problem with focusing on what you’re interested in but sometimes the research was too thorough or not thorough enough, an even coverage of each topic should have been attempted.

Schonwald admits to being a bagged salad lover and the book starts off with 84 pages of writing about mostly salad (the exception being a side trail with radicchio which can be eaten raw in salad or grilled and prepared cooked also). There is a good explanation of industrial farming, the unique climate of Salinas California, and the necessity of extending the shelf life of greens so they can be transported to the consumer who lives in other areas of the country. I never knew about the science behind the bag the salad is in and wish more time was spend talking about that. Not discussed are the ways that fresh produce is kept in storage or how that is picked, I thought we should have heard about that also. For example we have access to more fresh produce today than twenty or thirty years ago – why? And what technological changes are happening now that will make other fresh produce more readily available to us in the future? Are there cons to harvesting before a crop is actually ripe? Those are some controversial fresh produce topics that I wish he covered (not just salad greens).

The next section of the book was about meat, specifically, growing meat in labs. This was 36 pages long and was highly disturbing to me. The idea of a meat such as beef having the consistency of tofu and growing it in layers to stack up into a cutable piece made me lose my appetite. The writing in this section was less entertaining and got boring in some parts (as well as causing my gag reflex to kick in). I get the challenges, I was enlightened. What I found most interesting was the fact that attempting to pander to vegetarians by using a non-animal base for the meat culture is impossible and that growing meat to eat is so expensive that only millionaires could afford to buy it right now, if it was brought to market. The picture for the future of meat grown in vitro is grim.

Fish and fish farming was the third section which took up 54 pages. It seemed longer, I felt the section was too dragged out. Here is where the book was most boring. We don’t need to hear every single detail of an encounter which is not interesting or exciting in any way. This is the challenge with a project memoir: just because the author experienced it doesn’t mean it was worth including every detail in the final product: the published book. Some cutting and editing would have been in order here.

My favorite part of the fish section was where he explained that the excessive government regulation in the USA is prohibiting new industry from growth here and that other countries with fewer regulations are welcoming such businesses with open arms. Thus, thanks to government regulation Americans are forcing continued reliance on imported fish and shellfish (99% of what we consume already is imported from other countries). So much for the vegetarians who desire to eat fish from local food sources.

A short section of 23 pages discussed food trends in ethnic food and predicts the generic too large label of African food (even worse than labeling a food group “European”). This section was so short and felt rushed.

The last section was about the idea of non-food items providing our nutrients for basic survival. This section was just 11 pages long and focused on the U.S. military’s use of MRE’s and the idea that nanotechnology could somehow provide our bodies with food. Here I felt the author should have gone back to explore the idea of factory created foods infused with supplements and calories and protein in the same way that he exhaustively explored salad greens. For example today we have millions of people drinking diet drinks as meal replacements and the elderly using those or other canned liquid shake type drinks as solid food replacements also. There is a booming industry in the USA of medical diets supplied by doctors that are in ready to eat packets measured out to replace real foods which is low calorie, low cholesterol, sugar free, high protein (for weight loss help), and full of base vitamins and nutrients. Additionally people are relying more and more on supplements in pill, capsule, gel cap, or powdered form used to making drinks to consume in place of or to enrich one’s diet. The pros and cons of using such highly processed foods could have been explored, but it was not even touched upon.

Schonwald is pro GMO foods and keeps repeating it’s due to vitamin enriching rice that could help people in third world countries have better nutrition. I grew tired of that one mantra being repeated while the controversial issues of GM foods was not explored. The author puts down some people with concerns, referencing “the rising tide of food-specific neo-Luddism in America”. If you have an opinion other than the one he believes in the book turns from what I started out thinking was a fun beach read for foodies into something that irritates you.


I rate this book 3 stars = It’s Okay because I felt that the book went too in-depth in some areas and was too skimpy in others. It was entertaining in some areas and boring in others, it rambled in some parts and sprinted through others. It was not quite what the marketing materials said it would be either.





Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book from the Amazon.com Vine program for the purpose of reviewing it on their site. I was under no obligation to review it on my blog or to review it favorably. For my blog’s full disclosure statement see the link near the top of my blog’s sidebar.