Now You Know What You Eat by Valorie Fisher (review)

In a visual feast of a book, Fisher provides intriguing, infographic-style explanations of common kid foods. For a vanilla ice cream cone, for instance, she breaks down the constituents of the cone (flour + sugar + eggs + butter, in wordless rebus-like equations) and of the ice cream (cream + milk + sugar + eggs + vanilla extract), with all of those ingredients pictured in a row alongside the featured dairy treat; additional details note in picture equations the sources of those ingredients (eggs from chickens, flour from wheat, etc.). The book then dives into milk in more detail, still in the strongly visual format, and then returns to peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, potato chips, and other favorites, as well as going into more depth on single ingredients such as corn and eggs. Closing pages move on to nutrition, identifying what nutrients are found in the featured foods. The design hearkens back to the clean Dorling Kindersley visual ethos of the '90s with its use of realia, but Fisher amps up the charm by using a lively color palette for the backgrounds and toys and models as her figures, so it's clearly a miniature herd of cattle on the milk page and dollhouse-style people and furniture throughout. The explanations don't always fully satisfy, but the graphic styling will be irresistible to many kids who might zone out or struggle with text-heavy explanations, and they'll get an extra kick out of the soupçon of decoding challenge involved.