What to Eat Now: Pub Date November 11
Farrar, Straus & Giroux is publishing this book on November 11. It’s hardbound and will have about 750 pages.
You can pre-order it—ISBN 9780374608699—from: Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-a-Million Bookshop Powells Target
Here’s what the publisher says about it.
A thoroughly revised classic, What to Eat Now is a field guide to food shopping in America, and a treatise on how to eat well and deliciously.
What to Eat Now is a clear-eyed, no-nonsense guide to the most important food questions on our plate today. How do we make informed dietary choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities?
In the twenty years since Marion Nestle’s groundbreaking What to Eat first came out, food has undergone a radical change. The emergence of techno foods, the growth of corporate organics, and a surge of interest in food-delivery services reignited by the pandemic are just a few of the things that have altered how we think about how we eat.
The typical American supermarket carries more than thirty thousand products. How do you choose? Misinformation, disinformation, and corporate misdirection play a crucial and hard-to-see role in how the average shopper thinks about and chooses food.
In an aisle-by-aisle guide, Nestle, America’s preeminent nutritionist and a founding figure in American food studies, takes us through the American supermarket. With persistence, wit, and common sense, she establishes the basics of good nutrition, food safety, and ethical and sustainable eating, and gives readers a close-up look at the web of interests—from supermarket slotting policies to multinational food corporations to lobbying groups—that food has to navigate before it gets to your shopping basket.
Above all else, What to Eat Now is a defense of real food and of the value of eating deliciously, mindfully, and responsibly.
April 27, 2025
Jen Sherman, Shitty Housewife, <jensherman@substack.com>
A book recommendation
I’ve been thinking about these things because recently I read a book. (Yeah, I know, I read books all the time). Marion Nestle is a food policy expert, nutritionist, writer, and one of the nation’s preeminent advocates of eating well. She’s written many books about food politics and the food industry in the US, and one of her books I really liked was What to Eat, a guide to every section and aisle of the supermarket, and what the best choices you could make are in terms of health and ethics.
That book is almost twenty years old, and a lot of things in the food world have changed in the past two decades, so some of the things in the book are a little out of date. But happily, there is going to be an updated version published later this year: What to Eat Now.** I was lucky enough to be able to proofread the magnificent beast of a book, and it is glorious. Like the original, it covers every aisle and section of the supermarket, and is both a broad and detailed overview of the food choices you could make. There are a lot of books that go into detail about the things I alluded to in this post (farmworkers, food policy and politics, the meatpacking industry, truck drivers, supply chains, grocery stores), and if you fancy a deep dive into these issues, there are many great books out there. But if you just want a comprehensive overview of every category of food and how to make the best choice in terms of health, environment, human and animal welfare, this is the book you should read. It’s out in November and you can pre-order it now.
