Currently browsing posts about: Books

David Gelles.  The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy. Simon & Schuster, 2022 (264 pages).

One good thing about being stuck in Covid quarantine (mild case: 3 days of fever but no other symptoms for the last 5 days), is that I got to read this book.  I think it is hugely important and makes a compelling, if depressingly realistic, case for how corporate profit-first ideology has badly damaged American democracy.

I’m a fan of David Gelles, who writes for the Times about corporate malfeasance.  I’ve also been interested in Jack Welch since I read an article in Fortune magazine about how a speech he gave in 2001 was responsible for kicking off the Shareholder Value movement.

This was the push to give stockholders immediate higher returns on investment and made growth in profits the sole corporate goal (a big shift from blue chip stocks like IBM, which promised slow but steady returns over a long time period).

Gelles explains what this did to corporations and what they then did to America.  Companies like Welch’s General Electric, which made toasters and household electrics, fired employees, outsourced labor, cut all possible costs, merged and acquired, manipulated earnings, and forgot about ethics let alone social responsibility.  Boeing, infamously, did the same.   Hence plane crasshes and deaths.

Other results: destruction of the environment, loss of manufacturing, and the evaporation of decent working- and middle class incomes and the transfer of their wealth to stockholders and especially to corporate executives.  Hence their obscene salaries and compensation.

Gelles also describes the widespread acceptance of profits first, the ignoring of its consequences, and the collusion of Wall Street and the government in this destructive system.

Food companies are no exception.  I have long attributed the push to sell ultraprocessed junk food—regardless of its health consequences—as a result of what Jack Welch started.

Interestingly, Gelles cites a food company, Unilever, as an example of a corporation that is trying to put social values back in the picture.

He says others should follow Unilever’s example, and cites the 2019 statements by the World Economic Forum and the Business Roundtable to suggest that maybe business is finally catching on to the need for change.  (See my incredulous post on these statements)

I think he may be too optimistic.  As he admits on page 223, this is what actually happened during the pandemic:

One study showed that companies that signed the Business Roundtable statement were actually more likely to announce layoffs in the first months of the pandemic than companies that didn’t sign the statement, and that the companies that pledged to serve all stakeholders actually distributed more of their profits to shareholders than those who didn’t publicly pledge to look out for the common good.

So much for promises.

As a Lancet Commission said early in 2019, if we want social values to matter in business, government is going to have to start regulating.  For that to happen, we need much greater demand from civil society.

This book makes a strong case for the need to change the way corporations operate.  Let’s get to work.

Meredith Li-Vollmer.  Graphic Public Health.  Penn State University Press, 2022.

Probably because of my cartoon book, Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics, I was asked to do a blurb for this book, which I was happy to do.

In her thoroughly up-to-date, informative, and useful book, Li-Vollmer convincingly argues for the effectiveness of comics in conveying health risks and desired behaviors.  She proves this point with splendid and deeply engaging examples, and provides an instructive how-to for creating your own. This book should be in every public health curriculum; it’s not only informative but also wonderful fun to read.

They only used the sentence in bold face (edited to convert wonderful to wonderfully).

But the rest explains why I think the book is worth reading.   Li-Vollmer works for Seattle’s health department and discovered comics as a way of communicating public health messages.  The book includes lots of examples of the work of comic artists explaining issues related to a host of public health issues.  Although none of the examples focus specifically on food issues, some briefly cover food safety, eating watery foods on hot days, and how climate change affects food production.

I think this is a great way to communicate public health issues.  New York City subway rider that I am, I greatly enjoyed the AIDS story that the New York City Health Department told in posters in the early 1990s.  As the New York Times explained,

Our story so far, as seen in 6,000 New York City subway cars, above the windows and between the advertisements for hemorrhoid, hernia, and foot doctors:

Julio and Marisol run into each other while visiting Raul Rodriguez, who is in the hospital with AIDS. They apologize for the big quarrel several episodes back, when Julio refused to use a condom and walked out. Their romance rekindled, they leave Raul’s room to get some coffee and talk things over.

Suddenly, Rosa bursts in. “I’m scared,” she tells Raul. “I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m H.I.V. positive.”

Darra Goldstein.  The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food.  University of California Press, 2022.

