Rating: 
Summary: An entertaining and informative collection
Review: Maybe he didn't really eat "everything;" but Steingarten seems to have come close. Once one gets past Steingarten's gourmand snobbery, this is a highly enjoyable and informative book of chapters, which read more like essays, on different food-related topics. Steingarten mightily challenges fad diets and nutritional myths (like all fat, salt, or alcohol is bad for one's health) with well-researched statistics and information presented in a very humorous fashion. He becomes personally involved with each subject almost to a fault. There are even a few recipes thrown in for good measure. Buy this book and feel good again about eating!
Rating:
Summary: Funny, informative and inspiring (to make you cook, that is)
Review: Despite the Oliver Sacks-like title, this is a culinary florilegium by the food critic of Vogue and Slate. I quote the New York Time Book Review, bowing to its laconic accuracy: "Part cookbook, part travelogue, part medical and scientific treatise." Steingarten is tireless in poring over the scientific research on nutrition and cooking, and clearly loves his subject as much as he loves to try the same recipe a dozen times, hunting for perfection. He praises the greatest cooking and the finest simple pleasures (McDonald's, barbecue), investigates everything from ketchup to salt to Kobe beef, and argues for common-sense nutrition. He kicks against the Food Police: salt doesn't raise blood pressure, sugar isn't that bad for you, alcohol is good for you once a day, etc. (His essay "Salad, the Silent Killer," even if it doesn't burst the bubbles of the Food Police, serves as wicked parody of obsessive toxin-phobia and fault-finding.) To top it all off, Steingarten writes very well and is at times wickedly funny. A great food read.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating look at food around the world
Review: I came across Steingarten's book quite by accident. Pulled in by the title, I found myself absorbed from the first chapter in the witty and informative style of the book. It's a series of essays or articles on all the important food topics, such as bread, seafood, wine, and more. The thing I loved about it was his relentless commitment to researching. In the first chapter, he resolved to identify and conquer all his food prejudices.
In subsequent chapters, he goes to great lengths to learn all he can about a particular food-related topic, and he tests the ideas in his kitchen. My favorite chapter was the one on bread, or more specifically, his quest for the perfect levain, a type of bread made without yeast. He takes us through attempt after attempt in his kitchen until he gets it right, then reports that he and his wife ate nothing but the levain when it did come out right. What dedication to his craft!
Also highly enjoyable was his chapter on attempting to lose weight - I could really relate! As he discovered, however, some diets will make you lose your joy for food, which would be disastrous for him professionally.
You should read this book even if you don't usually read books like this, and get copies for all your relatives and friends who like to cook.
Rating: 
Summary: A Leading Contemporary Culinary Essayist. Great Read
Review: `The Man Who Ate Everything' is written by Jeffrey Steingarten, credited with being the food critic for `Vogue' magazine, belongs to a very exclusive club of American culinary columnists whose present leading light is James Villas and whose biggest star was M.F.K. Fisher. Oddly, I always had trouble appreciating Fisher's writing, while I simply can't get enough of either Villas or Steingarten. And, of these two, I am leaning to Steingarten if anyone asked me for a `good book on food'.
Steingarten's greatest strength as a writer to the amateur foodie is his ability to put himself in our position vis-à-vis the experts. He never pictures himself as an expert like Harold McGee on food science or Mario Batali on Italian cuisine or Nick Malgieri on baking or even like gifted neophyte Alton Brown on cooking technique. Unlike these professionals and teachers, Steingarten's shtick is how he gets there, not what he as learned after arriving. He is the culinary everyman's surrogate who can travel to Venice to visit Marcella Hazan for an education in cooking and eating Venetian seafood and have cooking expert Marian Cunningham fly in to teach him how to make a perfect piecrust.
