(digital jingle)
(light upbeat music)
- Welcome to a Conversation with History.
I'm Harry Kreisler
of the Institute of International Studies.
Our guest today is
Marion Nestle who is the
Paulette Goddard Professor in
the Department of Nutrition,
Food Studies, and Public
Health at New York University.
She chaired that department
from 1988 to 2003.
She is also Professor of Sociology at NYU
and Visiting Professor of
Nutritional Sciences at Cornell.
At Berkeley in 2017, she is
the Barbara Weinstock lecturer
on the morals of trade.
Her many publications
include Food Politics,
How the Food Industry
Influenced Nutrition and Health,
Safe Food, the Politics of
Food Safety, What to Eat,
Why Calories Count, From
Science to Politics,
Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated
Guide to Food Politics,
and most recently Soda Politics,
Taking on Big Soda and Winning.
Professor Nestle, welcome to Berkeley.
- Glad to be back.
- Where were you born and raised?
- In New York City.
- And looking back, how did
your parents shape your thinking
about the world?
- Well, my father was a bit
of an anarchist and was very
interested in social justice
so I grew up in one of those
families where those were big issues.
- And was there a lot of
reading in the household?
- There was quite a lot of reading.
Yeah, we read.
We read newspapers, that's a habit I've,
it's a lifetime habit.
- And keeping up with political
events and world events?
- Mm hmm (affirmative).
- When did you first get
the food / nutrition bug,
if I can use that expression?
And what first piqued your
interest in not just eating food
but studying it?
- Well, actually, the eating
food was a really profound
experience because I went
to a summer camp in Vermont
and if you, the people who ran
the camp were fabulous cooks.
And they had a very large
vegetable garden that supplied
the food for the camp.
It was a small camp.
And if you were good then you got to go
pick the vegetables for dinner.
And I remember, I was about
eight or nine years old
and was sent out in mid-summer
to pick string beans
and I started picking them
and then I bit into one
and I couldn't believe it.
It was warm from the sun,
it was sweet, it was crisp,
it was absolutely delicious.
I had never tasted a
bean like that before.
That got me interested in food.
- And what about politics?
Were you growing up in New
York City and was there
a real sense of political developments?
- Well, actually, I grew
up in Los Angeles because
my family moved to Los
Angeles when I was 12.
But I was given a nutrition
course to teach on my first
teaching job and it was obvious
right from the beginning
that you couldn't really
understand why people ate
the way they did unless you
understood the politics of it.
And I remember giving students
in that class a series
of articles in the New York review
of books on sugar politics.
Right from the beginning,
so it was always there.
- And where were you educated?
- Berkeley.
- Berkeley?
And you got your BA here?
- I have four degrees from Berkeley.
An Associate of Arts,
a Bachelor's of Arts,
a Doctorate, and a
Master's in Public Health.
- And, but you also studied
microbiology here or is that?
- Yes, I was an undergraduate
bacteriology major.
I did my Doctorate in molecular
biology and then I did
a Master's in public health
nutrition quite a bit later.
- And at Berkeley did you have any mentors
who especially influenced you?
- Well, in, when I was in
graduate school, certainly.
As an undergraduate, I was just
trying to figure it all out.
- And were you here during
the political turmoil
of the '60s?
- I was here during the
political turmoil of the '50s
and the '60s.
You know, when I was an
undergraduate it was when the
Civil Rights movement was
starting and the women's movement
was starting and when I
was a graduate student,
it was the free speech movement.
- And were you drawn
into those happenings?
- Very much drawn into it
but I had two small children
and there was no way that I
could put myself in a position
where I could be arrested
because I wouldn't have anyone
to take care of my children.
So I understood why it
was so difficult for women
to be revolutionaries.
- And, of course, the revolution
was creating a revolution
in women's consciousness at the time.
- [Marion] Yes.
- I like to ask my guests
what skills they think
students should acquire if, for example,
they want to go into nutrition studies.
How would you advise them?
Is there, doing nutrition research,
what does it take to do that well?
- Well, I think you only need
to know how to do research
in general and that means
an undergraduate program
that teaches you how to use a library,
how to search for information,
how to check whether
information is accurate or not,
how to think critically
about the information
that you are looking for.
I happened to do graduate
work in molecular biology
and what I think I got out
of that was always trying
to think about what alternative
explanation there could be
for the result that you
thought you were getting.
Critical thinking in
biology, the game when I was
a graduate student was to
try to think of something
that could have accounted for the results,
that hadn't been controlled
for in the experiments.
That's proved very useful
in thinking about nutrition research.
- And also there's an
emphasis on a problem that has
been defined by the field?
