If you're over thirty, is there anything here for you? Sure, there is. If you've baked a few loaves of bread in your time, you might bristle at taking instruction from someone who doesn't know what yeast looks like when she begins. However Erway does grow as a cook as the book progresses -- the recipes become more complex and inventive. Erway's own supper club, Hapa Kitchen, focuses on cooking foods inspired by growing up half-Asian in America, with one parent whose food culture is quite different from the U.S.-mainstream. A few of the dishes included share that focus. But again, it's not really about the recipes.
The Art of Eating is best when Erway is reporting on cultural trends like foraging, freeganism (i.e., looking for and sometimes surviving on discarded foodstuffs), trendy private supper clubs, and cookoffs -- a fun way to cook, gather, hone skills and raise money for charity. It's also good at addressing the need for community in eating -- that eating is an important social act.
Erway's prose is serviceable, but not always a pleasure to read. The book would have benefited if some of the more mundane play-by-play had been edited -- "I opened my cell phone and began typing a text message to Keith..." is the kind of thing there's too much of here and that works better on a blog. But like the Not Eating Out blog, there's plenty of inspiration, good ideas, and adventure.
