In this podcast episode, EWG President and Co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Marion Nestle, one of the nation’s most respected voices on nutrition and food politics. They’ll take on the push by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to achieve “Make America Healthy Again” goals through changes to federal food policy.
Cook and Nestle explore Kennedy’s complicated – and at times confusing – position on nutrition. They agree with Kennedy’s shining a light on Food and Drug Administration failures. But they question his seeming focus on harmful food additives, arguing that the administration sidelines some larger matters of context, such as resource shortages and failing nutrition education.
Cook and his guest also review the history of U.S. food regulation, pointing out that the success of Kennedy and MAHA aims seem to ride on shifts in nutrition policy fault lines.
Nestle has dedicated her career to public health and food policy advocacy. She is professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of several books and a daily newsletter, “Food Politics.”
Ken: Hi, it's Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. I have them all the time. And today's episode I'm especially excited about because my guest is Marion Nestle. Marion Nestle has dedicated her career to examining the politics of food and advocating for healthier public policy.
She's professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. She's authored numerous influential books, all of which will be listed in the show notes, that challenge corporate influence on the food system, explore the relationship between diet, health and policy. Marion's research bridges everything from molecular biology to public health. She's constantly empowering consumers to make informed food choices while holding industry and government accountable.
Marion is one of the most respected voices on nutrition and food politics. She has a newsletter, Food Politics, and every time it comes out – which is five times a week – I open it as soon as it hits my inbox. And for all of you out there, I strongly encourage you, if you have any interest at all in food, nutrition and health, subscribe to this newsletter. It's a must-read.
So Marion, welcome to this episode. Thank you so much for your amazing work. I consider you a mentor, a teacher, a friend, a legend, and I rely on your insights to guide me through the thicket – and it is a thicket – of food and nutrition, science and policy.
In a recent newsletter, Marion said USDA rhetoric is unlikely to make America healthy again. And that's too bad because there's just so much abundant rhetoric. We wish it could just be enough to make us healthy again, but it's not. So there's always a little bit of sass in Marion's newsletter, Food Politics. I love the sass.
Welcome to the program, Marion. I'm delighted we have a chance to talk. I'm remembering the time we were at a food conference in Milan – just thought I'd drop that in – and we couldn't find vegetables for almost an entire week. But everyone looked great, and the food was delicious, and so we just, we had a week without vegetables. That's okay, right? Welcome to the program. I'm delighted we have a chance to talk.
Marion: Yeah, I’m glad to be here.
Ken: Let's talk about topic A, which is the good news and the bad news of having Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.] as the head of HHS.
The good news for me is the, the higher profile for some issues that have long been ignored and that you've been writing about for many years, and the discouraging performance, in many ways, at the Food and Drug Administration. And Kennedy comes in as a reformer. The downside is there's an awful lot going on with the Trump administration that is doing the opposite of making America healthy again.
What's your take on Kennedy, make America healthy again? I've been reading all of your comments on it, but I'd love for you to share with the audience just sort of where you are now. Again, it's May, so we're past a hundred days. What do you make of it all?
Marion: Well, it's mind boggling.
Ken: Yeah.
Marion: On the one hand, you've got somebody in government in a very high position who is talking about the need to prevent chronic disease. That means diet. If you're interested in chronic disease prevention, it certainly means diet.
It means alcohol, it means cigarettes. It means a whole lot of things, but particularly it means diet because overweight or obesity affects 75% of American adults and 30 to 40% of American children. And if we wanna do something about chronic disease, we have to get people eating. healthily and eating less.
And he is talking about these things, but he's done it in the most peculiar way. He's picked on color additives in the food supply as the single most important thing that needs to be gotten rid of.
And I'm all for getting rid of color additives. I'm totally for it. They make, you know, some kids sick. There've been people trying to get rid of them for decades. It's about time. The companies have alternatives. The only reason that the companies aren't getting rid of them is because it turns out kids think that cereals taste better if they're brightly colored. That research has been done.