Russia is in the news these days (to say the least) and here is food historian Darra Goldstein’s deeply nostalgic account of how Russians managed to create delicious meals under the worst of circumstances, from tsarist to Soviet times.  Some excerpts:

To explain the title and the cover:

At the heart of any traditional Russian meal lies black bread, a loaf of dense sourdough rye….so ingrained was rye in the Russian diet that by the late nineteenth century, 30 to 60 percent of the country’s arable land was annually planted in this crop, leading to a veritable “kingdom of rye.”  The peasants expressed reverence for their rye bread by holding the loaf close to the chest and slicing it horizontally toward the heart. Wasting breadcrumbs was considered a sin, and even into the late twentieth century, entire cookbooks were devoted to using leftover black bread (p. 9).

On dacha gardens in Soviet times:

The only sure way to guarantee the availability of staples like potatoes was to grow them yourself.  Most of the population, including a great many city dwellers, cultivated their own garden plots, which allowed them to endure periods of food shortages.  These private plots…created a significant second economy–one the government came increasingly to rely on, since the collective and state farms never managed to meet the nation’s demand for fresh produce (p. 89).

On the samovar:

The origins of the samovar’s design are murky, and it is unclear whether this vessel arrived in Russia from the East or the West.  The model may have been the Mongolian hot pot or the elaborate Dutch urns that had taps rather than spouts…Whatever its origin, the Russians adapted a foreign receptacle into a useful object that became not only very much their own, but one that epitomizes Russianness (p. 119).

The book is indeed brief, but enlightening.  It made me think of Anya Von Bremen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing (Broadway Books, 2013).  Both are deeply appreciative of Russian cuisine (if that’s the right word), and ability of Russian cooks to take whatever was available and turn it into something edible and memorable.

Brian Kateman.  Meat Me Half-Way: How Changing the Way We Eat Can Improve Our Lives and Save Our Planet.  Prometheus Books, 2022. 

I hadn’t expected this book to be so compelling, but it was and I did a blurb for it.

Meat Me Half-Way is an exceptionally thoughtful and well-argued synthesis of the rationale for the “reducetarian” movement to eat less (but not necessarily zero) meat as a means to improve human and planetary health. I especially like the book’s call to unite vegans, vegetarians, proponents of plant-based and cell-based meats, and advocates for regenerative agriculture in this common cause.  Sign me up!

Kateman says

Ultimately, we all want to see the end of factory farming…we must support, or at least not actively oppose, legal approaches toward that end—even when others’ solutions for chipping away at factory farming are not our preferred ones.  This means plant-based meat and cell-cultured meat advocates not actively opposing better meat—even if they don’t think better meat is the ethical, environmental, or nutritional ideal.  This also of course means better-meat advocates not opposing plant-based and cell-cultured meat for not being “the real thing.  (P. 179)

University of California Press has just issued its fall catalog and Slow Cooked is on pages 12 and 13.

It includes an interview:

Here’s a description of the book.  Its publication date is October 4, but it can be preordered at any of these sites.

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Bookshop
• IndieBound
• Powell’s
• UC Press

I’m thrilled to announce that information about my forthcoming book—out October 4—is now available on the University of California Press website

Preordering options

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Bookshop
• IndieBound
• Powell’s
• UC Press

Here’s the official description:

Marion Nestle reflects on her late-in-life career as a world-renowned food politics expert, public health advocate, and a founder of the field of food studies after facing decades of low expectations.

In this engrossing memoir, Marion Nestle reflects on how she achieved late-in-life success as a leading advocate for healthier and more sustainable diets. Slow Cooked recounts of how she built an unparalleled career at a time when few women worked in the sciences, and how she came to recognize and reveal the enormous influence of the food industry on our dietary choices.

By the time Nestle obtained her doctorate in molecular biology, she had been married since the age of nineteen, dropped out of college, worked as a lab technician, divorced, and become a stay-at-home mom with two children. That’s when she got started. Slow Cooked charts her astonishing rise from bench scientist to the pinnacles of academia, as she overcame the barriers and biases facing women of her generation and found her life’s purpose after age fifty. Slow Cooked tells her personal story—one that is deeply relevant to everyone who eats, and anyone who thinks it’s too late to follow a passion.

