Book reviews

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.