Marion Nestle Transcript

Marion Nestle Transcript

Kerry Diamond:
Hi everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. Each week we feature interviews with the coolest culinary personalities around. Joining me today in the studio is Marion Nestle, author, consumer advocate, NYU [New York University] professor, and now memoirist. Marion is the author of a brand new book, and it's titled, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics. I couldn't put this book down. I've long admired Marion and her tireless work, and I've always wondered how she got her start and what led to her unique career and now I know.

Marion faced an incredible number of hurdles along the way, many related to being a woman and a mother. And she's joining me in just a minute to tell us more. Speaking of books, if you are going to be in or around Brooklyn on the weekend of November 5th and 6th, join us for our second annual Cherry Bombe Cooks & Books Festival at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn. We've got talks, panels, and demos all weekend long with amazing folks like Ruth Reichl. Yes, can you believe it? Ruth Reichl, Tanya Holland, all the way from California, Grace Young, the Chinatown champion, and Chef Erin French, all the way from The Lost Kitchen in Maine. We've even got Claire Saffitz in conversation with Claudia Fleming. Make sure you're signed up for the Cherry Bombe newsletter. To get all the details and early access to tickets, visit cherrybombe.com to sign up. The Cherry Bombe Cooks & Books Festival is presented by our friends at Kerrygold. Now let's check in with today's guest. 

Marion Nestle, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.

Marion Nestle:
Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

Kerry Diamond:
When I found out you had written a memoir, I was so excited. It's like Madonna wrote a memoir or something in our world, honestly.

Marion Nestle:
I'll burst into song.

Kerry Diamond:
You can.

Marion Nestle:
I don't think so.

Kerry Diamond:
I try to get people to sing on the show and no one's taken me up on it yet. I have to ask, why did you write a memoir?

Marion Nestle:
Well, I did it because I was stuck in Ithaca during the pandemic and I needed something to do big time, couldn't use the library, couldn't get into my office, couldn't get into research materials. I'm usually a nonfiction writer, so I thought I tried my hand at non-nonfiction and I was asked every week by reporters, by students, by people I know, “How did you do it? Why did you do what you do? How did you get interested in food? What was your background like? I mean, how did you do this?” And I thought, okay, why don't I sit down and try to answer those questions? And that's what I did during the pandemic. That was my pandemic project.

Kerry Diamond:
Tell people the elevator pitch of what the “this” is.

Marion Nestle:
Well, the “this” is that I write books about food politics, and I'm exceptionally interested in how food companies market their products and influence what people eat. And I guess the way I put it is food companies are not social service agencies. They're not public health agencies. They're businesses that have stockholders to please. And once you understand that about the food industry, you really understand a lot about the food system and what has to change, so that was my profound insight. I've always felt like I've just been describing the obvious, but apparently not everybody thinks about the food industry this way.

Kerry Diamond:
I would love to know how the process was for you. Was it painful? Was it enjoyable? Was it all of the above?

Marion Nestle:
Well, it was complicated. As you said, I'm a nonfiction writer. Memoirs are about memory and mine isn't better than anybody else's. And so I worried about what I could remember, and then I thought, well, okay, memoirs about memory. I tried to remember what I could remember and I didn't keep a diary, although I did find a log I had kept during one of the jobs I had. That was a big surprise. So I didn't have any records to go back to. I had no dates and times and where I could fact check, I was surprised that I got years wrong and couldn't make certain stories match chronologically, so that part was difficult. And then just trying to make sense out of what my memory of what I remember an experience is a terrifically unhappy childhood. What was that about? And how can I look back on it and reflect on it? So this was a time for reflection. I had the time to do it and I had the space and there were no other demands on my time. I was teaching, but not much.

Kerry Diamond:
Was it cathartic?

Marion Nestle:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it was. I thought, okay, I'm done with this. This is finished. And that was very good. And then looking back, I thought, oh, how did I do all that? I mean, I had never really thought about what an underprivileged childhood I had. I never thought of myself that way, but now looking back on it, I thought, oh, well, no wonder I had so much trouble.

Kerry Diamond:
Why the title Slow Cooked?

Marion Nestle:
I was out in my kayak on Lake Cayuga and it just came to me. I didn't really start writing or doing anything that got any attention until I was in my mid-sixties. Food Politics came out in 2002. I was 66. You could do the math. That's kind of late to get started.

Kerry Diamond:
I did think about Julia Child more than once. You referenced her a few times, but also because we often talk about Julia being such a late bloomer.

