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In this episode of Eat.Drink. Think., Marion Nestle, author of Slow Cooked, A Memoir in Food Politics, returns to Eat. Drink. Think. to help us think critically about food policy and politics. We talk about following the money when scientific studies are used as food marketing tools, and she gives us practical tips to navigate the news and identify what food system changes will rely on policy versus individual actions.
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Food Politics (Marion Nestle’s daily blog)
The USDA Updates Plant Hardiness Zones
Slow Cooked by Marion Nestle
Food Politics by Marion Nestle
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Full Transcript:
Amy O’Neill Houck:
Welcome to Eat. Drink. Think. I’m Amy O’Neill Houck. In this podcast from Edible Communities, a network of magazines published across North America, we celebrate all things local and sustainable in the food world.
Today, we’re speaking with Marion Nestle. We last chatted with Marion in late 2022 as her memoir Slow Cooked: A Memoir in Food Politics, was just coming out. Marion is Paulette Goddard professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University Emerita. Her research examines scientific, economic, and social influences on food choice.
In addition to her memoir, she’s the author of three prize-winning books, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, and What To Eat. She’s currently working on a new edition of What To Eat due out in fall 2025. Marion writes a near-daily blog on food politics that many of us passionate about food find essential reading. Marion distills industry-funded studies, offers reviews of new books on food, and writes eloquently about things like the Farm Bill, highly processed foods, food and technology, and the need for careful critical thinking when it comes to what we eat. Marion Nestle, welcome to Eat. Drink. Think.
Marion Nestle:
Oh, it’s nice to be back.
AOH:
Great. Well, I’m going to jump right in with something that you just wrote about. Your blog post from February 13th is kind of a great example of how you break down potentially challenging topics. It was titled USDA Updates Its Plant Hardiness Zones. And I love how you explain the new USDA maps and then weave them together with anecdotes about your own terrace gardening in Manhattan over the years.
And then you let the reader follow you down the path the new zones took you on to a Civil Eats article, then a US Forest Service report from 2022, and then back to the USDA in 2018. You have a knack for getting us to think along with you. Can you talk about how you approach this work and what leads you to and through a topic like this?
MN:
Sure. It’s hard to explain. I’ve been doing this blog for 15 years, five days a week, for the last 15 years. And when anybody asks me, “Why are you doing that?” I do it because it forces me to keep up with the literature and not only keep up but also think about it and think about it in a coherent way. And what I try to do on it is to lead people through my thinking about it. So, in that particular post, I had seen the Civil Eats article about it saying that the Department of Agriculture was ignoring climate change. And yet here it was updating its growing zones in a way that to me is just shocking because when I moved to Manhattan 30 years ago, there were things I could not grow on my terrace. The most obvious is rosemary. Rosemary on the West Coast is a perennial.
It grows in big hedges, and in the summer, when you walk by those hedges, it’s just absolutely magical. The smell is just so delicious. But I’ve tried year after year after year to grow rosemary on my terrace. It freezes in the winter. It doesn’t like being frozen, thawed, and refrozen, and it doesn’t survive. And the last several years, it survived. And so it’s obvious to me that the zone is changing, and the zones are changing everywhere. And I thought, “Well, I don’t understand why the USDA didn’t mention a word about climate change in discussing this, although it seems so obvious.” But the USDA has other branches that are writing about the effects of climate change on growing zones all the time. They don’t talk to each other.
AOH:
That’s interesting.
MN:
So that was a critical point about how government agencies function and don’t function. The USDA does very good work, but it’s not coherent work. It’s very disparate. And different agencies approach things in different ways without having any coherent policy position, which is kind of weird for a government agency.
AOH:
Is it something to do with size, perhaps? I mean, the USDA is probably-
MN:
Yeah, it’s enormous.
AOH:
… quite large. Yeah.
