Sam’s Reviews > The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats > Status Update

"A woman had offered him a puree of the bean, one of his early experiences with the delightful, salty mortar known as hummus."

Mortar? Hmmmm, how did the author arrive at this incorrect term?
Mix to paste (mixture before baking) to paste (glue) to mortar (plaster)?

"Fairchild’s vertiginous fascination with the birds came partly from the coca leaves he had chewed—a remedy to distract the brain from reduced oxygen high above the sea."

Vertiginous: causing or tending to cause dizziness.
I feel like the author was looking for synonyms of giddy (excited) and picked the fanciest sounding one without checking the definition.
And well, awkward sentence anyways.

"Stretching some three thousand miles from coast to coast, from the cold winters of upland Maine to the sweltering summers along the Rio Grande, the United States enjoyed more climatic diversity than anywhere else on the planet."
Sounds like propaganda to me. Come on, the US has more "climactic diversity" than China? Not sure I believe that.

The writing in this book is ridiculously choppy.