From Barnes & Noble

The New York Times once praised Marion Nestle for "her ability to look at issues as both a scientist and a consumer." Perhaps that double focus explains the unique appeal of this book: Who else but Nestle could hold us rapt through 640 pages about supermarket choices? The James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award winner writes knowledgably about agribusiness, deceptive labels, freshness, and price. Her expertise is wide ranging and specific: The chapters on frozen foods, sugars, meat, dairy foods, and salad oils contain information that even veteran cooks don't know. Worth its weight in coupons.

From the Publisher

Since its publication in hardcover last year, Marion Nestle’s What to Eat has become the definitive guide to making healthy and informed choices about food. Praised as “radiant with maxims to live by” in The New York Times Book Review and “accessible, reliable and comprehensive” in The Washington Post, What to Eat is an indispensable resource, packed with important information and useful advice from the acclaimed nutritionist who “has become to the food industry what . . . Ralph Nader [was] to the automobile industry” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

How we choose which foods to eat is growing more complicated by the day, and the straightforward, practical approach of What to Eat has been praised as welcome relief. As Nestle takes us through each supermarket section—produce, dairy, meat, fish—she explains the issues, cutting through foodie jargon and complicated nutrition labels, and debunking the misleading health claims made by big food companies. With Nestle as our guide, we are shown how to make wise food choices—and are inspired to eat sensibly and nutritiously.

Now in paperback, What to Eat is already a classic—“the perfect guidebook to help navigate through the confusion of which foods are good for us” (USA Today).

San Francisco Chronicle - Carol Ness

Nestle is simply one of the nation's smartest and most influential authorities on nutrition and food policy.

The New York Times - Marian Burros

[This] book is for anyone who has read a food label; been annoyed at how often their children nag them for certain cereals; wondered about the difference between natural and organic; or questioned who is minding the store when it comes to nutrition and food safety.

Publishers Weekly

According to nutritionist Nestle (Food Politics), the increasing confusion among the general public about what to eat comes from two sources: experts who fail to create a holistic view by isolating food components and health issues, and a food industry that markets items on the basis of profits alone. She suggests that, often, research findings are deliberately obscure to placate special interests. Nestle says that simple, common-sense guidelines available decades ago still hold true: consume fewer calories, exercise more, eat more fruits and vegetables and, for today's consumers, less junk food. The key to eating well, Nestle advises, is to learn to navigate through the aisles (and thousands of items) in large supermarkets. To that end, she gives readers a virtual tour, highlighting the main concerns of each food group, including baby, health and prepared foods, and supplements. Nestle's prose is informative and entertaining; she takes on the role of detective, searching for clues to the puzzle of healthy and satisfying nutrition. Her intelligent and reassuring approach will likely make readers venture more confidently through the jungle of today's super-sized stores. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Because the American food industry produces hundreds of thousands of products, consumers face a bewildering array in the average supermarket. Maintaining that the shopper's quest for healthy products conflicts with the seller's focus on marketing, Nestle (nutrition, NYU; Food Politics) assists the public in making informed choices. Besides reviewing the nutrition basics of obesity, organics, genetically modified food, and other topics, she decries tiny food labels, inadequate government regulations, and nutrition gimmicks. Foods are discussed in the order in which one finds it in a typical supermarket. Quite a few titles, e.g., Joy Bauer's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Total Nutrition, deal with various aspects of eating well; however, this book is the only one that discusses the impact of marketing on buyer choices. The amount of information can be overwhelming, despite the lucid prose, but Nestle's informed, unique perspective and credentials-she won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the James Beard Foundation and appeared in the documentary Super Size Me-will drive demand in consumer health collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/06.]-Margaret K. Norden, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

R. W. Apple
In a field full of crackpots and food-loathers and obfuscators, [Nestle] stands out as a level-headed, clear-thinking person who actually enjoys food (in moderation of course, as Julia used to say).

Alice Waters
Meticulously researched, thorough, and indispensable -- Marion Nestle's What to Eat delivers on its title. It's a reliable, riveting guide to the amazing truth about what we're sold by the American food distribution system. Refreshingly rigorous and fun to read.

Michael Pollan
When it comes to the increasingly treacherous landscape of the American supermarket, with its marketing hype and competing health claims, Marion Nestle is an absolutely indispensable guide: knowledgeable, eminently sane -- and wonderful company, too.