The reason I ask that is the
political aspect of your work
is very different.
So where I'm going here is
to compare your scientific
studies with your sense of politics.
- Well, I think what happened
with nutrition science
was a huge change in the
nutrition problems in the world.
Nutrition science started
out looking at what nutrients
were required by the human
body and in what amounts.
And that research was straight forward,
not politically fraught
in any way whatsoever,
the results were clear and understandable.
Where the complications came
in were trying to see how
experimental results
applied to populations.
But there wasn't anything
controversial about it.
When nutrition got controversial
was when chronic diseases
became the leading causes
of death and disability
in the United States and
in developed countries.
And then, nutritionists needed
to look at dietary patterns
and instead of producing
dietary advice that encouraged
people to eat more of things
that were required in the diet,
they were talking about eating less.
Eating less saturated
fat, eating less salt,
eating less sugar and all
of a sudden it got very,
very political because
that stepped on the toes
of the companies that were
making those products.
- And when did this
change in thinking occur?
- Well, I think it started in 1950s.
I mean, there are books
in the 1950s that have,
Ancel Keys, for example, who's
a cardiologist in Minnesota,
did a cookbook with his
wife in the late 1950s
with dietary recommendations
in it that look like
today's dietary guidelines.
I mean, they've never changed.
Eat less sugar, eat less
saturated fat, eat less salt,
eat a lot of fruits and vegetables,
don't gain too much weight, I mean really,
basic dietary advice.
So that was already known in the 1950s.
It just took a long time to
come into public consciousness,
particularly because the food
industry fought it so hard.
- And when, how does this
change you're talking about
relate to the industrialization
of agriculture and
especially after World War II?
In other words, is there
an interface there?
- Oh, absolutely.
What happened with
agriculture was that there was
the policies used to be
we'll pay farmers not to grow
very much food in order to
keep the price of the foods
high enough to support the farmers.
That changed in the 1970s.
The famous Earl Butz, who
was Secretary of Agriculture,
said these policies are wrong,
we should be encouraging
farmers to grow as much
food as they possibly can.
And they did and what happened
then was that there was
an enormous surplus of food.
Farmers were very good at
growing more when they were
rewarded for growing more
and the price of food,
of basic food commodities,
dropped because there was so much of it.
And then food comp-, and the
number of calories in the food
supply increased and food
companies had to figure out
how to sell their food
products in an environment
in which there was way too much food,
far more than the population needed.
And that's been the problem ever since.
- And, now, in your awakening,
in terms of the politics
of this, was that gradual over time?
You mentioned your first
teaching assignment,
you also were in the
government for a while,
but was what you were seeing
with regard to the problems
of food production, how
did that come about?
Over time?
- Oh, no, I had an epiphany.
- I see.
- And that epiphany occurred at a meeting
of the National Cancer
Institute in the early 1990s.
The people who were at that,
this was a meeting on
behavioral causes of cancer
and they had a couple of
people talking about diet
and a lot of physicians who
were anti-smoking advocates
talking about cigarette smoking.
And I had never, I mean, I
knew that cigarettes were bad
for you and I knew they caused cancer,
but I had never seen presentations
of cigarette marketing
before and the people who
spoke at this conference
showed slide after slide after
slide of cigarette marketing
all over the world, in
the remote Himalayas,
in the jungles of Africa.
And then someone got up
and did a presentation
on cigarette marketing to
children and this was the days,
these were the days of Joe Camel,
and I knew about Joe Camel,
I had seen Joe Camel ads,
but I had never paid any
attention to them before.
They were so much a part of
the landscape that they were
easy to ignore, you just
paid no attention to it.
And yet, this presentation made
it clear that the cigarette
industry was deliberately
targeting children in just
in hundreds and hundreds
of different ways.
And I walked out of that
presentation thinking,
we should be doing this for
Coca Cola, we nutritionists.
And I started paying attention.
- And then after you had your
degrees you actually went
and worked for the government
and was an advisor,
or rather a programmer,
for the writing of the guidelines.
- No, I was a, I worked for the
Office of Disease Prevention
and Health Promotion in
Health and Human Services as
what was called the Senior
Nutrition Policy Advisor,
a very fancy title.
What I was actually
doing was editing a book
called The Surgeon General's
Report on Nutrition and Health
that came out in 1988.
- And that's when you got a
shock, which was you were told
there were certain things
you couldn't write?
- Oh, on my first day on the job.
I was told the Surgeon General's Report,
no matter what the research said,
would never say eat less meat.
It would find some other kind
of euphemism for it but it
would never say eat less
meat because if it did
the Department of Agriculture,
which represented the meat
industry, would get very upset.
