Los Angeles Times: "Freeman has produced a wonderfully intrepid, quirky Southeast Asian pictorial overview based on many years’ traveling, shooting, eating, and above all, thinking. Reliving multiple journeys to Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, he asks us to care deeply about lands not just sustained by rice but literally sculpted by it. He writes at fascinating length about things that get jettisoned from most cookbooks - the sheer demands of this crop, the rural poverty of “ricelands,” the historical logic behind the brilliant "vocabulary of taste" (aromatic spices, multitudinous herbs, pungent fermented fish products, galvanizing chiles) with which Southeast Asian cuisines surround the basic foodstuff."
Asian Affairs: "With chapters devoted to spices, vegetables and noodles and a historical resume of how Asian food travelled east to Europe and the wider world, this book will interest plantsmen, cooks and social historians in equal measure. It would be a pity to dismiss Ricelands as merely a coffee table glossy. It's a thundering good read."
The Guardian: "Food and foreign places are constant companions, for obvious reasons. The combination is gloriously exemplified in . . . Ricelands by the photographer Michael Freeman. He explains the food of south-east Asia in words and pictures that have never been bettered."
MostlyFood.co.uk: "...an exquisite volume from the award-winning photographer . . . a well-written and well-researched book. Michael has a very light and very readable style and his love of food is evident."
