Episode #275
Marion Nestle: Food Politics In The Age Of MAHA

Marion Nestle brings her decades-long study of food politics into sharp focus, examining what the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has achieved, where it has already pulled back, and why that gap matters for public health and agriculture. Speaking live at Churchtown, she tracks the fault lines around food dyes, the GRAS loophole, ultra-processed foods, SNAP restrictions, pesticide policy, and the ongoing influence of Big Food, Big Ag, and Washington lobbying.

Marion Nestle’s stage talk has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Marion Nestle speaks at the Saving Real Organic conference at Churchtown Dairy, September, 2025

Dave Chapman 0:01
The next speaker is Marion Nestle. Marion is a new friend of mine. I only met her this year at a memorial service for Joan Gussow. She started her career late and just kept going. She’s a remarkable force in the food system.

Dave Chapman 0:21
Her book, “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health,” is very significant. Those are two words that were not casually put together before then, and now they’re commonly put together. So, Marion.

Marion Nestle 0:43
Hello. It’s just such an honor to be here. That’s all I can say. I’ve enjoyed every minute of this, and I’ve learned so much from you. When I was asked to speak here, I said, “What do you want me to talk about?” They said, “Just talk about what’s on your mind.” What’s on my mind is food politics, and that’s what I’m going to talk about.

Marion Nestle 1:08
By way of introduction, I write books about food politics. I’m a retired university professor. These are my three most recent books. I like showing the memoir on the left because I haven’t changed a bit. The fish book – “The Fish Counter (Picador Shorts)” is the one that they’ve got back there.

Marion Nestle 1:25
It’s a little tiny thing that’s an excerpt from the large book that’s being published in November, “What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters,” and there are some flyers for it back there. That’s the end of the commercial. But anyway, that’s what I do.

Marion Nestle 1:29
When my book “Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health” came out, as Dave said, the first question I was asked was, “What does food have to do with politics?” It took me a while to explain it. It takes no time at all to explain it now.

Marion Nestle 1:57
My starting point for this discussion, where I’m going to be talking about what’s going on in Washington, was Donald Trump’s announcement at the end of 2024, just about a year ago, that in appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services, he said, “For too long Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex.”

Marion Nestle 2:23
I nearly fell off my chair. He sounded just like me. Then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “We want to make America healthy again,” which is what I’ve spent most of my career trying to work on.

Marion Nestle 2:37
The industrial food complex – I don’t know what President Trump meant by that – but what I mean by it is the handful of companies that own most of the food in the supermarket. That’s Big Food, all those different companies. But then we also have Big Ag.

Marion Nestle 2:56
I like to show the slide of what happens to corn that Austin showed this morning, but I’m showing you a different one, which is how two companies, Bayer and Corteva, own 65 to 70% of the corn seeds and soybeans in the United States. That’s monopoly in action, and you heard plenty about what the significance of that is.

Marion Nestle 3:21
RFK Jr. calls out the food industry as the primary culprit in the worsening health epidemic. This is Kennedy’s agenda, which unfortunately you’re not going to be able to see, but he said, “We’re betraying our children by allowing the food industry to poison them.” He used the word poisons. By poisons, he meant three different kinds of things.

Marion Nestle 3:55
He meant the artificial colors and food additives, chemicals, pollutants, and pesticides. He talked specifically about mercury in fish, and he talked about ultra-processed foods. Then he wants, as part of the agenda, to improve the quality of food in food assistance programs, particularly SNAP, the food stamp program. He also wants to get the corruption out of politics- an amazing agenda.

Marion Nestle 4:27
I want to talk about how that agenda is playing out. First of all, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is a real movement. It should not be underestimated, and it has scored several substantial wins. The first one is getting color additives out of the food supply.

Marion Nestle 4:50
RFK Jr. has succeeded in getting the major food companies to voluntarily agree to remove artificial dyes, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for the first time, has a website tracking industry pledges to do this.

Marion Nestle 5:09
All of this information is announced on X (formerly Twitter). Here are three screenshots from X, listing MAHA wins from PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, and most recently, from Utz Brands, who have all pledged voluntarily to remove the colors by the end of 2027.

