By Lucy Knisley

Dave Thackeray
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

I’m desperate.

I’ve been looking for ways to get healthier food into the hands and mouths of the many.

There are dozens of eat healthier books. Thousands of videos from the likes of Jamie Oliver, each training us to think differently about what we force into our faces.

Millions of reasons to take this stuff seriously. If heart disease and strokes don’t worry us, the inexorable rise in type 2 diabetes should.

It would be easy to suggest that a remedy lies with parents and adults. Start with those best placed to act responsibly at the stove.

But go for the obvious and you’re committed to reversing habits of a lifetime. The ping meal. The TV dinner. Tins of processed vegetables. Breakfast bars to start the day; bars lathered with sugar rather than the kind of stuff your body needs to get geared up.

Adults just want convenience because they have layers of obligations that make up their daily lives.

Kids’ minds are much more malleable. Kids are receptive to what’s best for them. And if we can work with children as agents of change in the family unit, we stand a much greater chance of success than by pretending that we can make adults do things differently.

So now we’ve got to figure out the best way of helping kids to cook.

Superheroes and magic are a great start. But where’s the substance?

That, finally, is where Relish: My Life in the Kitchen comes in.

A book like no other in this genre, Relish is a book that’s as delicious to enjoy as the food described within it.

In Relish, Lucy, clearly a precocious illustrator (even now she’s only 32), paints a wonderful picture of her growing up in the company of food expert parents.

It must be the most wonderful thing in the world with mum and dad being a gourmet and chef, and Lucy has capitalised on her good fortune by sharing with her audience a tale of that upbringing and how food has shaped her.

We’re also treated in each chapter with tasty recipes that Lucy holds dear. This is clearly one well-schooled, smartly-fed cookie.

Relish will help us to reach younger audiences who need to be shown the right way to feed themselves for a lifetime. It is work of this calibre that won’t only fascinate, but motivate. And for that we must all be thankful to Lucy Knisley.

Since her making of Relish Lucy has gone on to produce a series of travelogues charting her various voyages, and brought us a fabulously colourful book about marrying in a far-flung land (America, which is, to us Brits).

Lucy is astounding. Out of this world. Small wonder she was signed up to illustrate Margaret and the Moon, all about how Margaret Hamilton’s critical role in getting man to the moon as one of NASA’s golden girls of the 1960s.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is available now at Amazon.

Book reviews

Mostly business, sometimes fiction, almost always both

Dave Thackeray

Written by

Founder of Word And Mouth | Host of #Thacknology

Book reviews

Mostly business, sometimes fiction, almost always both

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