Handpicked recommendations to other books that have a similar writing style or theme to Banana

From ancient empires to modern economics, veteran journalist Andrew Lawler delivers a sweeping history of the animal that has been most crucial to the spread of civilization across the globe - the chicken.

A consideration of all things paper: Entertaining, illuminating, irresistible, a book that masterfully guides us through paper's inseparability from human culture.

Technology in the kitchen does not just mean the Pacojets and sous-vide of the modernist kitchen. It can also mean the humbler tools of everyday cooking and eating: a wooden spoon and a skillet, chopsticks and forks.

The first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.

The son of a Cuban exile recounts the remarkable and contradictory life of famed sugar baron Julio Lobo, the richest man in prerevolutionary Cuba and the last of the island's haute bourgeoisie.

Throughout human history. certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. Six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period from the Stone Age to the 21st century.

A brilliant, original history of the spice trade, and the appetites that fueled it.

'Offers an exquisite chronicle of the rise and fall of this bituminous black mineral.... Part history and part environmental argument, Freese's elegant book teaches an important lesson about the interdependence of humans and their natural environment both for good and ill throughout history.'

Deftly leading readers around the world and across cultures and centuries, Kurlansky takes an inexpensive, mundane item and shows how it has influenced and affected wars, cultures, governments, religions, societies, economies & food. An entertaining, informative read.