Eric Schlosser
The industry wants you to believe there are no good foods or bad foods. Well, that's not true. And I can't think of anyone who knows the difference better than Marion Nestle.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0865477388
  
• ISBN-13: 9780865477384
• Format: Paperback, 624pp
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Pub. Date: April 2007
• Sales Rank: 9,805

• Table of Contents
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

Read an Excerpt

Excerpted from What to Eat by Marion Nestle. Copyright © 2006 by Marion Nestle. Published in May 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
 
Introduction
 
I am a nutrition professor, and as soon as people find out what I do, they ask: Why is nutrition so confusing? Why is it so hard to know which foods are good for me? Why don’t you nutritionists figure out what’s right and make it simple for the rest of us to understand? Why can’t you help me know what to eat?
 
Questions like these come up every time I give a talk, teach a class, or go out to dinner. For a long time, they puzzled me. I thought: Doesn’t everyone know what a healthy diet is? And why are people so worried about what they eat? I just didn’t get it. For me, food is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and I have been teaching, writing, and talking about the joys of eating as well as the more cultural and scientific aspects of food for nearly thirty years. My work at a university means that I do research as well as teach, and for the past decade or so I have been studying the marketing of food and its effects on health. Everyone eats. This turns the growing, shipping, preparing, and serving of food into a business of titanic proportions, worth close to a trillion dollars a year in the United States alone. I wrote about the health consequences of the business of food—unintended as those consequences may be—in two books: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health and Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism.
 
Sincewriting them, I have spent much of my professional and social life talking to students, health professionals, academics, government officials, journalists, community organizers, farmers, school officials, and business leaders—as well as friends and colleagues—about the social and political aspects of food and nutrition. It hardly matters who I am talking to. Everyone goes right to what affects them. Their questions are personal. Everyone wants to know what the politics of food mean for what they personally should eat. Should they be worried about hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, mercury, or bacteria in foods? Is it acceptable to eat sugars, artificial sweeteners, or trans fats, and, if so, how much? What about foods that are raw, canned, irradiated, or genetically engineered? Do I recommend calcium or any other supplement? Which is the best choice of vegetables, yogurt, meat, or bread?
 
Eventually I came to realize that, for many people, food feels nothing at all like a source of pleasure; it feels more like a minefield. For one thing, there are far too many choices; about 320,000 food and beverage products are available in the United States, and an average supermarket carries 30,000 to 40,000 of them. As the social theorist Barry Schwartz explains in The Paradox of Choice, this volume of products turns supermarket and other kinds of shopping into “a complex decision in which [you] are forced to invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety, and dread.” Bombarded with too many choices and conflicting messages, as everyone is, many people long for reassurance that they can ignore the “noise” and just go back to enjoying the food they eat. I began paying closer attention to hints of such longings in what people were telling me. I started asking my friends how they felt about food. Their responses were similar. Eating, they told me, feels nothing less than hazardous. And, they said, you need to do something about this. One after another told me things like this:
 
-You seem to think we have the information we need, but a lot of us are clueless and have no idea of how to eat.

-When I go into a supermarket, I feel like a deer caught in headlights. Tell me what I need to know so I can make reasonable choices, and quickly.

-I do not feel confident that I know what to eat. It’s all so confusing.
 

-You tell me how to do this. I don’t believe all those other people. They all seem to have axes to grind.

-Tell us how you eat.
 
The more I thought about what audiences and friends were telling me, the more I realized that changes in society and in the competitiveness of food companies had made the question of what to eat incredibly complicated for most people, and that while I had noticed some of the effects of such changes, I had missed others that were quite important. Years ago, I regularly shopped in suburban supermarkets in California and Massachusetts while cooking for my growing family, but that era in my life is long past. Besides, the whole shopping experience is different now. Today, too, I live in Manhattan. For reasons of space and real estate costs, Manhattan does not have enormous supermarkets like the ones in suburbs or in most cities in the United States. I live within easy walking distance of ten or fifteen grocery stores, but these are small—sometimes tiny—by national standards. Only recently have larger stores like Whole Foods come into the city. And I do much less food shopping than many people. My children are now adults and live on the other side of the continent. More than that, my job requires me to eat out a lot. Because I do not own a car I either have to walk home carrying what I buy, or arrange to have food delivered. It became clear to me that if I really wanted to understand how food marketing affects health, I needed to find out a lot more about what you and everyone else are up against when you shop for food—and the sooner the better. So I did, and this book is the result.
 
