Currently browsing posts about: Books

Gidon Eshel.  Planetary Eating: The Hidden Links between Your Plate and Our Cosmic Neighborhood.  MIT Press, 2025.

I did a blurb for this book:

Planetary Eating gives us a geophysicist’s deep analysis of the environmental cost of beef production and the benefits of replacing meat with plants.  Salads, he argues, are a blueprint for rebellion against corporate-run agricultural systems.

This book is divided into two parts.

• The first is a deep dive into calculating the environmental cost of eating beef.
• The second is how climate affects agriculture.

Eshel has fun with this.  He notes that his comments on meat-eating typically get responses:

roughly evenly split between the blindingly enlightened, zero doubt vegan activists, and angry self-appointed beef and big ag defenders.  And when I publish papers that suggest that in some circumstances beef may have some productive roles to play (it does), the tenor of the comments remains unchanged, but the camps neatly reverse, like Prussian troops in formation.

His main argument: “you cannot understand food and agriculture without invoking basic physics, thermodynamics, biology, and other pertinent sciences.”

He’s not kidding.  There’s a lot of all of that in this book and math calculations and formulas as well.  But what he’s trying to say makes sense.

I loved his analysis of why dairy farms do better in Texas and Arizona, states that would seem to be

Inhospitable to moist- and cool-loving cattle.  To combat cattle’s exceptional heat burden due to their large size, high performance, and large metabolic health output, migrating to where sweat dries fast, thus dripping minimally, is essential.  This requires near-surface air characteristics that strongly favor rapid evaporation.  Because few processes promote these conditions more than subsidence, which outside of the tropics is maximized downstream of mountain ranges that vigorous prevailing winds pass over, modern dairy migrate to those areas…Far from perplexing, locating dairy operations just east of the Rockies or the Coast Range now makes perfect sense, because that is the location of maximum effect of planetary waves the interactions of the prevailing westerly winds with the mountains excite.  And in that most coherent downstream node, the main effect for our purposes is subsidence; more subsidence, more comfortable and productive dairy cows.

I just got the first copy of my latest book!  It’s official publication date is June 10.

It’s published by Picador Shorts, short because the books in this series, on Oceans, Rivers, and Streams, are mostly under 100 pages (mine is 86).

Here’s what Macmillan, the owner of Picador, says about the book (and says how you can order 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).

What to Eat Now comes out November 11.  More on that when the time comes.

In the meantime, here are the other books in this series.  I love the covers.

Sylvia R. Karasu.  In Essence: A Tapestry of Selected Writings. 2025.

I wrote a blurb for this gorgeous book.

In Essence collects Dr. Sylvia Karasu’s elegant essays from Psychology Today and other publications.  These cover a broad variety of topics–vegetarianism, twins, opium, gullibility–each full of unexpected information, and all stunningly illustrated with artworks chosen to precisely illuminate the subject under analysis.  The book is breathtaking—a treasure not to be missed.

A brief excerpt from her essay on Collecting: A Demonic Passion:

Key Points

• The accumulator, rationalizing that someday things will come in handy, amasses an assortment of objects without any discernment.
• The collector, different from the accumulator and the hoarder, engages in a voluntary activity of selecting and ordering.
• People can collect objects, but also ideas and experiences.
• Collecting may include elements of exhibitionism, addiction, and obsession when the collection possesses the collector.

She writes:

“Let me look at my demon objectively. With the exception of my parents, no one really understood my obsession,

and it was many years before I met a fellow sufferer,” wrote the internationally renowned novelist Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1999). Continues Nabokov, “Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration.”

My new book, The Fish Counter, comes out June 10.  I will say more about it then.  In the meantime…

My interview about it with Nutrition Action’s Bonnie Liebman. 

Which fish are healthy and sustainable? It’s complicated

Seafood is good for you. That’s no surprise. But it’s not easy to find species that don’t contain mercury, PCBs, PFAS, or other contaminants, aren’t overfished, and aren’t linked to human rights abuse…  Read more here

Stuart Gillespie.  Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and the Planet.  Canongate, 2025.

I wrote a blurb for this book:

From his years of experience working in international nutrition, Gillespie has on-the-ground knowledge of why and how global food systems lead to widespread hunger, obesity, and environmental damage, and what needs to be done to make those systems healthier for all.  He makes it clear that this food fight is crucial to take on.

I particularly like his discussion of what is needed to transform food systems:

‘Food system transformation’ has become the mother of all development clichés in this decade.  The real goal of many who invoke it is not real transformation—it’s more about fiddling on the fringe.  To truly overhaul the food system, we need to see a major shift in the structure and dynamic of power.  Unsurprisingly, those in power now don’t really want such a shift, whatever they proclaim in conferences, interviews, and annual reports…What’s really being discussed in these conferences and reports is transition, not transformation.

On the need for a real food movement:

Linking people working separately on obesity, undernutrition or the climate crisis is one of the big challenges in creating concerted local-to-global action.  No transformative social movement yet exists that addresses malnutrition.  It’s about time.

Indeed, yes.

Kevin Morgan.  Serving the public: The good food revolution in schools, hospitals and prisons.  University of Manchester Press, 2025.  

