Book reviews

by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II (Benbella, 2006)

—by Steve Anthony

In the early 1970s Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet challenged the “sacred cows” of prevailing nutritional orthodoxy—that we can’t get adequate protein without regular consumption of meat and dairy products. In his landmark book, The China Study, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a renowned authority in the field of nutritional science, stands the old shibboleth completely on its head by making the case that, far from leading to good health, our high level of animal protein consumption is implicated in virtually all the major “killer” diseases in the West—from various cancers to heart disease to diabetes—as well as a number of other chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, obesity, and Alzheimer’s.

Coming from a two-quarts-of-milk-per- day farm-boy background, Campbell’s career has led him to the conviction that a plant-based diet easily provides all the nutrients we need while protecting us from a broad range of diseases. At the heart of the book is the China Study itself, which capitalized on a massive data base of mortality statistics compiled in China in the late 1970s at the behest of Chou En-Lai and known as the China Cancer Atlas.

A Review of Marion Nestle's What to Eat, North Point Press, 2006

—by Anne Holzman

You’ve heard about it from NPR and Oprah, taken one look at the size of it, and put it off indefinitely. Now it’s made that select little list of books that Working Assets phone customers can order when paying a bill.

Is it time yet for you to pick up nutritionist Marion Nestle’s latest assault on the assumptions behind our grocery choices, the 500-page What to Eat?

Her 2002 Food Politics analyzed how food producers bully federal agencies into changing policies so that we’ll eat for their benefit, not our own. In What to Eat, Nestle shifts her stance, imagining a trip to the grocery store and narrating what goes through her mind in each aisle as she shops.

You might have better things to do than follow someone around in a grocery store, but Nestle isn’t any old someone. She’s got a great sense of humor, years of experience researching the food industry, and an axe to grind that will look mighty familiar to anyone who’s fled the supermarket for the safety of a co-op.

I couldn’t help feeling a little smug about my co-op shopping as I worked my way through her list. I’m not going to get tricked by those corporate strategies to make me overweight and undernourished, right?

Presumably, the co-op structure avoids the supermarket’s problem of serving stockholders at the expense of shoppers, because in our case, we’re both.

—A Book Review by Katie Dahl, HPC Member

Are you more likely to choose a vegetable labeled “certified organic” or “locally grown"? Would you pay a little extra for grass-fed beef? Would you risk eating a mushroom from the wild or play it safe in favor of a mushroom from the produce aisle? If you expect Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, to tell you how you should answer these questions, you’ll surely be disappointed. But if you’re looking for an author who addresses the omnivore’s dilemma with a critical yet honest eye, the book is well worth the read.