And here are the amazing back-cover blurbs (for which I am deeply grateful):

• “Marion Nestle is one of my heroes. After reading her riveting memoir, I admire her more than ever. She is one of the most important voices in the food world, and in this book she gets personal for the first time.”—Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet Magazine 
• “Marion Nestle is a national treasure, and now you can learn how she came to be. Just like Nestle herself, this beautiful memoir is thoughtful, generous, unstinting, and deeply committed to learning from the past to build a better world.”—Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System 
• “I have always had such admiration for Marion Nestle: she is one of our nation’s shrewdest thinkers and has transformed the way all of us think about public health, the industrial food industry, nutrition, and the future of food. With this extraordinary book, I see for the first time how she became the clear-eyed, indefatigable warrior that she is. Her radical self-reflection and honesty is deeply moving—and in telling her life’’s story, Marion is forging a path for the next generation of food activists.”—Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse restaurant 
• “Marion Nestle is a brilliant, courageous champion of healthy food, social justice, and scientific integrity. This poignant and inspiring book tells us how she came to be that way.”—Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal 
• “Extraordinary! Nestle’s story moves me, heart and soul. I have long admired her leadership in awakening us to the crisis of our corporate-corrupted food system. In this work, however, she offers hope in the capacity of humans to transform obstacles and denigration into opportunity and dignity. She shares a gripping, very personal story that will help us discover our own courage. Just what’s needed now more than ever.”—Frances Moore Lappé, cofounder of Small Planet Institute

Tamar Haspel.  To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard.  GP Putnam’s Sons, 2021.  

I did a blurb for  this book:

In To Boldly Grow, Tamar Haspel gives us a warm, thoughtful, and thoroughly entertaining account of how she and her husband committed to eating and, therefore, growing, gathering, and, yes, hunting “first-hand” food every day.  This is a love story with an inspiring message: if she can raise her own food and have so much fun doing it, you can too.

I copied a few choice quotes, to give you a taste.

On calculating the amount of salt you can get out of seawater:

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I’m pretty good at math, and this was basic arithmetic.  But that beautiful pile of salt was the next best thing to creating something out of thin air.  You take water out of the ocean, put it on your woodstove, and end up with something people put in froufrou little containers and sell at the same per-pound price as wild-caught salmon.  We were mesmerized by a completely mundane process we could predict with perfect accuracy. (p. 123)

On raising turkeys:

Turkey stupidity is the stuff of legend; they can supposedly drown by looking up in a rainstorm or simply not figuring out they should take their head out of their water dish.  But ours seemed to have something going on in the brains department.  Not the kind of thing that gets you into Yale early admissions, but baseline street smarts.  From the day we brought them home, they were on the lookout for an escape route.  (p. 157)

On eating roadkill wild turkey (Kevin is her husband):

I didn’t know at the time that this bird would set the tone for so much of what we did afterward.  It was the very first time we jumped into a project knowing absolutely nothing, the first time we bumbled through successfully, the first time we made a meal of something we’d gleaned from the world around us.  And it proved we were well matched in this endeavor, because Kevin is the kind of man who brings home roadkill and I’m the kind of woman who wants it.  (p. 169)

Paco Underhill.  How We Eat: The Brave New World of Food and Drink.  Simon & Schuster, 2022.

What to say about this book.

For one thing, Underhill is a supermarket consultant, whose job it is to tell supermarkets how to sell more food.

For another (full disclosure), chapter nine is titled “Shopping with Marion,” and that would be me.

I met Underhill and his collaborator, Bill Tonelli, at the amazing Sunrise Asian supermarket upstairs from the corner of 9^th Street and 3^rd Avenue in Manhattan.  We wandered around the store for a bit, collected another shopper, and went out for coffee.  The result is presented largely in the form of a conversation.  Here’s a sample from page 157 that starts with Underhill explaining why he loves visiting Hollywood (he lives in New York):

“…And going to L.A. is so refreshing.  Partially because I got sick of eating here—I live by eating according to the season, and it’s so easy to do in L.A., but back here I’m like, cabbage and apples and potatoes, again?”

“Carrots,” Marion says.

“Carrots.  ‘Oh look, we have rutabaga.  Yay!’  So yeah, I’m a jerk.  I’m one of those people who want to be completely seasonal and local but can’t hack it everywhere.”

“Ithaca has a rutabaga roll every year just before Christmas,” Marion says.  “It’s a bowling contest at the farmers market.  You bowl with rutabagas.”

This is a chatty book with lots of Underhill’s insights into how supermarkets work, starting with parking lots, and what he thinks stores ought to do to face the retail future.

He also went to farmers’ markets, this time with Nina (Planck) Kaufelt.  That chapter is titled “The citified get countrified (and vice versa.”

It’s a chattier and unreferenced version of my 2006 book, What to Eat—the one I am currently updating—but I did take some notes.

I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not exactly an unbiased critic.