Bee Wilson's The Way We Eat Now — Why the Modern Diet Is the Way It Is

The book

Bee Wilson is a British food writer and historian. The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change (Basic Books, 2019) is her account of how human diets globally have been transformed over the last two generations.

The thesis is: in 50 years, virtually every culture on Earth has shifted toward a more uniform diet — more sugar, more refined carbs, more meat, more snacks, fewer shared meals — and this shift is largely the product of how the food industry has scaled, not of human preference.

Some of the data

Global sugar consumption per capita roughly tripled between 1960 and 2010.
The share of total caloric intake from ultra-processed foods in the US, UK, Australia, Canada now exceeds 50% in many demographic categories.
Meals eaten alone increased dramatically in every country with available data.
The "snack" — caloric input outside of three meals — moved from rare to constant.
Globally, more people now die from over-nutrition (heart disease, diabetes) than from under-nutrition. This crossover happened around 2010.

The mechanism

Wilson is careful: people are not choosing this. The food industry has engineered choice architectures — supermarket layouts, advertising, snack availability, school lunches, restaurant portion sizes — that reliably produce these eating patterns. Individual willpower is not the relevant level of analysis.

What's useful in the book

The framework. Wilson gives you vocabulary for:

Eating outside of meals. A 20th-century invention; not a human universal.
The vanishing of the family meal. Documented across most OECD countries.
Variety as a marketing trap. Modern supermarkets present infinite variety; the underlying ingredients are increasingly narrow (mostly corn, soy, wheat, sugar).
Convenience as the dominant axis. "Healthy" doesn't sell; "fast and healthy" does. The industry has responded.

What to do

Wilson is gentler than Pollan or Nestle on prescription. The book is closer to diagnosis. The implicit move is: eat more meals at a table, with people, of recognizable food, prepared at home or near it. None of this is news. The book's contribution is showing why this is hard now in ways it wasn't 50 years ago.

Wilson's project

Bee Wilson is the British food historian who has written
consistently across the food-politics genre. The Way We Eat Now
(2019) is her most comprehensive book — a global survey of the
nutritional transition, the shift from traditional diets to
industrial-food diets that has unfolded across the world since
roughly 1980.

The book's central argument: the dietary patterns Western
nutritionists have considered "the modern diet" — high in
ultra-processed food, sugar, refined carbohydrate; low in fiber,
fermented food, micronutrient-dense plants — are now spreading
globally. The diabetes-and-obesity epidemic that the West
experienced over four decades is now repeating in middle-income
countries on faster timelines.

The case studies

Wilson moves through specific countries: India's parallel rise in
both undernutrition and obesity; Brazil's regulatory response (the
2014 Brazilian dietary guidelines remain the most thoughtful
national guidelines in the world); China's massive nutritional
shift between 1980 and 2020; the UK's struggle with school meals.

Each case study is reported with care; Wilson is a good
researcher and a good writer.

What the book gets right

The framing of "ultra-processed food" as the central nutritional
problem, rather than fat, sugar, or salt in isolation, is correct
and well-supported by the broader research (Carlos Monteiro at the
University of Sao Paulo has been the lead voice on the NOVA
classification system that Wilson draws on).

The book also avoids the moralizing trap. The Western readers most
likely to read The Way We Eat Now are the readers most likely to
already feel guilty about food. Wilson handles the topic without
that register.

What the book misses

Wilson's coverage of African foodways is thinner than the rest.
The book treats Africa primarily as the next site of nutritional
transition rather than as a continent with its own active food
traditions resisting the transition. A follow-up book or a separate
work focused on African food sovereignty would round out the
picture.

The practical implications

Wilson's recommendations align broadly with Pollan and Nestle:

Cook from real ingredients.
Eat fermented food regularly.
Treat ultra-processed food as a category, not as individual
products.
Defend traditional food cultures where they exist.