Marion Nestle, What To Eat

slaniel | Food Politics: How The Food Industry Influences Nutriti;What To Eat | Saturday, January 12th, 2008

Marion Nestle’s earlier Food Politics was a magisterial tour through exactly how badly the food industry is lying to you. They do exactly what you would expect them to do: first they maximize their profits at your expense, then they use some of those profits to lobby Congress to make sure that no one regulates them. Every time the FDA tries to clamp down, the industry’s lobbyists fire back. They usually win. Food Politics is not a happy book. It’s deeply enlightening, and every American who eats food should read it. But it’s not the most uplifting read. It left me desperate to know who in the world (other than Marion Nestle) will tell me the truth. Fortunately there are a number of disinterested organizations that will do so. The Center for Science in the Public Interest comes out of Food Politics looking great: they fill in the gaps that the meat industry, among others, have left in FDA regulations. (The food industries have successfully painted CSPI as “professional scolds.”) Then there’s Consumer’s Union and any number of companies that do right by their customers. Good guys, though, are few and far between in Food Politics.

What To Eat looked like it would be somewhat more of a guidebook: head into the grocery store with What To Eat in your hand and quickly find the best foods for you — the ones that don’t inject harsh chemicals into your body, don’t emerge from laboratories, don’t leave the soil worse than they found it, etc. Nestle’s introduction sets up this hope; after Food Politics, she says, lots of people come up to her with desperation in their eyes. What To Eat was her attempt to help them. Much of the nutritional confusion that we experience when we go to the grocery store, she says, has been put there by food companies.

First of all, no food company will tolerate an “eat less” message. That’s why a clear message like “eat less meat” gets muddled to “eat lean cuts of meat.” That’s why the old food pyramid, which was very clear about eat more grains, more vegetables and less meat became the new food pyramid, which is less clear and emphasizes “more exercise” messages over “less food” ones. The new one, not to put too fine a point on it, is garbage.

Second and for the same reason, food companies hate the “organic” label, and have done all they can to weaken it. They hate that it would suggest some foods are better than others. So first they plant the message that “organic” means nothing. Nestle is very clear: “organic” means a lot. The food companies’ endless attempts to weaken it suggest that it means something important. But then food companies also have tried to weaken the regulations surrounding the “organic” label — for instance, they’ve fought to allow sewage sludge to be used as a crop fertilizer. They lost that battle, and thus far “organic” means a lot. If Nestle is right, it will require constant vigilance to defend the meaning of the word; the food companies, and their allies in the USDA, will do all they can to weaken it. I wonder whether the increasing size of companies like Whole Foods will help offset the conventional-food companies’ power. Nestle doesn’t go into much detail about that.

Her nutritional lessons are often fairly straightforward:

  • Eat more vegetables and less meat
  • Eat organic where possible
  • Organic agriculture hardly increases production costs at all. The increased costs are offset by lower costs for fuel and pesticides. And of course the long-term savings are enormous: the soil will last longer, the Gulf of Mexico may eventually get cleaner, your children’s bodies will be filled with fewer pesticides, and you won’t be speeding the immunity of bacteria and insects to antibiotics and pesticides.
  • Organic beef, while it does exist, is a negligible fraction of the total U.S. beef market, and is apparently very hard to find.
  • Fish that are higher in the food chain, like salmon, will have higher concentrations of PCBs. So eat fish that are lower down. And be careful to limit your total fish intake, because the PCB problem is everywhere.
  • Farm-raised fish are worse for you, and worse for the environment, than wild fish.
  • By the time What To Eat had gone to print, the government had not agreed on what “organic” means in the context of fish.
  • In general, knowledge really is power. Labeling foods by their country of origin would help, but food companies oppose it (because you might not buy fish from the more-polluted waters of Northern Europe). Implementing nutrition programs in schools really does make kids eat better. The most powerful food companies (say, Coke) oppose that too.
  • Yogurt is good for you, but only the plain kind. Danimals and Go-gurt are candy that free-ride on the healthful reputation of yogurt even while they’re packed with sugar.

A necessary condition for my food is that it not be poisonous, and that I not aid in the destruction of the earth by eating it. Remarkably, this seems like a really hard goal to attain. Food along the lines of that from Polyface Farms — perfectly sustainable, “beyond organic” — is difficult to find anywhere.

Knowing where all your food comes from, and building the reputations of specific brands, would make us all safer. Most food, though, is a commodity: we buy steak, maybe specifically sirloin, and don’t pay much attention to who’s produced it. One tiny corner of the coffee world — led by brands like George Howell’s Terroir — is trying to push in the opposite direction: by attaching specific farms’ names to specific batches of coffee, the farmers are encouraged to make a name for themselves. The idea is that their quality will increase if customers seek out, say, Daterra‘s coffee.

Brands are better for customers, but I wonder whether commodification is better for the shadier companies. If you can hide your company’s filthy beef under the generic label of “sirloin,” customers won’t be able to censure you when something goes wrong. Maintaining the strength of a brand may turn out to be expensive. I’d be interested in the pressures within the food industry towards and away from branding.

