I am pleased and more than a little proud to announce that Sinsheimer Literary has sold Marion Nestle's next book, Buying Nutrition Science: How Food Industry Sponsorship Skews Research and Harms Public Health (working title), to the good folks at Basic Books.
Marion has been writing on conflicts of interest in the food industry since her groundbreaking book Food Politics, and this will be another important book on a serious and pervasive issue. Just recently a JAMA paper revealed that in the 1960s the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard scientists nearly $50,000 to produce research demonstrating that saturated fat—not sugar—raises the risk of heart disease. The paper has been viewed more than 400,000 times, in a scholarly journal no less. But we still have a lot to learn about the influence of corporate sponsorship on nutrition research - and Marion is absolutely the right woman to lead the conversation.
On a personal note, this sale is particularly exciting because Marion is why I got into literary agenting. I was her editor on her last book, Soda Politics, which was not an easy book to publish, for reasons that had nothing to do with Marion herself - we had a wonderful partnership. And we came out the other side triumphant, with Soda Politics winning a James Beard award. When I told her this past summer that I was leaving OUP, and she told me she had another book proposal ready to go, it seemed deeply disappointing to both of us that we wouldn't have a try at book #2. So I offered to represent her, and to my surprise she immediately agreed. A few months later, here we are!