They would go to Congress and the report
would never come out.
So it used euphemisms.
- So you're, this is a
step-by-step process in a way.
And at first you're
learning about advertising
and being shocked by that.
- [Marion] No, actually that came later.
- That came later,
well, it doesn't matter.
The sequence doesn't matter.
- Mm hmm (affirmative).
- But it's really, but
hey, the government,
which is supposed to helping
in this process of informing
people about food is shackled.
- Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And, I mean, I had those
two years in Washington
were revelatory.
I mean, I learned things I
didn't even know I didn't know
on that job.
I mean, I had no idea how
politicized these things were
and how you had to, this was,
after all, during the Reagan
administration, and I
was dealing with people
in the Department of
Agriculture who were very eager
to protect the meat
industry, the dairy industry,
the food processing industry,
all of the major food industries
were under the protection
of the Department of Agriculture.
Because the people who
worked there were very much
in favor of corporate
agriculture and corporate food
production and found these
health issues to be, you know,
recommending people eat
less of these things,
that was un-American.
- I'm curious how your
work as a nutritionist interfaces
with your activism as
somebody who's concerned
about the politics of this.
Do the two backgrounds challenge you
or do the perspectives inform each other?
- Oh, I can't separate them.
I mean, when I think about these
problems I think about them
from the science all
the way to the advocacy
and everything in between.
I don't think it's possible
to talk about dietary
recommendations or what
people should be eating
without understanding how
the food system works.
How the agriculture system
works, where the pressures are,
who the stakeholders
are, all of those things
are all part of it.
- But you were also a
front runner, a leader,
in identifying this connection.
- Apparently.
I thought I was just stating the obvious.
That I was, my book Food
Politics, which came out in 2002,
was really the first to talk
about these kinds of issues
but I thought I was just
describing what was obvious
to anybody who looked.
- But it wasn't?
- [Marion] Apparently not.
- And it wasn't obvious
to the general public?
- Apparently not.
- Yeah.
And as you talk about nutrition
and the change of thinking
in nutrition one gets a
sense because it's food
and we all eat, it
interfaces with developments
in the world, namely changes
in what people are eating
because of the politics
of a production system.
- Well, and also, we have a
globalized food system in which
companies sell foods all over
the world and you can go to
a supermarket in the dead
of winter in Manhattan
and buy blueberries
from Chile or Argentina.
I mean, that's a globalized food system.
- And so then what are the
challenges of the interface
between these two?
Is it, does, do you have to
think twice about the conclusion
you're reaching because of
the interface with politics?
Or not?
- Well, I can't separate
the politics from either
the science or the production
or the public health aspects.
I mean, the politics are
always part of it because
if you are advising the public
to eat more of one thing
and less of another, you're
stepping on somebody's toes
big time, especially if people listen.
- The reason I'm pushing you on this
is that your perspective
is unique in other areas
because part of the
American political culture
is not seeing the politics
in issues like healthcare
and so on.
- Well, I would hope that
people would see the politics
in healthcare today!
- No, I'm, right, I'm
not being critical here,
I'm just sort of saying
the extent to which,
oh, that's politics, I don't
want to know how that affects.
So it's a, what I'm trying to say is that.
- Well, I hear that from students.
- [Harry] Yeah.
- You know, I teach
courses in food politics
and food policy and the
students are extraordinarily
uncomfortable thinking about the politics.
It's not something that
they're comfortable with,
they don't feel like they
want to participate in it,
feels kind of dirty, and remote.
And part of what I try to do
is to show that every single
food choice they make
is a political choice.
- And is this because
we're, we and the students,
are passive and they don't,
the default position is
not to take an active role
and that's what is required?
- Well, I think that, the
students that I talk to tell me
that they just don't feel
like they have any power
to take an active role.
They don't feel empowered,
they don't feel like
they're individual actions
will have any effect.
The problems of society seem
so enormous and so immutable
that they don't feel
like they can do anything
to affect change, especially now.
So, the part of what I try
to do is to demonstrate
that the food system has changed
so much and in so many ways
for the better that you can
use food in a way that will
make very positive changes in
people's lives and you really
can have an effect in a time period
that you can actually notice.
- Another aspect of your
work and of your books
is how clearly written they
are and they're written for
a broad public so that
people can understand things.
But language is a tool in
this struggle and one gets
the sense, quite obviously,
that language is a tool used
by the food industry to
obscure the discoveries
that are made.
Talk a little about that
because it's very important.
In other words, we're always
being confronted in advertising
which with a simple way of
saying something that actually
obscures the truths that
nutrition science has revealed.
