Nutrition, SNAP & Why We Need A Food Revolution
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Hi, it's Carrie. Our co-host Tanya Mosley and I will be doing an end-of-the-year Fresh Air Plus bonus episode, answering listener questions about the show and about ourselves. You can send the questions now to freshairplus at npr.org, with plus spelled out. That's freshairplus at npr.org.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, my guest is Marian Nestle, the molecular biologist turned nutritionist and food policy scholar whose voice has helped decode for decades what we eat and why it matters. Her well-known book, What to Eat, became a consumer bible of sorts when it came out in 2006, guiding readers aisle by aisle through the supermarket while exposing how industry marketing and policy steer our food choices. Two decades later, she's back with What to Eat Now, a revised field guide for the supermarket of 2025, where ultra-processed foods, plant-based meats, corporate organics, and our ability to have food delivered to our very doorstep have rewritten the rules. Nestle's journey began in the classroom.
When she first began teaching a nutrition course in the early 70s, she says it felt like she was falling in love with the subject. She went on to serve as Associate Dean for Human Biology at the University of California, San Francisco, and as Staff Director for Nutrition Policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped shape dietary guidelines for Americans in the 1990s. Nessel is the author of 15 books, including Safe Food, The Politics of Food Safety, and Soda Politics. We recorded this conversation last week as courts in Congress were battling over SNAP benefits for more than 42 million Americans during the government shutdown. And Mary and Nessel, welcome to Fresh Air.
Oh, glad to be here. Well, Marion, before we dive in, I want to talk to you a little bit about what's happening with SNAP benefits. Food banks are already reporting that they have been inundated with people in need of food. I want to know what you're thinking about in this moment, what this moment reveals, maybe about how fragile our food system here in the U.S. is right now.
Well, I think what it reveals is how fragile our economy is. We have 42 million people in this country, 16 million of them children, who can't rely on a consistent source of food from day to day and have to depend on a government program that provides them with benefits that really don't cover their food needs, only cover part of their food needs. And this amount of money is under attack and is looked at as a cash cow that will, instead of paying for people's meals, will pay for tax cuts for people who have lots and lots of money to begin with. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. It's unprecedented. We have never punished the poor as badly as we're punishing them now.
You know, when you first began your journey in nutrition, I heard you say that people actually questioned whether food and politics went together, that like food is not political. People were really surprised by that. You went on then to talk about how in America, we don't have a problem with a lack of food. It's about poverty. It's about policy. How are you seeing these forces play out right now in the way the government is approaching nutrition assistance?
Well, when I wrote my book, Food Politics, in 2002, the first question I got asked was, what does food have to do with politics? Nobody asks me that anymore. Part of that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and what he's doing, which is so obviously political around food, and everybody can see what's happening with food assistance. When I look at what's happening at food assistance, I And I'm just stunned at how similar this is to what happened in the 16th century when the English passed the English food laws. And they were passed with the idea that the poor were poor, not because of bad luck being born into the wrong family or circumstances beyond their control. R.F.K. Jr. ?
is at the HHS talking about toxins and ultra-processed foods. Many of the issues that you also talk about, too, you guys seem to be aligned on many things.
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