On a dreary February afternoon in Westchester County, N.Y., the cooks, farmers, servers and other staff of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture convened over a roast beef dinner to hear Marion Nestle hold forth on the state of food politics.
Dr. Nestle, one of the country’s foremost experts on nutrition policy, was still trying to get her head around the political realignments of the prior months. After his win in November, Donald J. Trump selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run his federal health department. The partnership produced a new take on an old slogan, “Make America Healthy Again.” It also led the McDonald’s-loving Mr. Trump to publicly criticize the “industrial food complex.”
The phrasing stood out to Dr. Nestle, a molecular biologist turned nutritionist who has spent decades pushing for stricter regulation of food additives and removing conflicts of interest from government health policy.
“He sounds just like me when he talks!” Dr. Nestle, who describes herself as “firmly left-wing,” told the crowd, eliciting laughter. “How is that possible?”
Dr. Nestle (pronounced NESS-ul) is not a name on the level of the chef Alice Waters or the food writer Michael Pollan. But among food activists and academics, she is considered one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement. She was among the first, in 2002, to lay the blame for America’s obesity epidemic at the feet of the food industry when she released “Food Politics,” a book of case studies illustrating how the industry manipulates government policy and the scientific establishment to its own ends.
Dr. Nestle was 65 when the book came out, and she could have stopped then. Instead, she has been on a run ever since, publishing a dozen more books, globe-trotting to deliver speeches and serving as a go-to source for journalists. But only now, at 88, does she seem to be reaching her peak. For years, Dr. Nestle’s ideas placed her in food policy’s progressive camp. But today, fears about food additives and environmental toxins are rampant, and some of her longest held and most passionate beliefs — about topics like regenerative agriculture, school lunches and additives — are marching toward the bipartisan center.
Dr. Nestle is still trying to make sense of the about-face by the right and how she should respond to it. Mr. Kennedy’s tendency to go against scientific consensus would seem in conflict with her own evidence-based approach. But she has not offered a full-on condemnation of the health secretary, to the frustration of some of her adherents. Dr. Nestle recently received a “hate letter,” she told me, for not criticizing Mr. Kennedy’s stance toward vaccinations.
The dietitian Christy Harrison, who credits Dr. Nestle as a major influence early in her career, has vocalized her disappointment. “I get the impression that Nestle is fiddling over the details of Kennedy’s diet-culture plans while he burns our public-health capacities to the ground,” Ms. Harrison wrote recently in her newsletter.
But Dr. Nestle has never tailored her views to suit what’s popular, and she doesn’t appear poised to start. “I’m going to support what I support and I’ll oppose what I oppose, and we’ll see where that goes,” she said.
So what does she make of seed oils? “I really don’t think seed oils are a big deal.”
Artificial food dyes? “I don’t think it’s the most important issue in the world, but I’d just as soon have them out.”
Removing fluoride from drinking water? “I think water should be fluoridated. It’s got an enormous body of research backing it up.”
At Stone Barns, Dr. Nestle lingered on the subject of ultraprocessed foods, a point of overlapping interest between her and Mr. Kennedy. “I think we need a complete change in our food system,” she told the crowd.
“Whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to bring us that change,” she added, “remains to be seen.”
Taking On the Food Business
Dr. Nestle’s introduction to the subject that would become her life’s work came almost by accident, when she was nearing 40 and teaching in a university biology department.
Raised in New York City by first-generation Americans who she said were members of the Communist Party, Dr. Nestle became the first in her family to attend college when she received a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied biology. She was often the only woman in her lab sections, and recalls her male peers depositing dead lab rats near her equipment.
Undeterred, she completed a Ph.D. in molecular biology and landed a job at Brandeis University. There, in 1975, Dr. Nestle was asked to teach a new course on nutrition, added by student petition; the department had no offerings on the subject, and interest in it was increasing in society. “Preparing for that class was like falling in love,” she said. She had a passion for food and cooking and was excited by the challenges that came with understanding how people ate — and how they should eat. She would go on to teach nutrition for decades.
In 1986, Dr. Nestle joined the Department of Health and Human Services as senior nutrition policy adviser. There she edited the first Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, released in 1988, before joining New York University as the chair of the school’s neglected and fusty Department of Home Economics and Nutrition. In time, she transformed it into the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, focused on the intersections of food, culture, sociology and politics. It was among the first of what would become many food studies programs at universities around the country.
“That program has had an enormous influence on getting food taken seriously as an academic subject,” Mr. Pollan said, “not just nutrition, but food and the food system and food politics.”
At the time, the field of nutrition was focused on educating people to make healthier choices, which presupposed that one’s food decisions were a matter of personal responsibility. But while working on the surgeon general’s report, Dr. Nestle witnessed the power food companies wielded; although the report cited overconsumption of saturated fats as a leading cause of death, Dr. Nestle was not permitted to recommend eating less meat, a top source of the fats, because of the Reagan administration’s unwillingness to upset the meat industry. (Dr. Nestle is fond of saying, “Anytime you advocate to eat less of something, it’s bad for business.”) She realized that food producers’ lobbying determined where agricultural subsidies were spent (and therefore which foods were most affordable) and even what the federal government was willing to say about what its citizens should and should not eat.
It became clear to her that, when it came to food, the problem was with the system, not the individual. “I never wanted to go to another meeting on childhood obesity and have speaker after speaker say, ‘How are we going to teach moms to feed their kids better?’” Dr. Nestle said. She decided to write about it and eventually published “Food Politics.”
