Food Democracy and Healthy Choices

Interview by Arty Mangan

AM: You have been called anti-capitalist. What is it about the wisdom of the market that you don’t trust?

Marion Nestle: I think the root cause of a lot of the problems about food marketing has to do with Wall Street’s pressure on companies to show growth, and that that forces companies into producing too much food in this country. People can’t eat that much. Even if they’re over-eating, they can’t eat that much. It puts companies into the position of pushing food in ways that they wouldn’t if there were a more civilized and less competitive capitalistic marketplace. You have to find ways to check capitalism or check the excesses of capitalism.

Photo by Jan Mangan

You can have a capitalist system without having quite the level of greed that we’re dealing with now. There have been times in American society when capitalism was checked, the country didn’t fall apart, the gap between rich and poor wasn’t so great, and it was more democratic.

I’m worried about democracy. I think that when we’re talking about food marketing, we’re talking about democratic institutions and the undermining of democratic institutions. People have to fight back on these things. So in a sense, I think of my work as doing community organizing around democratic institutions, if that’s not too pretentious.

AM: How do regulation and education come into the picture in terms of mitigating problems with the food system?

Marion Nestle: Well, education is not enough, because what people tell me is that they know what they’re supposed to eat—it’s just too hard. If you want things to change, you need to change the environment to make it easy for people to eat better food and eat more healthfully.

What’s happened in the last twenty years is not just marketing, but it’s the changing of the social environment and the food environment so that the default is eating junk food, eating all day long, eating larger portions and eating everywhere and not caring very much about what the food is or what the issues are that go behind food production.

You can educate people about what those issues are, and extremely well educated people will make these changes. They’re buying organic, buying fair trade and they’re supporting Whole Foods, farmers markets and all of these other places. But for a large portion of the American population that doesn’t have that level of education, we just have to make it easier for them to eat more healthfully.   

AM: How do we change the food and eating environment?

Marion Nestle: There is a whole range of policies that are under consideration. You could put restrictions on marketing to children. I don’t see this as just a First Amendment issue. The big Federal Trade Commission decision that said that you could not restrict marketing to children on television came in 1979, before the obesity problems started. Times have changed. Health problems are so extreme at this point, and the potential cost to society is so high, that a lot of the  “don’t touch it” kind of people are saying, “We really have to do something about this” and we should start looking at solutions that weren’t able to be considered twenty or thirty years ago.

Doing something about the whole food environment in schools, and the disconnect between what kids are told in school and what they’re given in school—that could be changed. You could mandate better food and more physical activity. In some places people are going into schools and saying they’re not going to stand for it anymore, and they’re making changes now. 

AM: Tell me about the work Chef Bobo is doing in the Calhoun School in New York City.

Marion Nestle: Chef Bobo. The guy’s brilliant. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted kids eating adult food, and they like it. They want to learn how to cook, and they want to know where the food comes from, and they demand to be told. They complain to their parents that the food they’re getting at home isn’t as good as the food they’re getting in school, because they stopped liking the taste of junk food. They behave better.           

AM: The food industry has developed a whole different segment of food for kids, creating the idea that kids’ food needs to be different.

Marion Nestle: Yeah, I think it’s extraordinarily subversive of parental authority. The purpose of marketing to kids is to put the power over food choices in kids’ hands. I think adults should make decisions about what kids eat. I don’t know a single parent that wants to fight with their kids about food.

If you look into the marketing to kids, even I am stunned by the deliberate nature of it, the extent of the message, the extraordinary amount of money that goes into finding out what kids want and how you push kids’ want buttons, how you get kids to pester their parents without their parents noticing. How you get kids and parents to look at foods as iconic or clever or cute and not realize that you’re wearing corporate logos and doing the advertising.

A food marketing report that’s just come out of the Institute of Medicine lays this stuff out. It had stuff in there that I didn’t know about, because the Institute of Medicine had federal access to information that I couldn’t get. And even they complained that they couldn’t get information from food companies. The food companies don’t want the information to get out. You read this thing and you’re just outraged. How dare they do this? How dare they target six-year-olds for eating junk food?

AM: This is really an insinuation by food companies into the cultural control of raising our kids.

Marion Nestle: Absolutely, without any question. There’s tons of research on the effect of advertising on children’s behavior. It all shows the same thing: that it’s designed to undermine parental authority, to make kids feel like they’re in charge, like they know more about what they’re supposed to eat than their parents do, and that parents are stupid. You get enough of that when your kids are adolescents anyway. This is just lowering the age at which kids start being contemptuous of their parents. I think it makes parenting much more difficult. You’re constantly being challenged and constantly being treated with contempt. 

AM: So what you’re saying is that they’ve figured out how to actually lower the entry point to this period of rebellion and rejection of the parent. 

Marion Nestle: To very young ages. I have friends with two-year-olds who say, “We don’t have a TV in our house, we have never taken our child to McDonalds, and yet our kids beg us to take them to McDonalds. How do they know that?”  The kids must have some kind of wi-fi that picks up these signals in some way.

I heard at a conference on children’s marketing that it’s supposed to go below the radar of critical thinking. You’re not even supposed to notice it. You just prefer a brand, without ever having any idea where that comes from. The food industry is very good at that, and what is chilling is the extraordinary research effort that goes into it. The dollars spent on it is just staggering.

I think if parents thought about soft drinks as being candy, and if they thought about cereals as being cookies, they would never give their kids that stuff for breakfast. I mean, everybody knows you don’t give your kids candy and cookies for breakfast. But they’ve been marketed as healthy. 

If I rant and rave about any one thing, it’s health claims and vitamin claims on food packages. I just don’t think they should be there at all, because it makes these foods look like they’re healthy. 7-Up is starting to put calcium and vitamins in 7-Up now, so it’s a health food. 

AM: Tell me about your new book.

Marion Nestle: The new book is called What to Eat and comes out in May. It deals with the issues around food politics. After I wrote Food Politics, people came up to me and said, “It’s a great book, but you didn’t tell us what to eat.”  People said things like, “I go in the supermarkets, and I go into paralysis and just don’t know what do. I don’t know how to make choices.” It’s just too complicated to evaluate the different kind of label claims. Eggs, for example, have three different kinds of certification systems. How is the average consumer supposed to know which is which or what it means. The book is really about how to think about food. People who’ve read it tell me that it’s totally changed the way they eat. Nearly all of them say, “I never thought there was any reason to buy organic, and now I do.”

I see nationally everywhere people who are increasingly concerned about the quality of what they’re feeding themselves and their children. This is grassroots democracy in action. It really is. I think it’s tremendously exciting. There’s no other place in American society where grassroots democracy is being exercised, as far as I can tell, except around food issues. I say go with it.  Run with it. Use it. It has no possibility of doing anything except benefiting both the people who are involved in it, and the people who are responsible for producing food.