From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject Marion Nestle knows it’s not easy to be a smart consumer of food, or of media. The only solution may be to get political.
Date November 10, 2020 1:10 AM
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[In a series of short essays, Marion Nestle discusses her current
thinking on food-system issues in her new book, Let’s Ask Marion.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MARION NESTLE KNOWS IT’S NOT EASY TO BE A SMART CONSUMER OF FOOD,
OR OF MEDIA. THE ONLY SOLUTION MAY BE TO GET POLITICAL.  
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Kate Cox
September 12, 2020
The Counter
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_ In a series of short essays, Marion Nestle discusses her current
thinking on food-system issues in her new book, Let’s Ask Marion. _

The Counter asks Marion Nestle, every journalist’s go-to nutrition
expert, how to infuse our consumption with some critical thinking.,
Bill Hayes

 

When I spoke to Marion Nestle two days into September, it felt like I
was calling from another life, far removed from the one I’d been
living when I last saw her.

But in fact, it was only mid-February when we had crossed paths, at
New York University, where Nestle is the Paulette Goddard professor of
nutrition, food studies, and public health, emerita. She chaired
NYU’s Nutrition and Food Studies department from 1988 to 2003, then
kept teaching until her retirement in September of 2017.

Nestle had popped into a journalism workshop given by me and our West
Coast editor, Karen Stabiner, for students of NYU’s graduate food
studies program. Before the pandemic, the Counter’s editors
regularly ran these workshops, like a traveling roadshow of sorts, for
aspiring food journalists, farmers-who-write, writers-who-farm, and
others interested learning how to tell stories for the rapidly
evolving industry loosely termed “food media.”

As journalists covering food’s intersection with politics, business,
and culture, our job is to help readers understand what’s happening
behind the topical headlines in general news and lifestyle
publications—that is, how money and power structures influence
what’s available in your grocery store, what it costs, and how good
it might be for you and your environment. Regrettably, that job is
complicated these days by having to explain too often what is and
isn’t journalism, and, well … how money and power structures
influence what makes news.

In her new book, Let’s Ask Marion, a series of short essays that
explore her current thinking on food-system issues (published
September 1 by the University of California Press), Nestle defines the
term “ultra-processed,” which she says “refers specifically to
products that are industrially produced, bear no resemblance to the
foods from which they were extracted, and contain additives never
found in home kitchens.”

It seems to me that information itself is proffered in those same
three varieties: unprocessed, processed, and ultra-processed. The
influences that determine whether a food story becomes a quick-click
listicle or an investigative deep dive aren’t so different from
those that have positioned Doritos at eye level on grocery store
shelves. If the vast industry known as “the media” fulfills the
wishes of its financial shareholders first, readers won’t notice
whether they’re being sold a flimsy product or being handed actual
facts, responsibly reported by a human being. As Nestle has pointed
out ad infinitum in her books, the same is true of food companies.

We should be comparing the effects of digital media’s junk food for
the mind on our ability to make well-reasoned decisions with the
effects of junk food on our bodies.

It occurred to me somewhere halfway through Let’s Ask Marion, the
latest of 11 books Nestle has written (she has edited three), that,
having pinpointed how much agriculture, Wall Street, and food
regulation have changed since her first book was published in 1985,
she’d also have much to say about how information has changed in
that time.

And what I really wanted to ask her was, how can we get smarter about
it? And what do we after that?

This conversation has been condensed for length and edited for
clarity.

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