Marion Nestle 5:32
Another win: he has gotten the FDA to close what is called the GRAS loophole – the Generally Recognized as Safe loophole – which is a provision in the FDA’s oversight of food additives that allows companies to decide for themselves whether the additives they put in their food products are safe. There’s a process, but it’s a trivial one, and that is being closed.

Marion Nestle 6:05
The FDA has said that it will pay attention to those additives. These are things that food advocates like me have been calling for for a very long time. Another MAHA win, announced on X, is that states are agreeing to ban sugar-sweetened beverages – and in some states, other kinds of foods – from being purchased with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards if participants are in the SNAP program.

Marion Nestle 6:39
I think twelve states have agreed to do this so far, and undoubtedly more are coming. I’ve hoped for a long time that there would be pilot projects to do this, particularly with sugar-sweetened beverages, and that there would be research attached to it. We’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed on that one.

Marion Nestle 7:02
However, we have to look at this in context. This comes at a time when the Trump administration has chosen to cancel the annual survey of food insecurity in the United States, a report that is published every year, usually in the fall. The most recent one was in 2023, and it’s easy to understand why they are not going to do this again.

Marion Nestle 7:28
There’s one expected to come out in a month or two, but the 2023 report showed a substantial uptick in food insecurity – that is, the inability to have a reliable source of food on a daily basis. The percentage of food-insecure people in the United States is now roughly the same as it was during the 2008 recession.

Marion Nestle 7:54
If you don’t want to know about that, if you want to cut SNAP and get rid of food assistance programs, you don’t want to know how many people are food-insecure in the United States.

Marion Nestle 8:07
What about ultra-processed foods? Ultra-processed foods are industrially produced foods that contain many additives, salt, sugar, and fat. There’s a complicated definition, but there is now so much evidence linking them to poor health that the obvious solution to many food and health problems in the United States is to cut down on ultra-processed foods.

Marion Nestle 8:38
The first MAHA report – the report that came out in May, Make Our Children Healthy Again: The Assessment – was a devastating critique of the state of child health in the United States. It mentioned the word ultra-processed forty times in that document, leading many of us to think that reducing ultra-processed foods would be a major part of the agenda.

Marion Nestle 9:05
However, in the report that came out in September, the strategy report, in which RFK Jr. and the government announced the plan for making children healthy again, ultra-processed is only mentioned once, and that one mention is, “Can we please define it?”

Marion Nestle 9:30
They have put a call out for defining ultra-processed foods. I think the reason for that is very obvious: eating less is very bad for business. We don’t know who got to RFK Jr. in between the two reports, but it’s clear somebody got to him.

Marion Nestle 9:49
What about agriculture, which is something of more interest to this particular group? Is it true, as Politico asked, that MAHA is an existential threat to industrial agriculture? How’s that for a thought? Publicly, the industry has been very quiet about MAHA; privately, they’re panicking, said Politico. Were they? Well, here’s what they’re panicking about.

Marion Nestle 10:15
RFK Jr. made a statement: “America’s agricultural policy is destroying America’s health. It’s destroying the economic health of farmers by forcing them to get bigger or get out.” Pretty exciting statement. The first MAHA report talked about, not in a favorable way, the subsidies for fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, and support for organic foods.

Marion Nestle 10:40
It said these account for a mere tenth of a percent of the 2028 Farm Bill, suggesting that the MAHA movement was going to support a farm bill that subsidized fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, and supported organic foods. What happened in the second report? Agricultural deregulation.

Marion Nestle 11:04
There is something in there about organic – streamlining the organic certification process and reducing costs for small farms transitioning to organic practices. That sounds pretty good. I wonder what it means in practice. We’ll find out.

Marion Nestle 11:24
RFK Jr. is not in charge of what goes on in agriculture. He’s in Health and Human Services, and he manages the FDA. The Agriculture Department is under the leadership of Brooke Rollins, who’s the Secretary of Agriculture, and she has announced a Farmers First policy – a small family farms policy agenda – because she said, “The defense of the family farm is a defense of everything America has been and everything that it will be.” Again, a really hopeful statement that the MAHA movement is going to support small farms.

Marion Nestle 12:06
Soon after that, she announced a proposed regenerative farming pilot program to address on-farm resource concerns while providing farmers with conservation plans. I don’t know what that means, but it could have a germ of real usefulness in it.