Marion Nestle:
Yeah and I was later. I was later. So why did it take so long? It seemed to me that was a question that I was going to need to confront in writing this is what took so long? That was interesting to try to figure out. I'm not sure I have it, but…

Kerry Diamond:
I was going to ask, I mean, I have my own take on it, but I'm curious, what did you come away with? Why did it take so long?

Marion Nestle:
Well, just that, I was raised in an era when expectations for women were very low, and I never learned to have high expectations because they were shot down so quickly. I mean, the constant theme of my childhood was don't stick your neck out. And it really wasn't until I came to NYU and was blessed with tenure. Oh my goodness, what a life-changing experience that was that I finally said, okay, I can do whatever I want. I'm not going to lose my job. I'm not going to... And then NYU turned out to be a place that totally valued what I did and supported it in every way possible. I mean, it's been a great experience being connected with that university, an experience that I know that not everybody has, but that was mine.

Kerry Diamond:
The parts about your childhood were pretty heartbreaking. I mean, you didn't detail physical abuse, but the mental abuse and just you look at how kids are treated today and I don't know, the lucky ones, it's so clear their parents love them so much. And even from a young age, your mom just seemed kind of cruel to you about things you couldn't control, your hair.

Marion Nestle:
My hair.

Kerry Diamond:
Your physical appearance.

Marion Nestle:
Oh my goodness, my hair. One of the nightmares of my childhood where... My mother was conventionally pretty, and from the time I was, my memory was eight years old, but when I talked to my mother about it late in her life, she said we were already at war when I was six. I assumed nobody in the family loved me. And I had no evidence to the contrary. And I thought it was terribly unfair and I fought it and that didn't work at all. It just made things much worse. Later, later, later, when she was in her late-seventies, she said, "Well, I could see that you and I were very much alike and I didn't want you to turn out like me. So I was trying to fix you." I wasn't fixable.

Kerry Diamond:
You were a kid.

Marion Nestle:
I was a kid. I wasn't fixable. And I had curly hair at a time when you just couldn't.

Kerry Diamond:
The part about you talking to your mom before she passed away was very poignant and you were helped by a therapist with that.

Marion Nestle:
Oh my goodness, yes.

Kerry Diamond:
Can you talk about that a little? Because I think everyone's childhood is different, as you say in your first sentence. Was that your little nod to Tolstoy when you talked about how your unhappy family was very unique in its…

Marion Nestle:
Good for you to pick that up.

Kerry Diamond:
Unique in its unhappiness. I think like so many families, we don't talk about our family's pasts, and we don't think about why we didn't do that until it's sometimes too late. And I know in my case, my family doesn't talk a lot about their past and I worry that it's too painful for my parents to have to talk about it or to have talked to my grandparents about it. So I'm sure everyone has their different reasons for not bringing it up, but you decided not to let your mom pass away without bringing up these hard questions.

Marion Nestle:
Yeah. Well, I was at the low point of my life at that point when a marriage was breaking up and I was losing my job at the same time. And the marriage and the job were intertwined. So it wasn't a coincidence that they were breaking up at the same time, but I was in a complete panic. I was in my late forties, early fifties. I didn't know what the future would hold. I had no idea what was ever going to become of me. I was terrified. And a friend suggested the time for therapy was now. So my therapist said, "Why don't you find out what this was about while you still can?" And trained me how to interview my mother without setting my mother off. My mother was in Los Angeles, I was in San Francisco. I went to Los Angeles and spent three days interviewing my mother.

I wish I had tape-recorded the whole thing. I did not. And I just started out by saying that I really wanted to find out more about her and knowing that everything was about her. So it was certainly not about me. Well, my goal in doing it was I wanted to find out why she had been so nasty to me. I really didn't understand it and wanted to find that out. And so I started out by saying, “I'd just like to ask you about your past,” and, oh, she said, “I thought you'd never ask,” so that was our starting point. So I interviewed her for three days. I got an answer to my question and I didn't discuss this in the memoir, but at the end of it, she wrote me a letter and said, "I really want to thank you for coming down. It's the first time I've ever been able to unburden myself about how I did not love your father."

Kerry Diamond:
Wow.

Marion Nestle:
That was her take on our three days of interview, that she was grateful that at last she had been able to unburden herself of something that I had known from the time I was six. It did not come as a surprise to me.

Kerry Diamond:
Did she talk about you and your relationship in that letter?

Marion Nestle:
Nothing, not a word.

Kerry Diamond:
Wow. Okay.

Marion Nestle:
Not a word.

Kerry Diamond:
Your mom was complicated.

Marion Nestle:
She was complicated, not a happy lady.

Kerry Diamond:
I've been reading it on a computer and I've got to go get my physical copy because you know how much I love physical printed things.