But of all of the issues to pick on, why pick on that one when what you really need to work on is calories? And that means fighting the food system because, you know, everybody needs to be eating less of junk food, and that's really bad for business.
So I want to see how he's gonna take that on, or if he's going to take that on. And it was not reassuring to see that the first action on getting color additives out of the food supply was to ask the food industry to do it voluntarily.
You know, please, would you please take them out? I think they need to be gone. Make them goodbye.
And so immediately, PepsiCo comes in and says, ‘we're gonna get the color additives out of food.’ Didn't say a word about Gatorade. Not a word. And the other companies said we didn't promise anything. You know, so I don't know what to make of that.
And then the other thing that he's doing is saying, ‘I want ultra processed foods out of schools. I want healthier food in schools. I want chemicals out of fish. I want chemicals out of the food supply.’ And a whole lot of other things that are in the purview of other agencies, not his. So where is this going? I have no idea.
When Trump announced Kennedy's appointment, he talked about the food industrial complex. I thought, ‘wait a minute, he sounds just like me. How is this possible?’
Ken: Yes exactly. I thought maybe you were moonlighting as a speech writer sometimes.
Marion: No such luck. So, I don't know where this is going.
Ken: Yeah. You know, I'm sure you're aware, you know, EWG has been working on food additives for some time. I mean, we consider the real leader in the nonprofit field to long have been and still is the Center for Science and the Public Interest. And we're working closely with them on a lot of these issues.
But we feel the same way – great that you're calling attention to some of these additives. The food dyes in particular. We've helped get laws passed in California; we've testified and provided technical assistance to a number of other states; and we have a bunch of petitions in front of the FDA.
But if you were to ask us what the real threat is for kids with chronic disease and starting them off right, we would say pretty much exactly as you've said, let's get rid of this stuff, we don't need it. But the real concern is nutrition. The real concern is that they eat properly.
The other thing that can, that will be coming along, 'cause it's in cycle to do it, is the dietary guidelines for Americans, right? So this is a debate that kind of hit its stride at the end of the Biden administration I think, with the committee that met and said, ‘we can't decide what to say about highly processed or ultra-processed foods. We're not sure what to say about alcohol.’ They kind of punted on those things – I think I have that right. So those will be big decisions.
But then that's one place where you would think this whole conversation about chronic disease, needing chronic solutions. You need behavioral solutions that last over a long period of time, in many cases, to take these on exposures to chemicals, good dietary habits, you know, you can't jump on and off the bandwagon – eat nutritiously a little bit and then, you know, like so many of– myself, fall off the wagon.
But the interesting thing for me, Marion, and I'd love your take on this, is the dietary guidelines right now aren't terrible if we just followed them. Right? Can you say a little bit about that? I mean, they say minimize processed food, minimize processed meats, eat more whole grains, fruits and vegetables. That advice has been there – the core advice has been there for a long time, right?
Marion: They never changed. The core advice has been there since 1980 when the first edition of the dietary guidelines was published. And I don't know whose bright idea it was to get Congress to pass a law that said that these things have to be revised every five years, but that's what we're in is by law that they've gotta do them, the dietary guidelines.
And the process is a process that's changed a great deal since I was on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in 1995. When I was on the committee, the committee chose the research questions, did the research, wrote the research report, and then wrote the dietary guidelines and turned in the whole thing.
And the government may have tweaked it, and they hired designers to do it, but it was a little tiny pamphlet of about 30 pages of very little tiny pages. And now it's 150 pages or, you know, and many web pages. It's, you know – and nobody can read it. It's unreadable.
But the core messages are the same.
When they're talking about foods that you're supposed to eat more of, they talk about food. Eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. When they talk about things that you're supposed to eat less of, they switch to nutrients. You know, eat less saturated fat, sodium – they don't even talk about salt. They talk about sodium, and sugars.
That advice has never changed. That's in the guidelines from the very beginning – but more and more and more obfuscated with mixing things together and clauses and sub-clauses and more and more and more pages. But the basic messages are the same.
