Book Review: New Good Food

Can't remember the difference between enriched and fortified? Or organic versus sustainable? Take a look at this handy, appealing and acutely useful book and you'll find out that's the least of what most of us don't know when we go food shopping.

This expanding world of natural foods is often a bit daunting. When I stand before bins of bulk grains, nuts and flours, or scan the counter at my favorite fish market, I often lose confidence because I'm just not sure what I'm buying. It doesn't help that all too often the people working in our grocery stores know even less than we do (I recently asked a fish monger where something came from and he defensively said, "fish is fish").

New Good Food Shopper's Pocket Guide to Organic, Sustainable, and Seasonal Whole Foods (Ten Speed Press, $9.95, paperback, 144 pages, 5 x 7 inches) is a palm-sized paperback that can be your best friend and advisor for any of us striving to be smarter food shoppers.

Written by Margaret M. Wittenberg, a vice president of Whole Foods Market who since 1981 has guided that company's quality standards, this handy volume is a condensation of New Good Food, a more substantial book written by Ms. Wittenberg last year. As a former member of the USDA National Organic Standards Board, she clearly has the credentials to write this book, but as a grocery merchant, she also gets what a consumer wants -- which is help while standing in the grocery aisle. If someone like Ms. Wittenberg can't go shopping with us, maybe this little book is the best next thing.

The book begins with a glossary of terms; it's not extensive but it's practical and quick to use, with the most common terms in today's grocery world. There's also a handy and demystifying section on how to read product labels which have terms with no definitions.

The core of the book are chapters about 14 different food categories:

• Fruits, Vegetables, and Juices
• Grains
• Whole Grain and Specialty Flours
• Breads
• Pasta and Noodles
• Beans, Peas, Lentils, and Soyfoods
• Nuts and Seeds
• Culinary Oils
• Meat and Poultry
• Eggs
• Dairy Products
• Seafood
• Essential Seasonings
• Sweeteners

The value of this little book is not just the buying information but also the details about storage and cooking. For example, there are details on how long you can keep eggs in your refrigerator, the smoking point of the most commonly used cooking oils, how much uncooked grains yield when cooked, how to store cheese, and how to make sugar substitutions with other natural sweeteners like honey or agave nectar.

There are definitions for a long list of different kinds of breads, lots of tips for cooking with 36 varieties of flour, and a particularly useful chapter on seafood that offers hard information about buying, storing and cooking fish and shellfish. If you're worried about toxins in your fish, especially methylmercury, this book has specific details about which fish have high versus lower levels.

I found the pages about "Cooking with Miso" particularly helpful as this ingredient continues to be largely mysterious to me, even though I buy and cook with it.

The book doesn't have recipes, nor should it. But it does have many cooking details for certain foods that may still be new to you. For example, in the chapter on grains, there are details about pressure cookers versus slow cookers versus the absorption method for dozens of grains that aren't commonly found in cookbooks, such as spelt bulgur, teff (the traditional ingredient in Ethiopian flatbread), and sorghum, a gluten-free grain. Did you know that adzuki beans can take 1 1/2 hours to simmer but take only 15 minutes in a pressure cooker?

The book ends with three pages of conversion charts -- Fahrenheit to Celsius to Gas Marks, U.S. Measure Equivalencies, and Metric Equivalencies and Conversion Factors -- all very useful and crisply presented. There's also a very handy index at the back of the volume.

If you're new to organic food, are confused about the new terminologies showing up on our grocery shelves, are trying to buy unfamiliar ingredients, or just want to be a better educated food consumer, this book will be extremely valuable to you. It's small, lightweight and inexpensive so keep a copy in your canvas shopping bag or have it in your kitchen as a reference as you write up a grocery list. You just might eat better if you do.

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