If ever there was a subject that inspires writers, it is food, and this anthology offers a generous helping of essays, memoirs, and poems spanning three millennia. Featured here are literary gourmands like Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain, M.F.K. Fisher, Bill Buford, Michael Pollan, and Calvin Trillin. Many of the standouts, though, are by authors not associated with cuisine, including Frederick Douglass, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Roland Barthes, David Foster Wallace, Barbara Kingsolver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Diane Ackerman, and Wendell Berry.