I began my research (and that is just what it was) by visiting supermarkets of all kinds and taking notes on what they were selling, section by section, aisle by aisle. I looked at the products on those shelves just as any shopper might, and tried to figure out which ones made the most sense to buy for reasons of taste, health, economy, or any number of social issues that might be of concern. Doing this turned out to be more complicated than I could have imagined. For one thing, it required careful reading of food labels, which, I can assure you, is hard work even for nutritionists. Science and politics make food labels exceptionally complicated, and they often appear in very small print. I found it impossible to do any kind of comparative shopping without putting on reading glasses, I frequently had to use a calculator, and I often wished I had a scale handy so I could weigh things.
 
Supermarkets turn out to be deeply fascinating, not least because even the smallest ones sell thousands of products. Much about these stores made me intensely curious. Why, I wondered, do they sell this and not that? Why are entire aisles devoted to soft drinks and snack foods? What do the pricing signs mean, and how do they work? Why is it so hard to find some things, but not others? Are there any genetically modified or irradiated foods among the fruits and vegetables? What does “Certified Organic” mean, can it be trusted, and is it worth the higher price? Is soy milk healthier than cow’s milk? If an egg is “United Egg Producers Certified,” is it better? Is it safe to eat farmed fish or, for that matter, any fish at all? Is it safe to eat take-out foods? If a sugary cereal sports a label saying it is whole grain, is it better for you? Does it make any real nutritional difference whether you buy white or whole wheat bread?
 
The answers to these questions might seem obvious, but I did not find them so. To arrive at decisions, I measured, counted, weighed, and calculated, and read the tiniest print on product labels. When I still did not understand something, I talked to section managers and store clerks. When they asked why I wanted to know (which they often did), I explained what I was doing and gave them my business card. If they could not answer my questions, I called the consumer affairs numbers on product labels, and sometimes talked to regional or national managers. I talked to farmers, farmers’ market managers, product makers, food company executives, agriculture specialists, organic inspectors, fish inspectors, trade organization representatives, and university scientists. I went on field trips to places that roast coffee, bake bread, and package groceries for delivery. And I spent months searching the Internet and reading books, unearthing articles in my files, and examining trade and professional publications.
 
I tell you this not so much to impress you with the extent of the research as to explain that this is the kind of effort it took me to figure out what was going on, and I am supposed to know about such things. If you have trouble dealing with supermarkets, it is for a good reason. You need to know an amazing amount about our food system and about nutrition to make intelligent choices, but most of this information is anything but obvious. It is not supposed to be obvious. Supermarkets have one purpose and one purpose only: to sell food and make a profit, and as large a profit as possible. Your goals are more complicated: you want foods that are good for your health, but you also want them to taste good, to be affordable, to be convenient to eat, and to reflect social values that you might care about. In theory, your goals could overlap with the normal business interests of supermarkets. After all, they do sell plenty of inexpensive, convenient, tasty foods that are good for you. But in practice, you and the supermarket are likely to be at cross-purposes. The foods that sell best and bring in the most profits are not necessarily the ones that are best for your health, and the conflict between health and business goals is at the root of public confusion about food choices.
 
This conflict begins with dietary advice, much of which is hard to interpret. What, for example, does it really mean to “Consume a variety of nutrient-dense foods and beverages within and among the basic food groups” as advised by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued in 2005? Or to “know your fats” as advised by the 2005 version of the pyramid food guide? As I explained in Food Politics, government agencies cannot issue unambiguous dietary advice to eat this but not that without offending powerful industries. This is too bad, because nutrition is not “mission impossible.” Its basic principles are simple. You need enough energy (measured in calories) and nutrients, but not too much of either. The range of healthful nutrient intake is broad, and foods from the earth, tree, or animal can be combined in a seemingly infinite number of ways to create diets that meet health goals. Think, for example, of how different the traditional diets are from Italy (pasta based, higher fat) and Japan (rice based, low fat), yet both are as healthful as can be.
 
Where diets get confusing is in the details: so many nutrients, so many foods, so many diseases, and so many conflicting research studies about one or another of them. The attention paid to single nutrients, to individual foods, and to particular diseases distracts from the basic principles of diet and health, but is understandable. You choose foods one by one, and those diseases affect you. Single nutrients and foods are easier to talk about than messy dietary patterns. And they are much easier to study. But you are better off paying attention to your overall dietary pattern than worrying about whether any one single food is better for you than another.

