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 expose. --Arthur Boehm

Product Description
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.

I haven't even had a chance yet to read Nestle's book myself, but it irritates me to see the food industry's PR machine spew out the usual (...) every time someone writes something they don't like. If they hate her this much, it's probably a pretty good book.


The food industry's assault on your health   December 26, 2002
 105 out of 109 found this review helpful

Nutrition expert Marion Nestle's "Food Politics" explains how the formula for a healthy diet hasn't changed. She advises that one should eat more plant-based foods (fruits, vegetables and whole grains) and less meat, dairy and sweets. But this message collides with the interests of the food-industrial complex, which makes the bulk of its profits by selling relatively expensive processed foods. The book examines how corporations have successfully fought the health message by using a number of overt and covert tactics to further their objectives at the public's expense.

In fact, this business success story has resulted in a generation of Americans who are significantly overweight compared with their predecessors. Nestle shows that public relations and government lobbying result in obfuscation and mixed messages about the relative values of certain foods; this generally confuses Americans and makes it difficult to get the "eat less" message. Interestingly, she reveals that the amount of sweets and snack foods consumed are in almost exact proportion to the advertising dollars spent promoting these foods, suggesting that limits on advertising junk food to children might be a reasonable first step in addressing this problem.

But Nestle is particularly critical of the criminally poor quality of the nation's public school lunch program and the "pouring rights" contracts struck with soft drink companies by cash-starved school districts. Our country's apparent unwilingness to provide nutritious meals to our schoolchildren is shameful, and Nestle should be congratulated for bringing the situation to light.

Other noteworthy sections of the book address the deregulation of dietary supplements and the invention of "techno-foods", ie foods that have been fortified with vitamins, minerals or herbal ingredients. The overall picture is one of regulators on the defensive and huckster capitalism run rampant. While it was disturbing but not too surprising to learn about relatively obscure supplement makers making absurd claims for products that have little scientifically proven value, it was somewhat amusing to see a reprint of a short-lived advertisement for Heinz ketchup that promoted its supposed cancer-fighting properties. It appears there are no limits to what kinds of food products might be similarly reinvented by marketers in their quest for higher profits.

In the closing chapter, Nestle proposes a number of useful solutions. Her ideas are reasonable and display a maturity gained through many years spent in government and academia. In an environment where food choices and information surrounding food products are increasingly difficult to understand, let's hope that this book inspires us all to demand greater accountability from the food companies that feed us. Highly recommended!


An Important Read in a Lackluster Format   June 14, 2005
 55 out of 58 found this review helpful

Here's the thing.

As one reviewer mentioned I think the bulk of negative reviewers have not actually read this book.

The author is a nuritionist, who says that despite the really basic nutritional advice of most nutritionists which has not significantly changed over the course of a half century, the public still views nutritional advice as difficult to understand.

Why?

Because the food industry makes more money when it sells more products. It has a vested interest in getting people to at least buy (if not eat) more food. Most importantly, the least healthy foods (i.e. highly processed foods) have the highest profit margins. To ensure profits, they pressure the government to avoid informing the public in an easily understandable format that they should eat less and avoid processed foods.

Is she saying this is the ONLY reason why americans are fat? No. But the fact that many, many, many americans have problems figuring out what the heck to eat is heavily due to the food lobbyists, a fact which she goes into in nauseating detail.

And therein lies the problem.

Nestle is an Academic and she writes like one. Anyone familiar with non-fiction in the style of Nickle and Dimed, Fast Food Nation, or even Island of the Colorblind will find Food Politics irritating. Not because the book is poorly written, per se, but because it's dull.

She obscures critical points between reams of facts, her narrative style plods along instead of floating or skipping, and I frequently felt like hurling the book across the room screaming get to the point already.

But I did finish the book.

Because the message is far more important then the limited medium. This book is critically important in that it hi-lights the sad reality that billions of dollars being spent vying for a place on the tip of your fork. Sadly very little of this money bears your health in mind.


If you liked Fast Food Nation   July 19, 2002
 51 out of 53 found this review helpful

Eric Schlosser writes about FOOD POLITICS, "If you eat, you should read this book." But while Schlosser revealed to a mass public the disturbing business of fast food, Marion Nestle takes on most of the food industry, and not without consequences (you can view a letter she received from a lawyer representing the sugar industry on the website for this book).

She argues that basic nutrition science is simple. Yet there is mass confusion about what to eat and what effects foods have. And the reason for all of this misinformation is that it benefits food producers to have an innocent flock of customers who are left uncertain of how to judge what is healthy from what is not. She clearly explains what means the food industry uses to influence policies to their benefit, often at the expense of public health. And she gives detailed examples that illustrate the extent to which some companies and industries go to sell their products.

While her suggestions for reform may be somewhat wanting, her descriptions of how decisions about food get made on political levels is masterfully researched and she is always respectful of science. While those people with vested interests in certain industries may label her a communist, she is merely critiquing a history of policies and marketing strategies that have, to be sure, provided us with an abundant food supply, but have also led to increased obesity and high rates of chronic diseases.


The obscene side of what we eat   March 4, 2002
 39 out of 44 found this review helpful

It's no surprise that we live in what the social critic Guy Debord calls a "spectacle" culture whose values and symbols increasingly originate from the marketing world. Mega-corporations are in the business of making a profit, and the way they do that is to use media to persuade ... folks into buying their products. Doubt it? Then try to get rid of all the advertizing jingles floating around in your head. Recent studies show that infants recognize manufacturing logos before they recognize their own names. We live in one vast commercial. We are consumer nation.

Marion Nestle has written an excellent and frightening book about the food side of consumer nation, documenting the lengths the food industry goes to manipulate the public, market its wares, and achieve the bottom line. The problem is that we over-stuffed Americans have too many choices about what to munch: food products proliferate. (I mean, just count the number of breakfast cereals available to you the next time you go to the supermarket. Do we REALLY need 43 different kinds of fiber to choose from?) So in order to push its product, the food industry revs up the marketing pressure. The ironically named Nestle exposes the ways that food manufacturers and retailers do this through their lobbying efforts with the FDA, through targeting consumer groups--especially kids--with as much zeal as Joe Camel used to hawk smokes to underagers, by bribing school systems to tout soft drinks and junk foods to students (as, for example, rewards for reading), or by fudging dietary and nutritional information packaged with the product.

The way in which the food industry manipulates us in order to push its products is obscene enough. But what's even more shameful is the fact that people are still starving, both here and abroad, even though there's so much damn food available that retailers are stumbling over themselves trying to sell it. UNESCO reports that between 35,000 and 40,000 kids die each day throughout the world (ncluding the U.S.) of starvation or hunger-related illness. These deaths aren't caused by a lack of food, but by lousy distribution of food. The politics and business of food pursues the bottom line while millions starve.

Read this book, be horrified, get angry, and change your life. Break free of the spectacle society. Mega-corporations can be stopped when we consumers stand up to them in the way they understand best: when we refuse to buy their products and play their game.