Wikipedia Deep Dive

Marion Nestle

11 min read

The Woman Who Took on Big Food

In 2011, Forbes magazine ranked Marion Nestle as the second most powerful foodie in the world. She was seventy-five years old, had spent decades in academia, and had never run a restaurant, launched a food brand, or hosted a cooking show. Her power came from something far more dangerous to the food industry: she could read scientific studies and explain, in plain English, exactly how food companies manipulate research to sell us products that make us sick.

The name, by the way, is pronounced "Nes-sul." She has no connection whatsoever to the Swiss chocolate and baby formula giant Nestlé. This coincidence has caused her no small amount of confusion over the years, though it does add a certain irony to her life's work of exposing how large food corporations shape what we eat.

An Accidental Career

Marion Nestle was born in 1936 to a working-class Jewish family. She studied bacteriology at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1959. She went on to earn a doctorate in molecular biology from the same institution in 1968. For the first part of her career, she was a bench scientist, not a food activist.

The transformation happened almost by accident.

After completing postdoctoral research in biochemistry and developmental biology at Brandeis University, Nestle joined the faculty as a lecturer in biology. Then someone asked her to teach a nutrition course. She describes the experience as being like "falling in love." Here was a field where she could teach critical thinking through something everyone cared about: food. The molecules she had studied in the laboratory suddenly connected to breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

She went back to school. At the age of fifty, having already earned a doctorate and built a career in molecular biology, Nestle completed a Master of Public Health degree in public health nutrition at Berkeley. She wasn't starting over. She was adding a new dimension to everything she already knew.

Inside the Sausage Factory

From 1986 to 1988, Nestle worked in Washington as a senior nutrition policy advisor at the Department of Health and Human Services. She served as editor of the Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, published in 1988. She also contributed to a report from the Food and Nutrition Board called Diet and Health: Implications for Reducing Chronic Disease Risk.

These might sound like dry bureaucratic documents. They were not.

The reports laid out the scientific foundation for what became the 1990 Dietary Guidelines for Americans—the federal government's official recommendations about what people should eat. Nestle saw firsthand how science gets translated into policy, and more importantly, she saw how industry lobbyists work to influence that translation.

When scientists found clear evidence that Americans should eat less sugar, less salt, less saturated fat, and less meat, the food industry didn't dispute the science directly. Instead, they worked to soften the language. "Eat less" became "choose lean." "Reduce sugar intake" became "use sugars only in moderation." The message got muddied just enough to protect sales while technically remaining consistent with the research.

Nestle took notes. She would spend the rest of her career explaining exactly how this game works.

Building a New Field

In 1988, Nestle moved to New York University, where she became chair of what is now the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies. She held that position for fifteen years. In 1996, working with food consultant Clark Wolf, she founded the food studies program at NYU.

Food studies was a novel idea at the time. The concept was to examine food not just as a collection of nutrients, but as a cultural, social, economic, and political phenomenon. What we eat shapes who we are. The forces that determine what ends up on our plates—from agricultural policy to supermarket design to television advertising—deserve serious academic attention.

The program succeeded beyond expectations. It inspired other universities to launch their own food studies departments. A new academic field was born.

In 2004, Nestle accepted the Paulette Goddard Professorship at NYU. She became Professor Emerita in 2017, though "emerita" in her case has not meant retirement. She continues to write, blog, tweet, and speak about food politics with the same intensity she brought to her earlier work.

The Books That Changed the Conversation

Nestle is the author of at least sixteen books, but a handful stand out for their influence on public understanding of the food system.

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, published in 2002, became her signature work. The book systematically documents how food companies fund research, lobby government, advertise to children, and exploit nutrition science to sell products. It won a James Beard Literary Award, an Association of American Publishers Award for Public Health, and a Harry Chapin Media Award for Best Book.

Think about that combination of prizes for a moment. The James Beard Foundation typically honors cookbooks and food writing. The American Publishers gave her a public health award. And the Harry Chapin Media Award—named after the singer-songwriter who wrote "Cat's in the Cradle" and devoted himself to fighting hunger—recognized her work as activism. Nestle had written something that bridged worlds.

What to Eat, published in 2006, took readers on a tour through a supermarket, explaining what they were actually looking at. The book won another James Beard Award, this time for best food reference book. It also won the National Multiple Sclerosis Society's Better Life Award, an unexpected honor that reflected how broadly her work resonated with people trying to navigate chronic illness through diet.

Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning), published in 2015, focused specifically on sugary drinks and the industry that sells them. The parenthetical in the title was optimistic but not unfounded. By the time the book appeared, cities and countries around the world had begun implementing soda taxes and warning labels. Nestle had been making the case against sugar-sweetened beverages for years, and the tide was finally turning.

How Food Companies Skew the Science

One of Nestle's most important contributions has been explaining exactly how industry-funded research works to confuse the public.

The technique is elegant in its simplicity. Food companies fund studies. These studies are not necessarily fraudulent—the data may be real, the methodology may be sound. But the companies control which studies get funded, which questions get asked, and which results get published.

