Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal - Softcover

"Pandora's Lunchbox is a brilliant and fascinating exploration of how our food gets processed, its powerful effects on our health, and what we can do about it. Highly recommended!"--Dean Ornish M.D., author of Eat More, Weigh Less, and The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health

"Melanie Warner is a journalist of keen skill, and in Pandora's Lunchbox she pries the lid off well-packaged secrets about how our so-called food is made. The resulting bounty of insights and revelations is almost overwhelming. This is a book of stunning, at times shocking truths, told in a crisp, compelling narrative. Of profound importance for everyone who eats."--David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, Director of Yale University Prevention Research Center and Director of Integrative Medicine Center at Griffin Hospital

"So much fun that you might forget how depressing it all is... There are more Holy Cow! moments here than even someone who thinks he or she knows what's going on in food production could predict."--Mark Bittman "The New York Times "

"In Pandora's Lunchbox, Melanie Warner has produced an engaging account of how today's 'food processing industrial complex' replaced real foods with the inventions of food science. Her history of how this happened and who benefits from these inventions should be enough to inspire everyone to get back into the kitchen and start cooking."--Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and coauthor of Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics

"Warner pulls back the curtain to reveal the industry secrets of how our most basic staples are being transformed into processed foodstuffs to boost profits. We get an (un)healthy dose of hexane-extraction, gun puffing and roast chicken type flavor, but like the best investigative journalists, she uses the personal stories of food scientists, innovators, and crusaders not to mention her own home experiments, to show why you'll want to think twice before hitting the drive-thru or reaching for that 'health bar.'"--Robert Kenner, director of Food, Inc.

"Indispensable."--Newsday

"In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma is a fascinating and cutting-edge look at the scary truth about what really goes into our food."--Publishers Weekly

"A gripping exposé."--Wall Street Journal

"Fascinating."--The A.V. Club

"From breakfast cereal to frozen pizza to nutrition bars, processed foods are a fundamental part of our diet, accounting for 65% of our nation's yearly calories. Over the past century, technology has transformed the American meal into a chemical-laden smorgasbord of manipulated food products that bear little resemblence to what our grandparents ate. Despite the growing presence of farmers' markets and organic offerings, food additives and chemical preservatives are nearly impossible to avoid, and even the most ostensibly healthy foods contain multisyllabic ingredients with nearly untraceable origins. The far-reaching implications of the industrialization of the food supply that privleges cheap, plentiful, and fast food have been well documented. They aredire. But how did we ever reach the point where 'pink slime' is an acceptable food product? Is anybody regulating what makes it into our food? What, after all, is actually safe to eat? Former York Times health columnist Melanie Warner combines deep investigatory reporting, culinary history, and cultural analysis, to find out how we got here and what it is we're really eating. Vividly written and meticulously researched, Pandora's Lunchbox blows the lid off the largely undocumented world of processed foods and food manipulation. From the vitamin "enrichments" to our fortified cereals and bread, to the soy mixtures that bolster chicken (and often outweigh the actual chicken included), Warner lays bare the dubious nutritional value and misleading labels of chemically-treated foods, as well as the potential price we--and our children--may pay"--