Marion Nestle:
And it's a gorgeous book, if I may say so myself.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh good. I can't wait to hold it. Are you going to do a signing? I know we're going to talk about your tour. Are you going to do a signing here in New York?

Marion Nestle:
Yes.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh good. But I just wanted to break out a highlighter and highlight all these passages. I mean, I know we've founded Cherry Bombe almost 10 years ago now, because I felt that there were certain women whose stories just weren't being told in the food world. But to have you put in black and white so explicitly how women were treated differently for decades, for decades. I mean, you weren't encouraged in school, in high school, in college. I mean, just barrier after barrier was put up in front of you.

Marion Nestle:
And it was normal.

Kerry Diamond:
And it was normal.

Marion Nestle:
It was totally normal and that was what you were to expect. And you shouldn't expect anything else. And I don't have a history of sexual harassment, but I'm sure that was part of it for a lot of other people. It wasn't for me. It was just endless barriers and I told some of the more important stories. I mean, the one where somebody who's doing exactly what I was doing was paid a third more than I was.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh.

Marion Nestle:
And I found out about it.

Kerry Diamond:
Well, the story how you found out about it was amazing.

Marion Nestle:
It was hilarious.

Kerry Diamond:
There was a woman's consciousness group that you had not been invited to be part of. Yet, you were the subject of a meeting.

Marion Nestle:
Right. I got called by somebody who said, "Guess what my consciousness raising group talked about last night?" I said, "I couldn't imagine." And she said, "Your salary at Brandeis University."

Kerry Diamond:
There was a big part of me that was shocked reading these stories, even though I shouldn't have been because, like you said, that was just normal.

Marion Nestle:
There were women who could overcome. And I tell the story of having met in 2019, just before the pandemic hit, I met a woman who has a Nobel Prize, and we were on a trip together and we talked quite a bit. And she had a lot of problems in her own life. And I don't in any way want to minimize those problems, but I was astounded by her story. She grew up in an academic family. She had traveled all over the world to Europe. They knew lots of people. She had mentors. She had help. She had just all of these advantages that I had never had and didn't even know existed. I didn't even know they existed.

Kerry Diamond:
The most shocking one to me, although a lot shocked me in the book, but one of the most shocking was the swimming pool incident. Can you tell people what that was?

Marion Nestle:
I call it the swimming pool epiphany.

Kerry Diamond:
The swimming pool epiphany.

Marion Nestle:
Epiphany. Yeah. It was a Saturday morning and I was a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University and I was in the biology department. I was, at the time, a bench scientist because my doctoral degree is in molecular biology. And I was doing a biology project and my kids had swimming lessons at Brandeis on Saturday mornings. It usually lasted three quarters of an hour. At this particular time, it lasted an hour and a half. They were going to do a double one for some reason or other. I said, "Ooh, I'll pop into my lab. There won't be anybody there. I'll get some work done." So I went to my lab, opened up the door, everybody was there, and I mean everybody, the lab director, his wife, the lab assistant, the technician, all of the doctoral students, all of the postdoctoral students, the undergraduate helpers, everybody was there but me. I hadn't even known that people were there on Saturday.

I walked in, everybody was shocked to see me, and I thought, well, this is why everybody thinks I'm not getting any work done. Oh, this is why I'm not getting any work done. And I thought, that's the end of my scientific career. That's it. There was no way in the world I could be there on a Saturday morning. Who else was going to take care of my kids? My husband at the time was a young assistant professor at Harvard. He had his own problems with laboratory. His career was clearly more important than mine. And that was it.

Kerry Diamond:
I remember sort of cheering for you at the beginning of that story when you said and the kids had a double swim lesson, and I thought, oh my God, she's finally getting a break, maybe she could go take a nap or something. And then the story takes a much darker turn.

Marion Nestle:
Oh yeah. I mean, that was it. And then I started looking for a teaching job, and that was the end of my lab science career, which I don't regret. It was very useful training.

Kerry Diamond:
So let's jump ahead. You worked in government?

Marion Nestle:
I did.

Kerry Diamond:
What did you do?

Marion Nestle:
I was the editor of the Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health that came out in 1988, the first and only Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition. It was in the era of [Charles] Everett Koop, who was this amazing fundamentalist Christian who turned out to be a giant of public health. And I didn't work for him directly. I worked in an office that was associated with it and basically wrote this 500-page report.

Kerry Diamond:
What impact did the report have?

Marion Nestle:
I don't know. It's hard to assess. Another one came out from the National Academy of Sciences a year later that said exactly the same thing. Both of the reports in the late-eighties talked about how dietary fat was the most significant nutritional problem and if you reduced your fat intake, all your nutritional problems would be solved, both of them said that. It was as if a consensus had been reached in the nutrition community, but nobody had predicted how the food industry would make fat-free products that had just as many calories and it was fat taken out of its caloric context. I wish I had that one to do over, although I was not responsible for that particular conclusion.

