Wekend Reading: What to Eat by Marion Nestle
What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices by Marion Nestle is this week's weekend reading. Nestle is a professor of nutrition at the NYU School of Public Health. I guess you could say she wrote the book on food politics. (In fact, she is the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, a 2003 book that started much of the conversation around food and health that's taking place today. )
Explaining the inspiration for the new book, published this spring, she writes
What to Eat is is a book about how to make sensible food choices. Consider that today’s supermarket is ground zero for the food industry, a place where the giants of agribusiness compete for your purchases with profits—not health or nutrition—in mind. This book takes you on a guided tour of the supermarket, beginning in the produce section and continuing around the perimeter of the store to the dairy, meat, and fish counters, and then to the center aisles where you find the packaged foods, soft drinks, bottled waters, baby foods, and more. Along the way, it tells you just what you need to know about such matters as fresh and frozen, wild and farm-raised, organic and “natural,” and omega-3 and trans fats. It decodes food labels, nutrition and health claims, and portion sizes, and shows you how to balance decisions about food on the basis of freshness, taste, nutrition, and health, but also social and environmental issues and, of course, price.
I cannot begin to tell you how much fun this book has been to research and write. It turned out to be as challenging a project as any I have ever undertaken, but also a lot more entertaining. Every time I walked into a supermarket, I discovered something new and often unsuspected. The most seemingly mundane products (eggs! bottled water!) led me to discoveries I had not even imagined possible. I found something astonishing—and often quite amusing—in every section of the store. I hope that you are just as amazed and amused reading this book as I was while writing it. I also hope that you put it to immediate use. Enjoy, eat well, and change the world (for the better, of course).
Available at What to Eat.
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Posted by Jess Brooks at November 17, 2006 8:46 AM
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