An entertaining examination of an industry whose many customers have a sweet tooth.
What’s in the box?
Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University, and Lisa Sutherland, former vice president of nutrition at Kellogg, write that grains are the principal food source across the world eaten directly, as porridges, or ground into flour for bread. But ready-to-eat breakfast cereals are a 19th-century American invention created by “a succession of religiously influenced health-food faddists and fanatics.” They shared the belief (still popular) that ill health is the result of the American diet, lacking nutrients and full of toxins. The faddists’ solution was a bland diet of mashed grains, so tasteless that it was confined to health spas and sanitoriums that were popular at the time. Matters improved as 1900 passed with the arrival of big-time entrepreneurs, the discovery of vitamins, an increasing focus on the child health, and, most important, the revelation that adding sugar makes cereal tasty. “Cereals may have started out as simple, highly nutritious grain foods for the health conscious,” Nestle and Sutherland write, “but they ended up as candy and cookies for breakfast for adults as well as kids.” It’s estimated that breakfast cereals generated $88 billion in global revenues in 2025—$23 billion of it in the U.S. General Mills and Kellogg make up 60% of worldwide sales, the authors say. The book includes dozens of color images of cereal boxes and their torrent of health claims. The authors write: “For decades, consumer groups and child-health advocates have petitioned the FDA—or have sued cereal companies—to remove unhealthful ingredients and misleading statements from the boxes.” Campaigns to eliminate unhealthy foods sometimes succeed, but people love sugar: Roughly half of baby boomers “say they still love the same cereals they loved as children.” And, when tested, people believe that highly colored food tastes better.
An entertaining examination of an industry whose many customers have a sweet tooth.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9780520421271
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.
A new exposé of the American meat industry.
Since Upton Sinclair’s 1906 bestseller, The Jungle, denunciations of the meat industry appear regularly, and they remain fully justified. A simple description of what happens when an animal enters a slaughterhouse will horrify most readers, and equally time-honored are journalists’ depictions of low-wage slaughterhouse work, which is gruesome, dangerous, and unhealthy. Sorvino, who runs the coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes, does not ignore these easy marks, but she aims higher, targeting multinational corporations, billionaires, global trade, climate change, soil destruction, and pollution. “Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations,” she writes, “but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future.” American farmers and meat processors benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, but their profits are a result of their cruel, assembly-line efficiency in factory farms or titanic feedlots, where the animals consume hyperdense feed, chemicals, and antibiotics to boost their weight before slaughter. Research reveals strong evidence that processed food, including bacon, ham, hot dogs, and salami, can cause cancer. Readers will gnash their teeth at Sorvino’s vivid accounts of rapacious billionaires and the half-dozen mega-corporations that dominate the industry, pollute waterways, and exhaust farmland under the very gentle hand of government regulators. In the final section, the author explores a few solutions, but she is skeptical that alternative protein will ever upend traditional industrial systems. She describes a dozen entrepreneurs and their protein alternatives, but “meat alternatives accounted for 0.2 percent of 2020 grocery meat sales.” Money is rarely their main problem because this is a trendy field for venture capitalists (even the industry giants are researching this area), but investors nearly always value profit over saving the environment, and many of their products are far from organic, requiring industrial farmed inputs, chemicals, and pesticides.
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-04-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.
A guide for women seeking to pursue their dreams without relying on alcohol.
Boulder, Colorado-based Allison is an entrepreneur, author, and business consultant who joined the Juicy AF alcohol-free community in 1999—“a community of like-minded, accomplished women supporting each other in living their best alcohol-free lives.” Since then, she’s aimed to help women in all stages of sobriety to halt the “drinking-remorse-drinking spiral” and embrace joyful futures. Her book effectively shows the hard-hitting and long-lasting impact of alcohol on the lives of people who can’t control their drinking—especially those of high-functioning, high-achieving women who believe that alcoholism mainly affects men. The book is organized into three parts, focusing on assessing one’s current relationship with alcohol, learning how to plan for alcohol-free life, and reimagining a new life from a spiritual standpoint. Allison offers revealing stories about her own struggles with binge-drinking and alcohol addiction as an outwardly successful woman who seemed to “have it all together.” She invites women to ask themselves if alcohol truly serves them, using interactive exercises, and then gives actionable advice for sticky situations, such as how to turn down drinks at stressful gatherings. The book’s latter half details how to apply spiritual laws to one’s life, so that the reinvented version of you has staying power. These laws include lessons on how to visualize one’s path, substitute behaviors, take direct action, practice forgiveness, and find community. Overall, this book is an excellent alcohol-awakening guide for women, including those readers who simply want to take stock of the role that alcohol is currently playing in their lives. The work is consistently positive, fun, and fast-paced, while also applying the pressure that many people need early in their sobriety journeys. It serves a demographic that’s long been underserved in the alcohol-free space, and brings a fresh, dynamic perspective.
A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 135
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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