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What’s On Your Bookshelf – February 2025?

Retirement Reflections

This past month, I’ve been focused on cutting ultra-processed foods from my diet, and my reading choices have strongly reflected this interest. But I’ve also explored a few other books—spanning a range of star ratings. Here’s what I’ve been reading in February.

My Rating: 5 Stars
For those seeking a better understanding of our modern food reality, this is a must-read.

In this detailed and highly compelling book, Chris van Tulleken discusses the hidden dangers of ultra-processed foods (UPFs)— industrially-made products packed with additives like stabilizers, emulsifiers, and artificial flavours.  These foods prioritize corporate profit over health and environmental sustainability. He carefully explores the rise of UPFs, detailing how they harm our health, cause overeating, and contribute to our ecological crises.

Like many, I’ve often glanced at food labels, shrugged at ingredients like maltodextrin and xanthan gum, and assumed someone, somewhere, had deemed them safe. Van Tulleken challenges this confidence by revealing an uncomfortable truth–these foods are not only nutritionally inadequate, many of them are also damaging to our long-term health. More often than not, UPFs are designed to manipulate us into overeating and are often cleverly packaged as “virtuous food choices” (think many diet, low cal, low fat, non-dairy versions amongst other seemingly nutritious offerings).

The book offers practical advice, helping readers identify UPFs and make informed decisions. Van Tulleken highlights the harsh reality that healthy food alternatives are often unaffordable or inaccessible for those living in poverty, emphasizing the need for systemic change alongside individual action.

A fellow Goodreads reviewer aptly called ‘Ultraprocessed People’ “the horror book of the year.” It’s a chilling yet essential wake-up call to the manipulation deep within our food system. Ultimately, ‘Ultra-Processed People’ not only shocks but empowers readers to question what they eat, why they eat it and to weigh the trade-offs between cost, convenience, and health. Biggest takeaway? Read all food labels carefully and ensure that you understand what implications each ingredient has on our longterm health.

My Rating: 4 Stars
Unprocessed Made Easy by nutritionist Delicia Bale offers 75 recipes to help reduce ultra-processed foods (UPFs) while keeping meals quick, healthy, and family-friendly. With 75 approachable recipes, a handy weekday meal plan, and a clear breakdown of minimally processed alternatives, it’s an excellent resource for anyone trying to clean up their diet without losing their mind.

I tried the Mediterranean Vegetable Halloumi Traybake—delicious! I’m eager to make more, including Chicken Pad Thai and No-Knead Garlic Flatbreads. While some recipes are familiar, I appreciate the variety, convenience, and having UPF-free meals in one accessible guide.

My Rating: 3.5 Stars
Quit Ultra-Processed Foods Now provides a structured six-week plan and practical tips for those looking to eliminate UPFs from their diet. Designed as a workbook, the emotional, social, financial, and physical aspects of food choices are presented alongside clear, science-based explanations.

I listened to the 2.5-hour audiobook, which included links to downloadable handouts. While helpful, I would opt for a physical or digital format next time, as the workbook structure seems better suited to those formats. Having already reduced my UPFs before beginning this audiobook, I found some material redundant. For anyone starting this journey or seeking additional support, this book offers valuable guidance.

My Rating: 4 Stars
A friend’s enthusiastic recommendation led me to The Good Women of Safe Harbour, and I’m grateful for it. Bobbi French’s debut tackles heavy themes—mental illness, adoption, abortion, cancer, and assisted dying—yet wraps these in warmth and resilience. The vividly drawn small-town setting and well-developed characters, especially Francis, made a lasting impression. French’s poignant writing has stayed with me. I especially enjoyed the ending and the clever twist that it confirmed. See my full review here.

My Rating: 3.5 Stars
Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club offers an intriguing premise—a 1950s historical fiction murder mystery set in a boarding house with a diverse cast of female tenants. While the novel starts strong, its multiple POVs eventually felt overwhelming. Inconsistencies, such as a significant historical error combined with a few implausible character actions, disrupted the story’s flow. While the ending tied things up, some resolutions felt too convenient. However, the boarding house’s personification added charm, and Quinn’s historical note provided valuable context, nudging my rating from 3 to 3.5 stars. An interesting story but uneven in execution. My full review is here.

