I love to read about food in any book. When I was a kid I thought British food must be soooo delicious because of Harry Potter 😂 I still get excited whenever a book mentions food, even if it’s just something ordinary like bacon and eggs or ice cream soda. Books can also affect my preferences for food during the time I read them, for example, when I was reading The Winds of War, a book about WWII, my diet consisted of food from the Axis Powers solely! I ate so much German sausage, Japanese potato salad, Japanese beef tongue, Japanese fried chicken, and pasta (my record is eating pasta and meatballs four nights in one week!). Apparently my appetite decided to be very different from my political views 😂
People tend to deride some monumental classics for page after page of tangential material, but back when I read Moby Dick, I found the mid-narrative Jeremiads on early 19th-century whaling practices genuinely fascinating.
And even in Les Misérables when Hugo went off topic for 75 pages or so describing some Napoleonic battle or the beauty of the French language, I was enraptured.
Great writing can make almost anything interesting.