Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture)
by Marion Nestle

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Book Summary Information

Author: Marion Nestle
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-15
ISBN: 0520254031
Number of pages: 510
Publisher: University of California Press

Book Reviews of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Book Review: An academic yet engrossing expos?
Summary: 5 Stars

I plowed my way through this book across many late-nights at my favorite 24/7 coffee bar, easily ignoring all of the "local atmosphere."

If you can handle heavy academic reading, this book is practically a Woodward & Bernstein thriller -- an extremely engrossing expos? concerning the VERY ugly political underbelly of the American food industry, and how it chugs away to keep all of us as confused as possible about our food choices and what honestly constitutes sound nutritional guidance.

If you're boggled by choices that SHOULD be simple, such as trying to figure out whether it's healthier to eat butter or some chemical facsimile which includes ingredients you couldn't pronounce to save your grandmother's soul, the spotlight on politics in this book will salve your frazzled mind. The decades of political insanity and posturing surrounding something so seemingly simple as [what food pyramid version is permitted in schools] says so much about the ENTIRE industry. Don't feel badly if you're a bit confused about "good nutrition," because you are NOT alone. Scores of millions of Americans feel the EXACT same way ... and Big Food likes it that way!

Nestle's writing does indeed get rather heady in some sections; however, she's challenging decades of contradiction, confusion, obfuscation, and outright lies that Big Food has tried to sell to America, so it really is necessary for her to preemptively buttress herself against anticipated challenges from Big Food and their seemingly-endless supply of lawyers and lobbyists. Ignore the negative reviews.

If heady, heavily-cited reading is NOT your thing, feel free to check out the [similar reading] suggestions, because there will probably arrive some point (or several) at which you REALLY want to throw this book at the wall. Just an honest observation.

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Summary of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture)

An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics laid the groundwork for today's food revolution and changed the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. Now, a new introduction and concluding chapter bring us up to date on the key events in that movement. This pathbreaking, prize-winning book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.

In the U.S., we're bombarded with nutritional advice--the work, we assume, of reliable authorities with our best interests at heart. Far from it, says Marion Nestle, whose Food Politics absorbingly details how the food industry--through lobbying, advertising, and the co-opting of experts--influences our dietary choices to our detriment. Central to her argument is the American "paradox of plenty," the recognition that our food abundance (we've enough calories to meet every citizen's needs twice over) leads profit-fixated food producers to do everything possible to broaden their market portion, thus swaying us to eat more when we should do the opposite. The result is compromised health: epidemic obesity to start, and increased vulnerability to heart and lung disease, cancer, and stroke--reversible if the constantly suppressed "eat less, move more" message that most nutritionists shout could be heard.

Nestle, nutrition chair at New York University and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General Report, has served her time in the dietary trenches and is ideally suited to revealing how government nutritional advice is watered down when a message might threaten industry sales. (Her report on byzantine nutritional food-pyramid rewordings to avoid "eat less" recommendations is both predictable and astonishing.) She has other "war stories," too, that involve marketing to children in school (in the form of soft-drink "pouring rights" agreements, hallway advertising, and fast-food coupon giveaways), and diet-supplement dramas in which manufacturers and the government enter regulation frays, with the industry championing "free choice" even as that position counters consumer protection. Is there hope? "If we want to encourage people to eat better diets," says Nestle, "we need to target societal means to counter food industry lobbying and marketing practices as well as the education of individuals." It's a telling conclusion in an engrossing and masterfully panoramic expos?. --Arthur Boehm

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