Read a Sample Chapter

What to EAT

North Point Press

Chapter One

A visit to a large supermarket can be a daunting experience: so many aisles, so many brands and varieties, so many prices to keep track of and labels to read, so many choices to make. No wonder. To repeat: An astonishing 320,000 edible products are for sale in the United States, and any large supermarket might display as many as 40,000 of them. You are supposed to feel daunted-bewildered by all the choices and forced to wander through the aisles in search of the items you came to buy. The big companies that own most supermarkets want you to do as much searching as you can tolerate. It is no coincidence that one supermarket is laid out much like another: breathtaking amounts of research have gone into designing these places. There are precise reasons why milk is at the back of the store and the center aisles are so long. You are forced to go past thousands of other products on your way to get what you need.

Supermarkets say they are in the business of offering "choice." Perhaps, but they do everything possible to make the choice theirs, not yours. Supermarkets are not social service agencies providing food for the hungry. Their job is to sell food, and more of it. From their perspective, it is your problem if whatyou buy makes you eat more food than you need, and more of the wrong kinds of foods in particular.

And supermarket retailers know more than you could possibly imagine about how to push your "buy" buttons Half a century ago, Vance Packard revealed their secrets in his book The Hidden Persuaders. His most shocking revelation? Corporations were hiring social scientists to study unconscious human emotions, not for the good of humanity but to help companies manipulate people into buying products. Packard's chapter on supermarket shopping, "Babes in Consumerland," is as good a guide as anything that has been written since to methods for getting you-and your children-to "reach out, hypnotically ... and grab boxes of cookies, candies, dog food, and everything else that delights or interests [you]."

More recent research on consumer behavior not only confirms his observations but continues to be awe-inspiring in its meticulous attention to detail. Your local library has entire textbooks and academic journals devoted to investigations of consumer behavior and ways to use the results of that research to sell products. Researchers are constantly interviewing shoppers and listening carefully to what they are told. Because of scanners, supermarkets can now track your purchases and compare what you tell researchers to what you actually buy. If you belong to a supermarket discount "shoppers club," the store gains your loyalty but gets to track your personal buying habits in exchange. This research tells food retailers how to lay out the stores, where to put specific products, how to position products on shelves, and how to set prices and advertise products. At the supermarket, you exercise freedom of choice and personal responsibility every time you put an item in your shopping cart, but massive efforts have gone into making it more convenient and desirable for you to choose some products rather than others.

As basic marketing textbooks explain, the object of the game is to "maximize sales and profit consistent with customer convenience." Translated, this means that supermarkets want to expose you to the largest possible number of items that you can stand to see, without annoying you so much that you run screaming from the store. This strategy, is based on research proving that "the rate of exposure is directly related to the rate of sale of merchandise." In other words, the more you see, the more you buy. Supermarkets dearly wish they could expose you to every single item they carry, every time you shop. Terrific as that might be for your walking regimen, you are unlikely to endure having to trek through interminable aisles to find the few items you came in for-and retailers know it. This conflict creates a serious dilemma for the stores. They have to figure out how to get you to walk up and down those aisles for as long as possible, hut not so long that you get frustrated. To resolve the dilemma, the stores make some compromises-but as few as possible. Overall, supermarket design follows fundamental roles, all of them based firmly on extensive research.

* Place the highest-selling food departments in the parts of the store that get the greatest flow of traffic-the periphery. Perishables-meat, produce, dairy, and frozen foods-generate the most sales, so put them against the back and side walls.

* Use the aisle nearest the entrance for items that sell especially well on impulse or look or smell enticing-produce, flowers, or freshly baked bread, for example. These must be the first things customers see in front or immediately to the left or right (the direction, according to researchers, doesn't matter).

* Use displays at the ends of aisles for high-profit, heavily advertised items likely to be bought on impulse.

* Place high-profit, center-aisle food items sixty inches above the floor where they are easily seen by adults, with or without eyeglasses.

* Devote as much shelf space as possible to brands that generate frequent sales; the more shelf space they occupy, the better they sell.

* Place store brands immediately to the right of those high-traffic items (people read from left to right), so that the name brands attract shoppers to the store brands too.

* Avoid using "islands." These make people bump into each other and want to move on. Keep the traffic moving, but slowly.

* Do not create gaps in the aisles that allow customers to cross over to the next one unless the aisles are so long that shoppers complain. If shoppers can escape mid-aisle, they will miss seeing half the products along that route.

Additional principles, equally well researched, guide every other aspect of supermarket design: product selection, placement on shelves, and display. The guiding principle of supermarket layout is the same: products seen most sell best. Think of the supermarket as a particularly intense real estate market in which every product competes fiercely against every other for precious space. Because you can see products most easily at eye level, at the ends of aisles, and at the checkout counters, these areas are prime real estate. Which products get the prime space? The obvious answer: the ones most profitable for the store.

But store profitability is not simply a matter of the price charged for a product compared to its costs. Stores also collect revenue by "renting" real estate to the companies whose products they sell. Product placement depends on a system of "incentives" that sometimes sound suspiciously like bribes. Food companies pay supermarkets "slotting fees" for the shelf space they occupy. The rates are highest for premium, high-traffic space, such as the shelves near cash registers. Supermarkets demand and get additional sources of revenue from food companies in "trade allowances," guarantees that companies will buy local advertising for the products for which they pay slotting fees. The local advertising, of course, helps to make sure that products in prime real estate sell quickly.

This unsavory system puts retail food stores in firm control of the marketplace. They make the decisions about which products to sell and, therefore, which products you buy. This system goes beyond a simple matter of supply and demand. The stores create demand by putting some products where you cannot miss them. These are often "junk" foods full of cheap, shelf-stable ingredients like hydrogenated oils and corn sweeteners, made and promoted by giant food companies that can afford slotting fees, trade allowances, and advertising. This is why entire aisles of prime supermarket real estate are devoted to soft drinks, salty snacks, and sweetened breakfast cereals, and why you can always find candy next to cash registers. Any new product that comes into a store must come with guaranteed advertising, coupons, discounts, slotting fees, and other such incentives.

Slotting fees emerged in the 1980s as a way for stores to cover the added costs of dealing with new products: shelving, tracking inventory, and removing products that do not sell. But the system is so corrupt and so secret that Congress held hearings about it in 1999. The industry people who testified at those hearings were so afraid of retribution that they wore hoods and used gadgets to prevent voice recognition. The General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency (now called the Government Accountability Office), was asked to do its own investigation but got nowhere because the retail food industry refused to cooperate.

The defense of the current system by both the retailers who demand the fees and the companies that agree to pay them comes at a high cost-out of your pocket. You pay for this system in at least three ways: higher prices at the supermarket; taxes that in part compensate for business tax deductions that food companies are allowed to take for slotting fees and advertising; and the costs of treating illnesses that might result from consuming more profitable but less healthful food products.

In 20%, supermarkets sold more than $35o billion worth of food in the United States, but this level of sales does not stop them from complaining about low after-tax profit margins-just 1 to 3 percent of sales. One percent of $350 billion is $3.5 billion, of course, but by some corporate standards that amount is too little to count. In any case, corporations have to grow to stay viable, so corporate pressures on supermarkets to increase sales are unrelenting. The best way to expand sales, say researchers, is to increase the size of the selling area and the number of items offered. Supermarkets do both. In the last decade, mergers and acquisitions have turned the top-ranking supermarkets-Kroger, Albertsons, and Safeway-into companies with annual sales of $56, $40, and $36 billion, respectively. Small chains, like Whole Foods and Wegmans, have sales in the range of just $4 billion a year.

But sales brought in by these small chains are peanuts compared to those of the store that now dominates the entire retail food marketplace: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart sold $284 billion worth of goods in 2005. Groceries accounted for about one-quarter of that amount, but that meant $64 billion, and rising. Many food companies do a third of their business with this one retailer. Wal-Mart does not have to demand slotting fees. If a food company wants its products to be in Wal-Mart, it has to offer rock-bottom prices. Low prices sound good for people without much money, but nutritionally, there's a catch. Low prices encourage everyone to buy more food in bigger packages. If you buy more, you are quite likely to eat more. And if you eat more, you are more likely to gain weight and become less healthy.

Food retailers argue that if you eat too much it is your problem, not theirs. But they are in the business of encouraging you to buy more food, not less. Take the matter of package size and price. I often talk to business groups about such matters and at a program for food executives at Cornell University, I received a barrage of questions about where personal responsibility fits into this picture. One supermarket manager insisted that his store does not force customers to buy Pepsi in big bottles. He also offers Pepsi in 8-ounce cans. The sizes and prices are best shown in a Table.

