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PORTSIDE CULTURE
‘WHAT TO EAT NOW’ NUTRITIONIST TALKS SNAP, FOOD POLICY AND THE
‘TRIPLE DUTY’ DIET
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Tonya Mosley
November 11, 2025
NPR.org
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_ Nutrition policy expert Marion Nestle's new book, What to Eat Now,
is a field guide for the supermarket of 2025. _
A California's SNAP benefits shopper pushes a cart through a
supermarket in Bellflower, Calif., Feb. 13, 2023., Allison Dinner/AP
Nutrition policy expert Marion Nestle says that when she wrote her
first book, Food Politics, in 2002, people often asked her what food
had to do with politics.
"Nobody asks me that anymore," Nestle says. "When I look at what's
happening with food assistance I'm just stunned."
Nestle says the Trump administration's efforts to withhold SNAP
benefits from millions of Americans has made clear how fragile our
economy is: "We have 42 million people in this country — 16 million
of them children — who can't rely on a consistent source of food
from day to day and have to depend on a government program that
provides them with benefits that really don't cover their food needs,
only cover part of their food needs."
Decades of studying the food industry have given Nestle a clear-eyed
view of why food has become difficult to afford — including the ways
supermarkets contribute to the problem. "The purpose of a supermarket
is to sell as much food as possible to as many people as possible, as
often as possible at as higher prices they can get away with," she
says.
Nestle's 2006 book, What to Eat, became a consumer bible of sorts when
it came out, guiding readers through the supermarket while exposing
how industry marketing and policy steer our food choices. Now, two
decades later, she's back with What to Eat Now, a revised field guide
for the supermarket of 2025.
Nestle recommends what she called a "triple duty" diet aimed at
preventing hunger, obesity and climate change: "Eat real food,
processed as little as possible, with a big emphasis on plants," she
says.
The more products you see, the more you're likely to buy. Therefore,
the products that are organized so that you cannot miss them are in
prime supermarket real estate. And companies pay the supermarkets to
place their products at eye level, at the ends of aisles — those
have a special name, end caps — and at the cash register. When you
see products at the catch register, they're paying fees to the
supermarket by the inch of space. And that's how supermarkets make a
lot of their money, is through slotting fees. And, of course, what
this does is it keeps small producers out, because they can't afford
to make those kinds of payments. ... I mean, we're talking about
thousands, or in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And
every single product that is in a supermarket is placed where it is
for a reason.
On how dollar stores got into the food business
They started out by selling the most popular ultra-processed foods.
... They're going to have chips. They're going to have sugar-sweetened
cereals. They're going to have every junk food you could possibly
think of. That's what they make their money off of. They will have a
few fruits and vegetables, a few sad bananas, a few sad apples, maybe
some pears, maybe some green vegetables, but not very many, and
they'll be in a case off somewhere because they have to offer those.
Because they're taking SNAP benefits, they're required to meet the
stocking requirements of the SNAP program, which requires them to have
a certain number of fruits and vegetables. … And [dollar stores are]
just everywhere. And during the pandemic, particularly, they just
proliferated like mad, and they undercut local stores. They're
cheaper. They have poorer quality food, but the prices are lower.
Price is an enormous issue.
If you want a Trader Joe's or a Whole Foods or a Wegmans in your
neighborhood, you've got to have hundreds of thousands of people
within walking distance or quick driving distance who make very, very
good incomes or the aren't gonna go there. They're going to close the
stores that are not performing well, meaning having lots and lots of
people spending lots and lots of money at them. And so as the big
grocery stores have closed in inner city neighborhoods, the dollar
stores moved in.
On food waste in AmericaOur food system in the United States produces
4,000 calories a day for every man, woman and little tiny baby in the
country. That's roughly twice what the population needs on average. So
waste is built into the system.
Because that's how the subsidies work. The agricultural subsidies
encourage food producers to produce as much food as possible because
they get paid for the amount of food that they produce.
On initially agreeing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America
Healthy Again" approach to the food industry
I was very hopeful when he was appointed, because he was talking
about, let's get the toxins out of the food supply. Let's make America
healthy again. Let's make America's kids healthy again. Let's do
something about ultra-processed foods. Let's do something about
mercury and fish. And a lot of other issues that I thought, "Oh, how
absolutely terrific that we're going to have somebody who cares about
the same kind of issues I do. This is very exciting."
When President Trump introduced his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. on social media, President Trump talked about the food industrial
complex. I nearly fell off my chair! I thought, "Here's the president
sounding just like me. What's going on here?" So then we had the first
MAHA report, the first Make America Healthy Again report, which talked
about a lot of these issues and put in an aspirational agenda. "We're
going to work on this, this and this" — all of that sounded
terrific. And then the second report came out and they had backed off
on nearly all of the things that I thought were really critically
important.
On why she believes the food system needs a revolution
I think it would start with transforming our agricultural production
system to one that was focused on food for people instead of animals
and automobiles. We would need to change our electoral system so that
we could elect officials who were interested in public health rather
than corporate health. We would need to fix our economy so that Wall
Street favors corporations who have social values and public health
values as part of their corporate mission. Those are revolutionary
concepts at this point because they seem so far from what is
attainable. But I think if we don't work on that now, if we do not do
what we can to advocate for a better food system, we won't get it. And
it's only if we advocate for it that we have a chance of getting it.
And you never know, sometimes you get lucky. …
I tell people that they can't do it on their own, that even the act of
going into a grocery store and trying to make healthy choices means
that you, as an individual, are up against an entire food system that
is aimed at getting you to eat the most profitable foods possible,
regardless of their effects on health and the environment. So you have
to join organizations. You have to join with other people who are
interested in the same issues and concerned about the same problems
and get together with them to set some goals for what you'd like to do
and then work towards those goals. Because if you don't do it, who
will?
Therese Madden and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for
broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan
adapted it for the web.
* SNAP
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* food policy
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* supermarket
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* diet
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* consumer goods
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