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Wish Fast Food Nation a happy 25th anniversary.

It’s hard for me to believe it’s been 25 years since this book first appeared, but 25th anniversary editions of my Food Politics and Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma are also in the works.

The book is about the beef industry and what it does to the animals, packing house workers, the environment, and human health.

Eric Schlosser wrote a new Afterword for this edition.

Here are two excerpts.

As of this writing…highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) has not yet caused a deadly epidemic among human beings.  Pasteurization kills H5N1 in milk, and the virus hasn’t yet mutated to become for contagious or more lethal.  But H5N1 has become endemic among wild birds, chickens, turkeys, and dairy cattle in the United States, allowing a continual mixture of its genes.  A bird flu epidemic that kills millions of people may never emerge from America’s factory farms—or it may next week, next month, next year.  The industrialization of livestock, the transformation of sentient creatures into commodities, and the absence of government oversight have created an efficient system for creating dangerous new pathogens.  As this book argued twenty-five years ago, that’s the price we pay for cheap meat.  That price doesn’t appear on the menu. (p. 312)

Economists often use the four-firm concentration ratio as a measure of the competition in a market for goods and services.  When four companies gain a combined market share of 40 percent or higher, an oligopoly has formed.  The prices offered to suppliers, the prices charged to consumers, and the wages paid to workers are no longer determined mainly by market forces.  A handful of companies have gained control of the market.  Effective government regulation becomes more difficult, as state and federal agencies readily become “captive” to the corporations they’re supposed to oversee.  Today, four companies control about 60 percent of the worldwide market for seeds and 61 percent of the market for pesticides.  Four companies control about 70 to 90 percent of the worldwide trade in grain.  Four companies are responsible for processing about 70 percent of America’s hogs and 85 percent of its cattle.

This book kicked off the food movement 25 years ago.  If you haven’t read it, now is the time.  We need it more than ever.

Today is my 90th birthday, and this is my 5765th post on this site since starting it in 2007.

To quote the late Gloria Steinem, this is what 90 looks like.

Photo taken at Autumn Leaves Books, Ithaca, July 2026

As should be obvious, I have had a hugely fortunate life.

I was born into a poor family but came of age during the now-understood-to-be-unique period between the end of World War II and the election of Ronald Reagan.  Then, a university education was essentially free; I paid $32 per semester in fees to the University of California Berkeley.  Housing was affordable; the first house I bought cost $14,500.  Anyone with a modest academic salary could expect to lead a solid middle-class life.  And for women, doors were beginning to open.

I was in graduate school in the early 1960s, a time when we thought we were changing the world.  We were going to end the war in Vietnam, end poverty, obtain civil rights, get equity for women, protect the environment, end injustice, curb corporate power.  We could see these changes happening.  The future was going to be better, and for everyone.

That was my normal.  I had no idea how unusual that 30-year period would turn out to be, or how powerful the backlash against it.

I was lucky enough to find work—teaching, writing, speaking—that I found deeply engrossing, stimulating, and rewarding.  I still do.

As for my ability to continue to do these things?  Good nutrition, of course,  And even more luck.

My book, Food Politics, turns 25 next year and I recently submitted a new Preface and Afterword for its 25th anniversary edition (forthcoming, February 2027).

Here is how I ended the Afterword:

I am often asked how I remain hopeful in the light of the food industry’s power to control and corrupt government. My answer: the food movement. I see its effects everywhere. Healthier foods are more widely available than when Food Politics first appeared. Increasing numbers of people, old and young, care about food issues and want to improve the food system. Every place I travel, I see more schools serving healthier and better-tasting meals, more farmers’ markets, more young people wanting to farm, more concern about humane farm animal production, more backyard chickens and urban gardens, and more attention to local, seasonal, and sustainable food. Most gratifying, more people understand the politics. A quarter century ago, I could not use the word “capitalism” in class or lectures without turning off the room. Now when I talk about food system problems, someone invariably challenges me: “but aren’t you talking about capitalism?” Yes, I am, and late-stage capitalism at that.

When my NYU department started food studies programs in 1996, we were virtually alone.[i] Today, colleges and universities host food programs and courses in practically every department and unit, all teaching students how to think critically about—and engage in—the country’s most pressing economic, political, social, and health problems. Food issues are a lens into those problems. They are high on the agendas of local, state, national, and international governments. The media cover agriculture, food, and nutrition extensively and, as a reporter once told me, command so much national attention that food issues constitute a Full Employment Act.

I especially see hope at the grassroots level. Many communities are engaged in efforts to improve school meals, reduce childhood obesity, align agricultural production with health goals, and make healthier food more available and affordable for all. Advocates are increasingly learning and following well-established strategies for achieving social change. To the extent they do, they have a good chance at success.[ii]

Today’s challenge is to take advocacy to the national level. If I could wave a magic wand, here is what I would do to make healthy food choices more available, accessible, affordable, and desirable—the default—and not only in the United States.

