|
Description:
|
|
Whenever we want insight on food politics, there is one person we call — Marion Nestle . She literally wrote the book on the topic along with several other books tackling various aspects of food production and consumption, from soda and fish to pet food and politics. She continues to write a daily newsletter, Food Politics , about what's happening in the food space. Professor, scientist, public health advocate, and voice of reason, we've asked her to break down the current rhetoric and help us understand the politics du jour.
Evan Kleiman: In the early days of MAHA, I recall that you were cautiously optimistic. What is your feeling now that we're starting to see strategy and policy take shape?
Marion Nestle: Well, it's pretty baffling, because I don't see any strategy or policy. What I see is a lot of intention, without very much indication of what they're actually going to do. They've scored a couple of what they consider to be MAHA wins, Make America Healthy Again wins, and those are getting food companies to voluntarily say that they will remove artificial color additives from their products by the end of 2027. That's a win, I guess.
The other is that they will get the FDA to finally close what is called the GRAS loophole. The "Generally Recognized As Safe" designation that food companies have been allowed to set for themselves about the additives that they're putting in the food supply. Whether either of these is going to really make America healthy again, it seems to me, is questionable. They're both good things. I'm for them. But if you want to make America healthy again, you've got to do a lot more than that.
Many of the recommendations that the administration is making to improve hospital food, prioritize whole healthy foods, take dyes out of breakfast cereal, put cane sugar back into Coca Cola and so on are voluntary. Not only that, neither sugary cereals or Coca Cola are healthy. What is the likelihood of the industry raising their hand to participate? And do these changes do anything to actually make these foods more healthy?
Well, let's deal with the second question first. Ice cream with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup is still ice cream. Coca Cola with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup is still Coca Cola. That's not going to make any difference to health at all. They're both sugars, so cross that one off.
Getting color additives out of the food supply, or the artificial color additives out of the food supply, is something that food advocates have wanted for decades. It's great that they're going to be gone. We'll see what happens in 2027, which is when most of the voluntary removals are supposed to take place.
Where we're really seeing action on those issues is at the state level, where states are passing laws about color additives, about sodas and SNAP and other kinds of things that are way ahead of what the federal government is actually doing. And if states are active enough, then food companies will have to comply, because they can't make products for different states.
But if you want to make America healthy again, you have to take on the food industry, and that's where your first question comes in. Let's just pick a couple of things that I think would make a really big difference — putting taxes, for example, on sodas or on ultra-processed foods, getting ultra-processed foods out of schools. Or the real one that I think would make a huge difference is putting a ban on food industry marketing of junk food to kids. Now, for those, I would expect to see ferocious food industry lobbying, because those are liable to really affect the bottom lines of the companies.
Color additives? They can replace color additives. Nobody will know the difference, and nobody will really care. Stop marketing junk food to kids? Ooh, that's the industry's line in the sand, and I would expect ferocious opposition. That was why I was interested to see that it was barely mentioned in the leaked strategy report.
Marion Nestle, who is an authority on food and public health, focuses on the socioeconomic influences that impact our food choices and health. Photo by Peter Menzel.
The National Food Museum recently released a scorecard on the Trump administration's food policies. The negative far outweighs the positive. Can you give us a few of the highlights?
There were promises at the beginning that they would take the chemicals out of the food supply, and that would mean dealing with production agriculture and making sure that production agriculture is not using chemicals that get into food, like, for example, the herbicide glyphosate, which has been linked to cancer and experimental animals. There have been a lot of lawsuits about that. That, again, was something that got dropped from the leaked strategy report.
A lot of the issues that were originally raised as being problems in the Make America Healthy Again movement have been kind of dropped or sidelined. In the meantime, the CDC has been destroyed, the FDA has been decimated, vaccines are off the table, and nobody is allowed to talk about climate change or economic or social inequities anymore. This doesn't look like a big win to me.
The USDA is experiencing a major reorganization, moving 2,500 employees out of Washington DC to five different hubs located in Raleigh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, and Fort Collins, Colorado. The pretense is to move decision-making closer to the agricultural community but the directive has received sharp criticism. Will dispersing the agency inhibit its effectiveness?
Well, unfortunately, we have an example from the first Trump administration to look at, and that was in what I consider to be an extraordinary tragedy, the Department of Agriculture moved the Economic Research Service out of Washington DC to Kansas City. The Economic Research Service was what I considered to be the best kept secret in Washington, because it was an agency of expert economists who did analyses of food issues.
Those analyzes were so sophisticated and so useful and so insightful that I depended on them for all of my work. I was just constantly contacting ERS people. The website was fantastic. It had the email address and phone number of every single one of the experts. If you had a question, you could just call them. They would just pick up the phone. And the materials that they wrote were absolutely invaluable.
The effect of moving that agency to Kansas City was exactly what you would expect. Hordes of people quit because they didn't want to move to Kansas City. They had kids in school in Washington DC or in Maryland or wherever they lived, and they didn't want to uproot their lives. They were all really, really, really good, so they could get jobs elsewhere, and they did get jobs elsewhere. So they lost enormous amounts of staff.
But all I can say is that the Economic Research Service is now doing what I consider to be pedestrian reports on keeping score issues. The kinds of analytical work that used to be done isn't being done anymore. That analytical work inconveniently showed that climate change was a big issue and that inequalities were a big issue, and that's one of the reasons why the agency got decimated and moved out.