Kerry Diamond:
Were you skeptical of that?

Marion Nestle:
Well, it's interesting. I mean, here's a memory issue. I didn't remember being skeptical. It was a long time ago in 1988, but somebody in the office with me said, "Well, Marion, you were complaining about it the whole time. You said that you predicted, that I remember that you predicted that the food industry would produce sugary products that didn't have any fat in them." That, of course, is exactly what SnackWell's did.

Kerry Diamond:
SnackWell's, my God.

Marion Nestle:
SnackWell's.

Kerry Diamond:
Do they still exist?

Marion Nestle:
I think they do. But there was another report that this was the consensus at the time and it was a very big report. It was an extremely political project. It was a steep learning curve for me. That was when I learned that the world in Washington D.C. divides into two categories besides Republican and Democrat, although that's very important, but they divided into people who like New York better than Washington or those who liked Washington better than New York.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh, I thought you were going to say politicians and lobbyists.

Marion Nestle:
Oh, no, no. They're all part of the same thing.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay, interesting.

Marion Nestle:
And I discovered quite quickly that I preferred New York to Washington and started looking for a job right away.

Kerry Diamond:
How did you get yourself back here?

Marion Nestle:
I had a friend who had an apartment in New York and wasn't living in it and she gave me the keys, so I could come to New York anytime I wanted to. The train was easy to take, and I was coming up every chance I could in looking for jobs in New York. And when the job at NYU came up to chair the Department of Home Economics, I got sent it by probably 30 people sent me copies of the ad. This was long before email, so I had a stack of these job ads on my desk and I applied for it and got it.

Kerry Diamond:
I loved that chapter of the book when you get this job and you discover, well, you didn't discover, people kept talking about the dirty kitchen.

Marion Nestle:
Oh yes.

Kerry Diamond:
And I was like, is she referring to her own kitchen? But you didn't have a kitchen. There's a lot going on in this chapter. So tell us a little bit about your lack of a kitchen and then the kitchen you inherited.

Marion Nestle:
Well, first of all, I moved into an apartment that was owned by NYU and I didn't have any choice about it. I just took the one I was assigned, and it was a kitchen-less mutant apartment. It didn't have a kitchen. It had a hallway with a sink and a little stove in it and there was a refrigerator in the living room. And when I complained about it, they said, "I don't know what you're complaining about. The previous tenant had the refrigerator in her bedroom." It was pretty dismal. And I didn't know how to negotiate for anything better. And I was in a poor school, in a poor department.

Kerry Diamond:
Which is going to shock everyone to hear NYU described that way, but that was the truth back then.

Marion Nestle:
This was 1988. NYU did transcripts by hand until 1990. It was a very, very different place than it is now. And I was brought in to try to make it better. I mean, that was my job. And so the first week that I came, all the faculty were gone to a professional meeting. So I was there by myself with flowers on my desk. They had left me flowers, which was really nice. And so I did get acquainted appointments and I went around from one to another and everybody said exactly the same thing. “We're so glad you're here. They really need you. We hate to bring this up, but we just have to.” And I said, okay. “Your kitchen is dirty.” My kitchen is dirty? What are they talking about?

So when I heard it for the third time, I thought, okay I got to find out. So I said, "What's the kitchen?" Well, the kitchen was the teaching kitchen that was in another building and I took the elevator up. I got off the floor. I could smell it. There was just this horrible smell on the floor. And I walked in and did my... Remember Leona Helmsley, who went around and was always brushing her finger to look at dust?

Kerry Diamond:
For those who have no idea who that is. She was a famous hotelier in New York City.

Marion Nestle:
It was very fussy about how the hotel looked. And so I ran my finger over one of the counters in the kitchen and it left a groove.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh yuck.

Marion Nestle:
And the counters were covered with visible recent occupation by mice. And so there were little mouse turds all over the place and there were cockroaches everywhere. It was absolutely horrible. So I went back to the department and said, "Who's in charge of the kitchen?" And they said, "Debbie." I said, "Who's Debbie?" Debbie was a graduate student. I said, "Why don't you ask Debbie to come see me?" So poor Debbie walks into my office and burst into tears and I had to assure her that this was not her responsibility.

