Read my full review over at 5 Minutes for Mom, where you can also enter to win a copy.

Lauren is a wife, mother of two, and an avid reader. She blogs at Baseballs and Bows.

Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way is Birnbaum’s memoir detailing her struggle to come to terms with her new condition as an anosmic – one who has lost their sense of smell due to illness, blockages or head injury. She was told her ability to smell would likely never return.

Birnbaum was able to taste the basics – sour, sweet, salty and bitter, but could not distinguish any other nuances of food. “Ice cream was a thick and cold slush. Lattes were hot, sometimes even gelatinous liquid. I ate yogurt for its smooth chill and bread soaked in Tabasco sauce because I could feel the spiciness.” Despite what she had been told by the experts, her ability to smell returned slowly, each new aroma arriving with a bang. Soon she could detect all sorts of smells, but found she couldn’t identify the source.

Season to Taste includes information about the science of smell, a la Mary Roach — though without her wit and extensive footnotes — mixed in with details of Birnbaum’s recovery. She describes how scent molecules enter the nose and travel to the brain; how and why smell is linked to memory and emotion.

Birnbaum recounts her quest to find out more about smell. She visited Taste and Smell clinics, both as a patient and observing others; spent the day with a flavorist who uses chemicals to create the flavors in packaged foods; took classes in France to learn how to enhance her sense of smell. It was while in France she learned to use triggers to recognize scents she could smell but not name.

She slowly returned to cooking, starting with baking as it requires exact measurements and doesn’t need to be tasted along the way. As new smells returned she delved into cooking savory dishes, some more successfully than others. But Birnbaum ultimately chose a career as a journalist, perhaps an unexpected path in her life, but one that forecasts an auspicious future.

If you enjoy memoirs that include food and science, along with a journey of ups and downs, then Season to Taste is right up your alley.

Nancy has never given the sense of smell much thought before, but finds it fascinating. She can be found blogging at Life With My Boys and Books.

If your school hasn’t caught on to benefits of a healthy lunch, then Amy Kalafa’s Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food Revolution and Win the Battle for Our Children’s Health is the book for you. Kalafa is the award-winning documentary filmmaker who created the film “Two Angry Moms,” chronicling the efforts of Dr. Susan Rubin and her Better School Food movement to bring wholesome, healthy food back into our schools. Click over to the Kirkus Reviews Blog for my review of Lunch Wars, which gives parents the tools needed to start their own school food revolution.

We’d love for you to leave a comment on that post and join in the conversation!

Nancy thinks school lunch food has come a long way since the days of pizza bagels and Sloppy Joe’s. She writes about her 2 boys, books and life in Colorado at Life With My Boys and Books.

After seeing such great improvement in my own health, I wondered about my children. Are some of their issues connected to food as well? In her new book What’s Eating Your Child, Kelly Dorfman explores the relationship between food and common childhood ailments. I hope you will click over to the Kirkus Reviews blog today to read about this book. I highly recommend it!

Lauren is a wife, mother of two, and an avid reader. She blogs at Baseballs and Bows.

Sandra Beasley doesn’t have it so lucky. From birth she refused to breastfeed, formula caused internal bleeding and standard alternatives such as goat’s milk and soy milk wreaked havoc on her system. Beasley is allergic to dairy, egg, soy, beef, shrimp, pine nuts, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, macadamias, pistachios, cashews, swordfish and mustard, in addition to several environmental allergies. Interestingly, she is not allergic to gluten or peanuts, which are some of the most talked about food allergies. The title, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, is borne of her birthday parties as a child where everyone in attendance — except the birthday girl — could eat the birthday cake, but then could not come anywhere near her without contaminating her. Even a kiss on the cheek by someone who had eaten the frosting would result in a lip-shaped rash.

Part memoir, part cautionary tale on how not to raise an allergic child, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl is wry without being scathing. Beasley compares the world we live in today, where food allergies are much more prevalent and schools have several page-long action plans in case of a reaction, to her childhood in the 80s where making allowances meant giving her the first lunch period and bringing in “Sandra-friendly” snacks when the other kids were getting cupcakes. She credits her mom for getting her through her childhood and references several times she camped out in the ER waiting room waiting for either the Benadryl or the anaphylaxis to kick in.

Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl explores some of the science of food allergies – what causes an allergic reaction, the difference between an intolerance and an allergy, how allergy tests work and why they aren’t so reliable, current research into treating allergies. Beasley maintains that not much time or money is being spent on researching the reasons behind the recent surge in allergies because the real benefit (and profit) is in treatment. She is an advocate for food allergy issues and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl is an educational and fascinating look at life with allergies.