MN:
It’s enormous. And also because, over the decades, it’s taken on responsibilities that it didn’t have originally. And some of those responsibilities are in contradiction to what its major mission is, which is to make sure that the country has enough food to eat basically, and it doesn’t care how it does that. So, largely, the Department of Agriculture is a support system for industrial agriculture, which today means corn and soybeans grown for animal feed and ethanol for automobiles and soon-to-be airplanes.
Pretty soon we’re going to be growing corn for airplanes.
AOH:
That reminds me of something you wrote recently pointing out that what the USDA calls specialty crops is actually food.
MN:
Yeah, that’s food, the specialty crops. So I think the USDA needs a big overhaul in its mission, and I keep poking away at that.
AOH:
So in a media and cultural and political landscape that’s increasingly polarized, where maybe folks tend to stake out their corner at your blog, which doesn’t actually shy away from opinion at all, comes across as reasoned and also opening to questioning and not knowing. Can you talk about how, as a teacher and as a public intellectual, you encourage critical thinking and openness in your readers and students?
MN:
Well, this is how I do it. I try to trace through each of my posts how I found out about it, the topic I’m writing about. So I give credit where credit is due as much as I can and what I did in order to write whatever I wrote about what I read how it influenced what I wrote so that my thinking processes as transparent as it can be. And I try to be totally transparent about what’s my opinion.
I often have at the bottom of the post comment in capital letters or in bold letters, and that’s my opinion. And so I try to separate opinion from fact. And the other thing that I try really hard to do is to link to original documents. So the blog is a phenomenal resource for looking things up. If you want to know about some issue in nutrition and food over the last 15 years, this is not a bad place to start. And certainly, for the kinds of things that I write and publish, I often go back to it because that’s where the references are.
And I’ve already done the thinking, and I’ve already organized it in a way that’s… that I hope is easy for people to read who don’t know anything about it. I try to make these posts as short as possible. I try to keep the quotations short and just try to give an overview of what the issue is and why I’m thinking about it the way I’m thinking about it.
And people can disagree. I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t take comments on the blog. I did for the first several years, and the trolling was so atrocious and unpleasant and difficult to deal with that I finally just had to shut off comments. And I was very sorry about that.
AOH:
I notice that you get emails, and you mention them from time to time when people respond directly to you about the blog.
MN:
Yeah. And their people who respond to the blog are usually pretty polite.
The people can subscribe to the blog by going on to foodpolitics.com and typing their email address in, and then it gets delivered to them after it gets posted. I usually post at nine o’clock, and sometime between nine and 11, it gets delivered. So there are those subscribers and my email address is at the bottom of the subscription because it has to be.
And I get very, very few comments, I mean, enough so that I can answer every one of them without any trouble at all. Very, very few. But when there were comments available on the blog, which is a very different thing than sending me a personal email, which has to come with your personal email on it, when people could comment on the blog, the comments were personal, really unpleasant. They were sexist, racist, antisemitic, ageist. I mean, they were really awful. And people who read the blog complained about having to read this kind of stuff.
AOH:
Yeah.
MN:
They didn’t like it, and I couldn’t spend my time going through every comment and deleting the ones I didn’t like. That was just really not something that… a way I wanted to spend my time. So when it got really bad… There was one post I used to get maybe five or 10 comments. And there was one post interestingly on GMOs that got 800 comments, and most of them from people who were pro-GMO. And I thought a lot of them must have been paid for.
AOH:
Interesting.
MN:
They were just so nasty. They were just really. And I… Then so I contacted the people who manage my website and said, “Turn it off, please.”
AOH:
Yeah, you mentioned the organization too, and I think it’s maybe helpful for listeners to note that you do tag things and have sections. So if somebody was looking for, say, information on food waste, which I’m going to ask you about in a minute, you probably have a collection of all of your articles that.
MN:
The WordPress search engine is beyond fabulous. I mean, you can search for parts of words, and it’ll come up with every post that has whatever that combination is. So searching for keywords, searching for names, searching for whatever, I mean, it’s just astonishingly quick and easy to do that.
