What is likely to be the effect of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on food politics? Nothing good.
The decision to overturn limits on corporate campaign contributions will affect every aspect of society, food included. I have long argued that campaign contributions are one of two major sources of corruption in government (the other is the way Wall Street requires corporations to report growth every 90 days).
If we want our congressional representatives to make decisions in the public interest, their election campaigns must be publicly funded. When corporations fund campaigns, representatives make decisions in the corporate interest. It’s that simple.
Those of us who care about creating a good, clean, fair, and sustainable food system will have to work harder now. But I can’t think of any more important work to do to protect our democratic institutions.
The Federal Trade Commission is the third agency dealing with food policies, this time advertising. As I’m fond of saying, the FTC is not exactly a consumer protection agency. Its main purpose is to make sure that businesses stay competitive. In 1978, under the leadership of Michael Pertschuk, the FTC made a valiant attempt to regulate food marketing to children. That disaster, which I have discussed in previous posts, kept the FTC from doing anything about marketing to kids – until recently.
On December 15, it is holding a forum on food marketing to children in Washington, DC. Here’s the agenda and information about registration. They will also do a webcast linked to that site.
But that’s not all the FTC is doing. It had so much fun trying to get information from food companies about their marketing-to-kids practices that it is trying the same thing with quick service and fast food restaurants. The FTC says it is seeking “Information from those companies concerning, among other things, their marketing activities and expenditures targeted to children and adolescents and nutritional information about the companies’ food and beverage products marketed to children and adolescents.” This sounds easy, if a bit confusing, but my guess is that the FTC will have to pull teeth to get it.
In the meantime, a few comments have already been filed in response to the notice. The ones from industry are predictable: too expensive! Too difficult! My guess is that they have this information readily available but are embarrassed to reveal it. Why? It undoubtedly will show that the companies spend the most money on the junkiest (and most profitable) products.
Michael Pertschuk, by the way, is still going strong. In June, he wrote an article on the FTC for The Nation. His article has much to say about the way the FTC is operating these days and is well worth a look. As he explains, the FTC was
created in 1914 during the Progressive Era, [and] was endowed with a potent authority for promoting competition and consumer protection that it has never fully used. This includes investigative authority over virtually all businesses, backed by subpoena power and the capacity to demand reports of data that corporations would rather withhold from public view…For the first time in decades, the Senate and House authorizing and oversight committees and the judiciary committees are pressing the agency to act more aggressively on the consumer-protection and competition fronts and are prepared, as needed, to strengthen its enforcement powers….But Congress needs to take action to unleash the FTC’s full potential. First, it remains a small agency with broad and complex responsibilities and cumbersome procedural burdens, especially in rule-making. Here, the FTC’s champions in Congress can make certain that Congress supplies more resources and streamlines the FTC’s authority. The agency also has a chronic problem of setting priorities: wherever it turns, there are corporate malefactors, large and small, deserving of prosecution.
But read the whole thing and see whether you think his optimism is justified. Better yet, go to the workshop on the 15th!
This page is somewhat disorganized in that I now put occasional print, audio, and video interviews, which used to be separated, together by year. The section at the very end is called Controversies; it is where I post letters from critics. Scroll down to find whatever you are looking for. Media interviews and reviews for specific books are on the page tabs for that book. For old podcasts and videos of presentations, look under Appearances and scroll down for Past Appearances; in recent years, I’ve been putting them in the chronological list here.
Interviews, media appearances, and lectures: print, audio, and video (the ones for which I have links)
Nov 28 This video about sugar in soft drinks was just posted on Twitter (X) but its YouTube listing says 7 years ago, when I was on a Fulbright in Mexico in 2017.
Jan 17 Podcast interview with Kathlyn Carney, Connecting the Dots. Lisen on Spotify or Apple Podcast
Jan 16 LA Times guide to Japanese subscription snack boxes (Video Part I). Part II is Jan 23 (same clip?)
