Episode #229
Marion Nestle: Follow the Food Money

Few voices have done more to expose the intersections of food, money, and power than Marion Nestle. In this wide-ranging conversation, the author of Food Politics breaks down how corporate lobbying, regulatory loopholes, and government dietary guidelines have all shaped the modern food system – often at the expense of public health. With sharp insight and clear moral purpose, Nestle makes the case for reclaiming nutrition from corporate control and elevating policies that support real food and real farmers. This interview is a must-listen for anyone who cares about the future of food politics in America.

Our Marion Nestle interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Marion Nestle in NYC, June 2, 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with Marion Nestle. Marion, I’ve listened to several of your books on audio, and the actor who narrated them often mispronounced your name.

Marion Nestle 0:16
I volunteered to read my own books, and I was told, “Absolutely not. We want a professional.”

Dave Chapman 0:25
Oh, that’s interesting. I interviewed Michael Pollan a couple of times. The second time, he said he was thinking of redoing the audio version of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” because he thought, “It should be in my voice. It’s a memoir.” I would have enjoyed hearing it.

Marion Nestle 0:42
People complained that it wasn’t in my voice. One of them that was done, they sent me a list of queries about how to pronounce things, but that was the only one. I don’t remember which one it was.

Dave Chapman 0:57
Your memoir, what was the title of that?

Marion Nestle 1:00
“Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics.” I’m told that the reading of these things is a very long and tedious process. I guess they were trying to save me, but I was willing to do it.

Dave Chapman 1:20
Well, sometime try one of them. It’d be interesting. If I wrote a book, I don’t know if I could read it. I don’t know.

Marion Nestle 1:28
Yeah, and you are willing. They sent me five voices to choose between.

Dave Chapman 1:33
I thought that the woman who did “Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics” did a very good job. I thought she was very listenable, too.

Marion Nestle 1:41
I listened to the five voices and picked one, but I didn’t know on what basis I was picking because I’ve never listened to an audiobook.

Dave Chapman 1:51
Well, I had a lot of work to do in the greenhouse in the last two weeks, so I took the opportunity to listen to two of your books. How many books have you written?

Marion Nestle 2:03
As of next week, 16.

Dave Chapman 2:05
Sixteen. Amazing amount of work. What age were you when you published your first book?

Marion Nestle 2:14
Fifty years old?

Dave Chapman 2:15
That’s what I thought. The second half of your life to date.

Marion Nestle 2:19
That’s when everything got done.

Dave Chapman 2:23
I’m really curious, I think that “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health” is probably the book that you are most famous for?

Marion Nestle 2:29
I would think so. Although my best seller is “What to Eat,” which is coming out in a new edition in November under the title “What to Eat Now.”

Dave Chapman 2:40
All right. Let me ask you, of all those books, which one would you think is most significant?

Marion Nestle 2:48
I guess “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health” was the one that really changed everything. People thought it was groundbreaking. I thought I was just talking about the obvious, but nobody… it apparently never occurred to anybody that food companies are businesses with stockholders to please and that their entire purpose is to sell more product, not less. That apparently was a new thought.

Dave Chapman 3:18
Well, it’s actually not a new thought now. I guess the book was successful in that people now understand. Would you agree with that, that people are now understanding that…?

Marion Nestle 3:29
When “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health” came out, the first question I got asked was, “What does food have to do with politics?” I don’t get asked that anymore.

Dave Chapman 3:30
What does food have to do with politics?

Marion Nestle 3:42
Everything. Starting from the point that it’s a $2 trillion business in the United States alone. Everybody eats and has an opinion about it. People’s opinions about food enormously influence purchases, and purchases influence business. So, businesses are involved in getting people to eat more food, not less. That’s how they make their money.

Dave Chapman 4:09
One of the questions I’ve started to ask people – I just asked Dan yesterday and I asked Michael Pollan the same question. Since “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health” was the came out, that was in 2002?

Marion Nestle 4:22
Yes. It’s come out in two subsequent editions.

Dave Chapman 4:24
But 23 years ago, the first edition. I think you were one of the pioneers of even describing a food system. Do you think the food system has gotten better or worse?

Marion Nestle 4:38
I think it’s the same. There’s just more of it. The issues that were relevant in 2002 are still relevant today. The problems with the food system that were relevant then are still relevant now. Climate change has gotten worse. That’s something that will affect food in ways that were not so obvious in 2002.

Marion Nestle 5:10
For me, the new edition of “What to Eat” is “What to Eat Now” is coming out basically 20 years after I did the research for the first book. Where I see the big changes is in the marketing of foods. It’s not that the system has changed; the way it’s marketed has changed enormously.