So, if I’m getting ready to write an article, I’ll just look up everything I wrote about over and see. And because I’ve linked to the original studies or the original… or the places where I got it. Sometimes, my blog is the only place where you can find documents, which is also kind of interesting. So I think it’s useful for me, and sometimes people tell me that it’s useful for them, not nearly as often as I would think.
AOH:
Well, you get quoted a lot. So I think that definitely, people are finding it. So reducing food waste is a popular topic with folks who are interested in reducing the effects of climate on our food system. And the idea of upcycled food or turning waste into new products is gaining traction. Do you have thoughts on the food industry side of this idea, the commercialization of reducing food waste versus maybe the less sexy idea of home cooks and eaters reducing food waste in everyday life?
MN:
Well, the first thing to understand about food waste is that 70% of it occurs at the production level, which you don’t have anything to do with. It’s what’s left on the field. It’s what didn’t get picked, what was the wrong size, it was whatever, 70%. So that’s by far the major proportion of food waste. And you and your kitchen have nothing to do with that. 10% comes at the grocery store level, much smaller than most people think, and that leaves 20% for what you’re doing.
And I’m all in favor of upcycling, and I’m all in favor of trying to reduce food waste, but it’s a drop in the bucket. And it’s a feel-good issue in the same way that food banks are a feel-good issue. Everybody loves them. It makes you feel really good to be doing that, and I think it’s good to feel good. So I’m not opposed to that. It’s just I don’t think it’s the most important issue going. And I know that people love it. And, of course, the food industry loves it.
It keeps everybody’s minds off of the junk that they’re producing and the waste that they’re creating in the process. So, of course, they like it. And, of course, they like food banks because it keeps everybody’s minds off of changes in policy that might actually provide food for poor people in ways that are more sustainable. So I have complicated feelings about it. I think, yes, we should all be careful and not waste food. That’s a really good idea. It’s not all that hard to do, but we should be pushing food industry to do that too.
AOH:
So, in that… from that side, then maybe finding economic incentive is not necessarily a bad thing as far as upcycled ingredients or…
MN:
Oh, I think the upcycled stuff is great. Use what’s wasted in ways that are… I mean, the best veggie burger I ever had was when Dan Barber at Blue Hill was doing an upcycling week in his restaurant and put together a veggie burger that was leftover beets and carrots from juice making, the pulp from juice making. Ugh, they were absolutely delicious.
Really just delicious on their own. So I think that, and there are companies that are involved in upcycling, more power to them.
AOH:
And perhaps that attention that they’re getting would draw consumers into perspective that it is industrial food that’s maybe producing most of that waste. Because in the media, you see things like, “Consumers waste a third of what they bring home, or 96% of what they waste ends up in the landfill,” that we’re not talking about the industry side as much in the media.
MN:
Well, we never talk about the industry side. We always talk about something personal because you can’t do anything about the industry side. You don’t see it. You’re not supposed to see it, and the industry is doing whatever the industry is doing everything that it can to deflect your attention elsewhere.
So that’s kind of why I write the books I do about to try to refocus attention on what is being done that is beyond our personal control and requires policy intervention, which is much more abstract and difficult for people to see.
AOH:
For sure. It seems like maybe industry is getting the sense that consumers are concerned about highly processed food or ultra-processed food because they’re sort of making noisy changes. Maybe they’re significant. Maybe they’re not, but they’re making a lot of noise about changing their products to simplify ingredients.
You’ve been talking about highly processed foods for years, and you were just posting about it very recently with respect to mac and cheese, for instance, being cheaper than carrots at Walmart. So I’m wondering, where do you think consumers are today with this increased awareness about ultra-processed foods, and what shifts do you maybe anticipate down the road?
