Review of What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci

*What I Ate in One Year* by Stanley Tucci (2024). Published by Gallery Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Something I have been incredibly grateful for while I’m unemployed is my local library system. I happen to live in an area with a solid library and multiple branches in every neighborhood, so if I want books, DVDs, CDs, or even video games, they’ll provide it for free. They even got rid of fees to get more people to come in, and I don’t think theft has become a bigger problem.

Anyways, when I was writing my master’s thesis and still employed, I was often going on their Libby app and checking out audiobooks to listen to while I was working. I got through a lot of books during that time, many of which I ended up reviewing on this blog, but when I’ve been applying to jobs, I’ve been thinking about how I listened to all of these audiobooks.

So lately I have started channeling that energy to make it less monotonous. If I have to send out hundreds of applications in one of the worst job markets during my adulthood, at least I’ll get some reading done. What I Ate in One Year was one of the books I listened to while doing this, and I would even put it on when I was cooking our dinners for the next few days.

All of that said, let’s get into the review of it! I don’t want to keep rambling on about context, as I know readers often aren’t coming for this portion of the blog post.

Diary entries and notes from Stanley Tucci’s life, with an emphasis on food.

This is a book that centers itself around food, which makes sense considering his current branding as of late. He’s done a major shift for PR on his image to be a family guy who knows a lot about Italian food, although some of the book doesn’t focus on Italian food. He does branch out!

Basically this is a book that’s a series of diary entries pretty much. Tucci narrates his days, pointing out the more remarkable interactions between people, especially when it comes to his family (wife and kids), and some musings on the more philosophical aspects of life, aging, and dying.

But the highlight of this book is spotlighting what he ate throughout this period. Tucci eats a lot of Italian food, as he is Italian American, and there’s a deep sense of appreciation for Italian cuisine and its preparation throughout his writing. I was not too familiar with him as a food person before going into this book, but I could see how much he cared.

He also was working on his career as an actor while writing these, so there are special characters and dinners from sets and after work that give insight into what his personal relationships with other actors are like. I knew all of the people being mentioned in the book, so I was nodding along when I was listening to these sections.

The writing itself isn’t the best, as these are quite literally diary entries. I don’t know how it reads on the page, but when listening to it in audiobook format, it literally comes across as him reading his diary. It is quite animated and comes to life, but at certain points I did find myself a tad tired of the medium in which he delivered these stories.

They were interesting though, that’s for sure. It was a glimpse into a life of a wealthy actor, and as someone who didn’t grow up with a lot of money nor could imagine living like this, it was compelling to see how people live like this. It felt like a look into a world I may never have access too,

However, there are entire sections of the book that feel quite frank for Tucci, and as someone who knew nothing about him before this, as I’ve never watched any of his interviews or reality content, I was not impressed. I think it’s valid to critique a restaurant, no matter how expensive it is, but some of his statements kind of came across to me as out of touch.

Overall Thoughts

I would say my verdict on this book is okay. I don’t know if I would sit down and read it, so I’m glad that I had an audiobook to listen to. The time passed pretty quickly through this medium and I was able to easily finish it because it flows quite well, despite the form of the writing dragging it down at times.

We only have this book being published though because it’s Stanley Tucci, and he has cultural power and capital. People want to read this solely because it is Stanley Tucci. Like if I wanted to publish my food diaries, no one is ever going to read it, nor will a publisher give me a huge advance.

In that way it feels like a lazy cash grab, but I think it works in some ways. The descriptions of the food definitely made me hungry, and I admire how much love and care Tucci is giving towards food and cuisine as a whole. I do wonder if he could expand it more into cultural anthropology and history in a mainstream, accessible way, but I don’t think he would write something like that—but I could be wrong!

Go read it if you’re interested. Maybe you’ll love it more than I did, as taste is incredibly subjective.

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