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CATCHING FIRE

How Cooking Made Us Human

By Richard Wrangham, Basic, 309 pages, $33.95

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AN EDIBLE HISTORY OF HUMANITY

By Tom Standage, Walker, 269 pages, $32.50

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BUILDING A MEAL

From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism

By Hervé This, translated by M..B. DeBevoise, Columbia University Press, 135 pages, $23.95

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THE END OF OVEREATING

Taking Control of the Insatiable North American Appetite

By David A. Kessler, McClelland & Stewart, 324 pages, $29.99

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FRESH

A Perishable History

By Susanne Freidberg , Belknap/Harvard UP, 408 pages, $33.95

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FOOD, INC.

How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer - and What You Can Do About It

Edited by Karl Weber, Public Affairs, 321 pages, $17.50

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THE UNHEALTHY TRUTH

How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It

By Robyn O'Brien, with Rachel Kranz, Broadway, 338 pages, $27.95

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The wide-ranging genre of current food writing encompasses technique-driven cookbooks, photography-heavy food porn, foodie memoirs, culinary mysteries and - drum roll, please - the seven books that are the subject of this review: serious, educational books that explore the history, science and politics of food, that come with lengthy endnote sections and lists of sources, and, invariably, contain facts and stories that are fascinating, even to a live-to-eat gourmand and food blogger like me.

To wit: In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, anthropologist and Harvard professor Richard Wrangham takes us back in time - way back - to make a case for cooked food as the cause of the evolutionary changes that enabled the Homo erectus species of man that emerged 1.8 million years ago to evolve into the Homo sapiens types currently cooking up a storm on the Food Network, and in some actual home kitchens, too.

Backed up by numerous references to research studies in anthropology, archeology, botany and nutrition, Wrangham convincingly proves his hypothesis - my paraphrase: We cook, therefore we are - that the consumption of food cooked over fire led to distinctive and humanity-defining changes in anatomy that in turn affected reproduction rates, culture and socialization.

Along the way, he shows why raw-food diets make their proponents lean but are not conducive to breeding (or civilization building), and as a bonus, provides a deadpan but hilarious description of three contemporary raw foodists of the genus known as instinctotherapists, earnestly eating lunch with Wrangham in the style of apes.

Fascinating fact gleaned from this book: Near the city of Antalya, Turkey, is a natural gas flame that has been burning for 3,000 years.

Another historical perspective on food comes from Tom Standage, a business editor of The Economist who is either an awesome polymath or a highly skilled researcher - probably both. He frames An Edible History of Humanity around the notion that history can be considered as a series of transformations caused, enabled and influenced by food. Civilization? It came about when agriculture was adopted by former hunters and gatherers. Wars? They've been fought for food and lost due to lack of food. Social structures and class differences? You guessed it - all arose out of food issues.

Standage has some varied stories to tell about food's place in history, and makes them all interesting, whether he's explaining how the human propagation of random genetic mutations in maize and wheat resulted in staff-of-life grains that could not survive without human cultivation, delineating why and how the European desire for spices inspired world exploration and the field of geography, or writing about the wide-ranging implications on world events of the humble potato.

This book's fascinating fact: Buried deep within the bedrock of a remote island in Norway lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a state-of-the-art, highly secure, fortified seed-storage facility that contains billions of seeds.

Seeds don't need to be kept fresh to be viable, but foods that do are the subject of Fresh: A Perishable History, by geographer and Dartmouth University professor Susanne Freidberg. The book opens with a history of refrigeration, and devotes the remaining chapters to a round-up of information on how different perishable foods have been stored, marketed and kept fresh over the years since refrigeration began.

One of the more interesting information tidbits in this comprehensive treatment of a rather dull subject is that the French were originally so opposed to cold storage that the word "frigoriphobie" was coined to describe their antipathy. And when a man named Frederick Tudor, a founder of the American ice trade (I know, the what?), first shipped blocks of lake ice from his family farm in New England to the Caribbean in 1805, he failed to sell it to the possibly frigoriphobic and definitely indifferent Martiniquais.

This book's fascinating fact: the peaches grown in the Montreuil area near Paris, renowned for their quality and appearance, were, in the late 19th century, marked with designs on their skins that were etched by sunlight through paper stencils.

As French as Montreuil peaches is Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, by Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise. In this small, slim, very niche market book, This, a physical chemist, explains the scientific principles behind the cooking of five dishes from the classic French repertoire to demonstrate what molecular gastronomy, not to be confused with molecular cuisine, is all about, and to introduce a new approach to cuisine that he calls culinary constructivism.

