What a Hampden shopper finds in What to Eat

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.

And the recent focus on buying locally produced foods should stymie the efforts of national industrial giants to place their most lucrative products (which happen to be, too often, highly processed and robbed of all nutrition) right where our hands will find them.

Still, it’s worth knowing which “natural” foods might be worthbuying when we do venture into the supermarket, and Nestle covers quite a few topics that can affect our choices even at our little co-op.

A fan of organics more for environmental health than for nutrition or flavor, Nestle sorts through the various “natural” labels and claims in detail. She describes her journeys to various supermarkets, mostly in the New York City area, and the difficulty of finding Certified Organic products.

She’s also focused on how to get the most nutritional bang for the buck, so she’s honest when the organics choice is “voting with your fork” rather than touting it on unproven grounds.

Even I, a lifelong co-op devotee and daughter of an earlier generation of nutritionists, got some surprises from What to Eat.

Take yogurt, for example. I’ve been hearing for years, from sources as reliable as my family doctor, that the bacteria in yogurt are beneficial to general health. I’ve been feeding my kids yogurt with sugar in it on the grounds that the trade-off is worth the benefits.

Nestle’s not convinced.

There is no good evidence, she says, that people who eat yogurt have any health advantages over those who don’t. Eat it if you like it, she says, and if you’re lactose intolerant, which most of the world is, it’s a good way to get the nutritional benefits of dairy.

She doesn’t discuss whether yogurt helps the gut recover from a bout of diarrhea—this book is about general dietary health, not treatment of illnesses. She’s suspicious, though, of the “probiotics” rage and has certainly caused me to reconsider our daily doses of Stonyfield Farms French Vanilla.

Similarly, I thought fish was practically a ticket to immortality. Nestle doubts it’s worth risking the contamination that comes with all those omega fatty acids we’ve been talked into craving, and she explains the chemistry and tells us where else we can get what we need. Eat fish only if you like it, she says, unless you’re pregnant. There’s no way of knowing that it’s safe.

I like it, but I’m running scared now.

And if I thought green tea might relieve my body of some of those fishy toxins, Nestle’s got bad news for me there, too: the only way it might contain lots of antioxidants is if I pay top dollar to have it shipped fresh; and there’s no proof that a tea sold online for $200 a pound offers any health benefits. “You might as well choose a tea by how it tastes,” she concludes.

Her discussion of supplements surprised me too. I make only the occasional stop in co-op “health and beauty” sections, usually for toothpaste or allergen-free skin products. I figure there’s no science behind vitamins, much less homeopathic remedies and other alternative healing approaches touted there, and I expected agreement from Nestle.

I got it, more or less, but here’s the surprise: the best way to protect yourself if you do take a supplement (a vitamin or herbal treatment, for example) is by “buying ones made by relatively large pharmaceutical companies that have the most to lose if [researchers find] problems with their labeling or contents.” Departing from her general endorsement of buying locally, she says that the supplements industry has shot itself in the foot in recent years, destroying regulatory mechanisms that might have allowed consumers to patronize small producers.

Here as elsewhere, she bridles at the assumption that it should be up to the consumer to make all these choices; regulation should protect us, not just inform us.

After all the arguments are over, the science in this book is fascinating. Even if you avoid eating beef, you’ve got to admire the cow for finding the molecules of fat in a blade of grass and using its biochemical machinery to convert them into nutrients that can feed, and even overfeed, humans.

I finished What to Eat feeling thankful for the choices we get to make here in our wealthy society, a little frightened about the food industry’s callous targeting of my family’s health, and very grateful for academics like Nestle who can explain both the choices and the marketing tactics in terms I understand.