Jan 14 The Franklin Institute’s Ben Franklin Birthday celebration. My talk comes first. Others are from Eric Oberhalter and honoree Wendell Berry. Use passcode $H81iALu
Jan 15 Two short answers to questions at FAO’s Regional Office in Santiago, Chile. Video 1: on what governments can do about childhood obesity. Video 2: on food choices in an unhealthy food environment.
July 5 Goldberg R. Food Citizenship: Food System Advocates in an Era of Distrust. Oxford University Press. Chapter 1. Health and Nutrition: Interview with Marion Nestle:1-13. Video online
July Carter J. Interview with Marion Nestle. In: Food for Thought: Feeding the People, Protecting the Planet. Aspenia [Aspen Institute Italia] 2015;67:101-105.
July Carter J. Intervista a Marion Nestle. Come cambiano le politiche alimentary. In: Fame Zero: Rinascimento agricolo. Aspenia [Revista di Aspen Institute Italia] 2015;69:198-202.
January 10 Video interview on Star Talk, co-hosts Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Eugene Mirman, with Anthony Bourdain, about the science of cooking (sort of).
May 21 Print interview with Revital Federbush for an Israeli women’s magazine, mostly about dairy foods I’m told (it’s in Hebrew, which I cannot read, alas).
November 19 Interview with Al Jazeera for a Fault Line program on “Fast food, fat profits: obesity in America (my 10 seconds starts at about minute 15).
September 16 Speech at Columbia University conference on Global Food Systems: Their Impact on Nutrition and Health for All on panel on Advanced Technologies, Food Safety and the Role of Local and Organic Food Production (video)
November 12 Panel discussion on the farm bill, Wagner School of Public Service, Puck Building (Lafayette at Houston), 2nd floor. Here is Wild Green Yonder’s take on it.
February 6, 2008 Biologique Foods radio, two podcast interviews with TJ Harrington in Bloomington, MN, one on food politics and the other on what’s in your food.
Interview with Laura Flinders (and Arun Gupta and Peter Hoffman), Grit TV. It’s on how to eat well without going broke, and starts with a Monty Python clip on Spam 11/26/08
September 5, 2007 Scientific American Podcast with Steve Mirsky. Because I am a Paulette Goddard professor at NYU, he sends along an article he wrote about Einstein’s experience with the gorgeous movie star.
NPR Science Friday, panel on the farm bill with Michael Pollan and Sandor Ellix Katz 8/10/07
Are you responsible for your own weight? Balko R. Pro: Absolutely. Government has no business interfering with what you eat. Brownell K, Nestle M. Con: Not if Blaming the Victim Is Just an Excuse to Let Industry off the Hook. Time June 7, 2004:113.
Bottled water is the target of environmental campaigns in the U.K as well as the U.S. My namesake, the Nestlé Corporation, appears to be under particular attack. Acording to the British government, tap water “requires 300 times less energy than bottled water and does not create bottled packaging waste.” I wonder how the company plans to rebut that argument.
I am outraged by the Cyclospora outbreak. It has sickened thousands of people so far (>16,000?), and made some of them very sick.
Cyclospora is different from other foodborne pathogens. It comes from human waste and cannot be removed by washing (although that helps some) or killed by chlorine. It can only be removed by microfiltration or killed by heat or, maybe, ultra-violet radiation.
It needs to prevented from getting into irrigation water.
Lettuce producers have known about the Cyclospora hazard for more than a decade. They have not acted, and neither has the government.
This outbreak is remarkable, not only for the large number of people affected, but also because of the inadequate, delayed, and chaotic oversight and response.
The DOGE-decimated CDC only issued its first health advisory two weeks after cases were reported, provides much less information than it used to, and is way behind on its tracking.
Yes, Cyclospora is hard to investigate. Symptoms do not occur for days or weeks after eating contaminated food. This means the evidence was eaten or destroyed long before anyone got sick.
Food Safety Rules
Everyone who produces food is supposed to assess the production procedures for places where contamination can occur, take steps to prevent contamination at those places, monitor to make sure the steps were taken, and test to make sure the procedures are working. The FDA is supposed to inspect to make sure all his is happening.