And so we talked about what the problems were and why it wasn't cleaner and what you had to do to get it cleaner. And she told me there was all this broken equipment. And I said, "Well, why don't we start with that?" So she came back a week later and she said, "You're not going to believe this." Try me. She said, "You know those two convection ovens that are in the back of the room that don't work." I said, "Yeah." She said, "Well, I brought in a repair man and he pulled them away from the wall and the cords were still packed up in the machine." They'd never been plugged in. They had been there for 10 years.

Kerry Diamond:
How was that even possible? What were these people learning?

Marion Nestle:
I don't know, but I brought in Rozanne Gold and said, "Help me with this." And she said, "You don't have a program here. Get it cleaned."

Kerry Diamond:
Tell everybody who Rozanne is.

Marion Nestle:
Rozanne Gold is a food writer in Brooklyn, who was really such a big help at the beginning. Finally, I said, "We got to get this place cleaned and if you don't clean it, I'm going to call the Health Department and they're going to close it down. You just got to do it." So they came up with the money to get the place steamed cleaned, and I walked in afterwards and thought, oh my God, the kitchen’s blue. I thought it was green.

Kerry Diamond:
That's awful.

Marion Nestle:
It was so awful. So things have gotten much better since.

Kerry Diamond:
One of the things that really just stuck with me was a story you told about being a child and living in Los Angeles, and there were avocado trees in your backyard. And food was always a struggle. Money was always a struggle when you were a child, and the avocados would just fall to the ground and rot and you would throw them away.

Marion Nestle:
I didn't have any idea what they were. I didn't know they were edible. And my mother didn't. I was living with my mother at the time. She didn't know they were edible. They were heavy. They were hard as a rock. They fell on the ground. We threw them out, collected them up and threw them out. And people who came to visit, nobody ever said, "Oh my God, you've got an avocado tree in the backyard."

Kerry Diamond:
And then you tell a story later in the book, you're at NYU and you want a better understanding of nutrition and the homeless population, the unhoused population in New York City. And you go on a tour to see how they're serving food in the different homeless shelters.

Marion Nestle:
Well, I was actually hired.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh, you were hired, okay.

Marion Nestle:
I was hired by Health + Hospitals to do an investigation of homeless shelters and make sure that the food that homeless people were being fed was adequate. And I worked with somebody on my faculty who's a dietician and we thought, well, it doesn't matter whether the recipes look good and whether the menus are adequate. The real question is, are people eating it? And what do they think about it? And what's going on with it? So we built visits into our contract and as a result, we spent the summer visiting homeless shelters, childcare facilities, places where foster children were kept and that kind of thing.

Kerry Diamond:
And one of the visits was to some teenagers who were in a foster home, teenage girls in a foster home, I think it was in Brooklyn. And you mentioned that there was a fig tree in their backyard and that they were ripe. And you grabbed one, you're like, this is amazing. And all the girls were like, ew. And I was so struck at the parallel between you and your mother and the avocados and these girls and the figs.

Marion Nestle:
Well, you just hit on something that I had never put together, but absolutely. It's exactly the same story. And that foster home, there were six teenage girls. Food was made for them and dumped out on a table and thrown at them. And I thought, why aren't they being given the money to go to the store, buy food, come back, prepare food, learn how to cook, learn some grocery store and cooking skills. The waste of that opportunity was so upsetting to me, as was the waste of many other opportunities in the whole homeless situation, but that was the one that was most poignant. But how clever of you to put those two things together when I didn't.

Kerry Diamond:
I also think those two stories illustrate what I think is one of the broader themes of your entire later career is how we've been so removed from the food system.

Marion Nestle:
Yes, yes. Well, I try not to be removed from it now. I have a terrace garden here in Manhattan with fruit trees on it that I discovered this morning are covered with lantern flies.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh no.

Marion Nestle:
And that's changed quite a bit. And I knew about food because I had gone to a summer camp in Vermont where the people who ran it had an elaborate vegetable garden. And one of my childhood epiphanies was discovering that string beans are really pretty delicious when they're fresh and picked off the vine. So there were just a lot of mixed messages. And growing up in New York City as I did and we were poor, so we didn't have terrific food. We ate a lot of canned stuff and fresh was not really something that was available. And then when we moved to Los Angeles, I guess we weren't much better off. And my father died when I was 13, and my mother and I had to exist together for the next several years. And this was not a happy relationship, so it was kind of difficult.

Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about Food Politics. I really hope that all of you listening, when we're done with this interview, you run out and you get Marion's book, but you should also get Food Politics if you haven't read it. It really is the one-two punch that I think people need to have in their lives. How did you come to write that book and it remains such a major book?