So, this dietary guidelines advisory committee, the process has changed. So now the agencies – Health and Human Services and USDA – they select the research questions. The advisory committee does the research and comes out with a report; the agencies write the guidelines. And it's become a process that's much more politicized and much more complicated, and I just think the whole thing is obfuscated.
So, the dietary guidelines advisory committee, when given the question of ultra processed foods, a relatively new term, said, ‘oh, it's just so confusing. We don't think we can say anything about it. Oh, dear.’
And I thought, why are they doing this? This is a situation in which they're not going to write the guidelines. The agencies don't have to pay any attention at all to what they say. Why not come out and make vigorous strong statements? But that's not what they did. And the agencies are going to ignore the guidelines.
The interesting thing is that Health and Human Services and Agriculture are going to have to appoint a committee to do the guidelines. They have said that they are committed to get the guidelines out by the end of the year, as they are required to by law, and so presumably they're appointing a committee within Health and Human Services and Agriculture to write these things. That committee can do anything it wants.
And so the question is on the ultra-processed food issue – which RFK Jr. says, you know, he's against it – what does the Department of Agriculture say? We don't know.
Ken: That's right. This is a joint jurisdiction. There are all kinds of debates about what's in the dietary guidelines and all kinds of debates about how it should be presented in the product that the public sees, which is now called MyPlate. It used to be the food pyramid, now it's a plate.
The first thing I noticed is that the CDC looked into it, and they discovered – I'm sure you've seen this study – that only about 25% of adults had ever heard of MyPlate, and only 8% of them consulted it when they tried to figure out what to eat.
Marion: Why would you want to? It makes no sense whatsoever. The pyramid was much, much better.
Ken: I thought so.
Marion: Yeah, the pyramid was researched. The food guide is the Department of Agriculture’s – it doesn't have anything to do with Health and Human Services. So that one belongs to the Department of Agriculture, and its researchers spent years researching a food guide that would meet dietary recommendations for nutrients, but also that people would understand and would understand the messages that some foods are better to eat than others.
And they came up with the 1992 pyramid. That was destroyed by the Bush administration. And then the Obama administration, you know, when a chef was running the policy part of the Obama administration, did this chef-y place, which the pyramid researchers had found that the public didn't understand as well as it understood the pyramid. That [it] didn't convey the message – people don't know how to read pie charts and don't like them very much.
And then they used the chef's term “protein” to cover a mass of foods including meat, fish, eggs and beans and other, you know, and other vegetables, when the grain portion of the plate and the dairy portion of the plate are also loaded with protein.
It just doesn't make any sense at all. I don't know anybody who uses it. Maybe some dieticians use it, but I can't imagine. It came out with some very good messages when it was first released, but those have dropped.
Ken: Right. And to me, you know, what that speaks to is the importance of Kennedy using his bully pulpit and not necessarily getting himself enmeshed in all of the – it really becomes political fights over what the dietary guidelines will stay and, you know, positioning himself to prevail over USDA, maybe, interests – who knows.
But one thing he commands is a large audience. For him to get that right in terms of what he says to people and his message about healthy eating probably much more important, has much more potential, maybe, to encourage the right kind of behavior than whatever we might come up with with the next edition of the dietary guidelines and MyPlate or what, however they present it. Do you think that's right?
Marion: Yeah. I mean, I'm, he's very charismatic. I'm worried that, you know, he's got all these supplement people who are pushing supplements in the FDA in the administration. I'm worried that they're gonna push supplements. I'm worried that they're gonna cave on ultra-processed foods. I don't know.
He thinks sugar is poison – okay. Everybody would be healthier eating less sugar. You know, much of what he's talking about is in the Department of Agriculture. They're going to have to work that out. I don't know how that's gonna play out.
You know, and there was one thing just, I just can't resist saying, since I'm talking to you. One of the things he said was he wanted mercury out of fish.
Ken: Yes.
