Britney Spears loathes meatloaf and all lumpy stuff. Arturo Toscanini hated fish. Ayn Rand despised salads. Alexander Theroux’s Einstein’s Beets is a study of the world of food and food aversions. The novelist and poet probes the secret and mysterious attitudes of hundreds of people mostly famous and well-known toward eating and dining out, hilariously recounting tales of confrontation and scandalous alienation: it contains gossip, confession, embarrassment, and perceptive observations. 08 02 Does the world need an 800-page book on food phobias, as well as dislikes, simple preferences, aversions, obsessions, squeamishness, food fetishes, fixations, fashions, snobbery, and inverted snobbery? Simple answer: Damn right it does and with Theroux at the helm, you can’t help wondering why it wasn’t a thousand, two thousand pages long.