- Well, advertising is
designed to appeal to emotion,
it's not designed to appeal
to cognitive structures
and academics are trying
to appeal to people's
higher ordered thinking.
I try to write clearly about
nutrition because I think
so much of what we know
about nutrition is obfuscated
by advertising, by the enormous interest
of the food industry and
selling food products
beyond anything else.
I mean, for example, I mean,
I've just written a book
called Soda Politics and
so I use the soda industry
as an example because
it's a really easy one.
And I just saw a student
just, a former student,
just sent me a photograph
of an advertisement
on the New York subway where Coca Cola
is advertising physical activity.
- [Harry] Mm hmm (affirmative).
- You know, if you're
active you'll be healthy.
And then here's Coca
Cola at the bottom of it.
So you can drink it with the
implication being that as long
as you're walking up the
stairs in the subway,
you can drink as much
Coca Cola as you like.
- And also the use of words
like moderation and balance.
- [Marion] Mm hmm (affirmative).
- So there's a real war here
between the people who want
to change what we eat and
the people who are producing
what we already eat.
- And think that what
we're eating is just fine.
Sure.
So, everything in moderation.
You can use that in two
completely different ways.
I use it all the time because
I happen to, I love to eat,
and I don't have any food
restrictions and yes,
I eat junk food, and yes,
I eat ice cream, and yes,
I eat all kinds of things
that horrify people.
But that's where I would say
everything in moderation, it's fine.
I mean, mostly I eat
a pretty healthy diet.
The food industry uses it
in another sense which is
you can eat our products.
And their idea of moderation and mine
might be quite different.
- And journalism plays a role in this.
I emphasize the clarity of your
writings because journalism
is an entry point for keeping
things the way they are
or changing them.
- Yes, I wrote a column for
the San Francisco Chronicle
for about five years so I've
had a little journalistic
experience and that was
an interesting experience.
I was writing on deadline,
which I didn't like very much,
and trying to communicate,
often, very complicated ideas
in a way that people could
grasp without going through
all the nuances, which, if
you're a scientist you have
to have in there.
It's not easy to write about
nutrition in a simplistic way.
And when I see journalists
writing about nutrition as
everything you know about
nutrition was wrong,
discount that one.
Or, it's really, sugar is the
only problem with the diet,
fat is the only problem with the diet.
All of those kinds of things
are journalistic approaches
that I think oversimplify
and are not helpful
in the long run but they
make people buy books.
- And simplicity to work
has to reveal the complexity,
either of the research or of the politics.
- Yeah, I mean, I think the,
I love to quote Michael Pollan's comment
on what people should eat,
eat food, mostly plants,
not too much.
I mean, that is an absolutely
brilliant, simply way of
expressing concepts that are
really quite complicated.
I thought he did a great job of that.
- The, one of the striking
things when one reads your work
and when you explore the
arsenal of of the food industry
is that they use terminology
that across sectors is embedded
in the political culture.
What I have in mind is freedom of choice.
- [Marion] Ah, yes.
- In other words, we
don't want a police state.
- A nanny state.
- A nanny state, or a
nutritionist from Berkeley
telling us what to eat
because we, as Americans,
pride ourself on freedom of choice.
We're hearing that in the
medical reform efforts now
as the opposition tries to
stop things like Obamacare.
Talk a little about that
because it's a real challenge.
- It's, yeah, it's very,
very difficult to deal with
but you don't really have a choice.
You only have a choice of what's there.
And, of course, they never
talk about the billions
and billions and billions of
dollars that go into marketing.
The most profitable
products that are usually,
unfortunately, the most
profitable products are the ones
that are least healthful.
So, the budget for just Classic
Coca Cola is 250 million
dollars a year, just in the United States.
- [Harry] To advertise?
- Just for advertising that
goes through advertising
agencies, just in the United States,
just for that one product.
And when you're seeing, when
you're bombarded with messages
over and over and over again,
you don't even notice them.
They're just so embedded in
your consciousness that you
just sort of automatically reach for it.
So the choice is being influenced.
The choice is influenced by
the way grocery stores position
their products, and that's
paid for, that's not random,
it's totally paid for.
It's influenced by the
marketing and the way that
restaurants operate and the way
that grocery stores operate.
All of this is planned and
so your choice is a choice
that has to be made in the
context of a lot of economic
decisions that these companies have made.
But, of course, you don't see those.
- And the political perspective
empowers you to see a larger
structure, which you have to
see to get over the hurdle
of changing people's
attitude towards food.
- Oh, I think that's absolutely right.