I did a blurb for this book:

In Serving the Public, Kevin Morgan describes the political, economic, and social causes of appallingly unhealthful and disrespectful institutional feeding programs in schools, hospitals and prisons, and the human and societal consequences of such programs, in both theory and practice.  His book provides compelling examples and arguments for why and how we can–and must–do better.

Much of the book describes situations in the UK—Morgan is a professor at the University of Cardiff in Wales—but he also draws on U.S. examples (and cites my work).  Here is why he thinks public nutrition matters.

But perhaps the main danger of personalised nutrition apps…is that they fuel the neoliberal belief that access to a healthy diet is a personal and private matter at a time when it is more imperative than ever to affirm the public duty of care that governments owe their citizens, especially poor and vulnerable citizens. Why is it more imperative than ever to affirm this public duty? Because the multiple crises of food insecurity, hunger and a host of diet-related diseases, to say nothing of the existential threats from climate change, are becoming more pronounced in the low-income countries of the Global South as well as in the high-income countries of the Global North.

And here’s another major point:

It is hard to exaggerate the significance of food in prisons. Our diet affects our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing whoever we are and wherever we live. But eating assumes even more importance for prisoners as they may be confined to a cell for twenty odd hours a day – even during mealtimes – and meals help to punctuate a day that otherwise consists of hours of mind-numbing tedium. Eating in prison is a unique experience because prisoners have limited capacity to choose what, where and when they eat, with the result that they lose control over key aspects of their health, their self-esteem and even their sense of identity.

I don’t usually think about these issues, remote as they are from my daily experience.  It’s good to be reminded of the importance of institutional food and why we should do all we can to make it better.

Michael T Compton, MD, MPH.  Veggie Smarts: A Doctor and Farmer Grows and Savors Eight Families of Vegetables.  Regalo Press, 2025.  

This one was sent to me for a blurb.  Here’s what I said:

This endearingly quirky book describes Compton’s love affair with eight families of vegetables for their growing habits, diversity, nutritional value, flavor, texture, and deliciousness, and he offers science, experience, charm, and recipes to prove it.  His dietary advice?  Eat your veggies!

And here are a couple of excerpts, this one about his thwarted love affair with cabbage.

I figured that we could somehow eat 20 heads of cabbage between the weekends in the Hudson Valley and the work weeks in the city.  They grew beautifully….Then it happened.  It was Friday evening, we had just arrived home from the city, and before even going into the house I was off to the two gardens…They were gone.  All 20 of them, gone.  Just 20 solitary cabbage stems standing, all heads and all leaves gone.  I knew it was a groundhog, and I immediately felt tears welling up in my eyes…Building the groundhog fence took me 20 hours one weekend, as I was determined to outsmart these New York woodchucks by burying wire at least eight inches underground around the entire garden.  They never tasted my cabbage again.

And this about his spinach failure.

This is hard for me to admit publicly, but I’ve never been able to grow spinach.  I’ve tried year after year and it never works.  It’s an embarrassment.  My two green thumbs work for everything else but the spinach is always a flop….I think my failure is driven by: one, my little, diverse farm grows about 90 cultivars across the 60 or so vegetables…two, each cultivar requires its own ongoing attention; three, spinach evidently requires a little more attention than average; and four, I have only been giving it average attention  This is despite the fact that spinach is one of the several vegetables that I’m addicted to…My condition even meets some of the psychiatric diagnostic criteria for addiction, except that it doesn’t impair my life.  Cravings.  Finding that once I start using (eating) it, I end up using (eating) more of it than I had intended to.  Having a strong desire or urge to use (eat) it (even when out of season).  And having withdrawals (necessitating highly disguished grocery store visits) when it is available neither on my farm (always) nor at the farmers markets (in the heat of summer).

The publisher says:

A nerdy farmer—and doctor with expertise in nutrition—explains how the vast majority of our vegetables come from just eight families of plants, which can guide how we eat them (“eight on my plate”), while recounting his journey of trading in city life to build a thriving organic vegetable farm.

The eight veggie families:  Brassicas, Alliums, Legumes, Chenopods, Aster Greens, Umbellifers, Cucurbits, Nightshades (hint: look at the pictures on the cover).

He says: eat some of each of them every day.

He’s a doctor who also runs a farm.

Quirky indeed, but fun and full of interesting facts about these families.

My next forthcoming book is now available for preorder.

I say next, because this one is a bit of a surprise, even to me.  It’s a spinoff from my forthcoming (in September, I think) new and thoroughly revised edition of What to Eat, retitled What to Eat Now—the book I’ve been working on for the last three years.

Here’s what the publisher says about 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….
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.

If you scroll down on the Macmillan website for the book, you can see the five other books in the Picador Shorts series on Oceans, Rivers, and Streams.  They all have great covers.  I’m thrilled to be in their company.

Macmillan is the behemoth consolidated publisher that owns Farrar, Straus & Giroux. the publisher of What to Eat Now, which in turn owns Picador, the publisher of The Fish Counter.

The book is also listed at

• Barnes and Noble
• Drury Lane Books
• Amazon
• and can be pre-ordered from your local bookstore

I will have more to say about this book and What to Eat Now as the publication dates get closer.  Stay tuned!