There’s a fun profile of - and interview with - “diet scold” Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating and Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health in Salon.com. Fans of Morgan Spurlock might recognize Nestle from Super Size Me: “She’s the only person in the movie who is able to offer a coherent definition of a calorie.”

Here are a few excerpts:

In “What to Eat,” Nestle demystifies the American foodscape, exposing the ways that nutritional advice is tainted by food marketers and the diet industry. Readers will find there’s much to be learned by taking a 611-page extended shopping trip with her. For starters, many foods with healthy reputations — most yogurt and fruit drinks and many cereals, even those promoted as high-fiber or high-protein — are loaded with sugars, and should be treated as dessert, not breakfast. Junk food is fortified and packaged to make it sound healthier than it is: As Nestle writes, “Vitamin-enriched sodas are still sodas. Organic gummi bears are still candy. Trans fat-free snack foods are still salty and full of rapidly absorbable carbohydrates.” And, sorry, raw cookie-dough eaters; today’s eggs are more likely to be contaminated with salmonella than they were just a few decades ago.

The Q & A on organics is the most interesting exchange, I think:

You’re enthusiastic about organic food. Why should people choose organic?

One reason absolutely overrides all others. There are no pesticides or chemical fertilizers used in the process, which means it’s much less harmful for the environment and for farmworkers. Certainly organic farms can be about as productive, and the food is at least as nutritious, and quite possibly more nutritious than conventional or industrially grown products.

There’s been a lot of controversy about the organic standard. What makes you trust it?

I talked to a lot of people who are in the organic business — farmers, producers, product developers, inspectors — and they all think it’s legit. Everybody involved with it seems to feel that it is a process with a lot of integrity. For one reason: they all watch each other. And really, the only thing that they have going for them is the credibility of the process, and if that process isn’t credible, it’s going to hurt everybody.

That said, there is tremendous pressure on organic farmers to cut corners, and those pressures come not only from the USDA, but also from Congress and the industrial food industry. To the extent that politics can weaken the organic standards, the industry does stand to lose the credibility that they’re now holding onto with their fingernails.

Do conventional food producers want us to think that the organic certification process is corrupt?

Of course they do. They want you to think that organic production is dirtier, because it uses natural fertilizer. They want you to think it’s not as productive. They want you to think that it’s less nutritious.

Go check out the whole thing here.