It may seem a bit ironic that a person who has to live on the Gluten Free diet could so thoroughly enjoy a book titled “Food: A Love Story.” Since the author is Jim Gaffigan, however, it shouldn’t really be such a big surprise. You know a book is good when you have to leave the room because your giggling and laughing is distracting to everybody else. My cat even became disgusted with me when I was giggling as she was trying to nap. She left the room in disgust.

I had no choice! How can you not laugh at the observation, “The French may refer to seafood as the “fruit of the sea,” and scientists may call shellfish “crustaceans,” but to me they are creepy-crawly giant insects on the bottom of the ocean. I have a rule that if food looks like something that would crawl out from under a refrigerator, I don’t put it in my mouth.” Perhaps it’s just because I don’t eat seafood of any sort that I really enjoyed the fact that Jim Gaffigan feels the exact same way.

Some of my favorite parts of his book are when he’s imagining what God’s reaction to all of this would be, “I’m sure God is up in heaven looking down completely bewildered. “What do I have to do to stop these humans from eating the crabs? I gave it a rock-hard shell! I put it on the bottom of the ocean! I named a disease after it! I knew I should have covered it in needles! (over shoulder) Jesus, you’re going to have to go back down there!””

Jim takes on everything from seafood to fruits and veggies (painters can use bowls of fruit as their models because you can walk away from it for two days and nobody will eat it, but you don’t see many pictures of donuts, do you?) and even identifies the various regions of the country based upon their culinary tastes. Whether you live in Seabugland (Northeast Coast) or Coffeeland (Pacific Northwest) I think that you will enjoy this book. Despite the fact that I can’t eat most of the foods that Jim mentions, I really enjoyed it. I’m glad that I could receive a copy of this book from Blogging for Books in return for my review.