Marion Nestle:
Well, it started in the early 1990s when I was at NYU and I went to a conference at the National Cancer Institute that was on smoking and diet as causes for cancer. And I heard presentations from some of the major anti-smoking advocates, physicians and scientists who were really concerned about the way cigarette companies were marketing. And they showed slide presentations on marketing of cigarettes all over the world, the jungles of Africa and the remote Himalaya Mountains and so forth. And then there was a presentation from somebody who did one on marketing to children. And this was the Joe Camel era. He showed slide, after slide, after slide of cigarette marketing in places where kids are. And I was just stunned by them because I knew that cigarette companies marketed to kids. I had seen cigarette advertising to kids. I had just never thought about it.

I never paid any attention to it. It was so much a part of the normal landscape of cities. There were just cigarette ads everywhere. You didn't pay any attention to them. And I walked out of those presentations thinking we should be doing this for Coca-Cola. And I started paying attention. That was the big difference. So whenever I traveled, I'd take photographs of Coca-Cola and Pepsi and other kinds of food advertising. Everywhere I went, no matter where it was, I started writing articles. And in the late nineties, so some years later, I was going to have a sabbatical and I needed a project for the sabbatical. And I thought, well, I'll put the articles together. And by that time, I had figured out that unlike science fields that value individual research projects published in prestigious journals, NYU valued books.

I was in a humanities field. We had invented food studies at NYU. So I was considering myself a food studies professor, as well as a nutrition in public health professor. And I thought, well, food studies values books, I'll put these articles together into a book. And that was the basis of Food Politics, which I overwrote and so it ended up as two books, which was very nice.

Kerry Diamond:
Tell us the title of the second book in case people want to read that.

Marion Nestle:
It's the politics of food safety, Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety. It's about biotechnology and food safety. It was the first time I'd ever written a book or a book that... I actually had a book in 1985 when I was at the medical school in San Francisco, but the person who published it had a midlife crisis and went to music school and closed up his, I mean, so my book disappeared, but I'm very bad luck with publishing.

So I thought for food politics that I was describing the obvious and that probably, yeah, it had taken me some time to notice it, but probably lots of other people were noticing it. And I was very surprised by the reaction. And the immediate reaction was kill it, murder it, put it out of business. Before it was just about this time with respect to the memoir, before it was published, there were all these really horrible reviews on Amazon. They were so terrible. And my editor at University of California Press called and said, "You got to do something about this. Get your friends to write good reviews." I thought, oh no, I don't think I could ask my friends to do that, but then I was saved by somebody else who looked at the reviews and said these were clearly paid for. Somebody got put up. These were all three, they're all the same. They all say the same things. They all are in the same tone, hasn't she ever heard of personal responsibility? Why is she blaming the food industry? And then we were often running.

Kerry Diamond:
And you had a whole new reputation, lots of new nicknames. Why was big food scared of you?

Marion Nestle:
Well, I was criticizing the food industry and saying that food industry marketing had some responsibility for rising rates of obesity. And it wasn't because food industry executives were sitting around a table saying, "How can we make Americans fat?" They were sitting around a table saying, "How are we going to sell our products in a food environment in which they're 4,000 calories a day available per person, and most people only need 2,000? How do we sell our product?" So it was the marketing push. Bigger portions is the most obvious example. If I had one nutritional concept to get across, it would be larger portions have more calories. I think calories count.

Kerry Diamond:
And sugar in everything.

Marion Nestle:
And sugar in everything.

Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. This makes me so crazy and I don't know the why behind it. Why is sugar not written in tablespoons or teaspoons on packaging? Because Americans measure things in tablespoons and teaspoons and grams.

Marion Nestle:
Because the people at the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] who set up these rules set them up that way.

Kerry Diamond:
You and I could pick all these people passing us in this lobby and ask them…

Marion Nestle:
How many grams in a teaspoon? And nobody will know. No, nobody will know. The whole story about food labels is that when the FDA was doing food labels, it had a whole bunch of prototypes that it tested on the public and nobody could understand any of the prototypes. So they picked the least worst. I mean, really that's what happened. And I think there's enormous food industry opposition to food labels. If the food labels could be not understood, the food industry could live with them. If people understood the food labels, they couldn't live with them. And that's why the whole question of warning labels on foods that are high in fat, sugar, and salt is fought so much, so that the FDA has said it's only going to have positives on food labels. It'll have something for healthy, but the kind of warning labels that they have in Chile and Peru and Brazil and some other countries in Latin America, we're not going to get those.

Kerry Diamond:
No, not for a long time.

Marion Nestle:
I don't think so.

Kerry Diamond:
How do you feel about the fact that we finally have a mayor who just loves food, loves restaurants, loves nightlife? He's a vegan. He wants people to eat healthier.

