827: Marion Nestle on Fibermaxxing, RFK Jr, and Collecting Cereal Boxes

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Marion Nestle** (0:14)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:16)
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**SPEAKER_3** (0:31)
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**Marion Nestle** (1:07)
Oh, I think my favorite by far these days is cookies and cream Cheerios protein.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (1:14)
I saw protein Doritos in the bodega last week.

**Marion Nestle** (1:17)
Right. Exactly. Exactly. As if anybody needed more protein, really, and as if Doritos were the best source of protein.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (1:29)
This is TASTE. I'm your host, Aliza Abarbanel. Dr. Marion Nestle is a renowned nutritionist who has been shaping food policy for over half a century. She co-founded NYU's groundbreaking food studies program in the 90s, and has published over 16 books, including her newest, Sugar Coated, Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food. Today on the show, she weighs in on many buzzy topics in the food world today. Think highly processed foods, fiber and protein maxing, dramatic evolution of food culture, and how her cereal box collection inspired this new book.
Marion Nestle, this is TASTE. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

**Marion Nestle** (2:13)
Glad to be here.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (2:15)
I'm really happy to get to speak with you. I've been an admirer of your work for a long time. Before we get into your career and your upcoming new book, I'm wondering if you can tell me an early food memory from growing up that you think somehow shaped your point of view.

**Marion Nestle** (2:30)
Well, you know, I did a memoir that came out in 2002 And I tell the story in the memoir because it was really quite formative. When I was a kid, I went to summer camp in Vermont. And the place where I went had a kitchen garden. And if you were a good camper, they did this Tom Sawyer routine and sent the best campers best behaved campers out to the garden to pick vegetables for dinner. And I was sent out to pick string beans for that night's dinner. And I had never seen a real string bean before.
I grew up in New York City. We had canned string beans. And I bit into one and it was this revelatory experience. It was warm. It was July. It was warm from the sun.
It was crisp and it was sweet. And it was just an astonishing experience that I've never looked back.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (3:35)
I love that the reward for being a good camper is doing more work.

**Marion Nestle** (3:39)
But as I said, Tom Sawyer.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (3:42)
Yeah, exactly. They have a whitewash fence for you next.

**Marion Nestle** (3:46)
But I loved picking vegetables. It was so much fun. And that farm had raspberries. That farm had blueberries. That farm produced maple syrup in the winter. I mean, it was pretty great.

**Aliza Abarbanel** (4:00)
This sounds like the ideal Vermont summer camp. And I'm curious, you know, maybe that was a revelatory moment with you with food. But professionally, like when did you develop an interest in working in food and doing kind of research and writing in that space?

**Marion Nestle** (4:16)
Well, I tell those stories too, because they were really formative.
I've always been interested in food because I like it and I love to eat. And I went to college thinking that I would study about food, but the options were agriculture, which I totally didn't get. I was a city girl. It took me a long time to understand about agriculture.
And the other alternative was dietetics. And I went to Berkeley as a dietetics major. I lasted one day. That was the end of that. It was too easy, and it was too home economics-y. I just, it wasn't what I was, I wanted to be challenged. So I ended up as a science major. Believe me, I was challenged. And in my first teaching job, I was teaching, I got my doctorate in molecular biology. And my first teaching job was to teach undergraduate molecular biology to undergraduate biology students. And I was teaching cell and molecular biology. And my department had a rule that you could only teach the same class three times, and then you had to change to something else. And you had to change second rule. You had to change to something else that the department needed, whether it was anything you knew anything about or not.