I love reading books about food - not cookbooks, but food writing - and Eat, Pray, Love is one that I absolutely adored.

While technically not a book about food, the first third of the book details Elizabeth Gilbert’s four month stay in Italy, where she pursued the pleasures of Italian food (this is the “Eat” in the title). It’s a great lead-in to a book that then travels onward (and inward) to an Ashram in India, and then finally to the beauty of Bali.

Gilbert writes about food in a way that puts you there with here - right there, for example, sitting in the Pizzeria da Michele in Naples, eating The World’s Best Pizza:’

“There’s not a menu. They have only two varieties of pizza here - regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It’s soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust - thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known that there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her.”

For me, reading about Gilbert’s food experiences in Italy felt like the next best thing to being there. And here’s the clincher - I gobbled up the entire section about this glorious pizza in Naples, and I don’t even like pizza.

The rest of the book goes down just as smoothly, looking at meditation, devotion and balance. All in all, Eat, Pray, Love is a wonderful gem of a book.

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