Marion Nestle 5:36
The products that I wrote about in 2006 when I wrote “What to Eat” no longer exist in supermarkets. I don’t think there’s a single product that I talked about in that book that I was able to talk about in the current edition because they’ve disappeared.

Marion Nestle 5:56
There are whole new aspects of the supermarket that didn’t exist 20 years ago. Plant-based would be the most obvious example. Except for soy milk, those products didn’t exist 20 years ago. There’s a new chapter on edibles and pet food. There are several new chapters that weren’t in the first edition of things that have really changed, but it’s all about marketing.

Dave Chapman 6:26
Part of the reason things have changed is that people have wanted something different, and marketing moves in to respond to that and maybe convince them to buy the same thing they were buying under a new label. But where do you think that is in the horse and cart?

Marion Nestle 6:52
It’s very hard to say, but let’s talk about organic since that’s what we’re interested in. When I wrote “What to Eat” in 2006, there were a few organic products in supermarkets. Now there’s not a supermarket in America that doesn’t have some organic products. I did a pretty comprehensive survey in New York City of stores that I thought would not have anything organic in them, but I never found a store that didn’t have some organic products.

Marion Nestle 7:27
Then there are whole supermarkets, like Whole Foods, that are devoted to organic products. What you think about industrial organics, Whole Foods, and Amazon owning it are other issues. But if you want organic food, you can find it. It’s not always more expensive than conventionally prepared foods, because I did a lot of price comparisons too. I was surprised at what I found in doing that research.

Marion Nestle 8:00
The changes are there. The changes are at the margins, and that’s a marginal change, in a way, because the food system is still based on conventionally grown crops with lots of pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides – all those things that are polluting the environment.

Dave Chapman 8:26
I see people choosing organic because they want an alternative to that chemical system.

Marion Nestle 8:31
Most people choose organics because they think it’s healthier, however they define that. It should be healthier. If it’s grown on better soil, it should have more nutrients from that soil. It’s very, very difficult to demonstrate that.

Dave Chapman 8:52
Yes, that’s right. Certification is complicated for that reason. There are things that, at least at this point in our science, appear to be somewhat unknowable. We can’t prove things one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not true.

Marion Nestle 9:12
This is true. And then the question is always, how much evidence do you need? Common sense is important in a lot of this. It seems to me that eating foods that are not grown with pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers makes sense.

Marion Nestle 9:32
It’s difficult to prove that herbicides and pesticides cause harm to humans, but they certainly cause harm to whatever it is they’re there to protect against. It’s hard to believe that they could do any good. Are they going to be good for human health? No, they’re not going to be good for human health.

Marion Nestle 9:53
We know they’re really, really bad for people who get doused with them through accidents or other kinds of problems. So, in that situation, you have two choices. You can say, “Well, nobody can prove it’s bad, so I’m just going to go ahead and not pay attention to it.”

Marion Nestle 10:10
Or you can use the precautionary principle and say, “Well, there are questions about it. I’m going to choose organic because at least I know that in the blood of people who choose organics, there are fewer of these pesticides and herbicides.” That has certainly been proven.

Dave Chapman 10:32
We all have glyphosate in our blood.

Marion Nestle 10:36
I just read a new study. You have lower levels of glyphosate if you switch to organics.

Dave Chapman 10:41
Okay. Organic has, I think, not two traditions but two aspects of its history. One is no pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, and no insecticides. The other has to do with soil health and nutritional quality. Organic, as it comes down from Sir Albert Howard, as one of the famous writers, he was written about primarily in terms of nutrition and health as a positive.

Dave Chapman 11:17
Then I would consider Rachel Carson as somebody who was really writing about the poisoning of America. These two strands blended to become the American organic movement, I think. Do you believe that Howard had it right?

Marion Nestle 11:36
Oh, yeah. These early thinkers about these issues absolutely could see the importance of healthy soils. That’s still true from the environmental perspective as well, because those chemicals leach out of the soils. They kill the natural organisms that are in those soils if they’re pesticides, or if they’re… They change the human microbiome. We don’t really know what that means exactly, but it’s unlikely to be good.

Marion Nestle 12:11
If you just use common sense in this, it makes sense that if you’re not using these chemicals that are harmful to wildlife, then it’s probably better all the way around. Look what it’s doing to wildlife and the water supplies. The idea that there isn’t a single stream in the state of Iowa that you can drink out of – not one – is my understanding of what’s going on now.

Marion Nestle 12:43
Why there isn’t an absolute revolution about this kind of thing is astonishing to me. People should be able to have water that they can drink. We’re very lucky in New York City; we have terrific water. It’s monitored very carefully to make sure it stays terrific. But not every community in the United States has that.

Dave Chapman 13:08
Iowa, at this point, has the second-highest cancer rate in the country for a state.

Marion Nestle 13:14
Yeah, I wonder what that’s due to. Again, very difficult to prove. But then the question becomes, how much proof do you need? What about precaution? I’m greatly in favor of precaution. If you have choices, you choose organics because they’re going to save you problems that you don’t know about, maybe. If you can afford it, it’s great. Do it.

Dave Chapman 13:42
Okay. We’ll talk about affordability in a minute. Michael Pollan’s famous food quote, seven words…

Marion Nestle 13:52
“Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That really covers it. From a nutritional standpoint, it covers it.

Dave Chapman 13:59
Yeah. I proposed to Michael that we add three words to that, “Mostly real organic.”

Marion Nestle 14:03
Well, I have other words. Defining food is not ultra-processed would be another edition.

Dave Chapman 14:18
I think he did imply that. But when he said, “Eat food,” that’s what he meant. But I thought he left out any conversation about how the food was grown. I think it’s important, and Michael agreed. I said, “I think this is very important.” He said, “I do too.” We hope that in his next book – if he moves beyond drugs and back to food – he’ll address that. That it is important that we understand a carrot is not just a carrot.

Marion Nestle 14:16
It’s part of what Joan Gussow, in her work, always talked about: connecting the agricultural system to the health and nutrition system as part of one unit. That’s food systems thinking. People who are concerned about food systems thinking argue, as I would, that you can’t talk about the nutritional status of people without understanding how the food is produced.

Marion Nestle 14:16
The production system is designed for profit; it was never designed for public health. I think we need an agricultural system that has, as its fundamental purpose, improving the health of people. It would be nice if it also promoted the health of the people working within the system. But that may be asking too much.

Dave Chapman 14:28
I think it would be one in the same, to be honest. I think if, if you are actually producing food that’s very healthy for the people eating it, it will be much healthier for the people who are growing it as well.

Marion Nestle 15:53
Well, I’m talking about what they’re paid.

Dave Chapman 15:55
Oh, yes, okay. Healthy for the community.

Dave Chapman 16:10
I think that you were one of the people who was significant in helping people to start thinking and talking about a food system. We’re here today at a service to remember Joan Gussow, who also was very active in this. Could you share, for people who maybe haven’t thought about this much, why we need to think about a food system instead of just the food that we get in the store?

Marion Nestle 16:37
First of all, my definition of a food system is everything that happens to a food from the time it’s planted or born until the time it’s consumed and wasted. It’s everything in that cycle, which involves the growing, the planting, the raising, the slaughter, the picking, the transportation, the selling, the buying, the preparing, the eating, and the wasting – all of those things are part of it.

Marion Nestle 17:15
The idea is that you can’t really understand why each of those things is happening the way it’s happening unless you understand all the other components of that system. We have an agricultural system in the United States that is designed to grow as much food as possible. I’m talking here about corn and soybeans, primarily, because those are the main crops that are produced in the United States.

Marion Nestle 17:44
The easiest way to explain what’s wrong with the food system is to talk about corn production. There are something like 12 billion bushels of corn produced in the United States every year. Roughly half go to feed animals, and the other half go to make ethanol for automobiles, with a tiny little percentage in the middle of that that’s food for people. Hardly any of the corn that’s grown in the United States is grown to feed people – unless indirectly, through animals – but not to feed people directly.

Marion Nestle 18:25
The idea that nearly half of the food supply gets burned up in ethanol fuel is insane. I can’t even get my head around it. It’s so insane because this is a system that’s designed for profit. It’s not designed to be good for the environment. We can argue forcefully that growing as much corn as possible on as much land as possible, because you can sell it to ethanol producers, makes no sense from the standpoint of the environment.

Marion Nestle 19:02
It forces corn to be grown in places where it should never be grown, because there’s not enough water. Water is being extracted in order to water that corn, just to go up in smoke when it’s burned in automobiles. It’s just a crazy system. I want to see a food system that is aimed at producing food for people. Yes, there would be feed for animals as part of that, but not nearly as much. People would be growing fruits and vegetables on that land. What a concept!

Dave Chapman 19:38
Marion, how did it happen that half of the corn in America is grown for ethanol, which doesn’t make sense anyway?

Marion Nestle 19:47
I think that this started in the 1970s. Up until then, the government had policies to try to make sure that producers of food got enough money to make a living. They did that by putting limits on the number of acres that could be devoted to major crops. Farmers were paid not to grow food and to limit the amount they were producing.

Marion Nestle 20:17
That changed in the 1970s with the famous Earl Butz, who was Secretary of Agriculture. He thought we needed to produce more food, not less. The famous “fence row to fence row” idea came from him – you should grow as much as you possibly can, and the government will protect the prices of what you’re growing. Farmers responded by growing much more food.

Marion Nestle 20:46
That policy began in the 1970s and picked up in the 1980s when President Reagan was elected and brought in a lot of deregulation. Farmers make money by growing more corn; the more they grow, the more they get in subsidies, insurance payments, and other forms of support.

Marion Nestle 21:11
The system is set up to protect large agricultural producers. It’s not designed to do much for the growers of fruits, vegetables, and grains that people actually eat. Fruits, vegetables, and beans are considered specialty crops. They’re covered in the horticulture title of the Farm Bill – not the commodity agriculture part.

Marion Nestle 21:43
They’ve kind of been the stepchildren of the Department of Agriculture. There’s not much support for them, and it’s small-scale. We like doing things big in America, so the bigger, the better – even though that approach destroys the soil, leaches chemicals into groundwater, causes terrible problems, and depletes the population of the Midwest. When all those small farms closed, people left. Everybody decries the loss of population in the Midwest, but that’s because it’s all big ag.

Dave Chapman 22:27
If fruits and vegetables are the stepchild, then organic is the unwanted, illegitimate Cinderella. It was never ever wanted to be desired by the USDA.

Marion Nestle 22:46
Organics are an explicit critique of the commodity agriculture system, so you can understand why they aren’t adored by the Department of Agriculture. Having the organic standards within the commodity Department of Agriculture is a conflict of interest from the get go – it’s a big problem.

Marion Nestle 23:10
The Department of Agriculture has never given organics the kind of support they need, and Congress has never given it the kind of support either. It’s considered a very annoying fly in the ointment.

Dave Chapman 23:26
Yeah. What happens in the world if the USDA stops supporting commodity agriculture and, in fact, we move to a purely capitalistic system without monopolies? Does it all collapse?

Marion Nestle 23:46
A lot of people think it would, and certainly, there would have to be a transition. You would have to break up a lot of the large farms, and you would have to do a lot of soil replenishment to bring those farms back to the point where they could support growing crops. I think it would be very interesting to see the Department of Agriculture support fruit and vegetable growers and see what they could do.

Marion Nestle 23:56
For one thing, it would bring the price down. The price is a big problem because, when poor people say they can’t afford to buy fruits and vegetables, they’re right. The price of all foods in the United States has gone up considerably over the last 40 years, but the price of fruits and vegetables has risen much, much higher than the price of commodity foods or of the ultra-processed products made from them.

Dave Chapman 24:48
Let’s look at that for a little bit. The price of the commodities has not risen nearly as quickly because it’s supported by the taxpayers to keep it down?

Marion Nestle 24:59
Yes. The Farm Bill – that obscure, enormous, completely incomprehensible piece of legislation – and I say this advisedly because I once made the mistake of trying to teach a course on it. It was not my best teaching experience. The students got so tired of me saying, “Nobody can understand this. It’s just too big.”

Marion Nestle 25:28
But the Farm Bill provides support of various kinds, many of them in very complicated ways, to large agricultural producers. Most of the money goes to the biggest producers. There’s an incentive to produce more and more and more, because then you get more and more money. Almost everybody feels that these things couldn’t be done profitably if the taxpayer subsidies weren’t there.

Marion Nestle 26:01
Farming is considered probably the only business in the United States where nobody is expected to make money – I’m talking about farming on any scale. There are reasons why farms are closing right, left, and center. The organic ones do a little bit better, but even they have trouble because the system is set up so that it’s so expensive to produce food, they can’t sell it at a price people are willing to pay.

Marion Nestle 26:37
We in the United States have one of the least expensive sets of food prices in the world – I think it’s under 10% of income. It’s not only because we’re so rich; it’s also because the price of food is kept artificially low by the way the system of subsidies works. I’m not opposed to food that everybody can afford – I think we need food that everybody can afford, but farmers need to be able to make a living so they can do it right.

Dave Chapman 27:13
There are certain talking points that are carefully crafted to attack organic. One of them is that organic food is for the elites – that only wealthy people can afford this food. I don’t think that’s true, but I do think it’s true that it costs more because it’s not subsidized. My question is: the greater the level of subsidy for what I would call “bad food,” the worse organic appears – not because organic costs so much, but because junk food costs so little.

Marion Nestle 27:49
That argument makes me really upset, because I think poor people deserve to eat just as healthfully as rich people do. But the system is set up. Remember, organics are the Cinderella stepchild of this system – not only kept down but also not liked very much by the rest of it.

Marion Nestle 28:19
We could change that system in an instant by giving the same kind of subsidies to organics and promoting them in exactly the same way. It could be changed instantly. These are political decisions. It’s a market-based political system, but the market is already skewed by the way the subsidies work. So it’s not as if this would be breaking new ground or doing things that haven’t been done before – just switching what you’re interested in.

Marion Nestle 28:55
Maybe under this new administration… Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s very concerned about chemicals in the food supply. Let’s see him take on big ag. I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s going to do about that.

Dave Chapman 29:11
What do you think?

Marion Nestle 29:13
I haven’t seen any evidence for it yet.

Dave Chapman 29:17
It’s almost an impossible battle for anybody. We haven’t seen it from anybody yet who is willing to take on big ag and succeed. There have been our dear beloved outlying politicians, the Chellie Pingrees of the world who try, but it’s never a serious threat.

Marion Nestle 29:44
Not yet. The statements like, “We want chemicals out of the food supply and water. We don’t want PCBs, mercury, and PFAS – all of these chemicals.” Okay, you’re going to take on big agriculture, big food, and big coal-burning power plants?

Marion Nestle 30:12
Every president that I can think of has tried to get coal-burning power plants to just clean up their emissions so they’re not spewing mercury into the atmosphere. It’s so heavy it falls onto the soil, gets into the water supply, and causes a lot of trouble. I’ve never seen a president able to shut that stuff down or shut it off. The current Environmental Protection Agency, if anything, is removing any kind of restrictions on those kinds of emissions.

Dave Chapman 30:51
It does seem to me that the Trump administration is fairly divided internally in its attitudes about this. Obviously, Kennedy is saying, “We’ve got to get chemicals out of agriculture.” It seems like the EPA is saying, “We should allow whatever.”

Marion Nestle 31:08
Whatever they want. We’ll have to see what happens. The agriculture industry has already put out statements that they don’t like the “Make America Healthy Again” commission report, and this is only the beginning.

Dave Chapman 31:08
Yeah. I saw the statement signed by 65 legislators in Congress: senators and Congresspeople.

Marion Nestle 31:22
Titch, titch, we can’t do that.

Dave Chapman 31:41
That’s right, yeah.

Marion Nestle 31:42
It didn’t help that the references weren’t any good, but there you go.

Dave Chapman 31:45
Yeah, that was a problem. Do you think it will be a real fight? Do you think that this is going to go beyond some statements and that there’s going to be a real battle going on?

Marion Nestle 31:58
I hope so. I’d like to see that. I think that would be very interesting to watch. Am I optimistic? Not terribly. But more power to them if they want to take it on. I just don’t see it. There was already some backtracking in that report, if The Washington Post’s accounts are to be believed. There were stronger statements about production agriculture originally in the report that were taken out. They’ve never experienced lobbying in action. They’re going to experience lobbying in action.

Dave Chapman 32:43
Okay, we’ll see. It’s interesting to me – with Kennedy, there are many things I don’t agree with, but when it comes to agriculture and food, I completely agree. I think he completely agrees with everything you’ve said. We have real alignment there. I wish he were Secretary of Agriculture rather than…

Marion Nestle 33:04
Much of what he wants to do is within the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, says that she’s aligned with Health and Human Services on “Make America Healthy Again,” but again, we have yet to see evidence.

Dave Chapman 33:28
Have you read Austin Frerick’s book “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry?”

Marion Nestle 33:31
I blurbed it.

Dave Chapman 33:32
Okay. The foreword by Eric Schlosser, I thought, was just kind of stupendous. Four pages – he’s quoting Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, the hero, saying that the enemy of capitalism is monopoly, and the defender of capitalism against monopoly must be the government.

Marion Nestle 34:00
Right, but when you have corporate capture of government, you can’t do that. We currently have corporate capture of government.

Dave Chapman 34:11
Can you imagine a world in which we break free of that?

Marion Nestle 34:15
I grew up in that world. I grew up in that astonishing period between 1950 and 1980 when all that stuff worked and worked the way it was supposed to. I thought, because this is what I was experiencing, that it was normal. It never occurred to me during that 30-year period that it was such an anomaly in American history.

Marion Nestle 34:47
That, unlike what those of us who were in the student movements of the 1960s thought, things were not going to get better, and we certainly underestimated the backlash. We’re seeing it now.

Dave Chapman 35:06
You said once, when asked, “How did this happen?” you said, “Well, it started in 1980 with the Reagan Revolution.” Can you talk about that – how we got here?

Marion Nestle 35:19
One of the really interesting things about all of this is that everything dates back to 1980, starting with agricultural supports and the way that changed, and the overproduction of food. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of calories in the food supply increased from 3,200 a day per capita to 4,000 a day per capita.

Dave Chapman 35:45
Can you clarify that statement? I read that, and I thought, “Wow.” When you say “in the food supply,” does that mean people are eating that?

Marion Nestle 35:54
No, in the food supply. We’re talking about the food supply. Remember, farmers are growing more food. They’re growing a lot more food. Therefore, the number of calories that they were producing, plus exports minus imports, added up to 3,200 calories a day in 1980. By the year 2000, it was close to 4,000.

Marion Nestle 36:18
These are calories available in the food supply per capita – men, women, and little tiny babies. Not necessarily what people eat, because a lot of food is wasted. Waste is built into the system. If you’ve got 4,000 calories a day per person, and you’re eating 2,000 calories a day, you’re wasting half of what is available to you. But the calories are there. They’re in the food system.

Marion Nestle 36:46
If you’re a food company, you have to sell those calories. You have to figure out how to do that. Your food is competing against the food supply, in which there are twice as many calories as are needed by the population on average. So, food companies made a lot of changes starting in 1980.

Marion Nestle 37:07
They began to promote eating outside the home. Because there was so much food, the cost was low relative to labor, rent, and other kinds of things. It became cheaper for people to eat outside the home. I don’t remember the exact figures, but in 1980, most food was consumed at home. By the year 2000, they were equal – or more food was consumed outside the home.

Marion Nestle 37:39
There are more calories available in restaurant foods than there are in foods cooked at home. Portions are big. One thing that happened was portion sizes got bigger. I had a doctoral student at NYU, Lisa Young, who did that research and documented the increase in portion size between 1980 and 2000.

Marion Nestle 38:05
If I had one concept to get across, it’s that larger portions have more calories. They really do. The more calories you eat, the more you gain weight. Then there were other things that happened as well. Reagan’s deregulatory agenda deregulated a lot of restrictions on advertising. Food companies were able to advertise what they were doing. Food companies moved in to create a food supply that encouraged people to eat more.

Marion Nestle 38:39
The best example I can think of is when I first went to NYU in 1988, there were signs all over the library saying, “Don’t eat here. It’ll promote cockroaches. It’ll ruin the books.” Now, there are vending machines all over the library, and people bring coffee in and do all these things. Bookstores – you were never allowed to bring a cup of coffee into a bookstore. Now bookstores have cafes. Food appears at the cash registers of clothing stores – candy, nuts, whatever.

Marion Nestle 39:16
Food is everywhere. The more food that’s available, the more people eat. The larger the portions, the more of it people eat. The more times a day you eat, the more calories you take in. All of these were big societal changes during that 20-year period, from 1980 to 2000. They account for the increased caloric consumption of the American population during that period by 300 to 500 calories a day.

Marion Nestle 39:48
There are arguments about how many, but nobody argues about whether there are more. There are more. That’s roughly a 20-pound weight gain that was experienced by Americans between 1980 and 2000. All of that is sufficient to account for the rise in obesity that occurred in the population, so that we now have a situation where 75% of American adults are overweight or obese.

Dave Chapman 40:17
That has inevitable health consequences.

Marion Nestle 40:21
Inevitable health consequences – not for everybody, but for a big proportion of the population. An enormous increase in type 2 diabetes, for which overweight is a profound risk factor, and a correlation with heart disease and cancer, and with overall mortality.

Dave Chapman 40:21
They mentioned today, one of the people speaking about Jon’s debate in the organic movement: “Could you have an organic Twinkie?” When Jon served on the National Organic Standards Board, there was a guy – I always forget his name – but he said, “Yes, you can have an organic Twinkie. I’m not here to tell people what they can eat.” Jon’s perspective was, “That is not what organic is about.” I thought that was a really basic conversation about what “organic” means.

Marion Nestle 41:15
The way I put it is: there’s the letter and the spirit of organic. Once, the organic movement was a spiritual movement. There was the idea of what food should be: it should be whole, it should replace what’s taken out of the soil, it should not harm the environment, and it should promote health.

Marion Nestle 41:16
Once it got codified into the National Organic Standards – which had to be done in order to create a legal definition – then food producers could say anything that meets that legal definition meets the organic standards. You could have an organic Twinkie by those legal standards, but it meant the letter of the law did not meet the spirit of the law.

Marion Nestle 41:16
The Department of Agriculture isn’t interested in spirit; it’s only interested in legalities. That’s why, from what I have observed since 1994, when those standards were approved… Did I get that date right? I think that’s when it was approved.

Dave Chapman 41:30
1990 is when the law passed.

Marion Nestle 42:15
Yeah, it was 1994 when the standards…

Dave Chapman 42:24
Then it was 2000 or 2001 that they actually began certifying.

Marion Nestle 42:37
That’s right. The 12 years it took to get the standards written. Once those standards were in place, then the interpretations came in. But what has been a sort of steady trend throughout the subsequent years has been an attempt to weaken the standards.

Marion Nestle 42:59
The object of the game, if you’re big organic and you’re industrial organic – which, what did Michael Pollan call it, the industrial organic complex – then your objective is to be able to market your products as organic as easily as possible, with as few restrictions as possible.

Marion Nestle 43:18
There’s been this steady tension, trying to keep the organic standards as close to the spirit of organics as possible versus the commercial interests of the big producers, who really don’t care about anything except making sure that they’re selling their products at a higher price.

Marion Nestle 43:42
It’s why it’s generated so much hostility against the higher price of organics. A lot of people think there’s just nothing to it, but in fact, every organic producer has to meet the letter of the standards.

Dave Chapman 43:57
I thought that the law was actually astonishingly good. It wasn’t that they got the Organic Food Production Act wrong, but one of the things that… I think that the invasion of the industry was inevitable. As people turned to organic to find their food, of course, the brands went there because that’s where the money was accumulating.

Dave Chapman 44:21
I think that – I speak for myself – I became very busy trying to figure out how to make a living farming, and I became less active as an activist off the farm supporting organic. Before all that, we were all activists in the organic movement. We were trying to figure out how to make a living, but we got together every year, and we voted on the standards.

Dave Chapman 44:48
Every state that had an organization, we got together and had our little bag lunches, and we spent a long, hard day arguing about what the standards would be. Then suddenly there was nothing to talk about. It was being decided in Washington, not in Vermont. I wish we had just said, “Our work is just beginning. It’s not over. It’s just beginning.”

Marion Nestle 45:14
It’s very hard for people who are not motivated entirely by money to understand people who are entirely motivated by money. It’s very hard to understand that. What I wrote about in “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health,” and what my subsequent writing has been about, is that following the money is not a bad first step in trying to understand what’s going on.

Marion Nestle 45:45
What I see are the relentless attempts to weaken the organic standards – just attempt after attempt after attempt. It never stops. It has to do with the fact that you can market these products at a higher price. That’s what it’s about. These companies have stockholders to please.

Marion Nestle 46:06
Once you are a publicly traded company in the United States, any values that you have are gone, except for one. You’re only allowed to have one value if you’re a publicly traded company, and that’s profits for stockholders. That’s the way the system works. Unless you’re a big corporation, but even there.

Dave Chapman 46:31
Here we are in a world in which those for-profit companies are dominating and controlling the government. As citizens who do have concerns other than money, we’re not indifferent – nobody’s indifferent to having their farm succeed – but we have other values that are important too. What are your thoughts about how we go forward most effectively?

Marion Nestle 46:59
You have to be organized. You can’t do it as individuals very easily. As individuals, you can vote with your fork. You go to the store, you make a choice of food, you’re voting with your fork for the kind of food system you want. But if you want to change the politics, you need to have lots and lots of people on your side. That means a level of community organizing that doesn’t get done in the United States very well.

Marion Nestle 47:26
The organic movement is one place that could do it if there were unified goals among the various components of the organic movement. But remember, there’s this tension between the letter and the spirit. The letter-and-spirit people need to get together on this and see protection of organics as a common goal and go after that.

Marion Nestle 47:30
You have to use the electoral system in the way that everybody else does, which means writing your congressional representatives, especially if you live in a Republican state. You have to let your representatives know what is important to the constituents of that state.

Marion Nestle 48:11
I say, run for office. You want to change the society at this point? We have to have elected officials who are more interested in public health than corporate health. None of this is very easy to do, and we’re at a very difficult time right now, where the amount of money that is being spent on the political system, thanks to the Supreme Court Citizens United decision, is pouring into politics.

Marion Nestle 48:50
The amount of money that has to be spent to run a political campaign is enormous. On the other hand, sometimes the good guys win, and you sure don’t win if you don’t run.

Dave Chapman 49:11
When “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health” came out, you were attacked, sometimes frontally and sometimes surreptitiously, as being a problem to these companies. One of the accusations was that you were a great champion of the nanny state. But you know what?

Marion Nestle 49:36
Right. Guilty as charged.

Dave Chapman 49:38
Okay. Let’s talk about that, Marion, because I have friends who, the moment that this comes up, go, “Well, I don’t want anybody telling me what I can eat.” I say, “Okay.” Can we talk about that? Guilty as charged. Tell me, what are your attitudes about food and talking to people about how they should eat?

