Food by Paul Freedman
Published 2019 · 439 pages · History, Nonfiction
How hard is Food to read?
Food scores 35 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Written by academic historians for a general audience, the chapters use clear scholarly prose with some culinary and period terms. Compared with Atomic Habits it is more demanding, but it stays far from literary density.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Essay-style academic sentences are measured and readable. Expect longer sentences than in popular nonfiction, but nothing like Jamesian nesting.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The subject is concrete: ingredients, kitchens, dining customs and trade across civilizations. Chapters add some interpretation of taste and social change, but the material stays tied to specific foods and places.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Ten chapters cover prehistory to the present across China, the Islamic world, Europe and America in 368 pages. Each chapter compresses a whole era of evidence, which makes it denser than Atomic Habits.
How Food is regarded
Food holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.