Marion Nestle breaks down our new food pyramid
Good Food
KCRW
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The good, the bad and the ugly about our new dietary guidelines.
- Marion Nestle reconsiders her seminal book What to Eat Now, two decades later.
- Polina Chesnakova sneaks in a few comforting, cool weather recipes from the Caucuses.
- Pyet DeSpain drew on her Native American and Mexican heritage to find a deeper purpose.
- Cha McCoy shines a light on underrepresented wine regions and pairings for foods of the diaspora.
- At the farmers market, Erika Chan of Kato shops for parsnips for dessert.
Connect with Good Food host Evan Kleiman on Substack.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is Good Food. What does food have to do with politics? |
| 0:07.7 | When I wrote food politics, which came out in 2002, that was the first question I got asked. |
| 0:13.6 | What does food have to do with politics? I would say that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has ended the need for that question. |
| 0:22.5 | Of course, food is political. It always has been. And whenever I'm confounded by the food |
| 0:28.0 | politics du jour, there's one person I call, Marian Nessel. She literally wrote the book on the topic |
| 0:34.1 | and continues to write daily missives about all that's happening in the food space |
| 0:38.7 | at her website, foodpolitics.com. 20 years ago, she realized that consumers were confused about the |
| 0:47.0 | endless choices we face at the grocery store. So she wrote a book called What to Eat. Now she's updated it to address our ever-changing food landscape. |
| 0:57.6 | What to Eat Now couldn't come at a better time. I should say that Marion is a professor, |
| 1:03.8 | a scientist, a public health advocate, and voice of reason. It is always enlightening to talk to her. |
| 1:10.5 | Hi. Hello. How nice to be back. I thank you for |
| 1:14.1 | the introduction. How special to actually see you in person. Yes, what a concept. What a concept. |
| 1:21.2 | Yeah, it's awesome. So let's talk about the massive elephant in the room, the new food pyramid |
| 1:26.7 | and dietary guidelines. |
| 1:28.8 | For a lot of us, it appears to be upside down. |
| 1:33.8 | Can you explain how the ranking has shifted? |
| 1:38.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:38.8 | I mean, it's so interesting because there's really a lot to love about what the new dietary guidelines and |
| 1:46.9 | new pyramid are. For one thing, the main message, eat real food, is something I'm wholeheartedly |
| 1:55.7 | behind. And for another, one of the recommendations, which is to limit intake of ultra-processed foods, although they call them highly processed foods that are high in salt, sugar, and refined carbohydrates, is also a message that I've been behind for a really long time. |
| 2:15.8 | And it's kind of mind-boggling to see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Brooke Rollins talk about these things everywhere, especially on X, which used to be called Twitter, which is where food policy gets announced in the United States these days. |
| 2:34.5 | On the other hand, the rest of it is so weird and so dismissive of science and complicated and |
... |
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