My Rating: 2.5 Stars
Helen Ellis’ Southern Lady Code mixes humour, Southern charm, and blunt candor in a brief essay collection. While some essays shine with sharp wit, others feel awkward or unsettling. The humour was less consistent than expected, making for an uneven and, at times, disturbing read.
My full (but still short) review can be found here.

What’s been on your bookshelf lately? My cohosts and I would love for you to share your recent reads with us.

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COHOSTS
Debbie, Deb’s World
Jo, And Anyways
Sue, Women Living Well After 50
Donna,  RetirementReflections

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Published by Retirement Reflections

Prior to retirement, I lived and worked in Beijing China for fourteen years (Middle School Principal/Deputy Director at The Western Academy of Beijing). Leaving international life behind, my husband and I retired to Vancouver Island in June 2015. To document both this transition and our new adventures, ‘Retirement Reflections’ was born. I hope that you enjoy reading these reflections, and will be willing to share your own.

88 thoughts on “What’s On Your Bookshelf – February 2025?”

  2. I’m enjoying following along on your path towards a future free of ultra-processed foods and Ultraprocessed People sounds like a great guide. I think I’ll pick it up to learn more. I fear that, even more than ever, consumers will be on their own to make good decisions about their health.

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    1. Hi, Janis – I can’t recomment UltraProcessed People highly enough. Richard just finished reading it yesterday and cynic that he often is, he found it eye-opening as well. If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to hear what you think about it.

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  3. It’s sad to think so many have been hoodwinked into believing that so much of the new food products they are buying are healthy.
    I’ll be looking out for The Briar Club…..hopefully I’ll enjoy it as much as The Rose Code and The Alice Network

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    1. Hi, Cathy – ‘Hookwinked’ is also an excellent word. Sadly, manipulation by big food companies runs quite deep.
      The Briar Club is quite a different read than The Rose Code or The Alice Network. I personally liked the latter two better, but there are many HUGE fans of The Briar Club. If you read it, I’d love to hear what you think.

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  4. Seems as though the novels were a little disappointing. The ultra-processed food books sound interesting. Because we eat a mostly vegan diet heavy on beans and vegetables, we mostly stay away from ultra-processed food, but we, of course, stray sometimes, usually on the weekends. Believe it or not, Oreos are vegan. 😉

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    1. Hi, Laurie – The novels that I read this past month were certainly outshone by Van Tullekin’s book. That was such a captivating read, everything else paled in comparison.
      It sounds like your diet is primarly built upon whole foods, which is definitely the healthy way to go. Sadly oreos are not in that category, but we do also need to live a little. ❤

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  5. I read the Chris Van Tulleken a while back – a good read. I think the ‘ranking’ of processing is important too eg a tin of beans or tomatoes is not the same as a muesli bar full of additives. It is also important to remember those who don’t have access or means to fresh fruit and vegetables and other produce, and what we can do about that.

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    1. Hi, Barbara – You have raised some excellent points here. Definitely not all UPFs are created equally – some being way worse than others. I found the Yuka App a quick and easy tool to help me out when grocery shopping.
      The unfair access to fresh fruits, vegetables and whole foods is a huge problem, emphasizing the need for systemic change alongside individual action.

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  6. Even though I’m not sure I really want to know (ha), I just added the sample of Ultra-Processed People to my Kindle. My food choices could definitely be better. Maybe this book will be motivation to take it up another level.

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  7. I’ve been reading labels more consistently since your post on UPF. I’m so grateful for my home grown foods. I’ve been eating down my freezer since defrosting it. I managed to replicate a beet gazpacho that I ate while on vacation. So delicious. I digress; I know this isn’t a food post. I finished J K Rowling’s book, The Casual Vacancy, about the family & community dynamics in play behind closed doors when a local politician dies. Currently reading The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams thanks to your recommendation on a previous post.