• Conduct ongoing national education campaigns to promote healthful choices.
• Refocus agricultural production subsidies on food for people rather than feed for livestock animals and ethanol and diesel fuel for cars and airplanes.
• Increase taxes on unhealthful foods and support lower prices for healthful foods.
• Restrict marketing of unhealthful foods and promote marketing of healthful foods.
• Enact a universal basic income program so everyone can afford to eat healthfully.
• Enact a universal school meals program—with adequate funding—so all children have access to healthful breakfasts and lunches.
• Overturn Citizens United and get money out of politics.
• Reform Wall Street to require corporations to provide benefits to their workers, communities, and society as well as to stockholders.

These ideas may sound like pie in the sky, but I deeply believe that setting goals—even those that seem highly unattainable—is a useful public health strategy. Unrealistic goals can educate, expand expectations, promote critical thinking, motivate action, attract resources, and encourage accountability. Sometimes, with skill and luck, they can even be achieved.[iii] Efforts to create better and more equitable food systems are prime expressions of democracy in action—of the people, by the people, for the people. They are well worth engagement, advocacy, and activism, and deserve everyone’s support.

Notes

[i] Bentley A, Parasecoli F, Ray K, eds. Practicing Food Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2024.

[ii] Bobo KA, Max S, Bobo K, et al. Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists. New York: Seven Locks Press, 2001.

[iii] Eyal N, Sjöstrand M. On knowingly setting unrealistic goals in public health. Am J Public Health 2020;110(4):480–484. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2019.305428.

My co-author, Lisa Sutherland, is a former vice president of Kellogg.  We had a great time writing this.

Information about the book is here.

For a 30% discount at that site, use code UCPSAVE30.

Here’s the official launch invitation

Please come to the celebration and launch for my new book, Tuesday, September 8 | 6:00–8:00 p.m. | NYU Bobst Library.  Registration and further information are here.

Summer J, Classens M, eds.  Teaching Food Studies.  Elgar Guides to Teaching.  Edward Elgar, 2026. 310 pages.

I wrote the Foreword to this book (see below), but when it arrived I was stunned and utterly honored to see its dedication: “To Marion Nestle and Mustafa Koç, principled and generous food justice leaders.  And to our families who inspire and nourish us.”

Here’s my Foreword.

In 1996, my NYU department was lucky enough to turn proverbial lemons into lemonade by taking advantage of an academic crisis and creating the first degree-granting programs in Food Studies, undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral.  At the time, Boston University offered a master’s degree in Gastronomy.  There may have been a few courses on food in other university departments, but food was widely considered unworthy of serious inquiry.  The first question everyone asked me was “why would anyone want to study about food?”

Now, I laugh when I remember that question.  As I and my NYU colleagues recount in our book, Practicing Food Studies (NYU Press, 2024), we did not realize we were starting a movement.  We viewed food as a lens through which to view, engage with, and critically investigate the most urgent issues raised by food systems, their societal, economic, and behavioral determinants, and their consequences for health and the environment.

By now, I can no longer count the number and breadth of currently available food studies and food systems programs, domestic and international; they can be found through two professional organizations that meet together every summer: the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society.  Members have access to a wide range of online course syllabi and teaching materials.

Teaching Food Studies is a welcome and I predict a soon-to-be-utterly-essential addition to these materials.  As far as I can tell, food studies courses, concentrations, and programs are now offered in practically every academic discipline, with their content determined by the theory and methods of each particular discipline but also by the specific interests of the teaching faculty.  If you are a assigned a course on food, begin with this new volume, quirky and individualistic as it is.

This book covers an astonishing range of topics from course titles (e.g., culinary diplomacy, food politics, food systems policy), to concepts (being critical, nutritionism, intersectionality), to food categories (ultra-processed, local food, school food), to practices (food podcasts, sustainable consumption, vertical plant factories), to food advocacy (collective action, digital food activism, voting with your fork).  One quirk is that the chapters are listed alphabetically, making them head-spinning to read in order.

But they are wonderful to read, and this book is one terrific resource.  Each chapter introduces a concept, the debates around that concept, and how the concept fits into food studies.  Most rewarding, the author(s) give deeply personal, opinionated, experience-based accounts of how teach the concepts and engage students.  The chapters are short, but packed with useful information, especially actual course assignments ranging from theory to application.

The authors, mostly unknown to me, are real teachers dealing with real students from real classrooms.  This book is about teaching, the real deal. I did not write the chapter on food politics, Gyorgyi Scrinis did not write the one on nutritionism, and Carlos Monteiro did not write the ultra-processed chapter.  Instead, all of us are honored by having our work taught and cited.

I found this book to be fun to read.  Some of the chapters describe concepts that are new to me, prefigurative politics, for example, defined here as the values and principles of the society we aspire to create in the future.   I also found it inspirational.  I particularly liked its emphasis on finding ways to overcome students’ feelings of hopelessness when they realize that dealing with systemic food system (and global) problems requires more than changing individual behavior.  I also appreciated the citations to the resources in the wide range of fields unfamiliar to me.  Anyone reading this book will learn new and fascinating things about food and food systems.  I certainly did.

