Read This Book: Unsavory Truth

Yet another gem of food science from Marion Nestle—author of Food Politics and What to Eat—Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat (Basic 2018) explores food and its power structures. This cautionary tale explains why we should think twice before about what we eat. Food companies might not be telling us the truth.

When it comes to crookedness, the food industry is frighteningly equatable to the drug industry, says Nestle. It has a systemic problem. Research is molded and mashed together to give companies the results they want. They court investigators and nutrition professional, stack the deck, cover their butts and run. Soon enough, a systemic problem becomes a personal, ethical dilemma.

Bad food science is now a public health crisis. But there are folks out their, like the KIND fruit-and-nut bar company, that are working to make things better. KIND pledged $25 million over 10 years to “improve public health by making truth, transparency, and integrity the foremost values in today’s food system.” And it just so happens that the author of this book was one of KIND’s first picks to help!

Bottom line: Read this book if you want the tools to recognize bad food science and protect yourself from it. Unsavory Truth is full of honest, hard-fought learnings like, “Everyone eats. Food matters.”