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.
Interview highlights
On how supermarkets are in the business of selling products, not providing nutrition
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 [people] 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 America
Our 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.
Copyright 2025 NPR