By subjecting cooking processes to rigorous laboratory testing, This endeavours to separate the culinary definitions within recipe instructions that tell the cook what to do, from the sometimes questionable culinary dictums that specify how to do it. There are no recipes included, and the few murky black-and-white photographs in the book make the food look unappetizing, but the diligent reader will learn, for example, the scientific reasons why the best French fries call for peeled potato sticks to be washed and dried before being deep-fried in oil heated to precisely 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and why a mayonnaise that is vigorously beaten is less fragrant and firm but tastier than one whisked with a weak hand.

Fascinating fact: a nutmeg berry, ground up into powder, can kill a person.

The spectre of death by (contaminated) food also appears in the politically inclined Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer - And What You Can Do About It, a companion guide, edited by Karl Weber, to the documentary film Food Inc.

The book, a collection of support material for the film, contains essays and articles by various contributors, including film producer and author Eric Schlossberg (Fast Food Nation); Robert Kenner, the film's director; influential food writer Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food) and nutritionist Marion Nestlé.

Among the contemporary hot-topic food issues covered are organic food, genetic engineering, ethanol production, global warming, the exploitation of farm workers and world hunger. The compilation format makes for repetition and overlap, but the main messages of the book come through loud and clear: For our own health and safety, and to protect children, farm workers and the planet, we should avoid factory farm products, grow a garden and strive to buy food that's local, in season and organic. Also, soda pop? Evil.

Fascinating/horrifying fact/quote: "Raising thousands of animals together in crowded conditions generates lots of manure and urine. For example, a dairy farm with 2,500 cows produces as much waste as a city of 411,000 people."

The consumption of organic foods as a means to avoid illness is also recommended by Robyn O'Brien, author, with Rachel Kranz, of The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick - and What We Can Do About It. O'Brien is a self-described "Southern-fried soccer mom" who started digging into the causes of food allergies in children after her youngest child (of four), had a severe allergic reaction to eggs as a baby. Using the business and research skills honed during her former career as an equities analyst with an MBA, O'Brien uncovered information about the toxicity of the U.S. food supply and corporate corruption by agribusiness companies that led her to become an outspoken advocate for a healthy diet of food free from chemical additives, artificial colours, hormones, antibiotics and genetic engineering.

O'Brien employs an engaging and unique mixture of folksy, confessional anecdotes and exhaustive summaries on her research findings to tell her story, and had me eyeing the milk in my fridge askance after I read that her son's eczema, sinusitis and chronic ear infections all cleared up when he stopped eating dairy products. She undermines her own credibility, however, by aligning herself closely with Dr. Kenneth Bock, a proponent of controversial alternative therapies to cure autism and other conditions, and by devoting not a little page space to promoting a business venture she runs called Allergy Kids.

O'Brien's fascinating fact: Canada prohibits dairy farmers from injecting cows with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) to increase milk production; the United States does not.

Both the quantity and quality of the food eaten by North Americans are analyzed in The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable North American Appetite, by David A. Kessler, a U.S. pediatrician who has been commissioner of the Federal and Drug Administration and dean of the medical school at Yale University. In clear but not condescending prose, Kessler sets out to "dissect the relationships between the stimulus of palatable food and the response of eating" in order to explain and understand the physiological and psychological reasons why some people become prone to "conditioned hypereating."

Kessler perks up the science-dense first three quarters of the book, essentially a rationale for the mostly common-sense advice that comprises the last quarter, by providing heart-stopping analyses of the menu offerings of U.S. restaurant chains such as Starbucks, Chili's and The Cheesecake Factory. He demonstrates how all of these restaurants, and many food-product developers, are in business to produce and serve "hyperpalatable" food, loaded and layered with the big three appealing and health-endangering foodstuffs: salt, sugar and fat.

Kessler's most fascinating story: a detailed account of how Cinnabon cinnamon rolls were expressly formulated to contain ingredients, including three kinds of sugar, that in combination provide a "highly indulgent" and "absolutely irresistible" sensory experience.

Read any one of these books, and you'll begin to rethink your approach to food and eating. Read them all in a short period of time, as I did, and you'll be ready to change what you eat. After taking this crash course in serious food issues, I'm still food-obsessed, but from now on, more of the food I obsess about will be organic.

Kim Moritsugu is the author of four novels, and writes about food at her Hungry Novelist food blog: http://hungrynovelist.wordpress.com.