The author/illustrator team that created Animals in Motion and Animal Senses this time explains how a food web works, then explores the eating habits of herbivores, carnivores, and scavengers. Hickman’s clear, easy-to-read text engages young readers (“How far can you stick out your tongue? Imagine if it stretched the length of your body the way a chameleon’s does”) and challenges them with quizzes, experiments, and activities such as how to make a model gizzard.

Some of Stephens’ double-page watercolour illustrations are striking but they fill almost half the book, squeezing out whole groups of interesting animal eaters. Two pages are devoted to the well-known blue whale, but there’s no mention of barnacles, whale sharks, parasites, partnership feeders (oxpeckers and rhinos), or the lovely parent-child tradition of sharing predigested meals.

Valuable space is devoured in other ways. Vampire bats are highlighted in two separate places. Large paintings of both pandas and koalas as “picky eaters” are given where one would have sufficed, and the full-page illustration of a bison’s face adds little to the section on cud-chewers. Labels are missing from the diagram of human teeth, whereas the forgettable Latin names of the cow’s stomach chambers are clearly labelled. The book ends abruptly without a summary or final quiz. Animals Eating whets the appetite, but left this reader hungry for more meaty information.