What to Eat, by Marion Nestle

just finished this book, and I found it well worth most of it, despite its 500 page length (600 if you read the notes). Nestle examines food from a nutritional standpoint, separating out what is important to pay attention to from what is not. For example, all the hype around soy - she looks at all the studies, and comes to the conclusion that if you like it, eat it - if not, don't. Either way it isn't necessarily all that great for you, nor is it all that bad for you. She illustrates why we get so many conflicting messages (the industries are sponsoring the studies, and food studies are really really hard to be conclusive about, because you can't feed humans only soy for 5 years, for example). She explains how politically driven it all is, because the USDA doesn't have our health interests at heart, it has the economic interests of the industries at heart. A good find: the Seafood Choice Alliance combines several factors to look at consumer fish buying - I've talked about the Seafood Watch Program cards before, but those look at ecological implications, not health (ie mercury levels) implications - Seafood Choice Alliance does both. And a choice quote:

You eat. Willingly or not you participate in the environment of food choice. The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for dinner.

Buy this book from Powell's