Warning: Reading this book will make you very, very hungry.

Author Joe Berkowitz, an editor and staff writer at Fast Company magazine, wanted to get his wife an amazing Valentine’s Day gift. He booked two seats for a tasting at Murray’s, a Manhattan cheese shop. As Berkowitz sampled cheeses that ranged in flavor from milky to dank (his word), his eyes were opened. “It wasn’t just the taste of one spectacular cheese though,” he writes. “It was the dawning realization that cheese was a miracle food, an edible unicorn. So many things needed to go just right in order for each one we’d tried that night to reach us and taste the way it did.”

In the entertaining and informative American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World, Berkowitz dives deep into the fascinating world of American cheesemaking. Although our country is fairly late to the centuries-old cheese party, some of the best cheeses in the world come from places like Vermont and Northern California. Berkowitz travels to festivals, competitions and a Parisian cheese cave to understand this delicious and varied food and the people who make it.

“The cheese world is made up of misfits, rebels, rogues, and romantics; venturing forth from all corners of the country, leaving their old lives behind, to work with something tactile and tasty that they truly love,” he writes. “In the year and a half that followed my cheese awakening, I would meet former accountants, psychologists, literary agents, and many others whose professions had involved open offices, Slack channels, and stand-up meetings first thing in the morning.” Berkowitz also meets food scientists, restauranteurs and Erika Kubick, a blogger who put on a cheese-themed burlesque show called (what else?) Strip Cheese.

Berkowitz writes with unbridled glee about the subject of “cakey blues and bloomy rinds and marbly cheddars.” The result is a thorough, fascinating and hunger-inducing (but never cheesy) examination of the culture of cheesemaking.

Bill Buford (author of Heat) again chooses a single-word title for his new book, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking, a funny, irreverent and obsessive account of his five-year odyssey to discover everything about French food—from learning how to cook it to exploring the medieval origins of the much-revered cuisine. France, he writes, “was secretly where I had wanted to find myself for most of my adult life. . . . But I could never imagine how that might happen.”

Through a connection at New York’s French Culinary Institute, Buford comes to know many influential French chefs, among them Michel Richard, Daniel Boulud and the legendary Paul Bocuse. What follows is a familial move to Lyon, the terrors (or, shall we say, “terroir”) of parenting twin toddlers in a gritty French city, sadistic “stagiaires”—essentially apprentice chefs—in famed Lyonnaise restaurants (pot-throwing, anyone?) and food-sleuthing expeditions to remote areas in France, where Buford comes to appreciate the soil that grows the unique wheat responsible for the country’s finest bread. Dirt sometimes ventures into the weeds in its excavation of culinary history and lore, but this may be forgiven in light of Buford’s honest hunger for knowledge and personal evolution: “I wanted to re-examine my assumptions about the kitchen, to restart my education, to get as elemental and as primary as possible. Heat. Water. Labor. Place. And its dirt.”

This book doesn’t offer any recipes, per se, but if perused closely, readers can find instructions for assembling perhaps the grandest concoction of them all: a life well and fully lived, seasoned with curiosity, perseverance and humor—and a dash of adventure.

Is there any question in modern existence more fraught than “What should I eat?”

Our choices about food can feel insanely consequential. Inundated with contradictory advice, anxious regimens and alarming YouTube videos, it is hard know what to believe. Will coffee slowly kill you, or save you from depression and cancer? Should you avoid butter, or put it on everything?

From the start, George Zaidan’s Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us distinguishes itself from the typical “eat this, not that” manifesto. Diet-related media likes to promise answers, spouting forth inarguable truths: Keto will transform your body and your life! High fructose corn syrup causes obesity! In contrast, Ingredients is about raising questions. The book begins with a bit of common knowledge—eating processed food is bad—and subjects it to scrutiny. How bad is it, exactly? How much life does every additional Cheeto suck from your body?

Ingredients is about the complex process of figuring out how to answer this question. In other words, instead of offering up faddish nutritional spin, or dishing out sanctimonious vagaries like, “Eat real food,” Zaidan does something different—and much more worthwhile. He guides you through how scientists assess the risks and safety of chemicals: how they establish the links between health effects and their causes, and how they sometimes get it wrong.

The result is a romp through the scenic highways of the scientific method and the murky swamplands of scientific evidence. After reading this book, when you encounter headlines like “Blueberries Shown to Prevent Cancer” or “Processed Food Increases Risk of Death by 14%,” you’ll have a much better understanding of how seriously to take them.

You may recognize Zaidan from his stint co-hosting CNBC’s reality show “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor.” As a science communicator, his writing and videos have been featured in The New York Times, NPR and TED-Ed. Ingredients takes off from his current National Geographic webseries of the same name, where he zanily explores the science of everyday stuff, like “What’s in air freshener?” and “What makes gum chewy?”