MN:
Well, ultra-processed foods is a relatively new concept. It was invented in 2009. That’s not all that long ago, but I think it’s now getting into popular consciousness in a really important way. In part because of the extraordinary amount of research that links ultra-processed foods with poor health. Ultra-processed foods I know there was a lot of debate about the definition, but to me, it’s pretty straightforward. These are foods that have to be produced industrially.
You can’t do them in your home kitchen because you don’t have the equipment, and you don’t have the additives that go into it. And so they’re usually foods with long lists of ingredients. Many of them are high in salt, sugar, and saturated fat, but not all, because salt, sugar, and fats are not considered ultra-processed. They’re considered processed culinary ingredients, and they don’t fall into the same category. But the amount of evidence that links ultra-processed foods, which are highly processed junk foods, basically, to poor outcome is so overwhelming now.
And there’s now a controlled clinical trial that shows that there’s something about these foods that encourages people to eat more calories from them than they otherwise would. That as this word is getting out, the food industry is starting to fight back, and they’re fighting back as hard as they can by recruiting people to write articles saying, “Well, you can’t define it, and ultra-processed foods means whole wheat bread, and we need whole wheat bread,” and that kind of thing.
So it must be having an effect is when the pushback is that extreme. And I think it makes dietary advice really easy. Don’t eat much ultra-processed foods. Pretty easy to identify them if they’ve got great, big, long ingredient lists. Chances are you don’t want to eat them, or you eat them in small amounts, or you make them an occasional treat. You just don’t bring back huge numbers of packages of processed foods, and you don’t eat fast food a lot. Once in a while, sure, no problem.
AOH:
There was an article in the Washington Post in early February that was titled, Your Plant-Based Meat Could Soon Have Some Animal Fat. Aside from maybe being clickbait for worried vegetarians, the article basically was saying that in order to make plant-based meats taste better, food tech companies were looking at adding in some animal fat and creating some sort of a hybrid food. And I was just curious. What do you think this says about the state of the alt-meat marketplace?
MN:
I think they’re in big trouble. I mean, they’re in big trouble. They came out with these products and with a lot of fanfare behind them, and everybody tried them. Everybody did. And guess what? They don’t taste all that good. And if you look at the ingredient list, they’re clearly ultra-processed. That’s a big problem for them. It’s a big problem. And the research that’s coming out says, “Mmm, there are real questions about whether they benefit climate that much. There are real questions about whether they’re healthier.” Very difficult to prove. The research on that would be really tough.
So, I mean, except for a core set of consumers who don’t want to eat animal products, people aren’t buying these. And heaven help us if they put animal fat back in, then they’re going to lose that ground. I mean, their intention from the beginning was to get people to give up meat and substitute this. And I don’t know who they talked to. They didn’t talk to me. If they had, I would’ve said, “Yeah, I don’t think this is going to work.” Certainly, the Impossible meat looks like meat, tastes like meat, appears to bleed like meat, and it’s… it beats the visual quality of Beyond Meat.
But I mean, people are not returning. They’re not getting the kind of return customers on this, and they don’t taste as good as meat. Meat tastes good. People like the taste of it. And my feeling always has been, you don’t have to eat meat if you don’t want to. There are plenty of other foods that have the same kinds of nutrients. It’s not a required nutrient. So why do substitute? I mean, I’ve never appreciated surimi, the artificial fish, or the fish substitute that is made. And these are… Maybe they started out as fish. It’s basically fish protein is colored to look like fish. I mean, I just never got that. What’s the point?
AOH:
Maybe it’s because it’s easy. I mean, we are sort of trained, especially in North America, to think of a protein, carb, vegetable on our plate, and maybe people go for the meat analogs because they don’t know what to do in the middle. They’re not used to making the other dishes that would provide those nutritional things.
I don’t know. I’ve just been with family recently, and I eat a lot of plant-based stuff. But when they want to throw together a quick meal, it’s definitely, “Let’s put an animal protein on the plate,” which can be delicious. But I wonder if that’s part of why the meat analogs are leaned on.
