I couldn’t help but smile upon first seeing the sunny yellow cover with 16 happy kids at the table sharing dishes from their native countries. What an irresistible invitation to join them for a mouthwatering feast!

Even before you open the book, the message is clear: international, diverse, community, inclusive, fun and delicious. When you start reading, it’s so easy to relate: We are different, but we all love food! 

Welcome to Our Table: A Celebration of What Children Eat All Around the World (Nosy Crow, 2023) is an epic smorgasbord featuring hundreds of dishes and ingredients, both familiar and exotic, temptingly flavored with fascinating tidbits about how certain foods are grown and prepared.

Written by poet-author Laura Mucha and her chef-food writer husband Ed Smith, the 64-page compendium is served up with Harriet Lynas’s cheery, drool-worthy digital illustrations, sure to whet the appetite and arouse curiosity.

The mouthwatering menu contains 33 “courses” or topics, most featured on inventively designed, reader friendly double page spreads along with several single page spreads + sidebars. Friendly kids of multiple ethnicities are shown eating, serving, or interacting with various types of foods (interesting asides are conveyed via occasional speech bubbles).

After a brief introduction, Mucha and Smith set the table with descriptions of common eating utensils. Besides forks, knives, spoons and chopsticks, more than 1/4 of the world eats mainly with their hands. In India, Pakistan, Bhutan and Bangladesh, fingers are the way to go! And in places like South Korea, Italy or Nigeria, hands are preferred only for certain dishes (lettuce wraps, pizza, pounded yams).

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