[.ca] New Whole Foods Encyclopedia (ISBN 0140250328)

From Amazon.com:
If you eat natural foods, or want to learn more about them, reading The New Whole Foods Encyclopedia will be a treat. The book is an invitation to learn the lore, health properties, and use of more than a thousand familiar and unusual foods and herbs. Each entry consists of a description, a little history or legend, the health benefits, and how to buy (or find) and use it. Author Rebecca Wood clearly delights in her subject--her writing is warm, like love letters to these intriguing foods. "I don't know what I love most about asafetida--its knock-your-socks-off sulfurous aroma ... or ... its pungent but pleasant and satisfying flavor," she writes of the herb also known as devil's dung. "I also love the way the word rolls off my tongue." Not all the entries are complimentary, though--Wood tried to like banana squash, but ended up feeding it to her chickens. Dotting the food entries are sidebars of recipes, preparation suggestions, and weird information that doesn't fit anywhere else: how horses get sunburned, why young wives fed their elderly husbands celery in the 1600s, tips for not crying over onions, and how to harvest natural chewing gum, for example. You may start by looking up a particular food, but you'll linger, reading just for the pleasure of it. --Joan Price

Very Resourceul!:
This is an excellent book for learning more about produce and other whole foods. She even includes some not so healthy foods and justifies her reasoning for them to be advised against. The book has useful information on how to find, select, store, and prepare food items and how they can impact the body. She includes Ayurveda and Oriental nutritional comments for most foods. Also, in the begining she has a short section on the basics to one of the best ways of eating up to date.

very good resource:
This book is a great reference to foods and current dietary practices. Being a proponent of Weston Price's research on diet, I was pleased to find that the informationin this book is very much in line with that information. The book is laid out in alphabetical order, listing each food discussed, and describing how to choose and use it in one's diet. I was quite pleased with how comprehensive and wide ranging the information was. The cover states that it includes information on Ayurveda, Western nutrition, and tradidtional Chinese medicine, and the book lives up to that promise very well. I have grown tired of all the fad diets and cookbooks that are perpetrated by various economic interests, and this book is a breath of fresh air. My only complaints are the near total lack of information about animal foods (which the book does not even pretend to include, so that is okay), and the "incomplete" information on soy. I have serious issues with the soy industry and some of the goings on therein, and personally avoid soy products of any kind like the plague. The soy industry has been behind campaigns of disinformation about healthy oils like coconut, and I do not trust any information that comes from those quarters. Much of what is circulated in vegetarian circles about the history of soy use in the Orient is distorted. Yes, it was in the Yellow Emperor's book as one of the 5 sacred grains, but it was never eaten as a food by humans until it could be made safe by fermentation, and then seldom in amounts greater than a couple tablespoons a day as flavoring (until the influence of the modern soy industry, that is). It was used as a rotation crop to fix nitrogen in the soil until fermentation was discovered. That is a part of the history that seems to get lost in the telling. Wood does have caveats against certain soy products, thank goodness, and her blindness to the dark side of soy is the only complaint I have about the entire book. The rest, including the use of coconut oil and butter, seems to me to be right on the mark. I wholeheartedly recommend this book as an additional reference to Sally Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions," and Ron Schmid's "Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine." It is a very good reference to the vegetable, grain, and fruit foods available. I would like to take off 1/3 of a star for the soy stuff, but feel that the rest of the book is so good as to merit an overall 5.

This book saved my life!:
Well, Ok not quite but almost! A few months ago my teenage daugher and I were diagnosed with numerous food allergies and told to follow a rotation diet. A life long vegetarian, it was an almost overwhelming to be told I could no longer eat soy, eggs, pinto beans, kidney beans, avocados, etc. And my daughter is not allowed any legumes as well (nor sugar either). Clearly the protein was going to be a challenge (we really dislike flesh foods of any kind) but then I read the guidelines for the rotation diet itself and quickly discovered the extreme limits of my food knowledge! Sure I had heard of (but never cooked) quinoa and flax but amaranth and yautia? Not. And even if I could find where to purchase these items, how would I prepare them? Both our weight and our attitude dropped signficantly in the first few weeks. Then we "modified" the guidelines and found ourselves physically sick again. Luckily for us, my husband purchased this book on a trip to Dallas. While I was skeptical about it's holding my interest as an actual "read through", I found it quite engrossing from almost the first page. Not only do I now know what to do with the foods on a rotation diet list (knowing that yautia is similar to potatoes means I can now make a favorite soup that otherwise I would have passed over) but because the index is brilliantly organized I can easily look up say "warming foods" and adjust my internal thermostat rather than the whole house which made my husband doubly glad he had bought it! The same for high BP, colds, cancer, you name it. And I can relax about the protein issue as well knowing which foods on "our list" are highest in protein instead of just choosing those foods with which I might have previously been most familiar. I bought a copy for my mom for her birthday and she can't put it down either! If you are really interested in preparing a variety of healthy foods no matter what your current state of health might be, do yourself a favor and buy this book. It might not save your life but it will certainly liven up your meals no matter what kind of diet you follow!

Invaluable in my kitchen:
I have numerous cookbooks and reference books, but this is by far the most valuable book in my kitchen. I refer to it almost daily, and can't recommend it highly enough. It's packed with useful information.

I don't know what this is!!!!:
So I look it up here. That's all. Sometimes in my travels ie ChinaTown. I find some very weird ingredients on the packages w/the few english words that is supposed to suffice us written for Americans. I'm grateful for this book, I found out some really good nutritional information on obscure seaweed that I had no clue was being used in pasta making in China. Image that, exactly what I needed for my thyroid gland. But best of all is the TCM and Ayurvedic info on these herbs & roots. Now I buy lotus root by the lb. But the best is correlating the info & giving my cooking a punch I never thought possible nor that I was capable of. I know that if it's something you put in your mouth, this book has got the goods on it. A must have in any kitchen witch's bookshelf.