In this store, the 2-liter container and the special-for-members 6-pack of 24-ounce bottles were less than half the cost of the equivalent volume in 8-ounce cans. Supermarket managers tell me that this kind of pricing is not the store's problem. If you want smaller sizes, you should be willing to pay more for them. But if you care about how much you get for a price, you are likely to pick the larger sizes. And if you buy the larger sizes, you are likely to drink more Pepsi and take in more calories; the 8-ounce cans of Pepsi contain 100 calories each, but the 2-liter bottle holds 800 calories.

Sodas of any size are cheap because they are mostly water and corn sweeteners-water is practically free, and your taxes pay to subsidize corn production. This makes the cost of the ingredients trivial compared to labor and packaging, so the larger sizes are more profitable to the :manufacturer and to the stores. The choice is yours, but anyone would have a hard time choosing a more expensive version of a product when a cheaper one is right there. Indeed, you have to be strong and courageous to hold out for healthier choices in the supermarket system as it currently exists.

You could, of course, bring a shopping list, but good luck sticking to it. Research says that about 70 percent of shoppers bring lists into supermarkets, but only about 10 percent adhere to them. Even with a list, most shoppers pick up two additional items for every item on it. The additions are "in-store decisions," or impulse buys. Stores directly' appeal to your senses to distract you from working about lists. They hope you will:

* Listen to the background music. The slower the beat, the longer you will tarry.

* Search for the "loss leaders" (the items you always need, like meat, coffee, or bananas, that are offered at or below their actual cost). The longer you search, the more products you will see.

* Go to the bakery, prepared foods, and deli sections; the sights and good smells will keep you lingering and encourage sales.

* Taste the samples that companies are giving away. If you like what you taste, you are likely to buy it.

* Put your kids in the play areas; the longer they play there, the more time you have to walk those tempting aisles.

If you find yourself in a supermarket buying on impulse and not minding it a bit, you are behaving exactly the way store managers want you to. You will be buying the products they have worked long and hard to make most attractive and convenient for you-and most profitable for them.

But, you may ask, what about all those beautiful fruits and vegetables? Aren't you supposed to eat more of them? Isn't the produce section the one place in the supermarket where the store's goal to sell more is exactly the same as the goals of healthy eating? Perhaps, but nothing in a supermarket is that simple. Collect a shopping cart, turn right or left at the entrance to the store, and let's take a look at the produce section.

Chapter Two

A couple of years ago I was spending some time in upstate New York and went to the Wegmans supermarket in Ithaca. I had read a Harvard Business School case stud}' about Wegmans, a chain of seventy or so stores in the northeast region known for its unusual attention to quality, responsiveness to customers' concerns about health and social issues, and active commitment to "Making a Difference in Our Community." Because Wegmans is family owned, privately held, and not traded on the stock market, the company has more flexibility than publicly traded chains to offer services that do not immediately increase sales or profits.

When you enter the Ithaca Wegmans, you find yourself in a huge produce section, larger than the size of a basketball court. You can easily imagine that you are in a farmers' market in the south of France or in Italy; the only things missing are the hot sun and the sellers at the individual stalls. You see stacks of gleaming fruits and vegetables. You hear the spray misting the salad greens. It smells good in there. You want to sneak tastes of everything you see. And the variety is extraordinary. One late-spring day 1 counted nine kinds of melons, five kinds of sweet pepby the time I buy it, and it will be even less so by the time I actually get around to eating it.

But maintaining the cold chain is not the only factor that affects the quality of fruits and vegetables. Even "fresh" produce is often subjected to processing before it reaches a supermarket shelf. To allow them to endure transportation, bananas and tomatoes are picked while still green, then chilled, warmed, and treated with gases to make them ripen. Bagged vegetables and salads have been washed and cut, subjected to "modified-atmosphere packaging" which changes the proportions of oxygen and carbon dioxide to delay spoilage), and sometimes treated with preservatives. Those raunchy and convenient "baby" carrots are ordinary carrots which have been cut into small pieces and shaped to look like small whole carrots, then bagged and shipped.

The conclusion: fresh is relative. The Food and Drug Administration says "fresh" foods have to be raw, never frozen or heated, and with no added preservatives. But even "fresh" fruits and vegetables are often subjected to processing before they reach a supermarket shelf. In supermarket terms, "fresh" refers to foods that spoil faster than others. It does not mean that foods were picked earlier that day, or even that week.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from What to EAT by Marion Nestle Copyright © 2006 by Marion Nestle. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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