Preamble:
This April, the BPPJ interview team sat down with Marion Nestle, author of more than a dozen books, including 2002’s Food Politics,and leading voice regarding food system issues in the United States.
During our far-reaching conversation, we touched on some of the Trump administration’s planned actions related to the food system. While the full interview with Nestle will be published in the Fall, the interview team thought it would be timely to publish an excerpt of the interview that spoke particularly to a matter currently playing out in the public sphere, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
Sincerely,
Max Dunsker, Amanda Fong, and Kirsta Hackmeier
BPPJ: We are moving into a new political climate, and it's too soon to say exactly what actions will be taken, but what leading indicators are you looking at to suggest the direction that national food politics are headed in the U.S. under this new administration?
Marion Nestle: I'm very excited by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. I think its heart is in the right place. It is certainly identifying the problems in a way that I have never seen identified at a federal level before. Much of [MAHA] focused on 75 percent of American adults being overweight or obese and the consequences of that. That to me is absolutely thrilling.
With that said, what the MAHA movement is actually going to do remains to be seen. So far, we know that it's very interested in getting color additives out of the food supply. Let me be very clear about this. I'm in favor of getting artificial additives out of the food supply. I just don't think it's the most important issue and I don't think it's an issue that's going to address obesity and chronic disease. The second thing that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he wants to do is clean up the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) loophole, which allows food companies to self-declare which additives are safe. Again, I'm absolutely in favor of that. I just don't think it's going to address the problem.
R.F.K. Junior says he wants to get ultra processed foods out of schools. Now we're talking! We know that ultra processed foods encourage people to eat more. They are a specific category of junk foods that have an enormous amount of research behind them and the one thing that has been absolutely shown is that they encourage people to eat more. You can't eat just one. You can't stop eating them, so people who eat a lot of ultra processed foods take in more calories.
In order to do this, the MAHA movement is going to have to take on the food industry. I see no signs that anybody is very interested in doing that, except for with color additives. But color additives are an easy one in public health terms, they’re low hanging fruit, because the food industry already has plenty of alternatives. The alternatives cost a little bit more and they don't work quite as well, but they've got alternatives. They use them in other countries where these additives are banned or have to have warning labels on them.
I want to see them take on obesity as a problem. If they're going to reallytake it on, they have to deal with overconsumption of calories. They have to be arguing for people to eat less. That means smaller portions, not eating a lot of ultra processed foods. And the way our economic system works, eating less is very bad for business. Very bad. So I don't know what he's going to do about that. It remains to be seen.
You can find the full interview published in the forthcoming Fall 2025 issue of the Berkeley Public Policy Journal.