To call Marion Nestle one of our preeminent nutritionists would be faint praise. Her contributions to the field of public nutrition, education, and health policy are truly staggering. She is the author of so many books that it’s hard to keep count. And at 89 she’s busier than: hardly a day passes when she isn’t quoted in a news article or interviewed for a documentary or radio show about food in America. In her latest book, What to Eat Now, she gives readers a field guide to the needlessly complicated modern American food system—in grocery stores as well as in the many other places where food is sold today. Nestle is an intrepid and indefatigable investigator. I especially like to think of her in one of her many natural habitats: stalking the aisles of supermarkets around the country and tallying the unit prices of bottled waters, or measuring linear feet of display space given to different cereals, or talking to managers to better understand how supermarkets actually work. Nestle cannot be deterred: she always gets her answer. To read this new book is to get a sense of the dizzying variety of foods available to the American consumer—and the great confusion that many face when confronted with it. She and I caught up at her office on the blisteringly cold day that What to Eat Now came out—to discuss her path to public health, frozen toast, food industrialization, and more.
Rohan Kamicheril: This book has been an epic journey for you—full of research and reckoning with the massive changes that have taken place in American food in the twenty years since the original edition came out. But I wondered if you could say something about the arc of your longer journey toward becoming a nutritionist: in many ways, your own journey has—not coincidentally—progressed apace with the field itself.
Marion Nestle: In a way, it was handed to me. I grew up during the Second World War, when there was canned food—and not much of it. I was always interested in food. I often tell the story of being eight years old at a camp in Vermont, and the woman who ran the camp was a really wonderful cook—I had never eaten food like that. They had a garden where they grew all their vegetables. They had lived in China for a long time, and she knew how to cook Chinese food really well. And I was sent out to pick vegetables and discovered string beans in July in the heat of the sun—sweet, crisp, and delicious. They also had berries and did their own sugaring off. It was a place where food was taken very seriously. I just absolutely loved it and have grown food or been involved with food ever since.
Then, when I was in high school, my mother had a friend who collected cookbooks, and she said to me, you like food, you should go study it. At Berkeley at the time there were two options for food. There was agriculture—but I was a city girl and didn’t know anything about agriculture. The other option was dietetics. So I went to Berkeley as a dietetics major—but I lasted just one day. I could see that the classes were going to be really, really easy. At the time, I believed that if classes were easy, they weren’t worth taking. It truly never occurred to me that something could be easy because I was good at it. I was always gravitating towards things that were hard for me. So I thought, OK, I’ll be a science major—which was very hard for me, as it turned out. I got a doctorate in molecular biology (in part because I had a crush on a professor who taught in the program—I thought he was the most intellectually exciting person I’d ever met)—and went on to take my first teaching job. This was teaching cell and molecular biology in a biology department. They had a rule that you could only teach the same course three times in a row. When my time teaching that course was up, I had to switch to whatever the department needed, whether I knew anything about it or not. I was given the option of human physiology or human nutrition. I picked nutrition.
RK: It’s so striking to compare your early joyful exposure to food with the bleaker picture of the industrialization of food that took place around the Second World War. Do you think we’re still living under the shadow of some of the changes from that era?
MN: Oh, there were a lot of changes that came about during the Second World War. The transportation system across the country changed so that you could now get things in New York that had come from California. And then industrialization of food occurred because they had all this processed food for the war effort that they now needed to do something with. And so that kicked off processed foods.
RK: You point out that technology and innovation have helped our foodways a lot. But there was a lot that it did that hasn’t necessarily given us healthier food, too.
MN: There was an enormous push to convince women that cooking was a chore. Laura Shapiro has written a book about that, Perfection Salad, where a concerted, unified effort went into convincing women that they should buy TV dinners. TV dinners didn’t taste good, but they were fun. You can’t separate those things. And then, starting in the 1980s, the shareholder value movement changed everything. It hit food companies especially hard. If you need to make a profit and grow your profit every 90 days, you have to be constantly innovating and making new things. And you have to make things that people want to buy. And therein lies the problem, because the things that people want to buy tend to be junk foods.
RK: It also seems like there is a concerted effort to sell people things that they could otherwise make for themselves. It makes you see cooking as an act of rebellion because it’s taking things back into your own hands.
MN: They sell frozen toast in supermarkets! I really don’t understand it. Frozen omelets, too. Cooking an egg is so basic—you need a pan, a stove, and some kind of fat. But increasingly a lot of people don’t have these things.
RK: Do you think that cooking is an essential part of feeding yourself well?
MN: Oh, absolutely. I learned it in eighth grade home economics. Thank heavens for that. Nobody else was going to teach me. And then when I was in high school, I learned that cooking is an essential part of life. When I was a young married person, I had cookbooks and taught myself to cook. But I already had the basics from that home economics class, so I wasn’t afraid of it. I had friends who were competitive home cooks, and they cooked from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking—that one really is challenging. But ultimately, I decided that’s not my kind of cooking. I like taking whatever’s around, throwing it together, and making something I really want to eat in twenty minutes, start to finish.
RK: Well, time is so crucial. In your memoir, you talk about how, when you were working in academia and raising young children you also had to take care of all the food and play the role of homemaker.
MN: Yes. And my kids were impossible to feed. One of them was a strict vegetarian, and one of them wouldn’t eat anything green.
