Customer Reviews

Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was deeply disappointed in Simon Majumdar's tale of traveling the world to "eat everything" in a year. As a part time foodie and semi-pro chef I was anticipating exciting descriptions of foods, ingredients and restaurants around the world. That is not this book.

The pronoun "I" is used more in this book than any other word. The book is disappointingly not about the food but is about Simon and his travels. Simon comes off as a self obsessed, self professed and self impressed lover of food but primarily unusual (to an American palate) foods. His descriptions of the food are limited and he spends more time talking about his walks through the cities and countries he visits. I had anticipated reading succulent word pictures of the many foods he ate. These are missing from this book. Instead we are told he ate "a dish of crunchy green beans with garlic", or "Sichuan-style spring rolls and a dish of fiery pork" -- nothing inspiring about the descriptions and no recipes or even clues to recipes to recreate some of his more "normal" food adventures (I will pass on the still beating cobra heart). Instead of telling us that he drank 30 year old sherry, could he have shared a name or brand?

The inclusion of recipes in this book or even pictures of the foods, people and places would have added a great deal to this journal about Simon and his travels because his words are not enough.

Most disappointing was Simon's unnecessary and gratuitous inclusion of repeated references to his genitalia and self perceived sexuality. Was it really necessary to be told he dreamed of carrying a large sign saying "will drop trou for food"? (He'll starve doing that!) Wouldn't it have been sufficient to tell us he thought of carrying a sign that said "will work for food"? Do I need to know what his tailor told him about his limited personal endowments or that he walks around in front of strangers in a short silk robe and nothing else? None of this was enticing nor did it add to the book. I guess it made his ego feel better.

And that is what this book is about -- Simon's ego. The food is not the star.

On the Food Network, there is a show called "The Next Food Network Star." It's a fun reality show; the competitors are portrayed as charming, interesting, and genuinely likable people. When they compete on the show, they're sometimes told things like "you made my mouth water when you described the food, that's a true talent." Unfortunately, they're often also told that they sound unenthusiastic, or pedantic on camera. When I read Simon Majundar's book, I felt like a judge on "The Next Food Network Star." This book shows moments of brilliance, but is uneven, unpolished, and unprofessional.

"Eat My Globe" is a book about a set of trips that Majundar took around the world, trying to sample many different dishes from many different cultures. The book gives a lot of facts: names of people he met, restaurants he visited, places he ate. It reads a little like a calendar: he tells you where he ate at breakfast (and what he ate), where he went next, what he ate for lunch, etc.

I found this book very tedious and difficult to read. Sometimes he'll describe in detail what he ate at a specific meal (for example, BBQ in Texas), but other times he'll just throw out the name of a dish and not describe the flavor, texture, or aroma. Majundar manages an unusual trick: he has written a book that is both too long and too short. He provides too much detail in the book about the minutia of his travel planning. However, he spends far too little time talking about the people, places, and foods that he encountered.

Worse yet, Simon is a terrible writer. As an example, here is what he writes about a woman called Tina, a stranger who invited him to Thanksgiving dinner via email: "I took the plunge and wrote back saying I would be delighted to join her for Thanksgiving and, over the next six months, we swapped regular e-mails so, by the time it came for me to pick up my rental car and make the short drive from San Francisco down to Santa Cruz, I already felt like I knew her and knew I would like her." Yes, this is an overly complicated, run-on sentence. But worse yet, that is almost all that Simon tells us about this woman. He doesn't tell us how she was dressed, where she was originally from, what her house looked like, what she did for a living, why she liked food, what type of accent she had. This happens again and again in the book: Simon says "I met this wonderful person and liked them a lot" and then doesn't tell the reader anything about the person.

Even worse, he does the same thing with food: he doesn't tell us how dishes are prepared, where the ingredients come from, when they were developed, why they were eaten. And, I have a sneaking suspicion that he was eating a lot of tourist food. Outside of the western world, meat is still an expensive luxury. I think that Simon ate meat for three meals a day for most of his trip.

