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.

I was in the Harvard Book Store the other night, where the odds of my buying a book increase exponentially with the length of time that I’m inside. I left with two Marion Nestle books: Food Politics and What To Eat. They continue on the Omnivore's Dilemma thread, in a couple different directions.

What To Eat seems to be a much more in-depth version of Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (and predates it, I should note) . The latter offers a simple bit of advice on what to eat: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I presume it runs off into detail about what exactly this means, what sort of plants to eat, and so forth. What To Eat marches off into the supermarket, scrutinizes every label, and does a ton of legwork so you don’t have to. It’s invaluable. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces at lunch [*]; it’s the sort of book that’s best at answering specific questions: “Does ‘organic’ mean anything? Should I drink bottled water?” I’m less certain that it’s the kind of book you’d want to read cover to cover, though I’m going to give that a try when I finish Food Politics.

Food Politics rests on a premise that should have been obvious, but which didn’t really click for me until I read Omnivore's Dilemma : the food industry needs to give its investors a return on their investment. This means that they need to increase their profits every year. They can increase their profits by either cutting their expenses or increasing their sales. They do bits of both; the latter implies feeding Americans more. People need only a certain number of calories to thrive; if they consume any more than that, they gain weight. So corporations pursue their one and only imperative at the expense of American waistlines. The total number of calories in the American food supply (American-produced, minus exports, plus imports) exceeds our dietary needs by a factor of two. Nestle notes that this probably overstates our calorie problem, since it doesn’t account for food that we throw away. But the problem is clear: we have too much food. The political problem is even clearer: any move to tell Americans to eat less will be met with fury by people with money.

This political aspect consumes, so far as I can tell, the rest of the book (I’m 1/5 of the way through it). Nestle details the first 100 years of nutritional advice from the U.S. government. It is a story of American ranchers fighting tooth and nail against every attempt to say that one food is bad and another good. The chapter on the food pyramid would be comical if it weren’t so sad. The Pyramid encapsulates what we’ve all known for at least 50 years: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” (Friend Seth calls this the “only eat what my mother said was good for me” rule.) Of course the meat industry will have none of that, nor will McDonald’s, nor all the processed-food companies, nor a lot of other wealthy interests.

The fight over the Pyramid was actually one of the brighter moments in the press’s nutrition coverage: they kept the spotlight focused on how the food industries were trying to distort government health findings, and as a result we got the food pyramid that we deserve. At most other times, and as with so many other companies fighting so many other issues, the food industries have succeeded in bamboozling the public by creating confusion where there is none. We’ve seen this in the ‘debate’ over natural selection, the ‘debate’ over global warming, the debate over the Iraq War, and so forth. The press continually get played by people whose whole purpose in life is to lie to us.

(The invisible-hand argument, as applied to the lies of profit-maximizing enterprises, would seem to say that if you get enough liars spreading lies about one another, you will magically get truth out the other side. This is why I’m questioning the validity of the argument, at least with the generality with which it’s normally presented. The “worst of all the Multitude” doesn’t always do something for the common good.)

Then there’s another big strand of how the press get played: preferring novelty to boring, established knowledge. The papers will tell you that someone died of a gunshot wound in an American inner city; they will not tell you that around 50 people died of heart-related illnesses, 5 from the flu, and 5 from diabetes in the same interval. Heart disease and the flu are boring. Likewise, the press will report that, say, Omega-3 fatty acids are The New Big Thing, but will not report that the Old Big Thing (“eat your vegetables”) is still a big thing.

I’ve come to believe that skipping the papers as much as possible, skipping much of the controversy that blogs focus on (who cares what Mitt Romney said about MLK?), and reading only wider-scope media (books, The New Yorker) is a recipe for a healthier mind. Food Politics and What To Eat only confirm that.

[*] — which mostly consists of fatback, Ho-Hos, and Hot Pockets.