Essential reading for anyone who cares about how we fuel ourselves.
The noted nutritionist offers a deeply researched look into the food that we eat—and why we need to do better.
At the outset, updating her 2005 book What To Eat, Nestle acknowledges that her work centers on the politics of food, which means, here, constant agitation against a food system driven by business imperatives “to produce and market highly profitable ‘junk.’” Added to this critique of food systems are imperatives of their own, these dealing with global problems: “hunger and food insecurity, obesity and its disease consequences, and climate change.” Nestle begins at the epicenter, inside modern supermarkets, where food corporations buy space on shelves at eye level to lure consumers into consuming…mostly junk, and junk that we wind up paying for three times: once at the cash register, once to cover tax deductions the companies take for these expenses, and once for treating the ensuing illnesses. Go to a wealthy neighborhood, and you’ll find expensive but abundant produce; go to a poor one, and you’ll find mostly highly processed food that is both cheap and deleterious to health, laden with sugars, sodium, and the like. Ironically, Nestle writes, that food system produces, annually, twice as many calories as a healthy adult needs—which Nestle counters with a long, complex discussion of how calories are measured, as well as an admonition: “Don’t eat more calories than you need.” She couples that discussion with a sobering note that if you walk at a leisurely pace for an hour, you’ll burn off the caloric equivalent of only 14 tortilla chips, meaning that any effort to lose weight must involve eating less, which, she notes late in her discussion, “is bad for business.” So have a carrot instead of a candy bar, she notes, and eat lower on the food chain, and buy organic—but, she also counsels wisely, “find the joy in food.”
Essential reading for anyone who cares about how we fuel ourselves.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780374608699
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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