Who Wants Pizza?: The Kids' Guide to the History, Science and Culture of Food

by Jan Thornhill

Part of the loosely constructed series by Jan Thornhill, which already includes This Is My Planet and I Found a Dead Bird , Who Wants Pizza? is brimming with no-nonsense facts that illustrate the importance of food choices and the practices surrounding food production. Full of direct, eye-opening information about why we need to eat, where our food comes from, how much of it we have, and why some food choices are wiser than others, the book covers a lot of important ground. Topics are easy to dip into and include digestion, the domestication of animals, different cultures’ table etiquette, sustainable agriculture, and the evolution of farming and food preservation. Short blocks of bite-sized text, just the right amount of “icky” info that kids love, plus a visually stimulating layout that uses captivating photo-illustration collages all add up to make Who Wants Pizza? a fun, fact-filled look at all things food-related.

Genres: Nonfiction, Food, Science

64 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2010

About the author

I was born in 1955 in Sudbury, but spent most of my childhood in southern Ontario where, encouraged by my artist mother and engineer/inventor father, I developed a life-long passion for both art and the natural world. I spent a lot of time exploring the fields, woods, ponds, and streams near where I lived, and was an avid collector of things I found. I brought home all kinds of treasures – skulls and fossils, bird feathers and empty nests, insects, snake skins, fallen leaves. Eventually I labeled everything and made a museum in the basement. I thought I’d get rich by charging a 5¢ entry fee…but my mum was the only one who paid!

After high school, I attended the Ontario College of Art where I had fun making experimental films and videos – not drawing and painting. For about ten years after that, I illustrated freelance for magazines and newspapers, and did odd jobs such as sewing thousands of beads and sequins on Dolly Parton’s dresses. Finally, in the late eighties, I switched to the much richer life of creating children’s books. From the beginning, the aim of these wildlife-based books has been to foster in young readers a love of art, nature and the environment.

I live in the Kawarthas in a house in the woods that my husband and I built. As well as making books, I grow organic vegetables, raise a few chickens each year, make bread from captured wild yeast, and wander around in the woods looking for wild mushrooms, slime molds, beetles and animal skulls. A lot of the things I find – skulls, snake skins, desiccated insects, a mummified bat & hummingbirds, etc. – have made their way into what I call my “museum-in-a-bag,” a collection of natural treasures I share with kids when I visit schools. I’m an obsessive observer of the world around me, so much so that I consider a day I haven’t learned something to be a day wasted.

Reviews

[Ursula Pflug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cat Sass Literary Nights, a reading series in Norwood, Ontario, will be hosting Jan Thornhill on:

Sunday, March 24, 2013
from 2:00 until 3:30 pm.
4255 Hwy 7
Norwood, Ontario
K0L-2V0

This event is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts.

Please join my wonderful friend, children’s author and illustrator, Jan Thornhill, for a fun and interactive afternoon exploring her nature books and her “museum-in-a-bag”—Jan’s collection of animal skulls, desiccated insects, dinosaur bones, snake skins, mummified hummingbirds, and lots more.

Jan Thornhill is the internationally acclaimed author and illustrator of twelve books for children that are published around the world and have won numerous awards. Most recently, the Learning Partnership, a literacy charity, has chosen two of Jan’s books, The Wildlife ABC and Over in the Meadow, to be distributed free to almost 200,000 pre-schoolers across the country in the Welcome to Kindergarten program. Jan’s most recent book is Who Wants Pizza? The Kid’s Guide to the History, Science & Culture of Food. She has just completed a new picture book, Is This Panama? A Migration Story, which will be published later this year.

Jan lives near Havelock with her husband, artist Fred Gottschalk, and six goldfish. She spends her spare time hanging out in the woods looking for animal skulls and obsessively collecting and cataloguing wild mushrooms, weird fungi, and slime molds.
Jan’s books will be available for sale and she will be happy to sign these and any others your family already owns.

www.janthornhill.com

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting Non-Fiction book that talks about food, not just pizza (though it does mention it often), it gives interesting facts about where food came from, how it's made, and why we need to eat. It had one section I thought was especially interesting that explained how food had changed over time. For example, if you had asked for a carrot a hundreds of years ago, you would get this gross white root. It then explained how the selection process got us the foods we have today.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

i thought this book was good, i liked it because it said alot of interesting things. but some times i found parts a bit boring.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book beacuse there is so many things i didnt know about food.

[Sandy D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Michael Pollan for elementary school-aged kids.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great read for foodies, especially kids. The book is chock full of interesting facts and contains lots of pictures.