What to Eat Now, More Than Ever

Marion Nestle has been the essential guide to our “food system” (one trillion dollars a year) in the United States for a long time.  Her work is relevant in other such as the United Kingdom that lack a robust food culture, for the most part because it was killed by the food system, not because it never existed.  Her major books include:

• Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002)
• What to Eat (2006)
• Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat (2018)
• Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics (2022)
• What to Eat Now (2025)

I have read each of these books and they repay the effort when I go back to them now that I serve as a tutor of preclinical medical students in, among other things, nutrition.  I avoid the simpleminded “clinical nutritionism” [1] of the conventional medical curriculum while emphasizing how much the dry recitation of the biochemistry and physiology of nutrition leaves out.  Not that this knowledge is dispensable to the healing arts.  The discovery of vitamins and other pathways and components of human metabolism was biochemistry at its finest.  My first mentor was present when giants who walked the earth were discovering lipoic acid and its role in multi-enzyme complexes and carbon fixation, which makes all life possible.  I still enjoy reading that literature because it teaches us to do science while not addled by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.

What is left out of “intermediary metabolism” and “nutrition” in the textbook is what Marion Nestle covers, and by doing so she explains why our food system is so dysfunctional, inefficient, insufficient, and ultimately unhealthy.  What to Eat Now  (November 2025) is her worthy successor to What to Eat.  For current developments, her FoodPolitics.com should be on everyone’s list of regular stops for news you can use.  The lead on 15 December 2025 about a publication with the title Egg intake and cognitive function in healthy adults: A systematic review of the literature is a perfect illustration of her work at its best:  From her comment on the paper:

 

 “May” is equivalent to “may not,” making the positive spin on the conclusions an example of interpretation bias consistent with industry funding.  The analysis shows that nobody is finding evidence that eggs have any measurable effect on cognitive function, so why bother with further studies.  They are unlikely to find a stronger effect.  This study is especially unfortunate because the first author is a doctoral student, whose mentors ought to have kept free of industry influence (emphasis added here and below unless otherwise noted)

Indeed.  At one time the first thing I read in a scientific paper was the abstract.  Now it is the acknowledgments where the funding sources are listed.  A paper on the incredible edible egg that was funded by Australian Eggs Ltd is to be passed over without a second thought.  The same, of course, applies to a paper about statins in the leading medical journal where the authors are, one way or another, on the payroll of Big Pharma.  I try to get this across to medical students, with uncertain outcomes.

What to Eat Now is a long but fascinating and often infuriating tour through the typical American supermarket, beginning with the periphery and ending in the center aisles.  On the periphery of every supermarket, we find the following: Water, produce (fruits and vegetables), meat (beef, pork, chicken), fish, dairy, and eggs.  The center aisles are where marketing takes over.  There you find lightly processed foods such as canned vegetables and frozen foods and culinary ingredients including fats, oils, salt, sugar, and spices.  Also in the center aisles are the ultra-processed foods.  This is where there is plenty of money to be made by marketing breakfast cereals, snacks, and techno foods to all of us, including not a few sophisticates.  A few highlights follow.

Water.  I remember when people gave up water fountains at work and play for bottled water. My thoughts were that this could not be something good.  And what eventually came of it were remarkable products such as Propel, which comes in an immune support version.  We are now living as characters in the marketer’s dream of selling “safe” water that is plain or fizzy (which I have grown to like, frequently but certainly not always in place of that iconic Southern treat Coca-Cola [2]), flavored with a chemical essence and/or sugar or a sugar substitute.  That public water sources are sometimes contaminated because our political leadership has lost the plot (See Michigan, Flint) only helps the marketer, and the Market rules: “Bottled water is the most profitable food item ever invented.”

Meat. This is the prime example, political and technical, of the category mistake that is industrial agriculture:

The meat industry’s concentrated power should remind us of other issues related to meat production.  One is the need for humane treatment of people as well as animals…Raising cattle should be a good way to turn grass into high-quality meat protein, but industrial meat production requires enormous qualities of corn and soybeans for feed and consumes vast quantities of nonrenewable energy and water.  Beef generates more greenhouse gases than any other food, a clear example of how consolidated power enables externalized consequences and their costs.

