What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters

A thoroughly revised classic, What to Eat Now is a field guide to food shopping in America, and a treatise on how to eat well and deliciously.

What to Eat Now is a clear-eyed, no-nonsense guide to the most important food questions on our plate today. How do we make informed dietary choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities?

In the twenty years since Marion Nestle's groundbreaking What to Eat first came out, food has undergone a radical change. The emergence of techno foods, the growth of corporate organics, and a surge of interest in food-delivery services reignited by the pandemic are just a few of the things that have altered how we think about how we eat.

The typical American supermarket carries more than thirty thousand products. How do you choose? Misinformation, disinformation, and corporate misdirection play a crucial and hard-to-see role in how the average shopper thinks about and chooses food.

In an aisle-by-aisle guide, Nestle, America's preeminent nutritionist and a founding figure in American food studies, takes us through the American supermarket. With persistence, wit, and common sense, she establishes the basics of good nutrition, food safety, and ethical and sustainable eating, and gives readers a close-up look at the web of interests--from supermarket slotting policies to multinational food corporations to lobbying groups--that food has to navigate before it gets to your shopping basket.

Above all else, What to Eat Now is a defense of real food and of the value of eating deliciously, mindfully, and responsibly.

Author: Marion Nestle
Publisher: North Point Press
Published: 11/11/2025
Pages: 720
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.26lbs
Size: 9.46h x 6.60w x 2.14d
ISBN: 9780374608699


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2025 pg. 84
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2025

About the Author
Marion Nestle is the most respected nutritionist in America today. Her book Food Politics was given the James Beard Award, the top award for food writing; that book and its follow-up, Safe Food, are backlist classics. A longtime nutritionist and former head of NYU's Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Nestle lectures worldwide and was featured in the movie Super Size Me. A native New Yorker, she raised her family in California and now lives in Greenwich Village.