everything

A book about everything

It’s a long time since 1 have read anything with complete fascination, but that’s what I did with Derek Townsend’s Cannibals to Caviar. You might say it’s a book about food or eating, and then you mightn’t, because so much else plays as important a part in the book.

Oh, the huge stacks of delightfully useless information it contains! Where else could you find out that hyenas’ droppings are white? Do you know how many tons of green fodder the 20,000 elephants in Tsavo National Park eat each year? Did you know that in Britain alone 800 tins of Heinz soups are sold every 60 seconds; that Kowloon (Hong Kong) means nine dragons, and that the Chinese prac tised aromatherapy for 10,000 years before Christ?

In an age where utilitarianism is the order of the day, it is pleasant to know things for the sake of knowing them, knowing that the information cannot be used productively, and that no one cares about it anyway (much good aromatherapy did the Chinese, but it’s no burden to know they did it!) except the one who adds the information to his store of cherished, interesting things.

Cannibals to Caviar takes us to a great many countries and many out of-the-way places; as much a travel book as an eating book. I like Derek Townsend’s style, which, even if now and then it becomes tinged with purple, flows easily and carries the reader along with it.

Townsend takes in most of the Pacific Basin, and some of the Islands—Fiji, Tahiti and Hawaii. But don’t expect to find a great deal of detail on any one place, for Town send is not that kind of writer. He roams about in a sort of anecdotal documentary style.

Some may find the mention of Heinz a little tedious: I do not while it remains in Townsend’s hands, but in the hands of less-restrained writers, the decision, which I’m told Town send has made, to tie-in his writing with one of the great international products, could result in such an absurdity as RLS’s Travels with a Donkey becoming tied-in Sleepy- Time Mattresses. Derek Townsend does not, of course, do anything like this, but he has invented the danger.

The photographic illustrations are good, but I’m not sure that the colour plates are not overshadowed by the interesting drawings by Stuart

Harrison which decorate the chapter headings. They go a long way to add to the attractiveness of an attractive book.

Jacaranda Press has done a good job with Derek Townsend’s Cannibals to Caviar. Besides being an interest ing book to read, it is a book nice to handle, and one which it would be

nice to receive as a present.

Peter

Livingston.

(Cannibals To Caviar, By Derek

Townsend; Jacaranda Press, 32 Church Street, Ryde, NSW; 144 pages with index; illustrated; $3.50.)