Nancy considers herself lucky that neither she nor her kiddos have food allergies. She writes about her boys, books and life in Colorado at Life With My Boys and Books.

If you’ve grown up believing a potato dropped into soup will absorb excess salt, a chili’s burn is in the seeds or that you shouldn’t refreeze meat, then Lobsters Scream When You Boil Them and 100 Other Myths about Food and Cooking is right up your alley. Cookbook authors debunk 101 myths about food and cooking and include recipes to demonstrate the principles they present.

Please click through to the Kirkus Reviews blog to learn more about what doesn’t cause or cure the common cold and some food-related falsehoods. I’d love for you to join in the conversation and tell me if you were surprised by the same things I was.

We are proud to be a part of the Kirkus Bloggers Network. You can subscribe to the Kirkus Book Blogger Network feed. Go to the home page, and then click the subscribe button to get the feed in your favorite feed reader.

Nancy found herself saying “huh” and “no way” a lot while reading these two books. She writes about her boys, books and life in Colorado at Life With My Boys and Books.

With the prevalence of eating disorders and mean kids who can harm children’s self-esteem, parents and doctors are often afraid to broach the subject with parents and teens, but the facts are that being overweight does hurt a child’s self-esteem, their general well-being (not being able to run and play like a lot of other kids), and their health, with diabetes and other typically adult concerns like heart and gall-bladder disease and asthma become more and more common in kids.

Ricki Lake wrote Too Small to be Big with pediatrician Dr. John Monaco to address these issues, not only from the viewpoint of a mother who was once an overweight teen, but with the years of talk show experience that helped her learn to put the right people together and to ask the right questions

The book is wonderfully informative, taking a non-judgmental approach that encourages parents to take ownership of the problem. It’s not a diet plan, but it does educate kids and parents on things like portion control, fast versus slow carbs, and ideas for kid-friendly foods that are also health-conscious for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It is repeatedly stressed that the All-Stride solution is not a diet plan. There are a lot of reasons that kids are overweight. Oftentimes it is eating the wrong foods, but sometimes it’s the right foods in the wrong portion sizes, or the lack of any sort of exercise. Getting moving is a component of the program — ideally one that the whole family will get involved in together.

The book is an overview of the All-Stride program created by Ricki Lake and her team of experts. Someone could definitely get instruction and motivation from the book alone, but I have a feeling that if this was an issue that a family wanted to address, that they’d want to join the website to get additional benefits from recipes and support.

We have a copy of Too Small to be Big to give away to one of you today. Please leave a comment here if you’d like to win. We’ll announce the winner on June 1. This Giveaway is Closed.

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Jennifer Donovan blogs at Snapshot about life with her family, when she’s not too busy reading and reviewing.

When I think of going “off the grid,” I immediately think of something going wrong. Not to make a blanket judgment, but generally those who exercise such an extreme divergence from “normal life” end up facing some disappointment. And indeed, as the subtitle hints, it involves “a family undone.”

This is not a typical memoir. For one thing, Melissa Coleman starts the story of her parents and their life trying to live off the grid in Maine in the 70′s when she’s still in the womb. Obviously she cannot remember that time in her life, but it’s apparent from her use of quotes from others who were adults at that time, that she has done her research. So instead of reading like a straight memoir which is very much centered around the author, this reads a little bit more like investigative journalism, but with the added bonus of Coleman’s presence, both as that young child and as the adult who is now writing with some hindsight.

Elliot Coleman, Melissa’s father, is truly a pioneer in organic farming. You may or may not agree with the burden that his dream put on his family, but his thoughts about the food we eat and our dependence on other people to provide us with the food is right in the mainstream today.

Coleman does not write with judgment, either on her father or the rest of the world who doesn’t choose to live that way, although she does contrast his choice quite pointedly with that of his wealthy parents who smoke and drank to “soothe some unnamed feeling of discontent created by the relative ease of their existence” (p. 32 ARC).

That has to make you think, and makes Coleman’s choice to do something for himself — to work hard to provide for all his family’s needs — seem natural.

The writing is absolutely riveting and it makes for a great read for anyone who likes memoir, especially those who might be interested in organic farming and natural foods. But because of her chosen style which reads as simply reporting a chronicle of her life, this might also appeal to those who tend to avoid more personal emotionally-driven memoirs.

Want more? Watch my video book review:

Jennifer Donovan doesn’t fancy herself a video personality, but doesn’t mind sharing a book review vlog now and then. She’s much more comfortable behind the keyboard blogging here and at Snapshot.

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