Marion: I thought, ‘oh good. Let's get mercury out of fish. Let's clean up the emissions from cold burning power plants.’ Every president that I can think of for the last umpteen has tried to do that, and all of them have failed.
Ken: Yeah. And this EPA has already relaxed the standards that were announced during the Biden administration.
Marion: Right.
Ken: So yeah. And it's not like you can talk to the fish about it, you know? It's not their fault.
Marion: ‘Don't drink that stuff.’
Ken: Yeah, that's right. ‘Stop swimming. Stop eating what you're eating.’ I mean, I think that's exactly right.
The whole notion for me of Make America Healthy Again, the premise so far as it goes is, you know, is to me interesting. But the execution is really worrisome because we've hitched this very sensible notion of being focused on a more holistic approach to healthy living centered around diet. But then when you attach it to other aspects of the administration that are taking us in the exact opposite direction.
And then you add to that the confusion that I think Kennedy has not done enough to solve. Is it really the dyes and the additives, much as we'd love to see those cleaned up? No, it probably isn't.
Marion: I think it certainly isn't.
Ken: Yeah. And then the other issue that I wanted to ask you about, there's a big push on in some of the states – and again this is, this is a jurisdictional thing – the SNAP program, what used to be known as food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
And EWG has lobbied in favor of getting that benefit protected for years. It's a big priority for us in the Farm Bill. We're the only environmental group that works on it, I think, consistently. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, FRAC, obviously other great groups who have made this the center of their work, and they've protected these benefits for years.
You know, you can use SNAP benefits to purchase junk food. And there's been a big push lately in some states to kind of go after the purchase of soda with SNAP money and maybe some other less than healthy foods.
But I found myself a little bit torn because I worry, you know, some things are already disapproved for SNAP. You can't buy tobacco products, and you can't buy some other foods. But I do worry that if we add some of these things to it, we're kind of demonizing the shopping experience that a SNAP beneficiary might have. We might discourage participation, feel like we're picking on people who, you know, [are] getting the benefit.
To me, it's more complicated than just saying, ‘let's clean it up.’ I worry about the 8-year-old with his mom in the checkout line and she's participating in the program, and the soda is set aside in front of the kid. There's something about that that really gets me, but maybe I'm too woke.
Marion: Yeah, and I can argue it either way. I think your arguments have a great deal of merit in them.
The counter arguments are that the WIC program, the Women Infants and Children Program, gives WIC moms a collection of foods that they can buy, and that's it. And presumably all of those are healthy. How healthy they are, we can argue about, but they're presumably all healthy foods.
Somehow that program works just fine. When the food stamp program was initially being legislated, sugar-sweetened beverages were off the charts. They were out of the package right from the beginning, and the retailers and soda lobbies came in and lobbied and got them put back.
So that was the result of lobbying. The reason that sugar-sweetened beverages are something that's being looked at is because there's sugars in water and nothing else. No other food is – except sugar itself – you know, is in that category. Even candy has other stuff with it. So it's really simple.
And there is so much evidence that drinking large amounts of sugar-sweetened beverages isn't good for health. You know, there's just so much evidence.
So, I've been in favor of pilot projects and, you know, for years have argued, ‘Let's try it. Let's try it in one small area. Let's ask SNAP recipients how they feel about it. Let's see how it works. They can still buy sodas with their own money.’
When I wrote my book “Soda Politics,” I got letters from SNAP recipients saying ‘we totally agree with keeping sodas out of SNAP. Keeping them in SNAP and allowing them to buy sodas with our electronic benefit cards is an incentive to buy them. If we didn't have that money, or that free money available, we probably wouldn't buy as much of them.’
I thought that was interesting. So I'm in favor of pilot projects. Every single attempt to get a pilot project failed. The Department of Agriculture refused, and now the Department of Agriculture is saying, ‘Let's try it.’
So, we'll see how this goes and whether it will be accompanied by the necessary research project that asks SNAP recipients how they feel about this. It would be really nice to know.