MN:
Well, I mean, the way it was explained to me, and I can’t even say this without laughing. When I say things like, “I don’t get it. If you don’t want to eat meat, don’t eat meat. Why do you need a meat substitute?” Somebody explained to me, “At last, I can take my child to a fast food restaurant.” And I thought, “Oh, okay, so your child was feeling deprived and not being able to eat fast food. Now they can eat the veggie burgers or whatever are being served there.”
I kind of get that. And then people who are vegans tell me that they like the taste of meat and they miss it. And so the idea that there would be a vegan substitute, which is why they cannot put animal fat back in these things, the idea that there would be a vegan substitute is very appealing to them. It comes pretty close to the taste of meat or close enough, especially if you put ketchup and onions on it, and then you don’t care what you’re eating.
AOH:
And what about cultured meat and other flashy food tech that’s been both attracting and losing funding as of late? Do you have any predictions about how these technologies build as environmental wins might play out?
MN:
Well, it’s not on the market yet, and there’s a reason why it’s not on the market. They can’t scale up the technology to produce enough to put on the market. And the problem with scaling up is that you’ve got to feed the cells and every time you add the feed, you run the risk of contaminating them with undesirable bacteria that are going to rot the whole thing. It’s a very, very difficult technical problem to solve, and I think everybody underestimated how hard it would be. Whether the products themselves taste good or good enough substitute, I have no idea. I’ve never tasted it. The chicken has been approved, the beef hasn’t been approved yet.
But chicken was served at a restaurant in San Francisco. I never got there. So I’ve never tasted it, and I haven’t been invited to one of the tastings. I’ve been sent a lot of beef substitute products, and I can’t say that I like them very much, but I’m not their core customer. If I want to eat beef, I’ll eat beef. If I don’t, I won’t. Don’t need a substitute, I guess. But other people are interested in them. And the technological approaches to these things are very appealing to investors that they think that a technological approach to dealing with a food problem is something that can generate a lot of money, and maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Don’t know.
AOH:
Can we talk about the Atlantic diet? It’s been built about as a cousin to the famous Mediterranean diet, and it seems to have entered the media consciousness this month after a study was released in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And all the headlines just kind of got me wondering what you thought about it.
MN:
I thought it was a plant-based diet, a largely but not exclusively plant-based diet that was different from the Mediterranean diet in that it didn’t use olive oil. I can’t remember whether there were any other differences. It seemed to me it was very, very similar to what you would call a healthy diet, a standard healthy diet. And you know if you eat healthy diets, you’ll be healthier.
AOH:
What do you think the impetus is? I mean, is it… behind creating something with a new name like that?
MN:
Yeah. Well, the authors of that study called it that. They could have called it Largely Plant-Based or Plant-Forward or whatever. But it seemed to me that it met the dietary principles that everybody’s promoting right now, which is a largely, but not exclusively, necessarily plant-based diet. I mean, Michael Pollan’s, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” really covers the territory.
AOH:
Can you tell us about your work shining light on industry-funded studies? Have you noticed any shifts in the way funding and influence is declared or acknowledged over the years that you’ve been doing that work?
MN:
Well, journals started requiring authors to say who paid for the studies, and whether they had any financial connections to companies that would stand to benefit if the study came out with a positive result. Most journals by the 1990s or early 2000s were doing that. Almost every journal required disclosure. Whether the disclosures are accurate or not is a separate issue. But it makes it very easy to look at a study and find out who paid for it and whether the authors had any particular conflicts of interest. And I wrote a book called Unsavory Truth: How the Food Industry Skews the Science of What We Eat. It came out in 2018, 2020. I can’t remember. 2018, I think. And it’s a book about food industry funding of nutrition and food research.
And so, since that book came out, I sort of hoped that nutrition and food researchers would stop taking money from industries with a vested interest in the outcome of the study. And what I mean by that is that I can look at the title of the study and guess who paid for it, and if I know who paid for it, I can guess what the result of the study was. And there’s something wrong with that picture. And there’s an enormous amount of evidence, which I reviewed in my book, mostly on drug industry funding of physician and medical science. And that shows that drug industry funding has a profound impact on study outcome and also physicians prescribing practices.
