Book Review: Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything by Simon Majumdar

Simon Majumdar is a food obsessed man, and Eat my Globe is a food obsessed book. Half-Bengali and half-Welsh, he lives in London. One day, about age 40, he finds a list of things he wants to do with his life, written years earlier. One item on it says "Go everywhere, eat everything". So, he decides to do that. He finds that his savings are enough to spend a year traveling, although he will have to travel cheaply.

The result is a lot of good food (and some really bad food), a lot of new friends, lots of adventure, and a pretty good book: Eat my Globe.

People who have read Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour will find this a somewhat familiar odyssey. But there are some differences. While both Bourdain and Majumdar travel the world in search of things to eat, their foci are different. Bourdain is a chef; Majumdar does some cooking, but it's not his profession; mostly he eats. Also, in A Cook's Tour Bourdain sets out to eat weird stuff. Cook's Tour is a much more macho book than Eat my Globe. Majumdar not only wants to eat, he wants to meet people he's interacted with in his blog or on food-centered websites.

There's certainly some challenging food in Eat My Globe - including dog, cat, rat, and snake. But that's not his focus.

Eat my Globe finds Majumdar in many countries. In the course of his year, he visits (in order) England, Ireland, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia, Russia, Finland, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, USA again, German, Iceland, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, India, South Africa, Senegal, Morocco, Spain, Turkey and Italy. He finds friends in nearly all these places, and good things to eat in nearly all of them as well.

Eat my Globe concludes with several appendixes. Appendix C lists his top 20 tastes from the year (not in order):
1. Theiebou Djenne, in Senegal
2. Tandoori chicken, in New Delhi
3. Yakitori in Ueno, Tokyo
4. Sichuan hotpot in China
5. Boiled new potatoes, in Finland
6. Breakfast ribs in Kansas City
7. Seafood kare kare in the Philippines
8. Souvlaki in Melbourne
9. Pho in Hanoi
10. Braai in South Africa
11. Shrimp cocktail in Mexico
12. Roast Chicken in Santa Cruz
13. Mee krob in Thailand
14. Mutton kebab in Mumbai
15. Pork pie in England
16. Jamon Iberico in Spain
17. Pani ca meusa, in Sicily
18. Balik Ekmek in Turkey
19. Smoked Omul and Sig, in Russia
20. Roti Canai in Malaysia

It's telling that nearly half of these items were cooked for him by friends in their homes, not by chefs in restaurants.

If you love to eat, and read about eating, this is a book you should get.