Picador Shorts – serie

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 being reissued 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.

A quirky, intimate, and eye-opening look into the ways of thinking like a fish.An extract from the much-loved modern classic on the subject of fish consciousness, What a Fish Knows.Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? Jonathan Balcombe dives in among our marine cousins to explore the essential questions of how fish perceive and process the world.With his ethologist’s gift for showing us the hidden depths of questions we’ve routinely preferred to think of as simple, and his raconteur’s flair for the surprising and the curious, Balcombe takes us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Balcombe upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian?in other words, much like us.Using humor and a repertoire of some of the most surprising fish facts you’ve ever heard, Balcombe shakes up what you think you know about what’s going on inside the mind of these denizens of the deep.Fish Sense 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.