Nestle’s books are remarkably eye-opening. They are rigorously documented proof that most everyone is lying to you. Fortunately we have Nestle and Michael Pollan on our side. The odds in our favor aren’t bad.

13 Comments

  1. A few random bits:

    1. I’ve often heard that you don’t need to become a vegetarian, but if you just cut out meat one day a week you will dramatically decrease your environmental impact and you also reap some health benefits. I think there’s probably nothing wrong with people having some meat in their diet. For one thing, the animals that we use for meat are basically evolved at this point to be sheltered under our evolutionary success, like dogs, and they do a great job turning stuff that’s plentiful and inedible to us (grass) into high quality protein. However, I think we’ve done them a disservice. One, we don’t treat them our meat animals well anymore, two, we don’t feed them stuff that they should be eating, and three we eat too much meat. I don’t think, outside of specialized environments like the arctic, did people eat red meat or really much meat at all beyond seafood on a daily basis. So we’re probably not well designed to be eating pork and beef all the time.

    2. “Organic” is good but I think there are lots of problems as it becomes more popular. For instance, I’ve heard that organic dairy occasionally free-rides a bit on conventional dairy. For instance, suppose you run an organic dairy farm and one of your cows gets mastitis. Well, you can’t use antibiotics to treat it. So unless it clears up very quickly, farmers often just sell the cow off to a conventional dairy farm. That doesn’t seem like a good idea. I think maybe what we need is something more like a “sustainable food program”. That is, you make rules assuming all farms are organic. No free riding. So how do you deal with a cow with mastitis in that case? Can a cow be “taken out of service” while it’s sick and given antibiotics, and only when it’s sick and not as a blanket preventative like we do now? Etc.

    3. If we’re not careful, between global warming and overfishing, the ocean is basically going to be full of nothing but unappetizing jellyfish in our lifetime. So maybe enjoy fish while you can? In any case, I’m glad I like fish like Herring, since it’s pretty low to the bottom of the food chain. Also, we need to perfect a way to farm seafood so that it’s not totally disgusting. I understand that apparently farming seafood is incredibly tough. It seems like you should just be able to make a giant fish tank and raise fish, but it turns out that it’s actually quite tough if you want to scale a fish tank idea up to actually farming fish. Apparently it is very easy for such a farm to completely collapse its fish population. I guess fish really are evolved to live in a giant body of water and it’s very difficult to cost effectively reproduce that environment in a controlled way in any volume.

    Comment by mrz — January 12, 2008 @ 4:17 pm

  2. P.S. Your css for ordered lists looks a little too much like your css for blockquotes.

    Comment by mrz — January 12, 2008 @ 4:19 pm

  3. She’s not related to the Nestle chocolate folks, is she? Because that would be, like, so ironical.

    Comment by #7buslady — January 12, 2008 @ 7:30 pm

    1. Nestle’s not related to the Nestlé people. She mentions that specifically in a couple places. I’m told her name is pronounced “nessel.”

    2. The rules for organic allow cows to be treated with antibiotics in cases like mastitis, I believe.

    3. Mrz: you should just go read Nestle’s books. :-)

    Comment by slaniel — January 12, 2008 @ 7:54 pm

  5. I just noticed why the CSS is all screwed up here. It’s a quirk in the “tranquility” theme that I based mine on. It’ll take me a little while to figure out how to get around this.

    Comment by slaniel — January 12, 2008 @ 9:34 pm

  6. Steve, Thanks for getting me all excited about these two books and Pollan’s books as well. (I just need to find time to read them now.)

    One question. You write: “Organic agriculture hardly increases production costs at all.” But then why is it more expensive?

    Comment by Chris — January 12, 2008 @ 9:43 pm

  7. Hey Chris,

    1. I’m glad you like the reviews. I always worry that I sound either too dry, or like too much of a doomsayer for the Sad, Sad State Of The World. I maybe don’t convey just how amazingly readable Nestle and Pollan are. Their books read like novels.

    2. I think organic is more expensive because people are willing to pay more for it. And I suspect that the lower cost that Nestle cites focuses on something narrower. I’m not sure. I’ll find the cite whence she gets the lower-production-cost claim, then pass it along here.

    Comment by slaniel — January 12, 2008 @ 9:47 pm

  8. The paragraph on p. 45 of What To Eat reads as follows:

    Fortunately, some questions about organics have been researched and do have clear answers. One such question is about productivity. As early as the mid-1970′s, studies began to question the idea that agricultural efficiency necessarily depends on fertilizers and pesticides. In 1981, a review of such studies came to surprising conclusions: farmers who converted from conventional to organic methods reported only small declines in yields, but the loss in income was offset by lower fuel costs. The study found that the farms were equally profitable, but that organic production kept the soil in much better shape. More recent studies confirm these results. Overall they show that organic farms are nearly as productive, leave the soils healthier, and use energy more efficiently. The productivity issue seems settled. There is a difference, but it is small.

