Armed with curiosity and scientific expertise, the Hartels take readers on a journey of food exploration. In this readable volume, the father-daughter duo tackles 60 everyday dinner-table queries. Based on newspaper columns penned by Richard Hartel, a professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the book serves as a quick and humorous food science reference. It is geared both toward the merely curious (one section explores hollow chocolate bunnies) as well as the more practical (readers find out what to do when salt gets sticky and how to stop guacamole from turning brown). In other chapters, the authors describe how the eyes react to working in an onion ring factory, the role microbes play in making food and what happens during food irradiation.