Marion Nestle:
Well, I think it's kind of wonderful. I want to see what he does. I'm waiting to see what he does. He's up against a lot of opposition. If you want a healthy food system and you want food that is healthier for the people in the planet, you're up against an industry that makes a lot of money by selling the opposite.

Kerry Diamond:
And Eric Adams, I should remind everybody, our mayor is Eric Adams.

Marion Nestle:
Eric Adams, yes.

Kerry Diamond:
Bloomberg tried with soda and all of that.

Marion Nestle:
Bloomberg tried. Yeah. And in some of the things that the Bloomberg Administration wanted to do like calorie-labeling and trans fat-labeling and so forth, getting rid of trans fats, they were way ahead of that. And that all became national policy. Where Bloomberg ran into trouble was on the soda cap, which was immediately framed as a soda ban and was fought by absolutely everybody, but that was because they did not follow basic rules of food advocacy or any other kind of advocacy. They broke every rule in the book.

Kerry Diamond:
Tell us what some of those basic rules are.

Marion Nestle:
Well, if you want to advocate for something, there are certain things you need to do. You have to have a very clear goal. You have to have people that you're working with who support that goal. You have to have strategies and tactics to achieve that goal. And you must have a very wide base of support. And in order to get that very wide base of support, you have to do a lot of going out in grassroots activity. They didn't do any of that. They just dumped it. And I was told later that they dumped it because they weren't ready, but somebody had gotten wind of it. And so they were forced, their hand was forced and they had to come out with it even though they hadn't done any of the preliminary work. They'd been working on it for a year, apparently.

But I got called that morning from some reporter for comment on the soda cap, which had already been framed as a ban. And I didn't know anything about it. And I didn't have any materials from the Health Department. There were no talking points. There were no facts or figures. So I called a friend, who, a colleague who worked at the Health Department and said, "I think it's a great idea, but where are my tools?" And she said, "I just heard about it last night." So everything about it was terrible. They should have backed off right away before making the fight over. It was just immense. I mean, I have fabulous photographs and actually gave a talk on it yesterday. It was really fun to talk about because the visual materials were so good on…

Kerry Diamond:
What do you mean the visual materials?

Marion Nestle:
The things that the soda industry did to fight the ban.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh, interesting.

Marion Nestle:
Yeah. “You can make your own decision about what to eat.” They had t-shirts that said, “I can make my own decision about how much soda to drink.” I mean, the soda industry did a great job on that, on fighting. And there were all these signs on trucks. “Don't let the mayor tell you what to eat.” And then the ads.

Kerry Diamond:
Just think of all the money spent on that.

Marion Nestle:
Oh yes.

Kerry Diamond:
Unbelievable.

Marion Nestle:
The soda industry will spend an infinite amount of money on anything that is likely to reduce consumption of soda.

Kerry Diamond:
Wow.

Marion Nestle:
We saw that during the soda tax initiatives.

Kerry Diamond:
If you were president, tell us 1, 2, 3 things you would do immediately.

Marion Nestle:
Universal school meals right off the top. That's a no brainer. A really easy one. Let's have our schools feed kids and not worry about how much money their parents make. It'll cost a little more. The payoff will be so great in logistics, in not having to stigmatize kids because they're poor. I just can't see any reason not to do it. It won't cause that much more. So that's for starters.

Kerry Diamond:
I got goosebumps when you said that. I think of Alice Waters all the time and how she has just stuck to her one message.

Marion Nestle:
I think her influence has been profound. And yes, and her sticktoitiveness and everybody thought she was crazy. And here we are with thousands of schools with gardens now and these are miraculous. I mean, I've been to schools with gardens. They're transformative for kids. Absolutely. So yes, off the top that, and then I would restrict food marketing to kids.

I would tax what are now called ultra processed foods. I would totally switch agricultural policy so that it is tightly linked to health policy. Let's have an agricultural system that is supported to produce healthy food, rather than our current system, which is feed for animals and fuel for automobiles. Number one, stop growing corn for ethanol. I'm sorry. I think it's such a mistake.

So those are just for starters, the big ones. Could we do that? I think yes. If we had the political will, do we have the political will? Not at the moment.

Kerry Diamond:
Yeah.

Marion Nestle:
Not at the moment. So I think there's plenty that could be done. And the idea would be to take a food systems approach, which means everything that happens to a food between the time it's produced until the time it's cooked, thrown out and wasted, is taken into consideration when you try to set your policy. And that would mean that agricultural subsidies subsidize healthy foods and because climate change is so dependent on eating less meat in a country like ours, that we stop the kind of subsidies that support meat and try to support fruits and vegetables. To me, it all seems very simple. Unfortunately, I don't have the power.

