Nutrition, SNAP & Why We Need A Food Revolution

Chris Brown is in the news again. And that means that people are publicly relearning and relitigating his history of violence toward women. Many of us are wanting to be protective of black men and boys to the point that we're unwilling to hold them accountable for the things that they do to women and girls. Listen to NPR's Code Switch podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley.

Today, my guest is Marian Nessel, the molecular biologist, turned nutritionist and food policy scholar, whose voice has helped decode for decades what we eat and why it matters. Her well-known book, What to Eat, became a consumer Bible of sorts when it came out in 2006, guiding readers aisle by aisle through the supermarket while exposing how industry marketing and policy steer our food choices. Two decades later, she's back with What to Eat Now, a revised field guide for the supermarket of 2025, where ultraprocessed foods, plant-based meats, corporate organics, and our ability to have food delivered to our very doorstep have rewritten the rules. Nessel's journey began in the classroom. When she first began teaching a nutrition course in the early 70s, she says it felt like she was falling in love with the subject.

She went on to serve as Associate Dean for Human Biology at the University of California-San Francisco and as staff director for nutrition policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped shape dietary guidelines for Americans in the 1990s. Nessel is the author of 15 books, including Safe Food, The Politics of Food Safety and Soda Politics. We recorded this conversation last week as courts and Congress were battling over SNAP benefits for more than 42 million Americans during the government shutdown. And Marian Nessel, welcome to Fresh Air. Oh, glad to be here.

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