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    1. Hi, Mona – I’m delighted that you are reading the dictionary of lost words and that you have been reading labels more consistently recently. I think this particular post does double up as a food post as well. If you have the time, and are willing to share your beet gazpacho recipe, I would love to give it a try.

      I am completely envious of all of your home grown food. Once again, I wish that we lived closer to each other. Lucky for you that we don’t. I might just become a mooch of your home grown food and delicious baking!

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  8. Am as poor as a church mouse at the moment but Amazon has faithfully promised the Van Tulleken book a fortnight down the line … everyone must be buying 🙂 ! Actually, with medical degrees along, long way back, have been studying nutrition since the 1990s . . it will be most interesting to read what concepts have changed since then. Still eat some processed meats for taste but have few problems in other ways and am hugely glad to see the UPF problem being taken more seriously than when I began learning and trying to make others believe …

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      1. Have already suggested the book to others and shall ‘speak up’ as soon as Amazon has delivered and I have read 🙂 ! I live semi-rurally too far from libraries with ‘sensible’ purchases . . . also, books on shelves act like original paintings on walls for me – absolutely ‘necessary’!!!

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  9. Hi Donna – you’ve certainly been doing a deep dive into your healthy unprocessed food eating and preparation. And I’m always interested to see what you’ve been reading lately. I even mention a book in my next post that caught me off guard by how much I enjoyed it…

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  10. I’ve also been cutting out UPFs so these books look very interesting. I saw the van Tulleken TV documentary. I like the sound of the Good Women of Safe Harbour.

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  13. Due to our conversations I’ve been taking more noticed of the Processed Foods we consume. It’s really shocked me. I will definitely be putting Ultra Processed People on my List. Also listing the Briar Club as it sounds like my kind of book.

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  14. That was not my favorite Kate Quinn book either but I did enjoy it enough to finish it. I have been working on cutting out Ultra processed foods for about a year now; and reading Chris’ book definitely gave me the motivation to do so. I’m redoubling my efforts after listening to/reading Good Energy by Casey Means.

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      1. Am smiling! Being a generation or two older than most commenting here, and living Down Under to boot, ‘. . . Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . ‘ from du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ is probably the one quote impossible to forget . . . Have read every page of every book of hers – not as ‘great literature’ necessarily, but as part of life then and there. A British noblewoman, more or less, writing rather enjoyably in very English style. . .

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  17. Donna, like you i have been on a mision to avoid UP foods. Your review of the book ‘Ultra Processed People’ has reminded me I still need to buy the book as a paperback version. I am going to have it sent to the UK in the hope my daughter-in-law reads it before our next visit. 🙂

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    1. Hi, Carole – I read UltraProcessed People digitally from my local library. It was such a powerful read that immediately upon finishing, I picked up a paperback copy from a bookshop for my husband to read. I also wanted to have a reference copy for my home library so the second copy was a great investment. (PS – Richard did devour the whole book which has made my fight to eliminate UPFs from our meals very doable).

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  18. I’m disappointed but not entirely surprised that Southern Lady Code was uneven. I saw it for sale in B&N but didn’t buy it. I figured all the Southern Lady tropes have been covered over the years online. But bless her little heart for writing the book. 😁

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  19. Well now, WP just ate my meticulously 😉 crafted comment so here I go again, abbreviated this time! I used to work in the food industry and even spent time in the R&D lab creating “recipes” to improve dairy products for mouth feel, stability, and of course flavour. Yes, this means additives. I think Michael Pollan (great food writer) once said to “eat like your great grand parents did” and “anything with a bar code or that is delivered through a car window is not really food” (paraphrasing). Words to live by!

    Donna, you captured my thoughts on The Briar Club pretty much word for word. Except I didn’t have an issue with all the POVs. The book stuck with me for days after finishing because it is set in a time that the Maggats want us to go back to, I think. The so-called good old days, which were anything but. Great post!