If vegetable producers took appropriate steps, contamination risks would be much lower.
But if there is no federal oversight, no inspection, and no punishment for producing unsafe food, producers won’t bother.
They particularly will not bother to test the irrigation water. Producers hate testing. If they find something, they have to issue recalls. These are complicated and expensive.
The fact that lettuce from one farm or one shredding facility could possibly have sickened thousands demonstrates the dangers of concentrating food production among a few large corporations. But the risks of corporate power run even deeper. Taylor Farms and other large produce corporations have long exerted political power to weaken food safety regulations, contributing to crises like this one. Taylor Farms representatives even met with the White House last week in an effort to distance the company from the outbreak…Recent budget cuts to federal and state health agencies further diminish the government’s ability to hold corporations accountable and protect consumers…
The Justice Department spent years investigatingAbbott Laboratories over how it managed a baby formula facility where potentially deadly bacteria was discovered and suspected of causing infant deaths, worsening a national shortage.
Some prosecutors believed they had evidence to criminally charge the company under a law they have used to pursue other businesses for allegedly selling contaminated foods, according to people familiar with the matter. Some supervisors also thought it was a good case, they said. Top decision makers instead closed the probe, the people said, opting for a lighter-touch option: clawing back money the company earned from selling formula through federally funded nutrition programs. The outcome, which hasn’t been previously reported, illustrates how the Justice Department under President Trump has moved away from strict approaches to corporate enforcement and raised the bar for punishing companies. Trump in an executive order last year called for minimizing the use of criminal sanctions, where civil penalties could be used instead.
When doctors, hospitals, parents, or others alert manufacturers that babies got sick or died while receiving infant formula, what happens next is left largely to manufacturers such as Abbott Laboratories and Mead Johnson Nutrition, giants of the industry…Under federal rules, if a complaint about an infant formula — such as a report of an adverse event — shows a possible health hazard, the company must investigate. But it doesn’t always have to inform the government agency that oversees the safety of infant formula. A company must complete an investigation and notify the Food and Drug Administration within 15 days only if it finds “a reasonable possibility of a causal relationship between the consumption of an infant formula and an infant’s death.” If that happened even once over more than a quarter century, the FDA could find no record of it, according to information obtained through public records requests.
The headline finding should stop every parent, pediatrician, and member of Congress in their tracks…Here is what KFF Health News found when it asked the FDA, through the Freedom of Information Act, for every such notification manufacturers had submitted since January 1, 2020: none. The reporters then asked the agency to search all the way back to January 1, 2000. Again: no responsive records.…This is not an academic problem for me. I currently represent families in two infant botulism outbreaks tied to powdered infant formula — the November 2025 ByHeart outbreak that sickened at least 48 infants across 17 states, and the spring 2026 Nara Organics outbreak that so far has sickened three. In those cases, we have dug deeply into the same regulatory framework KFF Health News just exposed…The adverse event reporting system for infant formula is not a system at all. It is an honor code — for an industry that litigation has shown may not deserve it.
Four years ago, I wrote two posts with titles I meant: “Mr. Abbott, you are going to face criminal sanctions” and, a few weeks earlier, “Mr. Abbott, you are going to jail for manufacturing tainted infant formula.” I was wrong. Not about the facts — about the willingness of this Justice Department to do anything about them….A DOJ spokeswoman explained that this Justice Department “does not believe in regulation by prosecution”….There are two details in the Journal’s reporting that should make every parent’s stomach turn. First, even if DOJ had wanted to prosecute, the office that does this work — the Consumer Protection Branch — was being disbanded as a cost-cutting measure, the same branch that put away the executives behind the Peanut Corporation of America salmonella outbreak. Second, one of Abbott’s defense lawyers — a former deputy attorney general — reportedly urged the incoming administration to overhaul that very office and strip it of its ability to bring criminal cases at all. Read those two sentences together and ask yourself who is writing the rules now.
Here is why the families I represent — and every parent who lived through the 2022 [Abbott formula] shortage — should be furious.