Marion Nestle 50:02
I’m greatly in favor of government regulation. Let’s go back to Adam Smith, if you like. The system doesn’t work unless there are government regulation – and the stronger the government regulation, the better. Because, if nothing else, it does two things. It creates a level playing field. Every food corporation has to play by the same rules. People who are in food companies tell me that they would love to stop marketing to children if only everybody else would too.

Marion Nestle 50:38
For that, you need government regulation. They’re not going to do it voluntarily because nobody wants to go first. Nobody does. It’ll cause them to lose sales. They can’t. I’m greatly in favor of strong regulation. The other reason is because it induces trust. The American public doesn’t trust the food system anymore, I think, for very good reason. They think food companies are just out for profit. Well, guess what? They are. So, we need strong regulation.

Marion Nestle 51:12
The question is, what do you do without it? Of course, anytime there is an argument in favor of regulating, then the counterargument comes up: this is a nanny state, and you’re telling us what to do. We can make our own decisions about food. We’re adults. We can make our own decisions. Well, yes, you can – if your decisions are informed. But you only have a choice of eating what’s in front of you. You only have a choice of what you can get your hands on and what you can afford.

Marion Nestle 51:51
We might have a very, very different food system if there were other choices involved. We might have one in which organics were the norm, in which everybody was producing organic food, and these other things were looked at with more suspicion. We would have a different food system if we had better labeling. If we had a better food system, we’d be able to make decisions better. If we had better labeling – how about food labels that people could understand?

Marion Nestle 52:22
I say that because when the Nutrition Labeling Act was passed and went into effect, and the rules came out in 1993, one of the things that just made me laugh when I went through this 875-page Federal Register notice, which I have a hard copy of in my office, was the discussion of the food labels – the nutrition facts and the ingredient list.

Marion Nestle 52:54
The FDA had tried a lot of different designs of the food label and took them out and did consumer research on them: focus group testing – what do you understand, and what do you not understand?

Marion Nestle 53:09
What they discovered was that the people who were tested didn’t understand any of the labels. None of them. They picked the one that was least poorly understood, but they were all poorly understood. The other thing that they found was that people who understood it the best picked the worst label, and people who understood it the least picked… It was a mess, but nobody really understood them. So, to say that the public is informed about what’s in food products is not really correct, because nobody can understand these things very well.

Marion Nestle 54:01
Then, of course, real foods don’t have labels. People have to know how to cook. I learned how to cook in eighth-grade home economics. That’s when I learned how to cook. It was very useful. We started with cookies. Everybody wants to know how to make cookies. I’m pretty good at making cookies. But we don’t teach that anymore, so people don’t know how to cook.

Marion Nestle 54:27
It’s very difficult to make real foods. Actually, it’s not difficult – it just feels like it’s difficult to take real foods and turn them into something delicious unless you know how to do it. It’s not that hard. Once you know how to do it, it’s really easy, but people are very intimidated.

Marion Nestle 54:47
Then the food industry has worked very hard to convince people that cooking, shopping, going to a store, and washing dishes are chores. All of these things are terrible chores, and you don’t have time for them – without any kind of sense of how much fun it is to cook, how entertaining it is to eat the products of what you’ve just made, and how it can be done quite quickly if time is a real issue.

Marion Nestle 55:20
But a lot of people don’t have knives, pots and pans, refrigerators, or stoves. Most middle-class or upper-class people have no idea that there are people in America who don’t have these things. But people who work with food assistance programs know very well that there are lots of families that don’t have these things. That’s the situation that we’re in, and you can only do what you know how to do.

Marion Nestle 55:55
So, to say that it’s a nanny state for the government to do something – it’s only a nanny state if it’s something you don’t like. If it’s something the government is doing that you do like – and most people are quite unaware of how the government is involved in the food supply – then it’s okay. There’s a lot of hypocrisy involved in this.

Dave Chapman 56:21
I want to be respectful of your time. We could talk for hours, but before we end, is there anything that you would like to say? Anything I should have asked you that made you think, “This is important, Dave, I want to mention it”?

Marion Nestle 56:34
I think the most important thing that never gets mentioned in discussions of food politics is how important the pleasure of food is, the deliciousness of food. It’s something that you get to do several times a day. In a world in which pleasure is sometimes hard to come by, eating is a wonderful thing. Eating healthfully can be delicious. It should be delicious. I think it’s delicious. I never want to forget that.

Marion Nestle 57:09
In any discussion of the politics of food and what’s going on now, what’s often overlooked is how important food is to people’s lives – not only as a source of nutrition and health, but also as a source of cultural connection and connections with friends, and just pure pleasure. Eating something delicious is just a wonderful thing to do, and you get to do it all the time.

Dave Chapman 57:38
Okay. Marion Nestle, thank you so much.

Marion Nestle 57:41
My pleasure.