Welcome to Food with Mark Bitman. I'm Kate Bitman. Thanks for being here. We know how many of you are loyal

listeners and we appreciate that so much. If you'd like to hear more from Mark and me and our small but

mighty team, check us out on bitmanproject.com. When you subscribe there, you'll get access to our recipe database, which now has

thousands of recipes, with more added weekly.

If you prefer a substack experience, we're on there, too, bitmanproject.substack.com.

Reach out to us with any questions, comments, or stuff you think should be featured on the podcast or on our site, food at markbitman.com. When I first began writing about food, and we're actually closing in on 50 years of that,

I wasn't especially interested in nutrition. I was interested in cooking, making food taste good,

and eating it. But in a curious

person who cares about personal and public and environmental health, that couldn't last forever.

So when I started writing about those other aspects of food, no one was more important to me than

Marion Nessel. Marion literally, the person who tied together food, nutrition,

politics in the United States before anyone else and better than anyone else,

patiently explained things to me whenever I got confused about them over a period that is at this

point just about 30 years. And so, of course, when the new dietary guidelines for Americans were published a couple of weeks ago,

I looked at them and, as I say in this interview, thought, huh, from an administration that

shows signs of being not only cruel but insane, these are not nearly as bad as I thought

they'd be.

And then I said to myself,

I'd better have this conversation with Marion. So here that conversation is, and for anyone who cares about what food they eat and what our government is recommending along those lines,

it's a valuable one. Thanks, Marion, for doing this, by the way.

Sure, my pleasure.

I'm sure you're besieged with requests.

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