Abbott gave $500,000 to President Trump’s inaugural fund. Public Citizen has documented that Abbott was one of 58 corporations facing federal investigations or enforcement that together poured some $50 million into the inauguration…And then there is the stock. As Common Dreams reported this week, the President’s own annual financial disclosure…shows that Trump began buying Abbott stock in late September of last year and picked up roughly $500,000 worth of Abbott shares over the course of 2025. The buying happened while his Justice Department was still sitting on a criminal case against the company.
$500,000 into the inauguration. $500,000 in stock in the President’s own portfolio.
As Marler is careful to say, “No court and no investigator has found that the donation or the stock purchases caused this case to be dropped. What is undisputed is the sequence: the money, and then the vanished prosecution. Whether one caused the other is a question no one in a position to answer has been willing to answer.”
I’d say it sures gives the appearance of conflicted interest if not bribery and corruption at the highest levels of government.
Excuse me, but we are talking about helpless newborn and very young infants here, utterly dependent on formula as their sole source of nourishment.
Congress needs to pass this act, and right away. And is needs vigorous enforcement.
Legal slaps on wrists will not stop food safety violations.
In the meantime, the safest formula is the liquid form, pasteurized to kill spores as well as living pathogens. Otherwise, powdered formula is a risk, a small risk, but finite. You do not want your infant to be one of the unlucky ones.
Federal disclosures show Bayer reported spending $9.19 million on lobbying Congress and the executive branch in 2025, which includes fees paid to at least 13 outside lobbying firms. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, 45 lobbyists were registered to lobby for Bayer under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
The White House invokes the Defense Production Act to guarantee supplies of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides. Regulators reapprove dicamba, a Bayer herbicide twice blocked by federal courts, and clear the way for new pesticides containing toxic, persistent PFAS “forever” chemicals.
And the U.S. Justice Department urges the U.S. Supreme Court to erase billions of dollars of Bayer’s liability for its glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer – placing the weight of the executive branch on the side of a foreign company against thousands of Americans who say Bayer’s products caused their cancers.
Over the past year, the administration under President Donald J. Trump has delivered a string of victories to Bayer, the German agrichemical and pharmaceutical giant that merged with Monsanto in 2018 to become the world’s leading manufacturer of genetically modified seeds and pesticides.
REVOLVING DOOR
The term refers to government regulators taking jobs with corporations and vice versa. US Right to Know reports:
The Trump administration yesterday handed Bayer another win, urging the Supreme Court in a new brief to side with the German pesticide company in a high-stakes legal case that could wipe out thousands of cancer lawsuits and potentially billions of dollars in liability tied to glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer.
Three out of nine U.S. officials who signed the brief previously worked for law firms that have represented Bayer, raising questions about whether the Trump administration is providing special favors and benefits to Bayer and siding with a foreign corporation against Americans with cancer.
COMMENT
It’s pretty amazing what Bayer gets away with. Despite Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s insistence that glyphosate is carcinogenic and needs to get out of the food supply, he has now backtracked on that. In his backtracking statement, he says:
Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals. The U.S. represents 4% of the world’s population, yet we use roughly 25% of its pesticides. If these inputs disappeared overnight, crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms even beyond what we are witnessing today. The consequences would be disastrous.
This sounds like he’s looking out for farmers. But glyphosate is used in industrial agriculture, not small- and medium-sized family farms, and certainly not in organic and regenerative farms. As an herbicide, it’s used on feed for animals and fuel for automobiles. It’s also used for drying wheat and oats. It should not be used for food for people at all.
Why is this still allowed? The Bayer Lobby Tracker makes that clear.
The United States (US) has recently released the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030. While the policy introduces sound recommendations for vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, and limits added sugars and ultra-processed foods (UPFs) (termed “highly processed foods” within the text), it fails to reflect the contemporary scientific consensus by prioritising animal proteins, animal fats, and full-fat dairy products.1 Additionally, this political position follows a supplementary institutional report that dismisses previous efforts to include health equity and social determinants in the empirical evidence base, labelling such integration a “methodological deficiency”.2 Consequently, these guidelines depart from the international standards required for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) prevention.3,4 Given US normative influence, this regression legitimises corporate interests, threatening transnational health governance and food and nutrition security.
