I gave up stamp collecting in the sixth grade, stopped practicing piano years ago, and never joined a softball league. Nowadays, if someone asks about my hobbies, I have only two real answers: reading and cooking. (Unless eating counts, too?) Without question, food and books are the things that give me the most happiness in life. I know I’m not alone.

These twin pleasures inspired Kirkus’ first-ever Food Issue. Before anybody scrolled through viral cooking videos on TikTok and Instagram or binge-watched episodes of Top Chef and The Great British Bake Off, food lovers consumed great writing on the subject. In the middle of the last century, authors such as M.F.K. Fisher (An Alphabet for Gourmets) and A.J. Liebling (Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris) treated cooking and eating with the seriousness—and the literary flair—they deserve. In later decades, Laurie Colwin (Home Cooking), Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential), Ruth Reichl (Tender at the Bone), Jim Harrison (A Really Big Lunch), Gabrielle Hamilton (Blood, Bones, and Butter), and others created genuine literature about their experiences in home and restaurant kitchens or the the joys of eating in and out.

Historians have unleashed a wave of books that view the world, both natural and human, through the lens of a single ingredient or foodstuff. Mark Kurlansky is perhaps the father of the genre that includes Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Salt: A World History, and Milk: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas. Meanwhile, revolutionaries like Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet), Marion Nestle (Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health), Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto), Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It), and Alice Waters (We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto) continually challenge us to examine where our food comes from and how we eat—both for our own health and the health of the planet.

Few nonprofessionals better exemplify our culture’s current obsession with food than the issue’s cover subject, Stanley Tucci. As an actor, he’s embraced food-adjacent roles in films such as Big Night and Julie & Julia. But his cookbooks, The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, full of recipes from his Italian American family, cemented the association of actor and kitchen. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Tucci posted a video of himself mixing a Negroni—the start of a series of viral videos of home mixology and cooking, which ultimately led to a food series on TV (Searching for Italy) and a memoir (Taste: My Life Through Food).

Tucci’s new book is What I Ate in One Year (and Related Thoughts) (Galley Books/Simon & Schuster, Oct. 15), in which he offers further ruminations on food and life, from gratifying meals prepared with his children at home (8-year-old Matteo has a memorable cameo making pesto) to a killer lasagna Bolognese in a Roman trattoria to completely forgettable—and sometimes insipid—food served on movie sets. Check out my recent interview with Tucci; like all the best foodies, he is full of strongly held opinions on ingredients, methods, and flavors. Bon appétit!

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.