I was very disappointed by this book. Simon clearly knows and loves food, and spent a year of his life going to interesting places and eating interesting things. But it's a shame that he only managed to turn that journey into a 264-page book. I didn't learn anything from this book, and I didn't walk away from this book wanting to go anyplace he went, or eat anything he ate. It has brief moments of brilliance, where he does a great job capturing a specific meal. But on the whole, I can't recommend this book.

When this book was offered on Amazon Vine, I was thrilled. I cook from scratch every day, love to try new recipes, to collect cookbooks, and to read about other cultures, cuisines and recipes. I had high hopes that this book would further my knowledge of world cultures and cuisines and maybe there'd be some new recipes. My hopes were dashed immediately. If you want to know more about the author, this is the book to read. Otherwise, to learn more about global cuisine, I recommend a subscription to Saveur magazine.

If you liked No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach, which I did, you would think you'd enjoy this book too. "You'd think."

I tried to get into this book and found I couldn't do it. A personal bias against perhaps the author's style? Too much of this, and not enough of that? Who knows? I also gave it to my mother to try it out and she too found it uninteresting. Maybe it's a 'family thing'? Whatever the reason, I would not recommend this book if you enjoy the food channel and were hoping for something akin to that experience in print, in this book.

I selected this title with no preconceived notions. It sounded like a fun book to read with plenty of anecdotes, nuggets of wisdom in finding good food and even some education. This book met my expectations in this regard.

In a general sense this book reads somewhat like a Food Network program, explaining what the search was all about, how the different foods are made, and how much he enjoyed himself. Some of this is quite interesting, though I was a little put off by the description of how blood sausage is made...

Where this book becomes tedious and less-than-ideal is in the generous helpings of fluff and ego that are also added in. The author doesn't come across as arrogant and rude, but he definitely has an air that comes through in his writing. There's a lot of filler too, stuff that isn't food-oriented that could be left out in favor of more relevant content.

This is an enjoyable read when viewed as a food-related memoir. It could have been better, and it could have held a lot more useful information, but as is it is still a pleasant read.

My favorite sub-genres of the memoir include the "project memoir," followed closely behind by the "travel memoir." So when I came across Simon Majumbar's Eat My Globe, I thought it would be a book I'd enjoy since it combines two of my favorite types of non-fiction.

Here's the thing about memoir. If you don't like the memoirist, the book will get old really fast. I have a feeling that's why some of you avoid memoir like the plague. You may have read a few and wondered why people love this genre full of people self-absorbed enough to write about the minutiae of their experiences, often sharing too much information along the way.

So, that said, I liked Simon Majumdar. He made no excuses for the fact that he might, in fact, be a bit of a jerk. He shares his shortcomings with a bit of a swagger as if to say, "This is me. Like it or lump it." That self-awareness and self-deprecating humor helped make this the kind of book that made me grin while I was reading it.

I didn't only grin, but my mouth literally watered many times as I was reading his descriptions of the food he ate while on the road -- whether prepared by an acclaimed chef or eaten from a street vendor (in fact my mouth is watering now as I'm writing about it). I also cringed a few times when he recounted some things that he ate bravely for the sake of meeting his mission to "eat everything." Some of these included cod whale sperm, rat, dog, and fermented shark (in fact I'm cringing now as I write it).

This book was an enjoyable read. As you can imagine, taking a year to travel the world and take in the food that the regions are known for, resulted in just a cursory investigation of each cuisine or culture. However, because Majumdar was mostly guided by people who he had met on web-based food sites, he found out interesting tidbits about the people or the food. He didn't just eat fine cuisine either (in fact, he ate very little of that). Instead, he ate what the locals ate at street vendors, local cafes, and in people's homes.

