Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is Marian Nessel, the leading public intellectual in the United States,

on issues related to public health, nutrition, and food policy.

She's the Paulette Gardard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies,

and Public Health at New York University, as well as a professor of sociology at NYU, and a visiting professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell.

Professor Nessel has authored many articles in academic journals, as well as nine books, including food politics and most recently soda politics. Professor Nessel, welcome to the show.

Oh, glad to be here. You know, when I think about the politics of food, your name is the first one that

comes to mind. I think you've established what I feel is a very well-deserved reputation for

clear and authoritative analysis to food politics issues.

And I guess the first thing I wanted to ask you is what is it about this area that first interested you

and how did it end up becoming your life's work?

Well, I can answer that question by saying that I went to a conference on behavioral

determinants of cancer, of all things, and I heard talks by physicians who were anti-smoking advocates,

and they showed, they gave talks in which they showed slide after slide after

slide of cigarette marketing all over the world and also cigarette marketing to children all

over the world. And I knew that cigarettes were bad for people. I knew that the cigarette

companies advertised, but I had never seen it put together that way.

And I realized that I never paid any attention to it, that cigarette marketing was such a part of the normal landscape of daily life that I just hadn't paid any attention to it.

And I walked out of those talks, and I thought,

we should be doing the same thing for food.

And that was it.

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