WHAT TO EAT NOW

The noted nutritionist offers a deeply researched look into the food that we eat—and why we need to do better.

At the outset, updating her 2005 book What To Eat, Nestle acknowledges that her work centers on the politics of food, which means, here, constant agitation against a food system driven by business imperatives “to produce and market highly profitable ‘junk.’” Added to this critique of food systems are imperatives of their own, these dealing with global problems: “hunger and food insecurity, obesity and its disease consequences, and climate change.” Nestle begins at the epicenter, inside modern supermarkets, where food corporations buy space on shelves at eye level to lure consumers into consuming…mostly junk, and junk that we wind up paying for three times: once at the cash register, once to cover tax deductions the companies take for these expenses, and once for treating the ensuing illnesses. Go to a wealthy neighborhood, and you’ll find expensive but abundant produce; go to a poor one, and you’ll find mostly highly processed food that is both cheap and deleterious to health, laden with sugars, sodium, and the like. Ironically, Nestle writes, that food system produces, annually, twice as many calories as a healthy adult needs—which Nestle counters with a long, complex discussion of how calories are measured, as well as an admonition: “Don’t eat more calories than you need.” She couples that discussion with a sobering note that if you walk at a leisurely pace for an hour, you’ll burn off the caloric equivalent of only 14 tortilla chips, meaning that any effort to lose weight must involve eating less, which, she notes late in her discussion, “is bad for business.” So have a carrot instead of a candy bar, she notes, and eat lower on the food chain, and buy organic—but, she also counsels wisely, “find the joy in food.”

Essential reading for anyone who cares about how we fuel ourselves.