Kerry Diamond:
CPG, consumer packaged goods. There's so many women in our community who are launching their own products today. And it's been exciting to see because in some cases it's food that they grew up on, that other groups have co-opted that shouldn't really have had ownership over them, but there's just this huge explosion of entrepreneurship and food, especially among young women. What would you like to tell them as they're conceiving of these brands and these products?

Marion Nestle:
Well, make sure that your product is healthy and good for people and the environment. Try to keep them as little processed as possible because the issue of ultra processed foods, this is the big new innovation in nutrition. It's only within the last few years. And ultra processed foods are specific category of junk food that are industrially produced, don't look like the foods where they came from, can't be made in home kitchens. And you want to stay away from those because there's now phenomenal amounts of evidence that they encourage people to overeat calories. So you want food products that are genuinely good for people and good for the environment. And you're not doing greenwashing or health washing, which lots of products are. And you got to figure out how to make a product taste good. I think that's quite challenging. And I'm doing an updated addition of What to Eat, a book I wrote in 2006. A lot has changed in the last 15 years. And one of the things that's changed is all the new plant-based products. And I wish they tasted better.

Kerry Diamond:
And had more plants.

Marion Nestle:
And had more plants, yes.

Kerry Diamond:
I apologize for not giving credit to who this was, but someone had a headline the other day, “Where are all the fruits and vegetables in all these plant-based products?”

Marion Nestle:
Right. Yes, exactly. And have a good business plan. Please have a good business plan because some astonishing percentage of new food introductions fail. And getting one that succeeds is very, very hard. But lots of people are doing it. It's fun. And I don't know, I get lots of venture capital in it.

Kerry Diamond:
Lots. Okay, last question. So many people listening to the podcast are career changers or want to be career changers, love the food world, want to make a difference out there. I'd love to give you the opportunity to pitch the NYU Food Studies Program because I feel like it changes people's lives. People talk about that program and their eyes just sparkle when they talk about it.

Marion Nestle:
Well, they say it changes their lives. And that's why we developed it. I mean, we basically developed the program that we wish we had had available to us when we went to school. And it's food-centered, it's food and everything. And our graduates go on and do food and everything, which is kind of wonderful.

We developed the program because of food consultant, Clark Wolf, who was working with me at the time said, "Let's put together an advisory committee and find out what these people want their employees to know." And I was so surprised by their list. They wanted people to know about food and culture. They wanted people to know about ethnic diets and the history of food and where food came from and what different kinds of ingredients are, and how to tell the difference between a good ingredient and a not so good ingredient. I mean, really to be very sophisticated about all of that. And so we said, "Gee, that sounds terrific."And that's what we put together.

And when we built the food studies program at NYU in 1996, there was only one other program and that was the Gastronomy Program at Boston University that Julia Child and Jacques Pépin had been behind. And we thought ours needed to be more academic, which is why we called it food studies and not gastronomy. And we were it. And I had the hardest time explaining to the NYU provost. “Why”, he said, “would anybody want to study about food?” And I tell you, I'm pretty good at answering that question. It's trillions of dollars in business. It's responsible for billions of people's illnesses. I mean, it's really important. And I couldn't convince him. And we were basically one of two programs in the country. Now every week I get an announcement of another food studies program or its equivalent. It may have a different name. Universities everywhere have courses in food studies. The NYU Business School has a sustainability initiative with a big food component in it. I mean, it's just absolutely everywhere. It's so exciting.

Kerry Diamond:
And at NYU is it just a graduate program or is it undergraduate?

Marion Nestle:
No, it's undergraduate, masters, and doctoral. We have doctoral students in food studies who have gone on to do terrific things. To me, it's just the most exciting thing in the world. It isn't very often when you get to be involved in creation of a field, let alone a field that has just burgeoned and is everywhere now. I just got an announcement of a new program today.

Kerry Diamond:
That's great. Well, seeds you planted, bearing a lot of fruit and vegetables. Well, Marion, thank you so much. I really appreciate you schlepping up here. And I think your book's going to be a big hit. I hope it's a big hit and I really encourage everybody to read it.

Marion Nestle:
Well, thank you very much. I'm just delighted to be here and I love Cherry Bombe.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh, thanks. We love you back.
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Marion Nestle. We are lucky to have you in the food world, Marion. I hope you know that. Be sure to pick up Marion's memoir, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics at your favorite bookstore. Also, make sure you're signed up for our newsletter for all the Cooks & Books details, visit cherrybombe.com for more. I would love to see all of you at Cooks & Books this November. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Thanks to Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center. And to our assistant producer, Jenna Sadhu. And thanks to you for listening. You're the Bombe.