And it’s no different in food or nutrition. And a lot… what makes it complicated is that the influence is… occurs at a subconscious level. People don’t go into this thinking that they want to be influenced, that they want to be bought out. They think they’re just doing science, and so they’re unconsciously skewing the way the research question is asked in order to come out with a result that the funder is going to like. And I get letters all the time from food trade associations. Pecans, for example. “We’ve got $50,000, and we’re looking for studies to show the benefits of eating pecans.” Well, they’re not going to fund anything that’s unlikely to show benefits. They’re just not going to do that.
So it’s rare to find food industry-funded study that comes out with results that are not in the funder’s interest. They do occur, and occasionally I post one. I’ve got one coming up. But mostly, I try to… Every Monday, I post one of these things, and I try to post the one that’s funniest or most ridiculous. Really, somebody did this study? There’s only one reason why they would’ve done that study so they can use the results in marketing. There’s no other reason for doing it. Though occasionally, I pick on somebody who I shouldn’t have picked on. That happened quite recently, and he called to complain. Is a researcher who’s doing something very, very interesting, as it turns out, and he can’t get any money other than money from industry.
AOH:
I was going to ask about that. Where do researchers who truly hope to be unbiased get their funding?
MN:
Well, I thought he was very impressive. He’s a researcher in the Dairy Science Department at Cornell, very impressive guy. And he’s looking at ways to feed cows so they won’t produce as much methane.
And he’s got an elaborate, breathtaking setup. It’s really impressive. He got his first funding from Cargill, which has a vested interest in feeding cows, but then he has a lot of independent government money as well, or foundation money, but at least he got started by getting industry funding, so I can sort of understand that. But I had… he had a study that came out with a result that looked like it favored the funder’s interest, and he called to complain about it. And we ended up going and looking at his setup, which, as I said, it is very impressive. So these things are complicated, and just because somebody takes industry funding doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily being influenced. It just comes out that way an awful lot.
Yeah. So the first hypothesis is that the influence is there, whether the researcher recognizes it or not.
AOH:
Well, I think that skepticism is probably something that maybe we’re not as trained to have as consumers as we might need to. The subconscious bias that you were mentioning is interesting to me. It reminds me of something that we talked about the last time we were here. In your memoir, you talked about your students. Excuse me. When they studied something, you had them write reports on studies, and regardless of whether the study was proved to be true or not, the students wanted to try whatever it was that they were researching, right.
MN:
Yeah, we’re human. And food is something that you put in your body. It’s personal. It’s intimate. It’s something that you’re very familiar with. People care a lot about what they eat.
AOH:
Yeah. What are your thoughts about micro, and now we’re even hearing about nano plastics in food?
MN:
Oh, dear. Well, I mean, again, it’s a political issue. It’s not something you, as a consumer, can do anything about because it’s there. And if it’s nano, you certainly can’t see it. Even if it’s micro, you can’t see it. So you just hope it’s benign and goes through the digestive tract as quickly as possible. I advise eating a high-fiber diet. Get rid of that stuff.
We don’t know what its long-term effects are going to be. The more I read about the kind of chemicals that are in food, the more concerned I am. But there’s nothing that you can do individually about it. Even if you’re growing food organically, the ground is so contaminated, the air is so contaminated. It’s just very, very difficult. And as more and more is studied about all of these chemicals and things that are contaminating food, almost nothing about it is reassuring.
AOH:
Can you tell us about the update to What To Eat? What’s going to be different about the new book, and what you’re enjoying about the process of updating it?