Simon took a gut-wrenching (literally) gastronomic tour of the world in his 40's. I can say what he did in travel, let alone the food, would kill a lesser person. He samples cuisine, something like Andrew Zimmern of "Bizarre Foods" but does stick at the more disgusting tidbits (rotted Icelandic shark, lambs tongue) but does get suckered into dried cane rat (which he says tastes about as good as it sounds.

I can confirm some of his findings in Thailand and also in Delhi; I also got a chance to eat at Bukhara, a tandoori restaurant in Delhi and the dhal, smoked over tandoor fires, is as darkly delicious as he says. In fact, after you have that simple lentil dish, it's sad to eat regular boiled lentils which bear as much resemblance to this dhal as canned soup does to home-made chowder. Fantastic.

He gives some travel tips at the end of the book which are terse but are ver good advice for the world wanderer.

My review title of "not awful" damns "Eat My Globe" with faint praise, but I couldn't really work up more enthusiasm for it. The book read easily for me and there were parts that evinced a grin or two, but in many other ways I was disappointed.

First, someone seems to have told Simon Majumdar that snarky sells, so he plays up the curmudgeonly, cranky, ill-tempered traveler bit to the point that I began to see him as unlikeable. Second, in his introduction, Simon tells us how important food is to him; he says "I can recall every meal I ever ate... We (the Majumdar family) signpost our lives by what we have eaten and when." That leads me to ask WHERE'S THE FOOD??? Meals the author describes as some of the best on his trip get one paragraph, each dish a sentence. He gives that much and more to hotel room accommodations and train trips. I understand that the book is both a food memoir and a travelogue, but the food drives the trip, so I found it disappointing that the descriptions were so weak. I don't know if it is because the author simply hasn't the skill to write descriptively and at length when he's not complaining or if the book was edited by a food-hater.

As I said, the book was an easy read and I didn't think I wasted my time reading it, but it just wasn't all it could be. In the constellation of travels to eat, Anthony Bourdain still shines the brightest. His "No Reservations" digs enthusiastically into the culture of a city or country and the joy he reveals in sharing food, his humanity in learning about people eloquently transports the reader. "Eat My Globe" takes the same concept but stays in the mundane.

I'm a big fan of the foods shows on the Food Network & the Travel Channel and any time I happen to catch Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern I stop everything and watch the rest of the show.

I enjoy watching them eating exotic foods from around the world and because of the work I used to do,I've travel extensively and enjoyed experiencing exotic foods unlike anything from my neck of the woods,so the idea of this book appealed to me.

The author,Simon Majumdar,is a normal guy with good job and income that like many of us,longed for the adventure of dining around the world and planned for a year of it.

The part that really interested me was unlike Bourdain & Zimmern,he was doing this all like most of us would,on a tighter budget and not first class.

While some of his attempts at humor and lightheartedness might put some people off as too crude,it didn't bother me at all because it's all pretty harmless.

It was interesting hearing his take on foods that we have around us in the USA,as it was about the truly exotic and nauseating foods around the globe.

Overall This book supplied an enjoyable weekend read for me and I would recommend it to other foodies out there

This is the most engrossing book I've read in a while. The author is quite witty, and many times while reading it I had to stop and wipe my eyes and take a deep breath.

The book is pretty simple. He hated his job, but liked to eat, so he spent a year travelling and eating. You get one recipe out of the whole book, and a lot of first-hand notes about where he went, what he did, and what he ate. He isn't shy to say what he thinks. Chez Pannise, for instance, disappointed him greatly. Sushi made from cod sperm was even worse. He doesn't want to ever talk about the dried cane rat. He spends a little time on everything he did on his trip and he seems to have had a grand old time.

In one brief chapter he brings up Anthony Bourdain as his nemesis. That disappointed me because the rivalry could have filled most of the book. Both the Author and Bourdain have eaten live cobra hearts, for instance, but there was no mention of the rivalry in that chapter.

Overall, I loved this book. It was well written and fun to read.