The inherent contradiction within the 2025–2030 guidelines is profound. By promoting animal-source proteins and full-fat dairy, the document proposes a dietary pattern fundamentally inconsistent with its own goal of limiting saturated fat intake below 10% of total calories.1 This internal incoherence reflects decision-making that continues to prioritise the economic interests of specific industrial sectors over NCDs prevention.5 The paradoxical nature of the guidelines is evidenced by the reliance on an anachronistic visual communication tool. While the inclusion of processing-based terminology is a progressive step, the reintroduction of a hierarchical food pyramid model represents a semiotic retreat into a reductionist era of public health. This abstraction fails to capture the complexity of modern food systems or the distinction between food types and the extent of industrial processing.3 While the international community moves towards representations emphasising fresh foods and the social context of eating, the US return to a pyramid isolates nutrients from the food matrix.6
In sharp contrast, the Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population remains the gold standard for food and nutrition frameworks.6 Published in 2014, the Brazilian approach introduced an epistemological shift away from the dominant reductionist paradigm by moving dietary advice towards the degree and purpose of industrial food processing. This strategy, facilitated by the Nova classification system, acknowledges that industrial alterations to food matrices have wide-reaching implications for biological integrity, metabolic health, social structures, and environmental sustainability.
As Table 1 illustrates, the contrast between the US and the Brazilian standards is defined by their diverging methodological and conceptual foundations. By prioritising an adequate and healthy diet centred on fresh and minimally processed foods, Brazil provides a robust template for addressing the interactions between human biology, cultural identity, and planetary health, achieving maximum scores across metrics of public health and sustainability.3,4,7
Focus on nutrient density and individual responsibility; health is framed as a matter of personal choice and moral deficit.
Multidimensional approach integrating biological, social, and environmental health; focus on food systems and collective well-being.
Scientific integrity
Supplementary report authored by experts with documented conflicts of interest with the beef, dairy, and food industries.
Independent process led by academic researchers, strictly free from commercial influence and industry sponsorship.
Classification system
Traditional food groups with an absence of technical criteria for industrial processing; focus remains on isolated nutrients.
Nova classification categorising foods by the degree and purpose of industrial processing (fresh and minimally processed foods, culinary ingredients, processed foods, and UPFs).
Visual communication
Reintroduction of an anachronistic hierarchical food pyramid model, representing a semiotic retreat into reductionism.
Rejection of the pyramid in favour of food-based representations that emphasise meals and the social context of eating.
Core recommendations
Prioritisation of animal proteins and full-fat dairy; selective recommendations against processed products.
Dietary foundation of fresh, plant-based foods and the categorical avoidance of UPFs.
Saturated fat management
Mathematical paradox between a 10% intake limit and the promotion of animal fats; absence of guidance on unsaturated fat substitution.
Achieved through patterns based on fresh foods; explicit emphasis on replacing animal fats and UPFs with plant-based oils and whole foods.
Environmental sustainability
Omission of the climate crisis and planetary boundaries from the policy framework; silence on the environmental impact of livestock.
Sustainability as a core principle; promotion of biodiverse, just, and resilient food systems that respect planetary limits.
Equity and determinants
Rejection of the “health equity lens”; social and environmental determinants dismissed as a “methodological deficiency”.
Structural pillars: integration of social justice, social determinants of health, and the promotion of food sovereignty.
Global influence and sovereignty
Functions as a permissive framework that dilutes the narrative on food sovereignty and serves as a scientific alibi for industrial actors.
A paradigm of regulatory sovereignty; provides the conceptual framework for pioneering policies like warning labels and fiscal measures.
Table 1
Conceptual and methodological comparison between the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines and the Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population.