Ken: Oh, totally. That seems to be the kind of thing, though, that in this administration, the ‘showing your work, doing the research’ part doesn't seem to be very interesting. It's more the TikTok strategy of getting the word out and doing press conferences.
Marion: Let me say one other thing about that. I think it's a cover for cutting SNAP.
Ken: I do too. I worry about that.
Marion: That the great enthusiasm for restricting what people can buy on SNAP is covering up for the real agenda, which is to make it much, much harder for people to get onto SNAP, to stay on it and to get their benefits.
Ken: I think that's right. If you really were concerned about, you know, health and its foundation in nutrition, you would look at this benefit and maybe even increase it.
Marion: Absolutely.
Ken: You know, in most places, if you're a family of three or four, and you make more than $24,000 a year, you're too rich for SNAP. I mean, it's brutally means tested, and the benefits are so modest, just like, I don't know, six or seven bucks a day per beneficiary?
Marion: I think the average is two-something. Or two per meal.
Ken: Yeah. So it's not like we're providing a benefit that's endless. But I think you're right.
And my first farm bill was 1977. And, you know, the food stamp program by the ‘80s was a lightning route for Republicans to go after the spending in it. And I have the same concern that you have, that this is a way of demonizing what people buy with their SNAP benefits, so why not just cut the benefit back?
Marion: Yeah. I mean the Republican view is that it's fraught with fraud and that everybody is buying luxurious, they're buying caviar with their – you know, that kind of thing, when in fact people are just trying to feed their families for the most part.
The other view is that SNAP recipients are all people of color, when the vast majority are in fact white. And everybody's got stories about standing behind somebody in a grocery line and complaining about what they're buying.
You know, I don't know. I try to stand back and take a policy viewpoint on it. SNAP works much, much better when the benefits are higher.
Ken: Yes, that's right.
Marion: People eat better. They feed their kids better, they feel better, they're not as anxious. I mean, there are so many reasons for making sure that everybody has enough money to buy food.
Ken: Oh, completely. And we saw that during, when the benefits went up during COVID, we saw that amply demonstrated, right? People ate better.
And then there's the related issue, an important way in which the dietary guidelines – at least technically – have a linkage to the real world, even though most people have never heard of them and don't follow them. But for school lunch, A USDA program, It'll be interesting to see how Kennedy and current Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins handle that question.
Marion: Mm-hmm. It certainly will.
Ken: So much pressure to cut spending. And to the extent that USDA is a major player in determining what kids get to eat at school, it'll be interesting to see, if you cut back on processed food in school – a lot of schools have no capability to produce, to cook on their own, right?
Marion: Right. And in any case, the schools are held to such a tiny amount of money. It's the only program in a school that's expected to be self-supported. You know, the financial issues are enormous. It's much easier if they've got people who could cook because then they can buy commodities at very low cost and turn them into something edible.
And there are schools that do really, really well with what they have available, but the overall problem is horrendous because they're given so little money.
Ken: Yeah. And it's been demonized by, you know – and I don't really mean to, and I know you don't either, introduce a partisan note, but it is partisan the way it's expressed. When efforts were made to make school lunch universal like we have in California now, where no kid feels demonized 'cause you can skip the school lunch completely, but everyone has access to it, as opposed to just eligible kids.
I just wonder why Kennedy wouldn't push to get, you know, a bigger budget for this kind of thing. Just like, you know, if you're worried about nutrition, spend more time and effort expanding the SNAP benefit. I just don't see how you get better, healthier eating when you're starving the finances of it.
Marion: Well, one of the problems is that he's trying to do something that's gonna cost more at a time when the entire focus is on cutting the budget. Although, the kinds of things that are cuttable are such a small part of what the budget is – you can't cut where the real money is.
And so the nickel and diming on social programs is because they're against social programs. That's what this is about, and you just watch these things go.
I mean, the obvious example is the one I talked about in my blog post, which is this amazing farm-to-school program where farmers grew fresh food, and it went to schools, and the government paid for it, or paid part of it, or they paid the farmers. And everybody won. The farmers won. The schools won. It was a win-win all the way around.
