Food: The History of Taste by Paul Freedman

Sometimes I pick up books based solely on their covers. Some of those turn out to be much needed departures from my narrow preferences. Others fail to delight. Food: The History of Taste falls in the second category. It's less a non-fiction book than a series of essays by different academics, mostly historians, that explores the history of food. Chapters are arranged in chronological order, from the archaeology of food to modern cuisine, to convey a sense of progress. It quickly becomes evident, however, that in addition to the different subject matter, chapters also differ in style and quality.

Some of the chapters are exquisitely boring. I skipped Chinese and Islamic cuisine completely and skimmed others. The two final chapters - "Dining Out" and "Novelty and Tradition" - are especially painful. They focus on the last 100 or so years of culinary tradition, which I expected to be the most interesting part. Dining Out, for example, is a 30 page explanation of what a restaurant is. Not how restaurants function or how meals are prepared or how menus are designed, but a stoic academic definition that mostly serves as a reference to other academics. It is inadvertently hilarious at times: "Most restaurants do not open for breakfast and those that do specialize to some extent in this meal." and "The clientele of a restaurant come with their friends, sit apart from others, and pay for a specific meal when they are finished". Leave it to academics to find the least interesting angle to a story.

Novelty and Tradition does somewhat better, by focusing on a surprising driver of food innovation. On one hand, chefs and diners look for traditional foods and tastes that match their expectations. Traditionalists follow recipes to the word, fight to protect regional specialties (like parmesan, feta cheese or falukorv) and look to the past for inspiration. On the other, innovators work to add new things to existing cuisines by improvising and appropriating elements from elsewhere. It's a dynamic process. Today's traditionalists started out as innovators. The public is quick to adapt new trends but never loses its appetite for more novelty. Yet, even this chapter is perhaps twice too long. It's also peppered with mind-numbing sentences like: "To discover when and why and which groups welcomed or rejected various food innovations in the post-war period is an ambitious research programme and hardly any actual investigation has been done in this field."

The actual history of food is surprisingly exciting, and you can catch glimpses of that here. Freedman and his co-authors do a good job of highlighting how today's food industry is dominated by companies founded in the 19th century. These companies were often built on the back of a single product. August Oetker (of Dr. Oetker) invented baking powder. Henri Nestle came up with baby formula and later developed an innovative way to mix milk powder with cocoa beans, which set the chocolate industry in motion. These, and other similar stories, illuminate the everyday world in unexpected ways. Considering the breadth of fascinating material, someone must have written an enlightening book on the history of food. This isn't it.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

I almost forgot to write an entry about The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Often, that means that a book was either no good or otherwise inconsequential. In this case, however, I blame the circumstances in which I read it. Our baby was having a hard time sleeping and I would often bring my Kindle with me when I put him to bed. That could take anything from five minutes to two hours so, for a time, I was blazing through dozens of pages each night. I would hold the Kindle in one hand and sooth our child with the other.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, unwieldy title aside, is something of a modern business classic. It's often included in lists of books that "Every Startup Founder Should Read". CEO hopefuls keep it under their pillow in case some of the wisdom sticks. Ben Horowitz is even more well-known for his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in some of the most successful companies of the past decade such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Lyft. He built his own company, then he helped others build theirs. In a way, Ben Horowitz is the Jay-Z of Silicon Valley.

Horowitz gets a few things right. Per the title, he argues that companies spend too much time worrying about strategy, when most things in business don't lend themselves easily to stale academic study. Sometimes things go wrong and you need to choose between two catastrophic alternatives. Sometimes your company is caught off guard by a sudden market shift. Most management books use hindsight to make everything sound much simpler than it actually was. The hardest decisions are often made after two weeks of sleep deprivation and under extreme stress. Maybe your personal life is just as distressed. Maybe you need to fire your best friend. In the moment, the pressure is much higher than Harvard Business Review case studies let on.

Roughly half of the book describes the story of Opsware, the company founded by Horowitz with Marc Andreessen. The other half is a collection of advice for would-be managers. Some of the advice is genuinely useful: "Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness", for example. Sometimes it's actually pretty funny: "If I had a tattoo for every time I heard a CEO claim that she’d just hired 'the best VP in the industry,' I’d be Lil Wayne.". I appreciate the effort that has gone into keeping the message as simple as possible without dumbing down the content. Again, the bar for business books continues to be low, but you could clearly do worse.