The past decade has been a fine one for food writing. The growth of food blogs alone has added thousands of voices to the fray. It is common for food books to now tackle politics, culture and science as well as taste. Here's my top five book picks from the decade. Five is far, far too few. In no particular order:

1. Michael Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma, 2006

If I was going to nominate a single voice for the decade that managed to encapsulate the Western world's food anxieties, it would be Michael Pollan. The questions of whether we should eat organic or industrial, local or imported, fast food or slow are put together into a readable and very human narrative.

2. David Thompson, Thai Food, 2002

David Thompson now sets the bar for recipe books that bear an adjectival place name. For a recipe book, it is encyclopedic and marries Thai history to the foods that it produced. 

Also, this was one of the only cookbooks that I carried with me to Cambodia when I moved there and it paid off handsomely. Obscure ingredients were available at practically every market and ingredients that are either painstaking or slow to prepare like fresh coconut milk could be found anywhere. I've managed to thoroughly coat the lurid pink silk cover of it in pork fat which is the best tribute to any cookbook.

3. Jeffrey Steingarten, It Must Have Been Something I Ate, 2002

Steingarten is the very model of food-loving obsessiveness and has the rare ability to focus on a single topic while retaining a sense of self-deprecating humour. After reading his chapter on Turducken (chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey) or on making blood sausage, I still wonder what on earth were Vogue thinking when they hired him?

4. Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, (2nd ed.) 2004

If you've ever asked why food works in the way that it does, it is likely that McGee has the answer. McGee's tome is a triumph of both science and food writing, it makes the former accessible and the latter deeply rational. If you don't really care why meat cooks or the history of sauces, this may not be the book for you. 

5. Hervé This, Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavour, 2006

Hervé This' idea of what molecular gastronomy should be simply comes down to the idea of imparting practical knowledge about food based on science rather than myth; an idea that he propagates in short and at times philosophical chapters on the rational analysis of how to cook. 

Somewhere in the decade, molecular gastronomy came to mean weird pairings of food made with foam. Sure, Molecular Gastronomy does point out that you can make about a cubic metre of foam from a single egg white if you so chose, but it certainly doesn't recommend it.