It was a program that costs under a billion dollars a year, which isn't even a rounding error in the federal budget. And they cut that? Why would you cut that?
Ken: And I think that program also had an element where they, farmers would provide food to, directly to food banks as well, right?
Marion: That too.
Ken: Yeah. And that got cut.
Marion: Why? I mean, it, it just makes no sense. The right hand and the left hand – or maybe we don't dare talk about right and left – you know, one side doesn't know what the other side is doing. And there doesn't, there's no coordination
But there's no policy in the Trump administration anyway. To try to make sense of it doesn't work.
Ken: Right. I keep saying to people, ‘does this administration ever show their work?’ I mean, how many times have you, I don't suppose you can take a class from Professor Marion Nestle and not turn in an assignment, but they seem to be able to do that pretty regularly at HHS and, to some extent, at USDA.
Or they'll simply say, ‘we're implementing things as Congress intended,’ even though this billion dollars for farm-to-school and farm-to-food-banks is gone, and everyone's in an uproar about it who benefited before. And these are the farmers who, they tend not to be in the big commodity programs; they're growing actual food.
Marion: What a concept.
Ken: Yeah. It's taken advocates decades, really, arguing for this direct link – local food going to schools, local food going to food banks – finally kind of make the breakthrough in recent years. And then it gets eliminated. If anything, could make America healthy again, you would think that would be the kind of direction we'd want to go, right?
Marion: Right. I mean, I don't know. You wonder who's advising them and, you know, what's going on there because so much of it just doesn't make any sense at all.
And this is without getting into the craziness about measles and vaccines and these other things. Just focusing on the kinds of things that they're talking about that I support. It's just very hard to know whether it means anything or whether there will be any actual …
We'll find out because what the president did was to appoint a Make America Healthy Again commission that is supposed to report in a hundred days, and I believe that's the end of this month.
Ken: Yes, it's coming up.
Marion: The hundred days are up at the end of this month. So at the end of this month, we're supposed to have a report that is the Trump administration's analysis – or Kennedy's analysis – of the state of American children. And then in another three months, they're supposed to produce a report that's the agenda for action.
And when I first heard about this, I thought, ‘oh, what a good idea. Oh, wait a minute. I've heard this before. Haven’t we already done this?’
And of course we did in the Obama administration, when the Let's Move campaign sponsored the task force on ending childhood obesity within a generation and came out with a report that did that analysis and a whole bunch of recommendations. And some of them they worked on, and most of them they had to give up on because of the intense opposition to it.
Ken: And that opposition was mostly Republican, as I recall.
Marion: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ken: Let's try and look on the bright side. That's not our resting place, I know, Marion, we – that's not where we start our day. But the bright side would be, you know, at least now there are Republicans who are acknowledging and talking about this in a way that if they had done so when Michelle Obama was talking about it, it would've been fantastic. But we'll take it if that's where they're headed now.
I'm worried that it's not where they're actually headed, but –
Marion: Well, we'll find out.
Ken: We'll find out. You know, they've got a vote on funding in Congress and programmatic priorities, and they've gotta come up with their MAHA agenda and then the programmatic part of it a hundred days later, as you say.
It's really been hard to pin down an administration that says, ‘we're slashing research on cancer; we're cutting enforcement of environmental laws; and everything's gonna be great.’ Those things don't quite line up.
Marion: They don't line up.
When Michelle Obama was working on Let's Move, I always wondered, did she have any idea that when she picked on school food as the point at which she was going to be trying to implement these recommendations, how controversial it would be? Or did she think that school food was a bipartisan issue?
Everybody wants kids to be healthy. You know, even Republicans want kids to be healthy. I kind of think she must have thought that she had picked a bipartisan issue. It certainly was wildly controversial.
Ken: Oh my gosh. The nanny state telling you what to eat and when to eat it and what you couldn't eat and so forth. All of that rhetoric disappeared when it came to Kennedy.