RK: And you mention how your husband at the time probably would have been happy to help, but it just wasn’t part of the discourse back then.
MN: I never asked him. It wasn’t something that women brought up in those days.
RK: This is clearly still an issue today. I wonder if part of the solution is acknowledging that this work that women have always done is something that everyone should valorize and that men should take a part in it, too.
MN: Everybody benefits from it. It’s fun. It’s easy. You get to eat what you produce. You get to make mistakes and the world doesn’t come to an end. That’s kind of nice. It’s experimental. It’s creative. Innovative. I find it effortless, really, but then I have very simple tastes in food. I don’t really like big, fancy preparations. Give me an omelet with a few vegetables in it and I’m perfectly happy. But at the time, boys weren’t allowed to take home economics. Girls couldn’t take shop. I think everybody should do both. I thought, this is crazy! Boys were taught how to fix cars—but girls need to know how to fix cars, too! Well, not anymore. Now nobody can fix a car because they’re all electronic.
RK: Do you think there’s a connection between that development and what food companies are doing with food—making it so complicated that it seems impossible to understand or make for yourself?
MN: They make it inscrutable so that you have to buy it. You think you can’t make it for yourself, but in fact, you can.
RK: You say in the foreword to the book that you wanted to write this book because you saw how fearful people were about making bad food choices. So much so that the moment of having to choose what they had to eat for dinner wasn’t an opportunity to be happy or to delight in something.
MN: People think, I have to worry about protein. I have to worry about vitamins. I have to worry about fiber. I have to worry about food safety—
RK: And there is a lot of information out there. Do you have any guidelines for the layperson for how to tell good information from bad?
MN: If it contradicts everything that you’ve been taught, there’s probably something wrong with it. Because the science doesn’t change. It really doesn’t. It gets incrementally tweaked, but it doesn’t fundamentally change. That’s why I’m so stunned by what’s going on in government now.
RK: But lots of other things do change. In the twenty years between these two books there have been incredible changes in American food. What are some signal changes that you’ve noticed?
MN: Well, ordering online now accounts for 20 to 30 percent of grocery purchases. That, plus the increasing consolidation in retailers. Walmart alone now accounts for 20 to 30 percent of grocery purchases. That’s a staggering figure—you can’t even get your head around it. It’s now possible to buy food everywhere, even in bookstores and libraries, and we’re eating too much of it.
RK: Which highlights two very contradictory facts about American food. On one hand there’s extraordinary excess (we produce 4,000 calories per person per day irrespective of age or other factors) and on the other we have an increasingly dire problem with food insecurity.
MN: Oh, yes. What an irony.
RK: Where does this contradiction come from?
MN: Oh—Capitalism, of course. That’s another big change. Five or ten years ago, I couldn’t even mention the C-word in public. Now everybody gets it. Raj Patel wrote a book called Stuffed and Starved about how the same economic forces have created poverty on the one hand and overconsumption in the other. You have one cause and two quite different results, depending on people’s resources. As the economic system has divided people with a lot of income from those with hardly any income, the gap has only gotten worse.
RK: Going back to what you were saying about inscrutability and food, it seems like things like plant-based meats would fit into this category, too. You could cook vegetables in the way that vegetables have always been cooked—and that’s actually quite an easy thing to do. But if you can convince consumers that they have to buy plant-based meat, which is something they could never make at home, then you have a customer for life.
MN: Right. That’s Capitalism. How do you monetize it? That’s the big question. I’ll never forget something a member of the Dietary Guidelines Committee said when they were discussing whether to advise people to eat less ultra-processed food, which is a good idea. He said, “But what will people eat?” I just howled! I thought that was so funny. They’re going to eat food—F-O-O-D, food.
I talk about triple-duty diets in the introduction of the book. It’s not yet a term that’s widely used but I mention it deliberately, because I think it’s a crucial concept. You want diets to simultaneously address poverty, obesity and chronic disease, and climate change. The same diet—more plants, less meat–does all three. And yet, it’s not a term that’s caught on.
RK: Even though you tackle some really grim realities about American food in this book, I always leave it feeling calm and reassured. How does thinking about food make you feel?
MN: I think food is easy, and I like it, a lot. I’m at a late stage in life where I don’t eat very much anymore, which is really unfortunate. But eating is a great thing to do, and you get to do it several times a day. Anything that makes you feel better these days is a very good thing.
RK: So you think there’s hope for American food yet?
MN: Oh, I do. And world food. I’m in the department of Food Studies at NYU where we’re surrounded by young people who think food is the way to change the world. It’s hard not to like that. It’s wonderful to be around them.
RK: I want to just return us to our current moment as we conclude our chat. It’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside with the wind chill.
MN: Oh boy.
RK: The tomatoes and the plums are all gone from the farmer’s market. On a day like this, to stave off the first chills of winter, what do you eat? What do you eat now?
MN: Well, I might go home and make a soup. I’m not sure what I have around, but I’ll find out. I was picking salad off the terrace yesterday. And I still have tomatoes. If it’s 20 degrees, they’ll be frozen now. But I have little cherry tomatoes that were still growing and putting flowers out.
RK: Even in this weather! And you have a cherry tree as well?
MN: A cherry, and a peach, and grapes, and raspberries, and blueberries. Not that they produce all that well, but the principle is terrific.
RK: We can all find little bits of green here and there.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.