One of the reasons why the
Berkeley soda tax succeeded
was because there was on the
ground one-on-one conversations
with people trying to
explain to them that here was
a corporation selling
something that was really bad
for people if consumed, I
mean, here's where moderation
comes in, if consumed in large amounts.
And that if you want to
protect yourself against some
of the conditions that are
associated with drinking a lot
of sugary beverages, you need to look at
what the corporations are
doing as well as what you like
or what's been advertised.
And particularly when that
advertisement has been directed
particularly at you.
- And so, let's say in the
case of the Berkeley tax,
it's really important to say, hey,
this really has health implications.
I mean, it's affecting your
body in a way that you may
or may not understand.
- But it was also
Berkeley against big soda,
which made it clear that here
was this big corporations,
the American Beverage
Association, funded by Coca Cola
and PepsiCo, mainly, was
coming in and fighting
a public health measure.
That's what they were doing
and that was made very visible
in Berkeley and I think
that was part of the reason
for the success.
- So to bring out the structure.
- [Marion] The politics, the politics!
- Yeah, the politics, the politics.
- Yeah, this doesn't occur
in a political vacuum.
- Now, now, going back to
what you were saying about
nutrition, it's interesting
because what you were saying
is that in a way nutrition
changed because of what doctors
were seeing in terms of chronic illness.
So the environment, in many
ways, impinges on the thinking
and other sectors are helping inform us.
So you were a person
who, as a nutritionist,
clarifies it and gives
us these works on issues.
But you're also getting help
from doctors who are, in a way,
seeing the effect of the bad food.
- Well, I would say it's,
these are public health
implications and there was a big shift
after the second World War.
From, remember, before
the second World War,
one of the really difficult
problems that they had
inducting people into the
Army was that people suffered
from nutritional deficiencies,
especially if they came from poor areas.
And after the war, the food
supply improved enormously
because we had figured
out how to get food across
the country, the transportation
system improved enormously.
And all of a sudden, much
more food was available,
people were eating more,
and people started getting
heart disease, people
started developing obesity,
they started getting Type II diabetes.
These were diseases that
had been quite rare before
and now, all of a sudden,
they were common and everybody
was seeing them.
And it took a while for
researchers to try to figure out
what diet had to do with that.
I think people were just
eating more and that was
the bigger problem.
- Let's talk a little
about the food industries.
You've touched on some of this before,
but let's clarify it for our audience.
The dilemma of the food
industry is they're producing
too much food and they have to sell it
in a competitive environment.
- Well, that's the overall dilemma.
- Yeah.
- The dilemma for an individual company is
how do I sell my product.
Well, let's just start with calories.
So, the American food
supply has an average
of 4,000 calories available per capita.
Per capita means little tiny babies,
sedentary elderly people,
it means everybody.
It's roughly twice what
the population needs.
So, if you're a food company
in that situation, you have,
and you're trying to sell your product,
and you have to remember,
if you're a publicly traded company,
you must report growth to
Wall Street every 90 days.
It's not enough to make a profit,
you have to grow your profits.
The single biggest driver
of obesity, in my opinion,
is what Wall Street does to companies.
So, companies have to
sell and they don't care
what the public health implications are
of what they're selling.
They care a lot about the
economic implications because
they're shareholders want to
get some dividends out of that.
So, they find new ways
to sell food products.
They make bigger portions,
because the cost of food
is very cheap, the cost of labor is high,
you can make a big portion,
it doesn't cost you much,
and you can make a huge profit on it.
They put food everywhere.
Absolutely everywhere.
So that if you go to a department store,
there are going to be candy
bars at the checkout counter.
Drug stores now look like
food stores because there's
so much profit in selling a
lot of these kinds of things.
Everybody eats, everybody's
going to be buying food.
And they advertise and market.
They market to kids, they
market to minorities.
- And in this warfare between
the people who want us to eat
well and the companies that
want to sell even the worst food
they are, food companies
are a moving target because
whenever something new comes
up, there's a new revelation,
then they want to package
their product to make it seem
that they are responsible.
- [Marion] Oh, yeah,
they're really good at that.
- Yeah, and so, basically, if
someone identifies a nutrient
that's important, then that's
plastered all over the,
it may be added, but then
it's plastered all over the
box of cereal, say.
But the issue is eating well
involves your total diet,
not that you're eating
a particular nutrient.
- Yeah, and I never talk about
nutrients at all anymore.
- [Harry] Yeah.
- I mean, just not at all.
I think they're, for Americans
who have plenty to eat
and get enough calories and
eat a reasonable variety
of foods, nutrients are irrelevant.
There's very, very little
evidence for nutrient deficiencies
in people in the United States.
I mean, it's practically non-existent.