MN:
Well, it’s in a very funny position right now because I turned in the manuscript three months ago, and I’m still waiting for an editor’s comments. So I don’t know what kind of shape it’s in until I hear from the editor. It’s being scheduled for publication in September 2025. So I guess I’m being given time to work on it. But it was my idea of a quick pandemic project. You have to be careful what you wish for. And I thought, I mean, I’ve been going to supermarkets for the last 15 years. I hadn’t been paying very close attention, apparently because they said, “If you’re going to do a new edition, you have to change at least 40%.”
I think this is a 90% change edition. I basically wrote the book over again from scratch, and I kept the structure the same or similar, but so much has changed. I could not believe it. I’ve never underestimated the work involved in a product quite so badly as I underestimated this one. All I could do is laugh about it. So much has changed. Every single product that I used as an example in the 2006 edition of What To Eat no longer exists. You can’t find it. Things that were just sort of obvious in supermarkets in 2006, entire aisles devoted to co*ke and Pepsi, uh-uh, no more. Now, it’s bottled waters of one kind or another. You go into a grocery store, the first thing you see is a wall of fruit-flavored waters.
Everybody has them. Every grocery store has its own. They’re just… I mean, it’s astounding to me that there’ll be 20 different kinds of a brand of bottled water of one kind or another. So that’s obviously a big moneymaker for supermarkets. And then there are whole new things that didn’t exist, the plant-based stuff, the plant-based meat, the emphasis on plant ingredients. Cannabis edibles, they didn’t exist.
AOH:
Right.
MN:
There’s a chapter on pet food, including cannabis treats for pets. I mean, so much has changed. And so it really involved going in and starting over and redoing the research. And also, a lot of issues that are very, very important right now are not as important 15 years ago.
And ones that were important 15 years ago are not important now. So it needed a re-shifting on that. I mean, when you would think that the basic issues would hold up really, really well, and they do in their way, but a lot has happened, and I think the book will be retitled What To Eat Now or something like that to make it clear that time has changed on it. But I have to say it was just as much fun to do as the first one was. I just love going to supermarkets and with a pad and pencil and taking notes and asking questions. And then, every now and then, something happens that’s really dramatic. So a new Wegmans supermarket moved into Manhattan last fall, and it’s got a Japanese fish market in it that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, where every Saturday at one o’clock they carve a tuna. I mean, it’s high theater.
AOH:
Sounds like you’re a grocery store tourist. It’s something I definitely like to do when I travel is find a grocery store.
MN:
Yeah, it’s so much fun. You learn so much about where you are and what’s happening and what the different rules are. And so it was really fun to do. But I’m waiting for edits.
AOH:
And predominantly, What To Eat is what to eat for our bodies, as opposed to what to eat from the more political, cultural sense that you talk about a lot in other areas.
MN:
They’re both, dear. It’s both. It’s both.
AOH:
Okay.
MN:
And it’s really not about what to eat because that’s easy. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. It’s how to think about the issues.
And so what I did was I used supermarkets as an organizing device and went through each section, section by section, and talked about the issues that come up in that section. So, in produce, I talk about the whole question of organics, and in the meat section I talk about what the hormones and antibiotics in the fish section.
Oh, the fish section. That’s the worst. I talk about why it’s so hard to know what you’re eating when you’re eating fish and what… how you try to balance the healthy parts of fish and the Omega-3s that they produce and all of that kind of thing with the toxicology that comes with them.
And PFAS are new. These chemicals in foods that everybody is worried about now, they were barely mentioned in the first edition of the book, and in this book, I felt like I had to discuss them in much greater length because they come up all the time. It was an entertaining and extremely enlightening project. I learned a lot.
AOH:
That’s great. Well, we’re definitely looking forward to it, and I hope you’ll be willing to come back when it comes out next fall. Marion, thank you so much for joining us.
MN:
My pleasure.
AOH:
We’ve been listening to author and food policy Professor Marion Nestle. Thank you for joining us today at Eat. Drink. Think. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to pick up your local Edible magazine. You can find show notes for today’s episode at ediblecommunities.com.
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