The Fish Counter (Picador Shorts)

America's leading nutritionist teaches you how to navigate the fish counter.

A standalone extract from the newly revised edition of her groundbreaking What to Eat (which is forthcoming in fall 2025 as What to Eat Now).

Marion Nestle, America's preeminent nutritionist and the scholar widely credited with establishing the field of modern American food studies, takes us through every aspect of how we grow, market, shop for, store, label, and eat fish in America.

With her trademark persistence and unerring eye for detail, Nestle pulls the curtain back on the complicated routes that fish have to go through to make it to our supermarket fish counter. What is the history of methylmercury contamination in our fish supplies? How have government agencies dealt with it in the past? How have they communicated its dangers to us, and how do they do that now? What should we consider when we think about food safety and fish? How healthy is fish, in fact?

Marion Nestle answers these and many more questions at the heart of how we consume fish. These chapters are a master class for anyone looking to eat more sustainably, mindfully, and with a full awareness of the many complicated factors at play when you're standing at the fish counter trying to make a decision about what fish you ought to buy for your dinner.

The Fish Counter is part of the Picador Shorts series "Oceans, Rivers, and Streams" in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.