By some accounts, it takes more than 200 gallons of fuel oil to raise a 1200-pound steer on a feedlot…the costs of feed, fertilizers, machinery, and fuel get factored in to the cost of meat, but the externalized costs of cleaning up animal waste, dealing with the effects of agricultural runoff on drinking water resources, and creating dead zones in Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico do not.  You pay those costs in taxes (to the often-nonexistent extent that the polluters are held to account), not at the grocery store.  And CAFOs – factory farms – are invariably located in low-income rural areas where residents have little political power.

Yes, they are.  Out of PMC [3] sight, out of PMC mind.  Then there is the fact that the Meat Racket (highly recommended) is basically a monopoly and behaves properly if malignantly as such.  But the most important point of this passage is that it confirms that industrial agriculture is a category mistake.  Cattle are a good way of turning sunlight through grass into high-quality meet protein, while regenerating the land upon which the grass grows.  And it is possible to subsidize grass-fed beef instead of feedlots with their human and animal cruelty, waste and antibiotics, corn and soybeans, which are in the main industrial products, not farm produce.  Moreover:

Grass-feeding improves the safety and nutritional quality of meat.  Why safety?  Unlike our digestive system, that of ruminants evolved to handle grass.  Rumen stomachs work like fermentation vats; they contain trillions of bacteria that convert chewed-up grass and hay into nutrients that promote muscle synthesis.  Ruminants do not handle grains as well as they handle grass.  Corn and soybeans make cattle grow faster and fatter but alter the rumen microbiomes; the cattle develop the equivalent of indigestion and are not as healthy.  The more concentrated nutrients in corn and soybeans sometimes encourage growth of harmful bacteria; the pathogens may not sicken the animals but can sicken you.  Compared to conventionally fed cattle (i.e., industrial feedlot), those fed on grass carry fewer pathogens, do not excrete as many, get sick less often, and require less treatment with antibiotics.

Grass-feeding also affects the nutritional composition of meat.  The adage “You are what you eat” applies to cattle as well as people.  Feedlots exist to fatten up animals in a hurry, whereas access to pasture allows the cattle to graze on low-calorie grass while expending energy and moving around.  Meat from pastured cattle has less fat and fewer calories.  The fat is also different.  It is still high in saturated fatty acids but has more of some good ones – omega-3s – because these are prevalent in grass…Grass-fed meat is also higher in conjugated linoleic acids (CLAs).

 

The latter are correlated with protection against cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type-2 diabetes.  It is correct to be skeptical of these studies, which are “nutritionistic” in that they look for health effects of individual components instead of food.  Still, the evidence points in the right direction, while grass-fed beef (and naturally raised chicken and pork) lessens the likelihood of further spread of antibiotic resistance.  Pathogenic Escherichia coli (the normal gut bacterium) isolated from meat and poultry frequently resist treatment with common antibiotics.  And with grass-fed beef the energy comes free from the sun and the water is supplied on site from ponds or wells in areas where it rains.

Ultra-processed Foods. What to Eat Now is very good on the subject of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), which we have covered here previously in a discussion Chris Van Tulleken’s book Ultra-Processed People.  Suffice it to say that UPFs can be described as high-calorie industrial products that taste good and are relatively cheap and easily prepared.  They are designed to be eaten fast and in large quantities.  They are not healthy but they are convenient in our disordered world.

They are also highly profitable.  The central aisles of the American supermarket are filled with them in both room-temperature and frozen versions.  Breakfast cereals and cookies are the former while frozen dinners are the latter.  The marketing of these products to children has been standard operating procedure since I was a child watching cartoons on a Saturday morning during the 1960s.  This is still evil, and the marketers are much better at it.  Perhaps the biggest problem with UPFs today is that they are the most common kind of food sold in the large food deserts of the United States, where the people have no other alternatives.  There is little doubt that UPFs are major contributors to the obesity epidemic.  The marketers generally put the blame for obesity on “personal choice,” while not letting their children get near the stuff.

What Not to Eat notably includes discussion of the research of Kevin D. Hall, previously of the National Institutes of Health, whose group did some of the most important research on UPFs.  Here, for example:  From dearth to excess: the rise of obesity in an ultra-processed food system (pdf).  Alas, Kevin Hall abruptly retired earlier this year when his recent research did not meet with approval of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services.  It turns out that while UPFs are extremely habit forming because they are the products of industrial design to be just that, they are not “addictive” by the strictest of definitions.  This does not fit in with the “policy-directed science” of the current administration so Kevin Hall had to go.  His earlier, pathbreaking work on UPFs has been discussed here before.  Research in human nutrition, as opposed to human nutritionism, cannot be done better.  One can only hope he finds a position where he can continue his work.

