Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Interview with Maria Rodale about the politics of your plate
I was recently interviewed by Maria Rodale about Eat, Drink, Vote (published, not coincidentally, by Rodale Books).
Politicians in Washington may bicker back and forth about issues that don’t seem all that immediately relevant to your daily life, but their decisions do trickle down to you—three times a day, every time you sit down for a meal. Your dinner plate (and your cereal bowl and your lunch box) are ruled by politics, from the lobbyists who made your chicken cheaper to the Congresspeople who listened to food marketers’ pleas to limit restrictions on advertising to children.
Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University and author of the popular FoodPolitics.com blog, has tried to capture the politics of your plate in a new book, Eat Drink Vote, a compilation of political cartoons that perfectly capture the absurdity that is our nation’s food regulatory system. (Check out a sampling: The 19 Biggest Food Problems in America)
Here’s the video:
