Eating My Words

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Eve Johnson is the former food editor for the Vancouver Sun and the
author of two books. In her introduction, she reveals that she became a
food writer by accident. Although she was originally hired as a Sun
general features columnist, her lifelong passion for food quickly earned
her a niche writing about the things that people eat and the way that
people eat them.

This book is a collection of those columns. Her topics include why
chocolate is evil, why mushrooms are scary, whether men need meat, lemon
meringue pie, the crotchety old fudge recipe, pheasant under glass, the
flaming Christmas pudding, a mess of pottage, bedevilled eggs, fast
food, cotton candy, and Twinkies. Each column is a quirky combination of
food history, nutrition facts, secrets from the kitchen, and the
occasional recipe. While Arthur Black has repeatedly said that Johnson
is a great cook, Johnson has no problems discussing her worst kitchen
disasters. This willingness to go public with egg (or worse) on her face
is one of the reasons that her columns are so readable. This is someone
not lecturing from on high but telling you a good story from across the
kitchen table. Historical facts are mixed with such lines as “A
tiger’s love for her kittens pales beside my love for my dishwasher”
or “I grew up in a house ruled by two antagonistic spirits: The
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and rye whiskey.”

Eating My Words is for people who sometimes take their food seriously
and perhaps themselves a little less seriously.