Techno Foods. UPFs have led directly to “techno foods.”  One item in What to Eat Now that left me certifiably gobsmacked was a techno food called Soylent.  Yes, that is the name and apparently it is a real thing.  Marion Nestle can take it from here:

When it comes to ultra-processed foods or concoctions of ingredients, count me as skeptical…I view these as “techno foods”, a designation I attribute to Greg Drescher, long at the Culinary Institute of America, who says he coined it “for want of a better pejorative.”

Such concoctions are creeping into every section of supermarkets and are the darlings of venture capitalists, wildly optimistic about the ability of such products to feed the world with less harm to the environment – and produce substantial returns on investment.  Supermarkets carry Soylent (‘simplify food, make it sustainable”), a totally ultra-processed ready-to-drink meal replacement developed by Silicon Valley software engineers.  I cannot believe anyone would name something you want people to eat after Soylent Green, a terrifyingly (or hilariously, if you prefer) dystopian movie released in 1973 (set far into the future, 2022).  It envisioned a world so overpopulated and environmentally degraded that only the wealthiest had access to real food.  Spoiler alert: Everyone else subsisted on wafers of reconstituted human bodies.  The film’s catch phrase: “Soylent Green is people.”

I watched Soylent Green at the midnight movie on campus sometime in the mid-1970s.  I want to remember it was on a double bill with The Groove Tube (not recommended).  Both got a lot of laughs, and Soylent Green was the last movie with Edward G. Robinson, so it’s got that going for it.  I suppose Soylent must be some kind of nerd humor.  But techno foods are a solution to nothing, except perhaps space travel.  Techno foods are the subject George Monbiot’s Regenesis, which has been called “science-adjacent scientism.” [4]  Techno foods are a fad and energy hog with an unpromising but probably expensive future. [5]

What to Eat Now finishes with short sections on prepared foods in grocery stores, bread, dietary supplements and cannabis edibles.  Prepared foods are relatively new to supermarkets and have proved very popular.  Food safety seems to be good in most stores.  Partially baked bread (“par-baked”) is probably better than industrial bread; I have noticed that it will grow mold while the industrial bread only gets stale.  The rule on supplements is to be careful, very careful.  The supplement business is about making money above all.  Dietary supplements can be useful, but it is often impossible to know what is in the powder, pill, or capsule.  This was confirmed here and more recently here for melatonin, which is marketed as a sleep aid.  What is on the label is often not what is in the bottle.  A better case for “Caveat emptor!” is difficult to imagine.

As for cannabis edibles, they are a puzzle.  I have friends, mostly golfers of that certain age, who swear by cannabidiol (CBD) from hemp as a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory supplement.  But CBD products are heterogeneous and it is impossible to know what component is active in any given preparation.  The placebo effect is real, though, especially for true believers for any supplement.  There are a lot of cannabis true believers in my generation!  The legislation that ended the recent federal government shutdown contained a poison pill inserted by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) that put hemp growers in a difficult position, so edibles may have a difficult future.  The hemp farmers in Kentucky are not amused.

What to Eat Now is The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters. [6]  It shows and tells very well how we got into this mess, and a better handbook is unimaginable.  It is also full of solutions to our food system, although these are not always explicitly included.  This makes What to Eat Now valuable as a guide to further action.  The category mistake that is industrial agriculture is never too far beneath the surface in What to Eat Now, as in the discussion of industrial meat production included above.

The necessary conclusion is that this situation must change.  Technology is not the problem, however.  The science-adjacent scientism of chemical inputs and commodity outputs along with conventional economic accounting that ignores externalities – these are the problem.  Food is not a commodity.  This will be a very heavy lift for our current politics, but it can be done if we find the will.  The first thing is that agriculture, the production of food and fiber for people, must become regional.  Since abbreviations have become all the rage, how about MARA: Make Agriculture Regional Again. [7]

The only thing this requires is the remaking of the Farm Bill in the United States (yes, a heavy lift but not nearly as improbable as the long-term existence of Impossible Foods).  Instead of the acreage devoted to industrial commodity crops such as corn/maize and soybeans, the land could produce food for human consumption with the same subsidies.  This pivot would lead to pasture-raised meet instead of feedlot cattle that travel a thousand miles in one direction to be “finished” and then a thousand miles back as parts.  The only reason this is possible is because externalities are not accounted for.  And butcher would once again be a skilled trade a more local America.