Steingarten's introduction which gives an explanation of the book's title makes one seriously wonder what our dear reporter did before he was tapped to write on food for `Vogue'. His list of culinary aversions could fill several major cookbooks, and have. One wonders if Steingarten had any food related assignment before he embarked on reforming his tastes to fit his `Vogue' assignment. While I sometimes fear that my sense of taste is remarkably dull compared to those of talented chefs, my compensation is that there is literally nothing I will not eat and there are very few things I will avoid. In contrast, pre-Vogue Steingarten had aversions to kimchi, dill, swordfish, anchovies, miso, falafel, clams, and all Greek food. The introductory essay is the story of how Steingarten overcame all of these aversions except to the one for eating insects.
This first essay is a perfect exemplary of Steingarten's style. It may have been easier to say these are the aversions he overcame, but it is much more fun to describe how he overcame them. This is not to say that the book is all about the tourist to the banal. Steingarten is well prepared for most of these trips and we, along with the author, learn much in the course of his trials and errors.
While this is not a book about food science a la Robert Wolke's `What Einstein Told His Chef', there is a lot of scientific method afoot in many of the essays. My favorite is Steingarten's excursion into the world of the perfect piecrust. As dedicated `Good Eats' fans know from Alton's episode on pie crusts, the building of the perfect pie crust involves resolving two contrary properties, flakiness and tenderness while doing battle with properties of wheat flour gluten which work so well when creating bread, but which, it is said, cause all sorts of undesirable characteristics in pie crusts, known to the French as `pate brisee'. Before expert Cunningham flies in from California, Steingarten surveys the entire body of writing in English on what makes a good pie crust and comes up with a perfect procedure involving a whiz of the flour in a food processor with half the shortening followed by a careful folding in of the remaining shortening and a hint of water to bring everything together. The result is a disaster.
The lesson from this attempt is that that villain gluten is not so irrelevant to a pastry crust as some writers would have you believe. When Madame Cunningham arrives on the scene, she whips up a dandy piecrust in about as much time as it may take you to write about it. Ms. Cunningham then flies off before Herr Steingarten has gotten everything about her technique down on paper. This leads to many transcontinental telephone calls while our Jeffrey perfects his fingering with the dough and gets everything down in black and white. The really ironic outcome of this exercise and the resulting essay is that Steingarten's description of the complete procedure takes SEVEN (7) full pages. And, that is with a recipe using shortening rather than my preferred butter. I may not follow his procedure, but I certainly enjoyed his journey needed to get him to that result.
Like Villas, it is quite likely that you will find much in Steingarten's writing with which to disagree. This is part of the fun. For example, he can find little to like about roasted turkey, the national American holiday meal. Since `Gourmet' and `Bon Appetit' and Nigella Lawson (among others) are still cooking up new recipes for the maligned bird, I suspect Steingarten has not talked anyone out of eating their gigantic poultry, but it is certainly fun listening to him rant about it and, as Ms. Lawson so aptly points out, tradition may be as much or more important than the turkey's culinary virtues.
As we are approaching the dark evenings of winter, I definitely recommend this book as a classic of American culinary writing. It is our Yankee answer to B'rer Villas' writing about food from the Southern perspective. As an essayist, Steingarten has the eye and mind of Stephen Jay Gould and the wit and wordsmithing (and similarly strong prejudices) of H. L. Menchen, my two favorite American essayists.
Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A New Yorker's Views on What's Good to Eat
Review: This book is a collection of short essays by Jeffrey Steingarten, food columnist for Vogue magazine. The essays touch on topics such as who makes the best ketchup (and how to make your own), how to make perfect mashed potatoes, judging a barbecue contest, cooking with Olestra (the fake fat), and fruitcakes. There are research essays on health related topics such as the French Paradox, and the possibly over-rated dangers of eating salt. Steingarten also likes to do experimental research in his own kitchen, resulting in essays on topics like bread, french fries, or ice cream. Sometimes he works with exotic ingredients, and other times he experiments with creative uses for packaged processed foods. Sprinkled throughout the book are recipes for specific projects from the essays, but this is not a recipe book by any means. Sources are not cited at all, neither in the text, nor through endnotes or a bibliography. There is, however, an index.
