Elisabeth Luard's 3 favorite reads in 2023

I've been recommending this brilliant re-appraisal of Darwinism to everyone I know (and plenty I don't!) for months. 

The underlying message is that the author of Evolution of Species was a Victorian pater familias who considered women fit only for childbirth and domestic duties, incapable of rational decision-taking - a view he applied to females of all species from the great apes to nematode worms.

The idea that it's the male who chooses the female and so decides the path of evolution is blown out of the water by this marvelous book.

A group of young female scientists have been examining what actually happens in the natural world. It turns out it's not the peacock who takes the decision to sprout a gaudy bunch of feathers - and incidentally attracting every passing predator - but the little brown peahen encouraging him from the sidelines. Revolutionary, or what?

I was hooked from the very first page, when the author reports a brief conversation with a top-of-the-heap oil-man who thought the idea of a philosophical book about food ridiculous. Sitopia asks how the lessons learned from the past might be applied to the way we might live now.

Her first book, Hungry City, is a panoramic sweep of human history from hunter-gatherer cave-dwellers to urban sprawl, bringing an architect's understanding of the development of cities. The first book established the author's reputation as philosopher, cultural historian, and prizewinning food writer.

Booksellers don't know where to put her on the shelves. If Hungry City asks the questions, Sitopia (a made-up word from the Greek for food + place) looks for the answers.

This book is intelligent and brave - and she writes like a dream. 

My kind of history - a 400-page bird's-eye view of Chinese gastronomy by a woman who knows how to tell a good story and isn't afraid to bring herself to the page - so important in a work of high scholarship, as this certainly is. 

The author just happens to be fluent in Mandarin, trained as a chef in the culinary academy in Sizchuan as earning a degree from its university, which makes her unusually qualified to set the record straight on what's surely the most complex, exacting, and least-understood of the world's great culinary traditions.

Noodles in the north, rice in the south - her travels over the years have taken her to every corner of China's vastness. She's won all the glittering prizes for her cookbooks and written an acclaimed autobiography, but this looks like the book she was always meant to write. Lucky us!