The book was not a best seller, but it proved influential. Mr. Pollan considers it one the most important books on the food system in his lifetime and said that his own books owed a large debt to Dr. Nestle.
“It helped me connect all sorts of dots between the way we’re eating and agricultural policies and the way capitalism works,” Mr. Pollan said of “Food Politics.”
Shifting the conversation away from personal responsibility and toward corporate power was, for many of Dr. Nestle’s readers, a revelation. It’s a message she has been hammering ever since, including, since 2007, on a blog called Food Politics that, among other things, shares policy news and government leaks and criticizes industry-funded nutrition studies. (A recent “industry-funded study of the week” showing that grape extract can improve cognition was funded by a maker of grape extract.)
“She’s done a great job explaining how the food industry has contributed to the sickening of America,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
The chef and food advocate Dan Barber, at whose invitation Dr. Nestle spoke at Stone Barns, put it slightly differently: “You do not want to be on the wrong side of an argument with Marion,” he said.
‘The Best Advice Is Boring’
Over Dr. Nestle’s half-century in nutrition science, as Americans have hopped from one fad to the next, her philosophy has remained simple: Eat a varied diet of minimally processed foods. Don’t eat too much, and limit the junk. It’s an opinion that she has shared widely for decades, and it lends itself to the snappy aphorisms for which she is known. In 1993, Dr. Nestle told The New York Times that the problem with nutrition wasn’t that it was confusing but that “the best advice is boring.” Thirty-some years on, she hasn’t changed her message. “The biggest problem in American diets is people eat too much,” she told me.
Health influencers have variously pinned the rise of obesity and other chronic health crises to increases in sugar, fat, salt or certain chemicals in the food supply. Dr. Nestle insists the problem is much simpler: portions ballooned. As companies mastered the processing of inexpensive ingredients like corn and soy into high-margin packaged foods, they realized they could maximize their profits by supersizing meals.
Sitting in a cafe at Stone Barns and eating an apple muffin, she said she could recall when it happened, in the 1980s; Michael Kinsley, then the editor of The New Republic, wrote a column about the phenomenon, built around muffin sizes. “All of a sudden muffins went from being — this would’ve been super large,” she said, holding her modestly sized muffin aloft. “And bagels! Bagels are completely shocking. When did bagels get that big?”
When it comes to nutrition, Dr. Nestle considers herself “a lumper,” her term for a person who focuses on big-picture dietary patterns. “I don’t care about the details,” she said. It’s a view that has put her somewhat out of step with the contemporary nutrition conversation, in which the concept of calories is seen as increasingly passé and the chatter among the nutrition-conscious is more likely to revolve around ketosis and fatty-acid ratios. Dr. Nestle calls these sorts of people “splitters,” and right now, the splitters are making a lot of noise.
There are problems with this approach, she insists. The food industry formulates processed foods to meet nutritional moments — high-protein Wheaties, anyone? — and focusing too much on any one aspect of a food misses the ways nutrients interact with one another. “If you’re just looking at a single nutrient, you miss the big picture,” she said.
Dr. Nestle insists that her own diet is absolutely ordinary, and while she makes a point of walking as much as possible, she has never been a gym goer. These days, she begins her day with a cup of coffee, and breakfast is often Shredded Wheat and blueberries. Lunch is “I don’t know, a salad or a sandwich”; dinner is often eaten out with friends near her office. She likes salads but said she had always eaten junk food, too, “just not too much of it.”
Much of the chatter about nutrition fads these days, she notes, is not based on reputable science and has a whiff of religiosity about it. “If you have belief systems about nutrition that are not backed up by science, then, like any other belief system, they’re not going to be controverted by facts,” Dr. Nestle said. People are speaking a different language, one that has more to do with emotion and faith.
“Lots of people don’t have that kind of religion anymore, so food is a substitute in some ways.”
88 and Rolling
Less than 48 hours after her visit to Stone Barns, Dr. Nestle hopped on a flight to Mexico to deliver speeches to the National Institute of Public Health and a large health advocacy group. Next came a lecture (and two classes) at Pennsylvania State University and a panel in Nashville. Later this spring, Dr. Nestle will give the commencement address at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Almost always, Nestle has numerous online panels, lectures and Q&As on the calendar.
Although healthy habits have undoubtedly played a role in her continued health and verve, she’s unwilling to ascribe too much value to her own choices. At least “some of it,” she said, “is certainly luck.”
Whatever the reason for her vitality, it is hard to ignore. In person, Dr. Nestle is trim and vigorous, her posture straight. She still begins most mornings by writing for two to three hours, as she has for over two decades. When she’s not traveling, she walks a few blocks from her Greenwich Village apartment to her office at New York University; she retired from her position at the university in 2017 but retained the title of professor emerita. There, she reads new research, prepares for lectures and speaks to reporters almost daily.
Dr. Nestle’s appetite is not what it once was — “I used to be able to knock off a pizza. Well, a small pizza,” she told me — but her metabolism seems to be the only part of her that’s slowing down. She has two books coming out this year and is at work on another, a history of food and nutrition policy and an examination of food marketing, told through the lens of breakfast cereal. It is slated for release around the time of her 90th birthday.
When I asked whether she ever considered retiring entirely, the question seemed to take her by surprise. “No, I really don’t,” she said. After 50 years in nutrition, the conversation is changing in ways that surprise her — and occasionally delight her, too.
“When I wrote “Food Politics,” I would often get asked ‘What has food got to do with politics?’” Dr. Nestle said. “I hardly ever get asked that anymore.”
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