Gary Taubes' Top Book Recommendations

Gary Taubes

Author

This book used to be described as the most famous book ever written about food. He has several chapters on the cause and prevention of obesity. [source]

Barry C. Smith

I’ve chosen The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin — a French philosopher, early physiologist, a gourmand who was fascinated by taste and eating and diet and ways of living all involving the consuming of food and drink. What I love is the particular attention to detail that allows him to focus exactly what is going on in us as tasters when we’re consuming food and drink. Most people of the day would have talked about how good or bad the food was, how well cooked it was, whether or not it came from the right place, was it of good provenance, whether you had a Bresse chicken; but in fact he’s interested in what happens to us, the experiences we have as a result as consuming food in the way we consume it. He might have been the first person — certainly in the French philosophical tradition — to notice something that has now been confirmed by science namely that what we call ‘taste’ is actually a combination of taste and smell. He has a lovely quote where he says ‘In fact, taste and smell might be part of the same apparatus. You can think of the mouth as the factory and the nose as the chimney but they’re all in the business of producing a certain range of experiences.’ Lovely metaphor! Part of the early industrial revolution, of course. Here he is writing in the early nineteenth century and he’s fascinated by how we might discover these properties of our own experience and he’s one of the first to describe something that’s now a standard view of taste in sensory science and in the food industry: e.g. if you hold your nose pinched tightly shut and you start chewing something in your mouth you get very little flavour. You’ll think it doesn’t taste of very much; you might get some saltiness or sweetness or sourness. But as soon as you let the nose go, in rush the flavours, and now you realise just how much smell is contributing. Early on in the book, he points out that this is something you can do to confirm the contribution of smell to flavour or tasting. [source]

P. D. Mangan

@Blacklabellogic Yes, first diet book ever. Brillat-Savarin wrote about how overweight people love carbs in the early 19th century. [source]

Gary Taubes

Author

Brilliantly conceived and executed, Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet is the book I have long awaited—thoughtful, balanced and unbiased—to understand the challenges that humanity will face as the twenty-first century progresses. Mann’s historical perspective provides the critically important context for us to understand how we got here and how we might solve the problems presented by a finite world of ten billion humans. [source]

Barack Obama

Former USA President

Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads. [source]

Mark Zuckerberg

Founder/Facebook

When I read Sapiens:, I found the chapter on the evolution of the role of religion in human life most interesting and something I wanted to go deeper on. William James was a philosopher in the 1800s who shaped much of modern psychology. [source]

Gary Taubes

Author

Weston Price was a great dental scientist. He travelled around the world and did the equivalent of controlled dietary experiments. [source]

Adam Haritan

One book that immediately comes to mind is Nutrition And Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. Additionally, there have been a few books that have been instrumental in helping me figure out my role, purpose, and mission in life. [source]