I'm going to go out on a
limb and say that I know
there are people who disagree
with that but there's
very, very little evidence for
frank nutrient deficiencies.
The big problems are the
people who are eating too much.
And that's a more difficult
problem to deal with
because there are cultural
factors and societal factors
that encourage people to
eat more than they need.
Restaurants serve big portions
because people love them.
And people are unaware
of the number of calories
that they're taking in.
I mean, I'm always saying
that if I had one thing
that I could teach people,
it's that larger portions
have more calories.
I can't even say it with a straight face
because it seems so ridiculous.
But there's plenty of evidence that
that's not intuitively obvious.
- It's interesting.
I interviewed, once, a Vice
President of Coke and the extent
to which they find
substitutes or alternatives
for the issue.
So, at that point Coke was
emphasizing to be active,
on the other hand.
- [Marion] Oh, yeah, they still are.
- Yeah and they basically,
there was an argument about water.
They had gotten into water
purification and doing good
in the Third World by purifying water.
So there's this arsenal is
very subtle and it interfaces
in a really insidious
way with what might be
the best information.
We should be active but
they seem to be saying, oh,
be active but also drink Coke.
- Yeah, well, I mean, they're
just trying to sell products.
That's all.
You know, if they're a
publicly traded company,
they have to grow their
profits, that means selling more
and more and more and more.
And that's what they're about.
That's their job.
Public health is a big pain for them.
I mean, Coca Cola started
listing obesity as the number one
threat to its profits as early as 2003.
In its filings to the Securities
and Exchange Commission,
where it has to list all
the things that are hazards
to its profits, obesity
has been number one
because of public health
people who are saying
that sugary beverages have
something to do with obesity.
It's a big problem for them.
So this puts them, it pits
them against public health.
And, whereas, they would love
to make as much money off of
bottled water or diet
drinks as they make off
of Classic Coca Cola, they can't.
It's more profitable.
- And the role of
government enters into this.
- [Marion] Mm hmm (Affirmative).
- And we've talked
already about advisories,
of government, about what to eat
and how they're constrained.
But a bigger issue is something
like the Agricultural Bill
which essentially puts in
place a structure of government
financing which benefits
those production processes
that are creating too much food.
- Exactly.
And also benefits the
ingredients of processed foods
so that the main agricultural
subsidies or protections
or insurance payments go
to the producers of corns,
soy beans, cottonseed,
and so forth and so on.
Very little of it goes
to fruits and vegetables.
So you have this curious
contradiction where one office
of the Department of Agriculture
tells everybody to make
half their plate fruits and
vegetables and yet there's very,
very little public Farm Bill
money going into supporting
fruits and vegetables.
The last Farm Bill had a
few hundred million dollars
but that's a rounding error
in the billions and billions
that go into the Farm Bill.
It's very, very small and
it's likely to be cut.
- Yesterday in your lecture,
you pointed out that foods,
vegetables and fruits, get
.45% of that budget whereas
tobacco still 2%.
- [Marion] Got 2%.
And this was 2008 to 2012.
- [Harry] Yeah.
- Yeah.
- And so what,
how can we change the government?
Look, we just had a foodie
First Lady, basically.
But one gets the sense that
in addition to promoting
being active and growing
your own vegetable garden,
that there was a lot that
the Obamas could not do.
- Well, that's certainly,
there's one argument about that.
I thought it was very complicated.
Mrs. Obama took a leadership role in food
that was extraordinarily important.
And the White House garden
gave lots of people to grow
gardens, gave permission for
lots of people to grow gardens,
it promoted organic gardening, I mean,
it just had an enormous effect.
Very difficult to measure but
I believe it had an enormous
effect on the food movement.
I mean, I was thrilled.
Imagine having a First Lady
interested in the same issues
I was interested in.
That was kind of fabulous.
But when she came up against
the line in the sand,
and I believe that
marketing to children is
the food industry's line in the
sand, and it's one that they
will not cross, they will
not allow anyone to cross.
She tried very hard to get
them to back off on marketing
to children and made at least
two extraordinary, eloquent,
beautifully, beautifully
constructed speeches about that
to the food industry.
But she had no elected
power to do anything.
She had no elected responsibility,
she didn't hold a federal office,
all she had was leadership.
And they could pay.
- [Harry] Moral leadership.
- Moral leadership.
This was moral, under moral leadership.
Which I think had an enormous
effect in ways that are not
easy to measure but which
didn't change the food system
in any measurable way
because she couldn't.
She was opposed at every single
thing she was trying to do
by the food industry.
If they didn't like what was happening,
they went right to Congress
and got an appropriations bill
to put something in that stopped it.