If you fund a hundred studies on whether your product causes health problems, statistics guarantee that a handful will come back showing no effect or even a beneficial effect. You publish those studies. You bury the others. Now you can point to "peer-reviewed research" showing that your product is safe, or even healthy.

Nestle documented this pattern across the food industry. Candy makers fund studies showing chocolate is good for your heart. Soda companies fund studies showing sugar doesn't cause obesity. Meat producers fund studies showing red meat doesn't cause cancer. The studies exist. They appear in scientific journals. But they represent a carefully curated selection of results, not the full picture.

In 2018, she published Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, a full-length examination of industry influence on nutrition research. By then, the problem she had been describing for decades had become impossible to ignore.

The Public Intellectual

Nestle has never been content to write only for academic audiences. From 2008 to 2013, she wrote the "Food Matters" column for the San Francisco Chronicle. She maintains a blog at foodpolitics.com, where she posts almost daily about food policy developments. She tweets prolifically.

She has appeared in documentary films about food and nutrition: Super Size Me in 2004, Food, Inc. in 2008, Fed Up in 2014, and many others. When filmmakers want an expert who can explain food politics clearly and credibly, Nestle's name comes up.

In 2022, the University of California Press published her memoir, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics. The title captures something important about her career. She didn't set out to become a food activist. She was a molecular biologist who fell in love with teaching nutrition, saw how the sausage was made in Washington, and spent the next forty years telling people about it.

The Influences Behind Her Work

Nestle has named four people as particular inspirations: Wendell Berry, Frances Moore Lappé, Joan Gussow, and Michael Jacobson.

Wendell Berry is a farmer, poet, and essayist who has written for decades about the relationship between agriculture, community, and culture. His work argues that industrial farming damages not just the environment but the social fabric of rural America.

Frances Moore Lappé wrote Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, one of the first books to connect personal food choices to global politics. She argued that hunger was not a problem of scarcity but of distribution and power.

Joan Gussow is a nutritionist who pioneered the concept of eating locally and seasonally, decades before "farm-to-table" became a restaurant marketing buzzword. She has written about the environmental costs of the industrial food system since the 1970s.

Michael Jacobson is a scientist who co-founded the Center for Science in the Public Interest in 1971. The organization has spent fifty years advocating for better food labeling, restrictions on junk food marketing to children, and other consumer protections.

What these four have in common is a willingness to connect food to larger systems—economic, environmental, political. Nestle absorbed their influence and added her own particular expertise: the ability to read scientific literature critically and explain how research gets manipulated to serve commercial interests.

Honors and Recognition

The list of awards Nestle has received over her career is almost comically long. The American Public Health Association gave her an award for excellence in dietary guidance in 1994. Eating Well magazine named her Nutrition Educator of the Year in 1997. She became a Fellow of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences in 2005.

Bard College gave her the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service in 2010. The University of California School of Public Health at Berkeley named her a Public Health Hero in 2011. She has received honorary doctorates from Transylvania University in Kentucky and from Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York.

In 2018, the International Association of Culinary Professionals gave her a Trailblazer Award. Les Dames d'Escoffier International—a philanthropic society of women leaders in food, beverage, and hospitality—named her a Grand Dame. Heritage Food Radio inducted her into their Hall of Fame.

In 2019, she became the first recipient of the Food Policy Changemaker Award from the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center. The award was created specifically to honor "leaders who are working to transform the food system." They gave it first to her.

In 2023, at age eighty-seven, she traveled to Scotland to receive the Edinburgh Medal, which recognizes significant contributions to the understanding and well-being of humanity through science and technology. Previous recipients have included climate scientists, epidemiologists, and pioneers in genetics. Nestle was honored for making people understand what they eat and why.

Why This Matters for Your Kitchen

If you are reading an article about potatoes gratin—as the person encountering this essay presumably is—you might wonder what a nutrition policy expert has to do with your dinner.

The answer is that Nestle's work illuminates the forces that shape what ends up on your plate before you ever make a decision about it. Why is cheese cheaper than vegetables at the supermarket? Because dairy producers receive government subsidies. Why do processed foods dominate the center aisles? Because food companies engineer products to hit what scientists call the "bliss point"—the precise combination of sugar, salt, and fat that makes you want to eat more.

None of this means you shouldn't make potatoes gratin. Nestle herself has never advocated for joyless eating. Her point has always been that people deserve to know the truth about food—where it comes from, how it's marketed, and what the science actually says about nutrition—so they can make informed choices.

When you slice potatoes, layer them with cream and cheese, and bake them until golden and bubbling, you are participating in a food tradition that predates industrial agriculture, nutrition science, and everything Nestle has spent her career studying. The pleasure of cooking and eating good food with people you care about is real. What Nestle asks is that we keep our eyes open about the larger system in which that pleasure exists.

At eighty-eight, she shows no signs of slowing down. Her next book, What to Eat Now, is scheduled for publication in 2025. The food industry, no doubt, is bracing itself.