Zaidan brings the same hyperkinetic, super-digressive, uber-nerd sensibility to his writing. After reading this book, I know more about aphid poop than I care to admit,  can tell you how cyanide kills and am aware that the distinctive, summertime aroma of swimming pools is not the smell of chlorine but of chlorine mixed with pee (ew).

For a title that gleefully veers into the technical aspects of statistics and organic chemistry, it’s a breezy read. Zaidan has a gift for punching up hard science with goofball details without sacrificing substance. Does the jocularity sometimes feel a little excessive? Sure. Personally, I could have done without a few of the (multiple!) references to spoof Harry Potter porno Hairy Smallballer and the Failure to Bone. But it’s a rare book that can compare achieving statistical significance in an experiment to reaching orgasm and still leave you feeling like you’ve learned something useful.

Ultimately, Ingredients teaches us how to be informed, skeptical consumers of scientific news—and how to appreciate the gradual, cumulative, collective effort of scientific research. “Science proceeds slowly and erratically,” Zaidan writes. “If you’re on the outside looking in, trying to figure out what’s true can be insanely frustrating. But once a super-solid Bridge of Truth is constructed, it’s a beautiful thing, just like the process that created it: science.”

Murder. Fraud. Poison. These are words typically associated with a suspenseful mystery novel, not an edible fungus. But in his riveting debut, The Truffle Underground, Pacific Standard deputy editor Ryan Jacobs weaves the fascinating scientific and historical backstory of the elusive culinary delicacy known as truffles with the stealthy feel of a diamond heist or spy operation. 

Truffles are one of the most revered wonders of the gastronomic world. Although they’re found all over the globe, it’s the black winter variety, also known as black diamond or black pearl, that is especially rare, lusted after by thieves as much as valuable jewelry. The French countryside is one of their richest places of origin, nestled within the roots of oak and hazelnut trees in the Périgord region. Jacobs’ years covering international crime as an investigative reporter translate perfectly, as he drills down into the inner workings of the truffle underground. 

Jacobs follows the truffle from spore to plate, a journey “fraught with so much biological uncertainty, human competition, and logistical headaches that a single shaving could be understood as a testament to the wonder of human civilization.” His in-depth research not only focuses on the present day but also covers how truffle farming came to be so secretive, exclusive and competitive. It’s an uncertain process that requires specific conditions and timing, made all the more difficult by today’s changing climate. And when truffles do form, their appearance is random, unearthed by specially trained dogs with the keenest of scent glands. 

Truffle thieves are aware of all these factors and run their operations accordingly. Jacobs discusses the intricate details of this corruption, from the young recruits, middlemen and fraudsters to the detectives, law enforcement officials and restaurant owners who badly need this gastronomic gold to stay competitive. The Truffle Underground is an eye-opening tale that brings to light the fact that food items can be just as valuable as any other goods, especially when harvests are uncertain. As fittingly noted by Jacobs, “It’s a medieval undertaking in a smartphone world.”

Author Bren Smith declares, “I have the heart of a fisherman and the soul of a farmer,” and in his memoir, Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer, he proves this to be true over and over again. Starting off on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, he passed through Massachusetts (and through its jails), climbed onto lobster boats, plied his way north again to Alaskan fisheries and finally landed on the Thimble Islands off the New England coast. The salty adolescent who loved the company of fishermen and could swig and swear with the best of them evolved into an expert ocean farmer, pioneering the “climate cuisine” industry and promising an innovative way of feeding our beleaguered planet. Take a new look at what’s for dinner: seaweed.

As Smith scales up from his 20-acre vertical ocean farm, he births an industry that must struggle to avoid the “sharks”—and mistakes—of globalized big business, and he hooks celebrity chefs like Mark Bittman and Rene Redzepi. Kelp noodles soon take center stage on the plates of upscale New York and Las Vegas restaurants, and Google starts serving them in innovative offerings in their employee cafeterias. For those who wonder about ingredients, Smith includes recipes like Shrimp Fra Diavolo with Kelp and Barbecue Kelp and Carrots, along with where to find the goods.

Smith is an articulate, very human ambassador for sustainable, ethical and environmentally beneficial mariculture, weaving his plea for changing the way we eat with solid proof of why it’s so necessary. He includes a global history here as well, spanning coastal cultures from China and Japan to Scotland and Atlantic Canada, all rich with best practices and viable traditions.

Calling for “all hands on deck” to achieve survival as climate change continues to alter our natural resources, Smith urges that we learn to eat what the ocean can grow instead of growing only what we are used to eating. He offers ways to help like cooking and fertilizing with seaweed and shellfish and supporting local “sea trusts.” And GreenWave, the company he helped found, provides an open-source farming manual for building your own kelp hatchery. If this new age of “climate cuisine” needs an introduction, Eat Like a Fish is surely it.