Food Files: Marion Nestle on Health Claims, GMOs and Local Food

I am launching a new initiative here on Change.org’s Sustainable Food blog! Introducing “Food Files,” our very own bi-weekly interview series featuring those who produce, process, study, regulate, organize, write about, care about, take action on and eat sustainable food. I will be seeking out everyone from farmers to elite scholars, from NGO activists to government authorities in hopes of shedding light on a range of perspectives and ideas.

I plan to publish Food Files every other Monday, starting today. To inaugurate the series, I caught up with renowned nutritionist and food studies scholar Marion Nestle to hear her opinions on a few of the subjects nearest to our hearts: misleading health claims, GMOs and the potential of local food, among other topics. The first thing I learned is that her name is pronounced like nestle like “nestle into bed” instead of Nestlé like the chocolate company.

She is a Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at New York University. She has authored several books, Food Politics, Safe Food and What to Eat, writes the “Food Matters” column in the San Francisco Chronicle and maintains a great blog, “Food Politics," where she takes on the hot nutri-political issues of the day.

So without further ado, I bring you the first edition of Food Files:

I know you call yourself a “health claims junkie” and you write about lot about misleading health claims on cereal boxes and the like. What do you think companies’ interest in misleading customers that ways says about our country’s food system?

We have an enormous food industry in this country; it’s worth about a trillion dollars a year, half of it in food prepared outside the home. And companies have to sell that. There’s about twice as many calories available in food in the food supply than anybody needs. There’s 4,000 calories a day available per capita. That’s roughly twice average population need. Companies have to sell it.

Do you think there’s a solution to that in this turbo-capitalist circumstance?

Yes, it’s called regulation. I think the role of government is to balance the interests of business and the public. Businesses have a place in society, but they don’t have as big a place as they’ve been given, and we need some checks and balances. And I’m not the only one who thinks that. Look at what’s going on in Wall Street; it’s part of the same dynamic.

Along those lines, I’ve heard the Justice Department is investigating Monsanto for antitrust violations.

I bet they don’t get very far with it.

Yeah?

Yeah, Monsanto has good lawyers.

What are your thoughts on GMOs?

It’s a question of science-based versus value-based ways of looking at these issues. The companies only talk about science. They argue that because nobody’s ever died from eating genetically modified foods that they’re acceptable. And everybody else argues that just because they’re safe, or even if they’re safe, they’re not acceptable. I don’t see any movement in those positions at all.

A lot of people are making the claim that we need GMOs to feed all the people in the world since the population’s booming …

I think that’s a debatable question. The studies that have been done on productivity and yield and use of insecticides and so forth vary greatly depending on who’s doing the study. Until we have some objective parameters for looking at this, I don’t think we’re going to be able to resolve these questions very easily.

I know that you served as Associate Dean of UC San Francisco School of Medicine a few decades ago and taught nutrition to medical students and doctors. I was wondering what you found about the medical community’s understanding of nutrition then and whether you think it’s changed since.

I suspect it’s just the same now ... the students were really interested in nutrition and health and really interested in prevention when they came in, and when they left they were doing treatment because that’s what they were taught how to do. So unless we have a healthcare system that values prevention and that rewards physicians for preventive efforts, that system isn’t going to change either.

If you could design an entirely new foods system for the US, what would It look like?

It would be mixed. I’m not a 100 percent person. I don’t believe we need 100 percent sustainable, 100 percent local, 100 percent organic. I don’t think that’s going to work. But what we do need is a system that’s far more sustainable than the one we have now and in which the costs of food production are located in the food-production system, not externalized to environmental clean-up or healthcare costs the way they are now.

So I’d like to see a much more mixed farm economy with a lot more small farms and medium-sized farms and everybody across the board focusing on producing whatever it is they’re producing in a more sustainable way.

Even the industrial producers?

Oh yeah, I think they could do a much better job.

I imagine some of the readers of my blog feel that the only way would be 100 percent local, small farmers …

Well, I live in a city that has winter. If you’re living in a part of the country that has climate challenges, you need to get your food from outside. People have always traded foods inter-country. It’s part of what’s fun.

I think of it this way: if we didn’t buy vegetables in winter from countries that can grow it, the farmers in those countries couldn’t be exporting food. To think that in this day and age every country will be self-sustainable in food makes no sense, but for the countries that are far from being self-sustainable, there’s a lot of improvement they could make in that way.

And they would be a lot better off if they were growing a lot of their own food. I think one of the most heartening trends in what’s going on now is the way everybody’s growing their own food. I think it’s a great trend. The number of small farmers in America went up last year for the first time in about a hundred years. That’s great news. So I want to see more of that.

Even if everybody bought a little local food, that would make such a difference to local farmers in producing a market for what they are doing. Right now it’s a tiny fraction. It could be a much bigger fraction. There’s plenty of room for growth there.

And on the industrial side — you know, the mass production of large amounts of food for large amounts of people — there’s plenty we can do. We can eat less meat, that would certainly be a help, then we wouldn’t have to grow so much commodity crop for feeding animals. But I also think they need to look at ways to treat waste. That in itself would be an astonishing contribution.

Photo courtesy of Lou Manna