So I'm guessing that those other agencies that are being moved out too will also have their wings clipped. And the expert staff... I mean, one of the things about the Economic Research Service was these people were really expert. One of the approaches of this administration is to get rid of experts and to rely on personal experience much more.
This is a perfect example but on a big picture level, how will these kinds of moves, which, in a way, are de facto cuts, impact your work and therefore trickle down to the consumer?
Well, my work is based a lot on reading an enormous amount of information and trying to make sense of it. I relied a lot on Department of Agriculture documents for that. But if the agencies are not collecting data the way they used to, those data won't be available, and I certainly don't have the ability to gather those data on my own. It's expensive to do that, and you have to have access to survey instruments and reporting instruments and all kinds of other things that individual citizens don't have. So you know, for those of us who rely on government sites, the idea that the government sites are disappearing is really disheartening.
Have you heard from any of your colleagues plans to band together and to do their own research?
I've not. What I'm mostly hearing from is people who've lost their jobs.
You posted a graph on your website showing that the cost of vegetables has gone up considerably this year. What kind of policies could the administration pursue to bring down the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables? And are we likely to see that happen?
I think we're not because I've seen no indication in the MAHA strategy document that it's going to change the way the agricultural support system works. The agricultural support system subsidizes two different kinds of things. In the food system, it subsidizes production agriculture, which means corn, soybeans, cotton, other kinds of the canola, those kinds of things. If you look at the corn supply, for example, 12 billion bushels a year, or something like that (we grow a lot of corn) almost half of it goes to feed animals. The other half goes to produce ethanol, to fuel automobiles. Try to get your head around that.
Only a tiny fraction of corn goes even to make high fructose corn syrup, let alone get eaten as corn on the cob or frozen corn or tortillas. So we have a food system that is subsidized by the government, that is feed for animals and fuel for automobiles. I think we need an agricultural system that is focused on producing food for people, which means, amongst other things, fruits, vegetables, beans, and edible grains. I don't see that happening because they don't have the lobbying power. And unless we completely redo the agricultural system, it'll stay exactly the way it is.
What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters is available in November. Photo courtesy of North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Speaking of beans, the latest headline involves Robert F Kennedy Jr, scrapping expert recommendations to elevate beans, peas, and lentils as protein sources for America's dietary guidelines. What incentive does he have to do so? And what are the ripple effects this could have on the industry and lunch programs?
Well, the dietary guidelines are due out this year. In December, the scientific advisory committee to the dietary guidelines produced a enormous report, more than 500 pages, reviewing the science of diet and health and coming out with recommendations, which RFK Jr. has said he's going to ignore. Instead, he has said that Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture, this is a joint report, will be four or five pages, very simple, and give very simple advice.
In announcing that that was what they were going to do. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, said, "No longer will the dietary guidelines reflect leftist ideology. This time they're going to be based on real science." And I thought leftist ideology? When did the dietary guidelines ever reflect leftist ideology? And then I had this enormous insight, oh, leftist ideology, that must mean plants. That if you're saying that diets would be healthier if people ate a lot of plant foods, that must be leftist ideology. The opposite of that is bring back meat.
I don't know whether the meat industry is involved in this or not. It's hard to believe that they're not, but it doesn't really matter, because people who are ideologically in favor of eating more meat, not less, and replacing plants with meat are advisors to RFK, Jr. And he has chosen as the people who he surrounded himself with who are advising him, people who are very, very much in favor of eating more meat, not less. Never mind what the science says. That'll be interesting. I can't wait to see them. They're supposed to come out soon.
Marion, you've been on the inside of policy at the federal level. What do you foresee happening if this deregulation and dismantling of agencies continues? And how hard will it be to put regulatory limits in place in the future once they've been stripped away?
I think recovering from this is going to be a matter of decades. It won't happen quickly. So, in a sense, the MAGA movement has already succeeded in dismantling public health and food is part of that.
I'm interested in public health. I want people to be healthier and I want people to eat better. I want everybody to be able to eat a healthy diet and have enough money and have the education and have the facilities to be able to produce healthy food for their kids. I want schools to have healthy diets. So that's another thing. Try and take ultra-processed foods out of schools without giving schools more money. I don't know how you're going to do that.
So I think we're in for a period in which Americans will not be healthier again. This is how to make America sick again.
I think there is so much noise in what is called the "wellness space." All this talk about seed oils and tallow, people tend to fixate on ingredients rather than a holistic approach to a healthy diet. I mean, Americans have always looked for the silver bullet. Can you offer us clear and concise advice about what constitutes a healthy diet in 2025?
Oh, sure. It's so easy to talk about that the journalist Michael Pollan can do it in seven words: "eat food, not too much, mostly plants." So if you define food as real food, then you don't eat too much of it, and you make sure you got lots of vegetables and fruits and beans and grains in your diet, you're going to be fine. |
.png)
More
Religion & Spirituality
Education
Arts and Design
Health
Fashion & Beauty
Government & Organizations
Kids & family
Music
News & Politics
Science & Medicine
Society & Culture
Sports & Recreation
TV & Film
Technology
Philosophy
Storytelling
Horror and Paranomal
True Crime
Leisure
Travel
Fiction
Crypto
Marketing
History
Comedy
Arts
Games & Hobbies
Business
Motivation
