Books

Note:  Each book has its own web page with information about what’s in it, and its blurbs, reviews, and media.  Click on the link to get to that page.

What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters.  Publication Date: November 11, 2022.

Information about the book is here.  You can pre-order it—ISBN 9780374608699—from:  Amazon   Barnes & Noble   Books-a-Million   Bookshop   Powells   Target

 

The Fish Counter.  Picador Shorts, June 10, 2025 (96 pages).

 

The publisher’s information about the book is here.   You can preorder it—ISBN 9781250391193—from Amazon   Barnes & Noble   Books-a-Million   Bookshop   Powells   Target

Here’s what the publisher says about it:

America’s leading nutritionist teaches you how to navigate the fish counter.

A standalone extract from the newly revised edition of her groundbreaking What to Eat (which is being reissued as What to Eat Now).

Marion Nestle, America’s preeminent nutritionist and the scholar widely credited with establishing the field of modern American food studies, takes us through every aspect of how we grow, market, shop for, store, label, and eat fish in America.

With her trademark persistence and unerring eye for detail, Nestle pulls the curtain back on the complicated routes that fish have to go through to make it to our supermarket fish counter. What is the history of methylmercury contamination in our fish supplies? How have government agencies dealt with it in the past? How have they communicated its dangers to us, and how do they do that now? What should we consider when we think about food safety and fish? How healthy is fish, in fact?

Marion Nestle answers these and many more questions at the heart of how we consume fish. These chapters are a master class for anyone looking to eat more sustainably, mindfully, and with a full awareness of the many complicated factors at play when you’re standing at the fish counter trying to make a decision about what fish you ought to buy for your dinner.

The Fish Counter is part of the Picador Shorts series “Oceans, Rivers, and Streams” in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.

More information about the book is here.

 

Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics.  Publication date: October 4, 2022.

Information about the book is here.

Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health (with Kerry Trueman), 2020

For information and orders, click here.

Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, 2018

For information and orders, click here.

Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning), 2015

Order from Oxford University Press or Amazon. For more information, blurbs, reviews, and media click here.

Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics (2013)

Order from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-million, IndieBound Click here for more information about the book. What’s wrong with the US food system? Why is half the world starving while the other half battles obesity? Who decides our food issues, and why can’t we do better with labeling, safety, or school food? In Eat, Drink, Vote, Nestle teams up with The Cartoonist Group syndicate to present more than 250 of her favorite cartoons on issues ranging from dietary advice to genetic engineering to childhood obesity. While encouraging readers to vote with their forks for healthier diets, this book insists that it’s also necessary to vote with votes to make it easier for everyone to make healthier dietary choices.

Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics (2012)

Calories—too few or too many—are the source of health problems affecting billions of people in today’s globalized world. In Why Calories Count, Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim explain in clear and accessible language what calories are and how they work, both biologically and politically. The authors offer candid advice: Get organized. Eat less. Eat better. Move more. Get political. Click here for more information Pre-order from your local independent bookstore or University of California Press or Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com.

Feed Your Pet Right: The Authoritative Guide to Feeding Your Dog and Cat (2010, now out of print)

Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim present an entertaining, informative, and objective examination of the booming pet food industry—its history, constituent companies, products, and marketing practices–with the facts pet owners need to decide for themselves how best to feed their cats or dogs. Click here for reviews and much more » Order from your local independent bookstore or Amazon or Free Press/Simon and Schuster or Barnes & Noble or IndieBound. Information about the book is on Facebook (click here).

Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (2008, paperback 2010)

Marion Nestle tells the gripping story of how, in early 2007, a few telephone calls about sick cats set off the largest recall of consumer products in U.S. history and an international crisis over the safety of imported goods ranging from food to toothpaste, tires, and toys. Click here for much more » Order from your local independent bookstore or Amazon or UC Press.

What to Eat (2006, paperback 2007).

What to Eat is a book about how to make sensible food choices. Consider that today’s supermarket is ground zero for the food industry, a place where the giants of agribusiness compete for your purchases with profits—not health or nutrition—in mind. Click here for much more » Order from your local independent bookstore or Amazon or Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Food and Nutrition (2004, now out of print)

Taking Sides presents current issues in a debate-style format designed to stimulate student interest and develop critical thinking skills. Each issue is framed with an issue summary, an issue introduction, and a postscript. The pro and con essays represent the arguments of leading scholars and commentators in their fields. More here » Purchase on Amazon.

Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (2003, paperback 2004, revised edition 2010)

Marion Nestle argues that ensuring safe food involves more than washing hands or cooking food to higher temperatures. It involves politics. When it comes to food safety, billions of dollars are at stake, and industry, government, and consumers collide over issues of values, economics, and political power—and not always in the public interest. Click here for much more » Order from your local independent bookstore or Amazon or UC Press.  

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002, paperback 2003, revised edition 2007, tenth anniversary edition, 2013 )

We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. Click here for reviews and much more » Order from your local independent bookstore or Purchase on Amazon or UC Press.