The conceptual divergence between these frameworks reflects a broader tension between public health principles and the narrative of personal responsibility. By rejecting social and environmental determinants, the 2025–2030 US guidelines shift the entire burden of health onto individual choice, ignoring the structural barriers defining the food environment.2,8 The reintroduction of individual responsibility as the central axis of food policy is an ideological framework that converts systemic failures into individual moral deficits, thereby legitimising state regulatory inaction.5,9 In an era where NCDs prevention requires robust environmental and policy interventions, the US return to a personal responsibility framework represents a dangerous abdication of the state-led public health mandate.4
The erosion of scientific integrity within the US policy framework is a manifestation of the commercial determinants of health.5 The formulation of these guidelines suggests a clear case of corporate capture. While official political discourse promises to “Make America Healthy Again” by addressing corporate influence, the supplementary scientific report was authored by experts with documented conflicts of interest with the beef, dairy, and food industries.1,2 These commercial interests have effectively undermined the promotion of an adequate and healthy diet. Reversing this trend requires decisive state-led interventions beyond individual choice, necessitating robust policies to restrict UPF production and structural reforms to address the corporate actors dominating global supply.4,10
The failure of the 2025–2030 US guidelines to address the environmental dimensions of diet is negligent in an era of ecological instability. While the international community aligns with the EAT-Lancet 2.0 consensus, which emphasises that food systems must operate within planetary boundaries, the US guidelines remain silent on the climate crisis.8 Transitioning towards plant-forward diets is a foundational requirement for mitigating the environmental degradation caused by intensive livestock systems. The omission of these factors ignores the reality of the Global Syndemic, in which obesity, undernutrition, and climate change are interconnected pandemics driven by the same food system failures.9 By failing to address environmental impacts, the US promotes a model of consumption linked to planetary health degradation, further endangering global food and nutrition security.
The axis of scientific integrity has shifted to the Global South, where Latin American nations—including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay—uphold food systems that are socially just and environmentally sustainable. These countries have pioneered transformative interventions, such as Brazil’s focus on food processing, Chile’s warning labels, and UPF taxation in Mexico and Colombia.4 The political and economic power of the US increases the likelihood that its guidelines will be leveraged by transnational corporations to dismantle these regulations. In international bodies like the Codex Alimentarius, the US framework provides a scientific alibi for industrial actors to dispute sovereign policies, framing evidence-based regulations as barriers to trade. This reflects documented precedents, such as the use of US policy to circumvent international protections for breastfeeding, illustrating how domestic guidelines can function as instruments to impede global health progress.5
Ultimately, the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines do not represent a legitimate departure from scientific progress, but a case of corporate capture with direct implications for national and global morbidity. The World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the global public health community must act decisively to protect the integrity of dietary guidelines against the corporate concessions represented in the US guidelines, which dismiss established evidence on the health impacts of food processing and social determinants. Transnational health governance must be insulated from the influence of corporations that seek to undermine public health for private gain.5,10 Resisting the global influence of this flawed framework is essential to ensure that future generations have access to an adequate and healthy diet that respects both cultural heritage and planetary limits.
The leadership vacuum created by the US concessions offers a pivotal opportunity for the Global South to redefine public health governance. Latin American nations, supported by regional networks such as the Latin American Inter-institutional Network for Technical Cooperation on Food Environments and the Prevention of NCDs, are already demonstrating the efficacy of science-based, conflict-of-interest-free leadership. Safeguarding global health now requires fostering cross-regional collaborations, securing independent funding, and consolidating Brazil and the region as the pioneers of food system transformation. The era of corporate concessions has ended; the era of evidence-based leadership has begun.
Contributors
FSN conceptualised the study. FSN, EAFN, LLM, NK, and MN performed the formal analysis. FSN drafted the original manuscript. EAFN, LLM, NK, and MN provided critical revisions and edited the manuscript. All authors had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
Declaration of interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Acknowledgements
None.
Funding: This manuscript did not receive any specific funding.
Towards unified global action on ultra-processed foods: understanding commercial determinants, countering corporate power, and mobilising a public health response
