There are a few folks outside of the grocery industry to whom my career in buying, formulating, and selling billions of dollars of “better for you” groceries owes a huge debt. Professor Marion Nestle is one of those people.

When I was a young gun at Whole Foods (prior to Amazon), responsible for the profit and loss of what eventually grew into a $5 billion division, my supervisor suggested I read some of Marion Nestle’s work. Nestle had spoken at a Whole Foods gathering of some sort, something above my pay grade that I was not privy to. They had extra copies of her books, so I managed to snag a couple during a weekly check in with the boss. The two books were Food Politics and What To Eat.

Of course I read them both right away. Food Politics was a romp, a surgical take down of the role that lobbying and corruption play in our food supply. What To Eat was right up my alley as a biology and political economy nerd, along the lines of Margaret Wittenberg’s texts on ingredients, quality standards, how and where food is produced and why that all matters.