Since most people's Thanksgivings revolve around food, and Thanksgiving is tomorrow, we're talking about our favorite food-related books today!
There is a whole series of these books by Laura Numeroff. They're considered "circular tales" because, at the end, you come back to what you said at the beginning. If you aren't familiar with If You Give a Mouse a Cookie or any other the others, it goes basically like this: a kid offers the titular cookie to the titular mouse, who requests a glass of milk... then a straw... etc. etc. until he's making ridiculous demands. I always kind of thought the mouse was rude. Like, just be happy with your cookie, dude.
The first several of these books were food related... giving a pig a pancake, and a moose a muffin. Then they expanded out to things like giving a pig a party, and Happy Easter, Mouse! But this is the original, and the only one I remember reading in school.
So mine... sorta counts. It's not so much about food as it is about a beverage company... but that's ok.
Ok, I will give you that there is a MAD amount of propaganda in this book. I mean, Schultz is obviously trying to get you to believe that Starbucks is the most super, awesome company in the world. And while I don't buy into that ideal... it was a good book.
Starbucks has become such a THING in this day and age. The logo is immediately recognizable and most people buy their coffee from there. You can even find a large number of people who refer to all coffee in a coffee shop as "Starbucks."
And I will concede that Schultz does run a great company. They cre about their employees, they care about giving around the world. They make an effort to have a smaller footprint on the ecosystem, which is awesome.
It was also cool to learn about how so many of the Starbucks staples came to be. Via, and the exact way that the coffee is made and how Pike Place came to life, and WHY it came to life, is all really fascinating to read about.
You do need to read this book with a bit of a grain of salt, but honestly, I really enjoyed it. Really, how could anything about COFFEE be bad?
I love If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Also, that Starbucks book sounds really interesting too.
ReplyDeleteThe Starbucks book was WAY better than I thought it would be. And Starbucks is a much better company than one would think. They're very good to their employees and, even when the economy was shit and they were trying to cut costs in every way, the guy STILL refused to cut the medical benefits of the part-time employees.
DeleteWhich, I personally, just think is really cool.