A fair warning to anybody who wants to read this manga: It will make you want to eat. If it's not the art of the food itself, the character's descriptions of how and why every bit of food works, going into detail about what makes the food work, will get you. With that said, let's get right into this.

STORY:

Toriko takes place during the Gourmet Era, an era where food is highly revered and skilled chefs are given essentially celebrity status by an adoring public. Naturally, someone has to gather the food for everybody, and that's where the bishoku-ya come in. The series takes this setting and has fun with it, giving us strange and surreal, yet still appealing foods to be hunted and explores the idea of respecting all that it took for your food to get from the wild to your plate.

CHARACTER:

This manga follows the exploits of bishop-ya Toriko and his partner, the chef Komatsu. While these two provide a lot of enjoyment and a good chemistry between them, I would feel that I was failing at something if I didn't point out an actual flaw here. While Toriko is a good character, at times it can feel like his personality is limited to just the generic shonen hero personality and he doesn't really have a lot to set him apart from that. Still, the characters are enjoyable and even the side characters are still entertaining and fun to watch when they're on. As for the villains, they show how to best establish that a character is a villain using the world you've created and to set them up as a foil to the heroes. As mentioned before, much value is placed on respecting everything involved in getting food, and above all else respecting the animals who had to die to feed you, and this is best reflected in the heroes philosophy when it comes to hunting animals: Only kill if you plan to actually eat the meat; eat it all, without leaving anything leftover; and make sure that you don't take so much that you disrupt the environment. As such, the Bishoukukai, the villains of the story, show very little concern for the actual well-being of their prey or the environment and are only concerned with getting good food and keeping it to themselves.

OVERALL:

This series is a must read in the shonen genre, especially adventure stories such as One Piece or Dragon Ball and I encourage people to try it out as soon as they can.