Marion Nestle - Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics

For nearly half a century, I have been teaching and writing about the effects of politics on what we eat and, therefore, on our health. I began my career fascinated by nutrients, every one of them, but I ended up viewing foods, diets, and entire systems of food production and consumption as far more significant. Food companies, as I like to explain, are not social service or public health agencies. They are businesses required by stockholders to prioritize profit above all other valueshuman, social, and environmental.

In saying this, I have always thought I was stating the obvious. Never did it occur to me that I would be considered one of the countrys most hysterical anti-food-industry fanatics ... the anti-pleasure nutritionist.

Since the early 2000s, I have been writing books about food politics. Some have won praise and prizes and are considered highly influential. But as careers go, mine got off to a late start. My first book, Nutrition in Clinical Practice, came out in 1985 when I was teaching nutritionand nutrientsto medical students. It took another seventeen years to produce the one for which I am best known: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. By then, I was sixty-six years old, a late age to be starting on the most active, productive, and rewarding years of my academic life. The book you are reading is the fifteenth I have written, coauthored, or coedited, and the thirteenth since 2002.

I attribute my late start to having been a Depression-era baby born into a poor family and coming of age in the 1950s, when women, even those from the working or lower middle class, were expected to do nothing more with their lives than marry and have children, and to do so as early as possible. Trying hard to conform to social norms, I did just that. I married at the age of nineteen. Back then, if educated women worked at all, it was as secretaries, teachers, nurses, or, as in my case, laboratory technicians. Any woman who worked was expected to quit as soon as she had children. I did that too. My family, the other adults I knew, and my teachers discouraged ambition, let alone agency, and it took me decades to figure out I had both.

At the dawn of the second wave of the womens movement, which opened up education and job opportunities to women, I went to graduate school in molecular biology. By the time I finished my doctorate in 1968, I had married, dropped out of college, returned to graduate, worked as a lab technician, had two children, been a stay-at-home mom, divorced, and met the man I would marry a few years later. After getting my degree, I held academic jobs, but these were lower-level, untenured positions I could manage along with family responsibilities. Nobody supervising those early positions took my work seriously, and neither did I.

Nevertheless, those jobs gradually allowed me to acquire enough teaching, research, and administrative skills to qualify for a high-level staff position in the federal government, which, in turn, qualified me for a tenured position as chair of the Department of Home Economics and Nutrition at New York University, the life-changing job I started in 1988.

Until NYU hired me, I had never thought about what kind of work I might want to do if I had choices. I did not think I had any. The NYU position came with what I viewed thenand still doas miraculous benefits: job security as a tenured full professor, a salary adequate to live on with a subsidized rental apartment (figure 1), and a solid platform from which to teach, write, and speak publicly. By then, my children had finished college and were on their own as young adults. I could finally get to work.

FIGURE 1. On the terrace of the twelfth-floor apartment I have rented from NYU since 1990. This place unites my interests in food, science, and politics. I grow fruits and vegetables in pots. Some of the buildings behind me house NYU science departments; one is the landmarked site of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the greatest tragedy in the history of US labor. Bill Hayes took this photo in 2015 for the Steven Barclay Agency, which represents my public lectures.

The epiphany that launched my career as a critical analyst of the food industry came soon after I arrived at NYU. In 1991 I was invited to speak at a National Cancer Institute meeting about behavioral causes of cancer: cigarette smoking and dietary practices. I was one of two speakers about diet; the other was the New York Times science and health columnist Jane Brody, now a longtime friend. The other speakers were physicians and scientists, American and elsewhere, who had worked for years as antismoking advocates. In that pre-PowerPoint era, they showed slide after slide of cigarette advertisements from places around the world, from remote rural villages in the Himalayas to rapidly urbanizing cities in Africa and Asia.