    The footnote to that para is as follows:

    See William Lockeretz, Georgia Shearer, and Daniel H. Kohl, “Organic Farming in the Corn Belt,” Science (February 6, 1981): 540-47. At the time, this study seemed revolutionary. For more recent studies confirming the productivity of organic farming practices, see D.K. Letourneau and B. Goldstein, “Pest Damage and Arthropod Community Structure in Organic vs. Conventional Tomato Production in California,” Journal of Applied Ecology 38 (2001): 557-70; John P. Reganold et al., “Sustainability of Three Apple Production Systems,” Nature (April 19, 2001): 427-46; and Paul Mäder et al., “Soil Fertility and Biodiversity in Organic Farming,” Science (May 31, 2002): 1694-97. An editorial accompanying the Science paper calls it “encouraging news for organic fans” and considers the findings conclusive (page 1589).

    Comment by slaniel — January 12, 2008 @ 9:59 pm

  9. Actually, I’m really enjoying your accounts of the books. They’re not dry at all.

    I suppose the thing I was wondering about was whether the different methods are “equally profitable” because the organic food sells at a higher price. There seems a bit of wiggle room in the way that paragraph is worded, though the most natural way to take it is that the production methods are equally expensive for the farmer per unit of food.

    Comment by Chris — January 13, 2008 @ 12:20 pm

  10. Note to #7buslady: Nestlé the food company goes far, far beyond chocolate. They are one of the key members of International Big Food; like Kraft, Purina, etc.

    Note about profitability of organic farming: I believe the higher prices are due partly to good old supply-and-demand, and partly to the fact that the food must be treated more carefully throughout its trip from the farm to the store. Example: since it can’t be treated with preservatives, it must be refrigerated during shipping, and must get to the store quickly. If it gets delayed, it quickly rots and must be discarded. Compare a delicate organic tomato with a “conventional” one: thin skin, squishy, incredibly juicy and delicious, shelf life about a day; vs. thick skin, hard, not particularly delightful to eat, shelf life nearly 2 weeks.

    Comment by Gary H — January 13, 2008 @ 2:13 pm

  11. I think I’ve fixed the CSS problems. I don’t know why I used ‘tranquility’ to begin with. It’s a defective theme in a lot of ways. After I’ve got all the kinks worked out of my modified theme, I’ll submit it to the æther for others to use.

    Comment by Steve Laniel — January 13, 2008 @ 2:18 pm

  12. Nice review of Marion’s book.

    1. Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is DEFINITELY not the way you wanna go. CSPI and CU are both consumer advocacy organizations. The current food system problem is not a consumer problem in the traditional sense. It’s more of a structural problem that isn’t amenable to traditional consumer advocacy. Anyway, CSPI has no problem with industrial food production and tends to follow a more nutrient-focused approach, e.g. “let’s engineer a better soda!”. Also, CSPI has continued to negotiate with the food industry and recently negotiated the aborted Murkowski-Harkin amendment to the farm bill with the food industry. This amendment would have provided national standards for school food but would have also granted sweeping preemption to the food industry, kept soda in schools, as well as a lot of other things. CSPI is worthless at this point. Marion is too polite to say probably but if you read between the lines in her recent work in NEJM and in some academic publications, she is very much a ‘whole foods’ person and has, I think, little patience for what CSPI has become in the last few years. CSPI also brought us NLEA with its preemption provisions and is responsible for the current dismal state of school food, I think, with their insanity in the 70s around sugar and competitive foods, leading to National Soft Drink Assoc. v. Block. You’ll get better info out of public health sources, the slow foods movement, CSA’s, and agricultural reform organizations. Really, for nutrition advice I stick to Marion or to diets/methods that predate the invention of ‘nutrition’ in the early 20th century.
    2. The food industry loves branding and is extremely focused on building brand. However, it tends to be focused on inducing consumption. There is a distinction here that I sometimes see in relation to food between a mark and a brand.
    3. You cannot extract the nutrition policy/food problem from our agriculture policy/foreign policy. It’s an intractable problem not suited to consumer advocacy analysis… at least I don’t think.

    Comment by Jason — January 13, 2008 @ 5:29 pm

  13. Hey Jason,

    Lots of good points. I’ll just reply to one now, namely the foreign-policy one. You don’t think that if people bought local, organic produce, it would have an immediate effect on foreign oil policy? I seem to recall reading in “Omnivore’s Dilemma” that the amount of petroleum used for produce nears that used for passenger automobiles, when you factor in pesticides, antibiotics, and transporting produce to homes. You don’t think that local organic produce would bite into this immediately?

    Seems like addressing the petroleum problem by “voting with your fork” is perfectly sensible, no?

    Will chat about your other points soon. Thanks so much for all your comments.

    Comment by slaniel — January 13, 2008 @ 8:17 pm

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