Episode 137: Professor Marion Nestle

The Checkout speaks with the godmother of food policy studies, Professor Marion Nestle, author of the memoir Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics and the must read What To Eat.

https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/marion-nestle Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, in the department she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She holds honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky and the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.

She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley. Previous faculty positions were at Brandeis University and the UCSF School of Medicine. From 1986-88, she was senior nutrition policy advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. Her research and writing examine scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice and its consequences, emphasizing the role of food industry marketing.

She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of fifteen books, several of them prize-winning, most notably Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002); Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (2003); What to Eat (2006); Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, with Dr. Malden Nesheim (2012); Eat, Drink Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics (2013); and Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) in 2015. She also has written two books about pet food, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (2008) and Feed Your Pet Right in 2010 (also with Dr. Nesheim). She published Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, in 2018 and a book of short essays with Kerry Trueman, Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health in 2020. Her most recent book is a memoir, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics (2022).