Virtually all of the essays held my interest. Some of them led to some ah-ha moments, as he explains the science or culture behind favorite dishes that just don't always turn out well in my kitchen. Steingarten is a New Yorker through and through. He revels in being able to start an odd cooking project late at night, popping out if need be to 24-hour groceries to get that exotic ingredient that happens to be missing from his kitchen at the time when he needs it. He goes to great lengths to ensure proper cooking procedures for ultimate results, such as continuously monitoring and correcting the cooking temperature when boiling potatoes for mashing, or ordering freshly ground flour to be flown in special for his bread. This seems to be a rather city-oriented way of thinking about cooking. Out here in the country, I don't have time to monitor the temperature of my potato water, but I grow my own potatoes and know that the variety and age of the potatoes probably is much more significant for excellent mashed potatoes than the cooking temperature. To get fresh flour, I grind my own, and if I don't have an ingredient in the house when I begin a recipe, I substitute or change recipes rather than go right out and buy something. In sum, Steingarten's way of thinking about many topics is very much that of a consumer from the big city. While readers may not share that approach, the book is nonetheless interesting and informative.
The one chapter I was less than pleased with was the one on Olestra. Steingarten came across as being so thoroughly enamored with Olestra, it sounded as if he felt he had to say only positive things about the product because the manufacturer had been so generous in letting him play with it.
Rating: 
Summary: A guy who likes to hear himself ramble
Review: After reading all of the reviews, I thought this would be a good, insightful read for someone who is interesting in the culinary arts. Instead, it's like listening to someone tell you a long boring story and you don't have the heart to stop them. He goes on about little projects like finding the cheapest subsistence diet, the difference between ketchups, and all the ridiculous diets he has been on. Very boring, inconclusive, and uninteresting. Also, I wouldn't trust anyone's palette who likes Diet Coke as much as this guy. $14 bucks wasted.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect for those in-between times
Review: This is the perfect book to have when at a traffic jam, doctor's office or any of the hundreds of daily jams we find ourselves caught. I found myself laughing out loud several times at many of these admittedly wacky but witty tales. The subject matter was in itself a winner - he touches on everything from non-fat fat to fruit ripening to when to buy certain products. And this is the best feature of the book - it is not only entertaining but also informative...the best of both worlds. He does not have the poignancy of a M.F.K. Fisher or the razor claws of the reviewer Simon Britchky or the down-to-earth charm of a Nika Hazelton but in his own way, he is just as good.
Rating:
Summary: I'd actually send this man fan mail...
Review: I read this book in no time at all. I have found myself picking it up again and again to read the odd chapter. His recipes are superb and the writing is fantastic. His comments about everything from fruitcake to spit roasting are so funny I found myself falling out of my chair laughing. I would recommend this book to anyone regardless of your interest in food. He pulls you into the world of gastronomy like whirlwind until you find yourself intensely interested in everything gastronomic.
Rating:
Summary: It doesn't get any better
Review: Despite the Oliver Sacks-like title, this is a culinary florilegium by the food critic of Vogue and Slate. I quote the New York Time Book Review, bowing to its laconic accuracy: "Part cookbook, part travelogue, part medical and scientific treatise." Steingarten is tireless in poring over the scientific research on nutrition and cooking, and clearly loves his subject as much as he loves to try the same recipe a dozen times, hunting for perfection. He praises the greatest cooking and the finest simple pleasures (McDonald's, barbecue), investigates everything from ketchup to salt to Kobe beef, and argues for common-sense nutrition. He kicks against the Food Police: salt doesn't raise blood pressure, sugar isn't that bad for you, alcohol is good for you once a day, etc. (His essay "Salad, the Silent Killer," even if it doesn't burst the bubbles of the Food Police, serves as wicked parody of obsessive toxin-phobia and fault-finding.) To top it all off, Steingarten writes very well and is at times wickedly funny. A great food read.
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