    Deb

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    1. Hi, Deb – I am so sorry about your eaten comment. This has been happening a great deal to me lately as well. I thought that WP had simply developed a dislike for me. 😦
      I look forward to our discussion on The Briar Club. It always delights me (and still surprises me somewhat) that someone’s “Best Ever 5* Read” is someone else’s far less stimulating one. I was trying to keep my reivew short so didn’t always express my thoughts well. It was less the multiple points of view that didn’t work for me — and more that some characters (like Nora) were far better developed and much more captivating than others. So, I would have loved less characters if they could all have been as richly drawn as Nora.
      Eating like our greatgrandparents did has turned out to be better advice than I originally realized! 😀

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  20. My last two reads have been quite a contrast. Book group read Yellowface (RF Kuang) which even those of us who enjoyed it found unsettling. For light relief afterwards I read How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley. Not sure what it was about the title that drew me in😳, but it was fluffy and amusing and just right for what I needed at the time.

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    1. Hi, Kate – I am so sorry that WP ate your first comment. This has been happening to me repeatedly both in commenting on WP blogs and in creating my draft WP posts (which is manages to eat before I can save it). Using the backspace is also a sure sign that WP will irreparably delete my words. I hope this crainess gets fixed soon. ❤

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  22. No I dea what is going on this morning, but I’ve had to duplicate every single comment I’ve left. Heavy sighs. What I said the first time is that I’ve just started Ultraprocessed people, and it’s disappointing about the Kate Quinn book – I usually look forward to her stories.

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    1. Hi, Jo – I know! What is the heck is going on with WP? Most commenters for this post said that they had to comment twice. And I have lost so many comments on WP this week that it’s been making me crazy. I am delighted that you are reading UltraProcessed People. I look forward to hearing what you think. 46% of GR readers rated The Briar Club as 5 stars so you could like it.

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  23. I am doing my best to eat foods I cook from scratch and omit all the processed stuff. It really isn’t necessary toward eating well and good-tasting food.

    A couple good reads for me this month:
    The Cure for Women
    Go as a River

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    1. Hi, Eilene – I’ve been trying to juggle buying no upfs, buying Canadian, ensuring taste and quality without breaking the bank. I might just have to give up on that last requirement. And by trying to eat local produce as much as possible, that has meant much cabbage, beets, carrots, potatoes and squash on repeat this winter! 😀

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  24. Pingback: Love Story or Romance: Is There a Difference? #discussion #readinglife #WOYBS #bookx #booksky #bookblogger #womensfiction - Reading Ladies

  25. Thanks, Donna, for sharing your recent reads. I, too have been thinking more about ultra-processed foods and trying to move away from them and eat more foods in their original forms. Books like these are a good way to start. I think I would like The Good Women of Safe Harbor, too! Hope you are doing well 🙂

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    1. Thanks, Barb – What I learned from all of my recent reads on UPF is that no one is coming to save us. Each of us are on our own to get informed and stay vigilant on what we buy at the grocery store and what we consume. This means that I am currently in the grocery store for longer carefully reading labels – but the end results are worth it! ❤

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      1. You’re smart to do that. I recently bought reduced sugar dried cranberries and later discovered they had sucralose in them. I had bought an entirely different brand the last time and it just had less sugar. So annoying because I avoid artificial sweeteners.

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      2. I know, right! Now we need to be experts in decoding deceptive food labels just to ensure we know what we are getting. I use the free app Yuka and find it very helpful at scanning barcodes and instantly telling me the harmful additives and why.

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  26. Hi Donna, Thank you for sharing your recent reads and reviews. I will try to borrow the Ultra Processed People book from my library. I’ve been reading mostly travel information and recently finished the first two Strike (detective) novels by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling).