And I can think of at least
four examples of that.
Four examples where the food
industry went to Congress
and got something in an
appropriations bill to make
ketchup a vegetable, to
allow potatoes to be served
in school meals every
single day, no restrictions,
to stop an inter-agency
effort to try to set nutrition
standards for marketing to
children, that was stopped cold.
And then the business
about he dietary guidelines
not saying anything about sustainability.
I mean, these kinds of things,
these are fighting public
health measures using
the political system in a
way that most food advocates
don't have access to
because they don't have
that kind of money.
- It's interesting because
what seems to be emerging
is a picture of a strategy
that on the one hand,
the power of the food
industry is so systemic that
the right strategy is to chip
away at one particular sector.
- [Marion] Not true.
- I hope that's, is that a good.
- I think it's more complicated than that.
I mean there's been an enormous
change in the food system.
If you go to a supermarket today,
the food in the supermarkets
today is so much better
than it was 30 years ago.
It's just that young people
don't remember because
they weren't here 30 years ago.
It's really much, much better
and many food companies,
many restaurants are serving
food that is cleaner,
it's better prepared, it's organic,
it's not made with artificial
colors and flavors.
I mean, there have been enormous changes
in the food industry that
come from people voting
with their fork for the
kind of food that they want.
And I don't think you can
underestimate the role
of individual food choice in that.
Every time you make a
decision about what you're
going to be eating, you're
voting with your fork
for the kind of food system that you want.
You want a, you buy your
food at farmer's markets,
you're supporting small farmers,
you're not supporting big agriculture.
And the food industry is quite
aware of that and there have
been many articles now talking
about how the food industry
has to respond to this enormous
consumer demand for better
healthier food, food
that's better for people
in the environment.
So I think the food movement is
actually does have some power.
It just doesn't have power in Washington.
I wish it did.
- And so, what you're
describing is a change
of consciousness, broader
than we may realize,
but on the other hand that the,
the movement could, should
embrace the notion of choice.
In other words, let's
take choice away from
the food industry and put it
in the hands of the people
who want better food and
want to be healthier.
- Yeah, I think that's happening.
I mean, I see that happening.
You know, to move from
that to political power
in Washington means taking
all of the thousands
of organizations that are working
on food issues of one kind
or another and unifying them
in some way so that they have
some lobbying power and can control votes.
But that means people
have to get out and vote.
It means people have to run for office.
It means people have to
engage in an ugly, messy,
money-controlled political system,
which a lot of people don't want to do.
- Is there a movement also
implicit in what's going on
to making a difference at the local level?
Because if you're buying
food from local markets,
from local farmers, and
going to organic markets,
you're making choice and so
it's a entry point into changing
the system before
Washington changes itself.
And it may be more realistic.
- Yeah, I think it's far more
realistic and I tell students
who are interested in making
changes in the food system
to do it locally.
Look in your community
and see what the needs are
and work in the community.
Go to your local schools.
What kind of food are the
kids eating in those schools?
Good, bad, indifferent?
Can you make it better?
There's lots that can be
done on the local level
and if enough is done on the
local level then Washington
has to listen.
- And what, obviously we're
entering into a period
of dark ages in Washington.
What should we be watching for
in the food area as something
that the government may
try to turn back a lot of
the advances that have been made?
- Well, the big one is SNAP,
the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program,
food stamps is what it used to be called.
That's the big one because
it is 80% of the money that
comes into the Department of Agriculture's
Farm Bill appropriations.
The actual support for
agriculture is only 20%.
So, it's this enormous 80
billion dollar a year program
that Congress is just dying to cut.
- And what, explain
what this program does.
- [Marion] It's food stamps.
It provides electronic
benefits for people to go into
grocery stores and buy food.
- Right.
And so the change might be in what you can
use that money to buy?
- No, the change will be
to cut the amount of money
which is already quite
minimal considering that
there are 45 million people
who have these benefits.
And for them, that's the
last of the safety net
in the United States for poor people.
The President's budget that
came out quite recently
has the most, just cuts of
these tiny little programs
that help poor people and help people
with various kinds of things.
And so they're cutting all of these,
the argument being we don't
want tax payers who aren't
interested in these things to
be paying for these things.
So that's the same argument
as we don't want tax payers
to have to support schools if they don't
have children in schools.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
That's not the way societies should work.
- Right.
And will there be resistance
to these cuts from the food
industry, of all people?
I mean, in other words, do they ben-.
- Well, there actually might
be because retail stores
get the most profits from
the food stamp program.
That's where people buy them.
So, retail stores, most of
the money in food stamps
is spent at retail stores.
The retail stores don't want to lose that.
So they might, but it's hard to know.
- Soda politics has been a place
where there have been some successes.
What has been the key
to what makes it work,
because that's gonna tell
us about the political
organizing that we needed to
do to change the food system.
- Yeah, I subtitled Soda
Politics, Taking on Big Soda,
and in parenthesis, and
Winning, because sales of sodas
are down so far.
They peaked in about 1999 and
have been declining ever since
and this year, for the first
time, sales of bottled water
exceeded sales of sugary beverages.
We still have a long way
to go but they're way down.
Now, the soda industry
believes that public health
advocacy is responsible for
that and I hope they're right.
I'm going to assume that they're right.
That means that public
health advocates have done
a terrific job of explaining
to people that sugary beverages
are not good for their health.
That they predispose to diabetes,
that they predispose to a
whole lot of other conditions
and that people would be
much healthier drinking
less soda and certainly there's loads
of anecdotal evidence, all
I did was stop drinking
sugary beverages and the
weight just fell off.
I mean, I've heard that so many
times I can't even count it.
So I think that message got
out and then advocates also
worked to get sugary
drinks out of schools,
out of work places, got
government agencies to say
this is gonna be a soda-free zone,
hospitals to get rid of
their vending machines.
I mean these efforts at the
local level have added up
and it's become, in some social circles,
no longer socially acceptable
to drink Coke or Pepsi.
- If you were advising students
to prepare for a future
in which they were making
choices that affected
what we eat and they wanted
to change the food industry,
how should they prepare for
that future in their own lives,
beside invoking choice on their own part?
What else should they
be studying to prepare
for a future career in that work?
- Well, I wanted to turn
students into food advocates.
I want them out working with
people to try to improve diets
and make diets healthier
for people on the planet.
And there are loads and loads
and loads of ways to do that
because there are so many
organizations that are working
on these issues that you can
pick the particular tiny piece
that you want to work on.
Improving school food, improving
the environmental impact
of whatever the food system
is doing, whatever it is,
you can find an organization
that's working on it.
Join organizations, volunteer.
- And this really is an
issue about inequality.
- [Marion] Absolutely!
- Because wealthy people
know a lot of the stuff
we're talking about but the
poor are more often the objects
of the advertising and, yeah.
- [Marion] Absolutely.
Yeah, no, it's absolutely
a social justice issue.
And you can work on social
justice issues using food
as an entry point in a way that
you cannot do with any other
political issue, in my view.
Because everybody eats.
So everybody can relate to it.
It's not hard to explain to
people why the food system
for them is the way that it is
and what they can do to make
changes in it.
And lots of people are
interested in listening.
It's an exciting time.
- One of the things that
emerges from your work
and your presentations is
you remain an optimist.
- Absolutely, because
I can see the changes.
- And is that what fuels your optimism?
- Yeah.
I mean, well, first of
all, I work with students.
How could you not be optimistic
if you work with students?
I mean, they're optimistic.
They're so interested,
they're so excited about
what the future holds for them
and so eager to make positive change.
How could you not be?
I mean, I get my inspiration from them.
And, you know, I try to
support them in any way I can.
Yes, go out and do it.
No, don't be discouraged.
Look at the changes that have taken place.
Look at how much better
supermarket food is.
Loot at the number of farmer's markets.
Look at how, at the sales of organics,
to pick just one example.
And then my own personal example
is look at what's happened
with food education in universities.
My department at NYU started
a program in food studies
in 1996, 21 years ago.
We were it!
There was one other program
at Boston University
in gastronomy but we
were the only sort of,
that was in the School
of Continuing Education,
we were the only academically
involved program.
We started out with
undergraduate, Master's,
and Doctoral programs.
Everybody thought we were crazy.
Who would want to study about food?
Who would want to do that?
How are you gonna get students?
They couldn't believe it.
The New York Times wrote about
our program the week after
it was approved by New York State.
We had people in our office
that afternoon holding
the clipping and saying,
I've waited all my life for this program.
And we've never looked back.
Now every university has some
kind of food program going on.
There are five in New
York City that I know of.
There are thousands and
thousands of young people
who are interested in food
issues in a way that combines
politics, sociology, science,
whatever it is they're interested in.
They can use food, everybody's
figured out that you can
use food to teach anything.
- One final question,
requiring a brief answer,
what lesson do you think one
can learn from your career?
- [Marion] From mine?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, do what you like.
It'll really be fun.
- And on that note, I want to
thank you, Professor Nestle,
for being with us today and
coming back to Berkeley,
your alma mater.
- My pleasure.
- And thank you very much
for joining us for this
Conversation with History.
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