Sone really fantastic recipes! There are also a lot of pictures! I'll definitely be trying some of these recipes! ( )

Dan Buettner's first books were about the places in the world that use a plant-based diet with few animal products and lots of olive oil. This cookbook offers 100 recipes on that theme, many from the other countries, which I enjoy. One problem is that he refers to cashew cream, but never provides a recipe for it. I can look it up on line. Nevertheless, it's a good holiday gift for friends who have everything and obsess over food. Then we can live a long life. ( )

Got this book from the library just before it closed for Covid19. So many yummy looking food and recipes. I also love the story of each town covered in the cookbook. I would love to try some of them in particular the Okinawa section. But right now it's so depressing with stay at home covid ordeal and we only make one trip to one store for groceries roughly once every 10 days. ( )

I'm not sure why I read this, as I have no desire to live to 100, and certainly not at the price of giving up the varied flavours I enjoy eating foods from different cultures.

Pretty pictures, but nothing I wanted to cook. Interesting enough to leaf through as a library ebook, but the first thing I check in a cookbook to buy is the index. No index, or an obviously poor one - they don't get my money. ( )

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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.

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 . ( )