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  28. Hi Donna, I love your deep dives and the way you share your findings so eloquently, as you have with these books on ultra processed foods. You are a star with your reviews and I love reading what you have thought of books and why you’ve rated them in such a way. A fab post and a stunning co-host xx

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  30. Pingback: This week’s small pleasures #428 – Thistles and Kiwis

  31. I just read the biography “Goethe” by A.N. Wilson. He structured it using Goethe’s Faust and sees Goethe’s life as a Faustian life. We always saw Heinrich Faust as a classic European intellectual. But as much as in the plot, we are fascinated by Goethe’s style. Anyway, reading this biography, one learns a lot about the philosophy of this time, especially from Immanuel Kant and other writers of this think tank of Jena and Weimar, like Schiller and Hegel. A.N. Wilson quite often shows connections to contemporary writers and thinkers. All in all, this is a perfect biography and a text for everybody who wants to learn about the beginning of the century of reason and the Romantics. Together with Andrea Wulf’s “Magnificent Rebels”, it gives a great insight into the beginning of Romantic thinking and its end.
    Happy reading
    The Fab Four of Cley
    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

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  32. Hello, I am glad you enjoyed some interesting novels (even if not all four or five stars!) along with your ultra-processed food readings. But I really really love when folks share posts about eating real food and I have bookmarked this post so I can send some folks here as needed.
    Sometimes it is very effective to get people “thinking” by sending them to a post like this to just hear someone’s learning journey.

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    1. Thank you for marking my post to send to others. I do this too. Actually, my husband and I frequently send posts and articles to each other that we find interesting (especially healthy food posts). Yup, we live in the same house – but we tend to read from different sources so this helps to mix things up for each of us. 😀

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      1. It sounds like you both enrich each other’s learning by sharing that way too….
        and speaking of spouse’s – I was just telling my spouse that coming back to blog world this month reminded me of the quality posts that come in my feed. Like this one from you (hearing succinct book reviews with a bit of opinion) and then the photographers and writers I follow, gosh! I forgot just how enriched the blogosphere makes me…

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  33. Always enjoy your book review posts. Have been thinking and trying to eat better since we messaged back and forth a few weeks ago. Haven’t made my homemade salad dressing yet, but reading labels on what I do drizzle over my spinach and blue cheese!!

    Safe Harbour sounds very good, lots of themes and issues. We just finished The Housekeeper’s Secret by Sandra Schnakenburg (a memoir) and it dealt with many of the same hard topics.

    I loved the cover of the Kate Quinn book but the book didn’t pique my interest. I generally try to avoid the big bestsellers and rarely read more than one book by the same author.

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    1. Hi, Kirstin – Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking comment. You made me wonder if our food choices have truly become healthier over the past ten years. I asked both Google and ChatGPT (which I figured was at least an easy place to start). Both said “yes and no” to my query, stating that “Overall, food choices have become healthier in some respects, especially for those actively seeking better nutrition. However, widespread reliance on ultra-processed foods and misleading marketing still pose significant challenges.” Areas that Google and Chat stated were better included: awareness, rise of plant-based diets, reduced sugar, growth of alternative diets. Areas that remain a concern were listed to be: UPFs still dominate, hidden sugars and additives, portion size and convenience culture, cost and accessibility as well as greenwashing and misinformation . So we have made gains, but sadly still have many food related challenges ahead. Thank you again for your thought-provoking comment.

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  35. Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra Processed People strikes me as a compelling read. Eye-opening too, of how ultra-processed foods dominate our diets, impacting health, addiction and in ways we very often overlook.

    GWT

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  36. Hi Donna – I have just started reading Chris van Tulleken’s book … and I’ve noted a few salient points, even though I’m only on page 31 … and want to mention one thing – except of course can’t find it … marked but not pencil mark … I’ll do a review anon (anon being the word) thanks for all these thoughts on UPPeople and UPF foods – horrifying but so interesting and informative – cheers Hilary

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    1. Hi, Hilary – I was just thinking about you. Thanks so much for stopping by. Chris van Tullekin’s book had a significant impact on me. I read it this past December and have not knowingly touched an ultraprocessed food since. See you at your site soon!

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  37. Hi, Donna,

    Dave and I have become sourdough addicts! We make 2 whole wheat loaves at a time, each week. From the discard, I make our desserts. My next experiment is to churn fresh butter.

    We are incredibly fortunate to have farm fresh produce and dairy so close and affordable. I would love to grow and preserve food from our own garden.

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