Marion Nestle 12:27
On the other hand, Secretary Rollins uses a lot of language and rhetoric that I find very disturbing. She said, for example, “Gone are the days when we will be advancing the Green New Deal. The USDA will root out wasteful programs, especially ones that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and far-left climate agendas.” It’s the “far-left” stuff that disturbs me, because that’s rhetoric, and it’s not very specific about what the concern is.

Marion Nestle 13:03
Last week, Secretary Rollins announced a suite of actions to support American farmers, but she’s not talking about you. She’s talking about the industrial producers of corn and soybeans, in part to compensate for the fact that China bought nearly $13 billion in soybeans last year, and this year it’s going to be zero – which, for industrial soybean producers, is likely to be a problem. The USDA is determined to make up for the losses they are suffering.

Marion Nestle 13:41
There’s concern that the second MAHA report pulled back on one of the things that the MAHA movement has been very clear about – they want to get the pesticides out of agriculture – but the second MAHA report did not say anything about restricting pesticides such as glyphosate. It pulled back on that.

Marion Nestle 14:02
In the radical journal, The Wall Street Journal, did an investigation of what happened there and found that farmers and industry groups had gotten to RFK Jr. His commission had sought input from the food and agriculture industries because they complained bitterly that they were not involved in the first MAHA report. Even though RFK Jr. had criticized corporate influence, he was now reaching out to food and agriculture industries and finding out how Washington really worked, I think.

Marion Nestle 14:44
The New Lead had an article explaining that the changes and omissions in the second MAHA report were in direct response to lobbying from major agricultural groups. That explains why the Trump administration has backed down on its promises about getting rid of PFAS.

Marion Nestle 15:08
His first EPA, in the Trump 1 administration, had promised to crack down on these chemicals, and now the EPA is eliminating some of the provisions and not going after PFAS in the way that it did before. Sorry, Abby. No help on that one.

Marion Nestle 15:29
I want to say something about the Dietary Guidelines, because in order to know what this administration is doing about these kinds of issues, we need to see the assessment document, we need to see the strategy document, and we need to see the Dietary Guidelines, which are due to come out before the end of this year.

Marion Nestle 15:54
Secretary Rollins has been giving speeches about the Dietary Guidelines, and she says the guidelines will highlight whole foods and regenerative farming. There’s a grain of hope in that. The guidelines, she said, will prioritize whole, healthy, and nutritious foods such as whole-fat dairy, fruits, vegetables, and meats. In other words, they’re going to go after whole, unprocessed foods.

Marion Nestle 16:23
But in a previous discussion in which she and RFK Jr. talked about how they’re going to issue very short dietary guidelines – and do them very soon – she said, “We will make certain that the guidelines are based on sound science, not political science. Gone are the days when leftist ideologies guide public policy.”

Marion Nestle 16:48
When I read that, I thought, “When did leftist ideologies ever guide public policy in nutrition and health? If they did, I would be a much happier person.” Then I thought, “What does she mean by leftist ideology?” Then I thought, “Ah, I get it. It’s plants.”

Marion Nestle 17:13
Sure enough, meat will make America healthy again, for the current federal guidelines are favoring inferior plant-based protein, and that’s going to have to change. Here we have Secretaries Rollins and Kennedy touring Texas and other places on a mission to connect agriculture and health – something that Joan Gussow did from the very beginning, and that I’ve picked up in my own fashion and wish we could actually do.

Marion Nestle 17:48
I don’t know what to say about what’s going on. The rhetoric is terrific in most cases. The reality – we just don’t know yet. On the other hand, they have at least three more years to show us what they’re going to do.

Marion Nestle 18:00
But I think the conclusion at this time is beautifully put by this cartoon in which MAHA is celebrating getting rid of food dyes – oh yeah, switching high-fructose corn syrup for cane sugar. I can’t even talk about that with a straight face – and getting rid of seed oils, while at the same time they’re dismantling the country’s research and public health system.

Marion Nestle 18:26
That’s what we’re up against. I think a movement is absolutely required at this point – a movement in which everybody who cares about these issues gets together and makes their voices heard as loudly as possible, in as many places and in as many ways as possible. I thank you very much for the opportunity to share this with you. Thank you.