Marion: Good. Let's get rid of it. I'm for getting rid of it.
Ken: So what do you think – I mean, we're in this era now, so much attention from influencers and others about diet and health and personal coaches and so forth. And yet despite all of that, the overall profile of the American diet, we haven't moved the needle.
Where do you see us missing the boat here, that we should be trying to improve people's diets and their health and nutrition. Where should we go?
Marion: I think there's a lot that could be done. But you can't expect it to be done by the food industry because the food industry's job is to sell products.
You know, as I keep saying, they're not social service agencies; they're not public health agencies. They're businesses. They're selling widgets. It doesn't matter what they're selling, they have to make money on it. I have plenty of evidence for that, that that's the driving force.
So you need policy. You need a government that is willing to do some things that are going to make a big difference in people's lives.
And, you know, I tend to be a – in public health terms – an upstream thinker. The first thing you have to do is get money out of politics. And have legislators who are willing to do things for public health rather than corporate health.
Okay, let's not talk about whether these are politically realistic or not. Let's just talk about what might work. Getting money out of politics. Universal basic income. Universal school meals. An agricultural system that is focused on health instead of feeding animals and fueling automobiles. How about an agriculture system that's focused on producing food for people? And that pays farm workers reasonably, if there are any farm workers left after what's happening now?
Those kinds of things. Dietary guidelines that are simple. That just tell people, ‘eat these foods and don't eat those foods.’ Or ‘eat less of those foods.’ I would never say never eat a food. I like junk food just like everybody else.
But I mean, I think there are things that were really straightforward. A national education campaign – much better food in schools would make a big difference because we know that for many kids, the food they get in school is the best food, the only meal they're going to get all day. And probably the healthiest.
So, let's give them healthy breakfast and lunch, at least. You know, [that’s] politically not very feasible right now, but if you don't work towards that, then when the opportunity arrives, you won't be ready to push for that.
But beyond that, I don't know what else to do. I think we need curbs on the food industry. We need marketing restrictions. We need them to produce foods in smaller portions, so people don't eat so much 'cause we know that the bigger the portion, the more people eat from it. Human nature.
But certainly marketing, stopping them from marketing to kids. And this doesn't just mean television. This means social media – absolute requirement that anybody who's pushing a product on social media has to disclose loudly that it's sponsored. Teach kids media literacy in grade school. What's an ad? What's real content? What's news? What's a fact? And what are the differences?
Ken: Those are all the north stars that we need to keep in mind. I'm not alone by any means, relying on your good judgment and experience and smarts and courage to point them out. I'm just deeply grateful for everything you've done. And we'll see how this unfolds.
Marion: We certainly will,
Ken: Right? It's exciting in, you know, in dangerous and positive ways, both. So, I'm gonna root for the positive–
Marion: Why not?
Ken: –but call out if it doesn't come to fruition. 'Cause there's a lot riding on it now.
There's a lot of people who wanna believe that Kennedy's gonna make something good happen. And, you know, I'm a bit of a hard sell, but I do believe in a lot of the things he's been saying about what's wrong with our food system, what's not been working at FDA, that some of these food issues have been ignored for a long time at the Food and Drug Administration, even though ‘food’ is the first word in their title.
My fingers are crossed, and let's hope for the best.
Thank you so much. I don't wanna take more of your time on this momentous day when I get to sit down and talk to you, but I'm so grateful. And hope our paths cross in person again soon. It's been too long,
Marion: It's been way too long. Let's make it happen.
Ken: Marion Nestle, thank you so much for joining us today.
If you want to read more of Marion's work, her newsletter, Food Politics, is a must read. Comes every day and it's free. You can find it at foodpolitics.com.
I also want to thank all of you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links for a deeper dive into today's discussion.
Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @kencookspodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about EWG, head over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account @environmentalworkinggroup.
If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community.
Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby, thank you Moby. And thanks again to all of you for listening.
