Book Review: The Blue Zones Kitchen by Dan Buettner

About:

The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 by Dan Buettner is a cook book / travel book which publishes recipes from the worlds Blue Zone locations around the world. Mr. Buettner is a National Geographic fellow and bestselling author.

• 304 pages
• Publisher: National Geographic
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1426220138

My rat­ing for The Blue Zones Kitchen— 4
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Thoughts:

I have always had interest in the world’s Blue Zones, frankly I don’t understand who wouldn’t. Blue Zones are geographical areas around the world in which people average longer and healthier lives than in other places. It is not unusual for someone in a Blue Zone to live to by 100 years old.

In The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 by Dan Buettner the author gives recipes and a short write up (several pages) about each zone (Sardinia in Italy, Nicoya in Costa Rica, Loma Linda in California, Okinawa in Japan, and Icaria (or Ikaria) in Greece). The photographs are gorgeous and the write ups are very interesting. It is important to note that the diet of Blue Zone residents is only part of the reason for their longevity, climate, reasonable amount of exercise, family, work, and relationships all have a big say in getting to old age.It is difficult to imagine that in today’s worlds such zones still exist. In our society we don’t have to lift a finger to turn off the lights, it’s unthinkable to walk a mile to the store, and it’s much cheaper to eat garbage then good food. Worst of all, you can go for moths on end without seeing any of your friends or neighbors.

The recipes look simple with few ingredients. I have made two of them (falafel and smoothies) just to see if the directions are clear, and they were. Full disclosure: I have made these dishes before using different, but very similar recipes. Many of the recipes are simply mixing in the right amount of ingredients without the need to cook or bake, fast and simple.

I do, however, have to complaints, one is small, the other not so. First of all, it seems to me that the author setup to write a cookbook and ended up with a cookbook / travel book hybrid. There is no index in the book for the recipes, they are listed by country, so if you have a certain ingredient on hand there is no way for you to find out which recipe you can make unless going through the whole book. The second is that several ingredients are very difficult to find and the author did not include any substitutions (I had to look up what mirin is), but that’s just me being a bit pedantic because I don’t have enough experience cooking to know how to replace ingredients .
You can check out some more of my cookbooks reviews here.

Buy The Blue Zones Kitchen from Amazon.com*
More Books by Dan Buettner*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I got this book for free from TLC Book Tours.
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account