Instead of one White Oak Pastures in Georgia, there could be fifty, with the beef, pork, and chicken marketed to retail customers at affordable prices, at scale, instead of at retail only for those who can afford it and wholesale to the restaurants these people frequent.  Repeat across the country, with dairy and eggs, vegetables and fruits.  The number of heirloom apples formerly extant in the mountains of North Georgia is unknown, but not all are lost.  That the apples in my grocery store come from Washington State (2,700 miles) and New Zealand (8,000 miles) is absurd.  What is necessary is not difficult in theory.  But it would break some very stout rice bowls, both of those in Congress and their patrons who fill them generously.

The failures of industrial agriculture described in What to Eat Now also go deeper, where they illustrate the largest problem of Late Capitalism of the Neoliberal Dispensation (apologies to Werner Sombart, Joseph Schumpeter, Ernest Mandel, Karl Polanyi, Quinn Slobodian, Corey Robin, Herman Daly, and a host of others, then and now).  And that problem is the social reproduction of human life itself, as culture, society, and polity.  Capital cannot continue to “grow” in our finite ecosphere.  Marx was correct in his analysis of Simple Reproduction in Capital, Volume 1, Chapters 21 and following. [8] Whatever comes next will not be what has been.  If we want our children and grandchildren to eat well and by doing so have the capacity to live well, we must take to heart the lessons of What to Eat Now.  And do it as close to home as possible.

Notes

[1] Nutritionism is the belief that individual “nutrients” are the key to a diet rather than the food that is eaten in the diet.  When essential nutrients were being identified by biochemists through the first half of the twentieth century, this view was useful in principle.  Now nutritionism hides more than it reveals.  People do not eat nutrients.  People and their animals eat food, and food, including food culture, is the proper subject of nutrition science.

[2] One of the best things about What to Eat Now is that Marion Nestle does not preach.  A treat is just that, a treat.  And a healthy diet has plenty of space for treats such as a plain Oreo cookie, a soft drink, or a Klondike bar, in moderation.

[3] Professional Managerial Class.  Discussed here among many other places at NC.

[4] From the link: “Can this work?  As a technical proposition, yes.  As a solution to our unsustainable food system, probably not.  And not only because it will be difficult to find a latter day Edward Bernays who can convince people that eating powdered bacterial sludge is good for them and their environment as easily as the original Bernays convinced first-wave feminists 100 years ago that smoking would be good for them.  For one thing, the energy requirements for such a massive effort are assumed away, which is standard scientistic operating procedure.  In the coming world that seems to be arriving ahead of schedule, these requirements are likely to be impractical and unsustainable.”

[5] One of the more interesting techno food stories is that of Impossible Foods.  This venture was founded by Pat Brown of Stanford, whose invention of microarrays that measure global gene expression in a cell or tissue, particularly in cancer research, was widely believed to signal a Nobel Prize.  When results proved difficult to reproduce from one lab to another he transitioned to techno foods.

[6] This very long book (703 pages including an outstanding bibliography and index!) does gloss over some of the science of diet, however.  For example, Ancel Keys is referred to as a cardiologist.  He was not according to what I have read.  However, he was the physiologist who is most responsible for the Diet-Heart Hypothesis (DHH) that demonized fat and cholesterol in the diet.  This led to the substitution of processed carbohydrates for fat calories.  Keys later admitted that his emphasis might have been overdone.  A strong case has been made that the DHH led to the obesity epidemic, perhaps as a concomitant of the parallel increase in consumption of UPFs loaded with excess calories and industrial additives beginning in the 1960s.  The “danger” of cholesterol was featured on the cover of Time at the height of concern.  When the American Heart Association changed its tune in 2015 that there would be no dietary guidance on cholesterol, this did not appear on the cover of Time.  In her discussion of enhanced water, Nestle writes that “Water is H₂O, two molecules of hydrogen weakly bonded to one of oxygen.”  Not exactly.  Water is two atoms of water and one atom of oxygen and the bonds between them are not weak.  It takes a lot of energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

[7] My first thought was MALA: Make Agriculture Local Again but “mal” is a nonstarter.  Besides, local is a tangible subset of regional.

[8] For those so inclined, this new translation is revelatory.