I also appreciated the editors’ focus on the importance of teaching critical thinking about food issues, while never neglecting the need to provide students with ample reasons for agency and hope.  I can’t think of a better way to do this than through food studies.  This book is a treasure.  Use it, and enjoy!

 

Marion Nestle, New York University

October 2025

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Arriving Sept 8. For a 30% discount, pre-order here using code UCPSAVE30.

Chin Jou.  Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food.  University of North Carolina Press, 2026.  344 pages.

I have been a fan of Chin Jou’s work for a long time and did a blurb for her latest book:

Captive Consumers is a tough, uncompromising, and utterly compelling analysis of the ways America’s mass incarceration system uses food as punishment, and must become more humane.

From the publisher:

Using a wealth of sources from untapped historical records to prison newspapers, Jou excavates the voices of the incarcerated and shows that prison food dehumanizes the imprisoned, compounds racial and class inequalities, and induces more violence—ultimately making carceral institutions more dangerous. But this compelling book also illuminates how people behind bars have reasserted their identities, resourcefulness, and humanity through self-prepared food even as prison food services profit from lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts that reward cost-cutting over care. If US corrections systems continue to perpetuate physical and psychological violence through food, Jou argues, Americans will suffer not just wasted tax dollars but the cost of bringing traumatized, ailing, and hungry formerly incarcerated people back into society.

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Arriving Sept 8. For a 30% discount, pre-order here using code UCPSAVE30.

I walked into Autumn Leaves Books in Ithaca last week to talk to them about my event there on September 12, and was surprised and delighted to see my forthcoming book with Lisa Sutherland—for the first time!

Its official publication date is September 8.

If you pre-order it through UC Press, you get a 30% discount. Use promo code UCPSAVE30.

Early Reviews

“An entertaining examination of an industry whose many customers have a sweet tooth.” — Kirkus Reviews

Nick Freudenberg.  Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice.  Columbia University Press, 2026.

I wrote a blurb for this book, happily:

A roadmap for health activists, Fighting for New York illustrates each step needed for successful advocacy through campaigns conducted by a wide range of city-based community organizations since the 1960s.  These stories should inspire any reader to join the movement to make health justice a reality.

It’s about groups in New York City that worked or are still working on campaigns to improve health or achieve other social objectives, what they did that worked and did not work, and why such campaigns are worth doing.  Some of the campaigns he discussed are about food, some not.  All have lessons to teach.

Some excerpts.

On why these campaigns are worth studying:

Campaigns such as Lunch for Learning’s win in making school lunches free for all public school students in New York or the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse’s successful advocacy for new rules to protect women from sterilization abuse in the city’s public hospitals, launched coordinated activities carried out over time with the goal of changing specific policies, programs, practices, or ideas that widened health inequities. By considering these campaigns as an appropriate subject of study — a useful unit of analysis, in the language of researchers — activists and scholars can define characteristics of more and less successful campaigns. (p. 37)

On getting kids fed in schools:

School food campaigns also strengthened democracy and civic engagement. Thousands of parents and children participated in rallies, signed petitions, and learned about city politics, with the added benefit of winning their goal of free lunches throughout the school system and showing that activism could make a difference. Lunch for Learning also taught a lesson in government accountability. When Mayor de Blasio hesitated to implement universal free lunches in 2017, activists widely distributed a video of de Blasio endorsing universal free lunches at a 2013 Mayoral forum on food policy organized by CFA and other food justice organizations. This message reminded the Mayor that his 2017 re-election campaign might benefit from support from parents of school children and activists supporting universal free lunches. (p. 162)

On strategies:

More broadly, urban health justice movements could bring together activist groups working across issues to identify the common beliefs that encourage or deter activism for health and to design coordinated multi-faced strategies to build support for more favorable attitudes. Right wing movements and their patrons in the United States have used this strategy successfully in recent decades. (pp. 288-9)

More on strategies:

How could urban health justice movements provide a framework for making wise strategic and tactical choices on aligning health, social justice, and democracy?  I suggest three ways to help activists answer these questions. First, activists should root their campaigns and messages in people’s daily lives. Lead poisoning, for example, is experienced as a health problem for children. It is also experienced as a social justice problem. The parents of lead poisoned children may have difficulty getting a landlord to follow the law that requires cleaning up the apartment or testing for lead to prevent poisoning in the first place. Other tenants in the building may resent landlords’ failure to clean up buildings where children have previously been poisoned or the city’s failure to enforce housing laws. Between 2017 and 2022, New York failed to collect $1.07 billion in fines from landlords for housing law violations and unpaid property taxes, a sum that could have repaired thousands of apartments to prevent poisoning.

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Pub date is September 8. Pre-orders through UC Press get a 30% discount. Use promo code UCPSAVE30.

I just got my copy of the University of California Press catalog for Fall 2026.

The full catalog does not seem to be online yet (mine is hard copy), but the UC Press entry for Sugar Coated is here.

The publication date is September 8.

It can be pre-ordered: