TTT Interviewee: Marion Nestle Session #1 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: May 19, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It’s May 19, 2009, and I’m with Marion Nestle in her office at New York University. Good afternoon. Nestle: Good afternoon. Q: It’s nice to be with you. Could we start by your telling me a little about when and where you grew up, and what your childhood and what your parents were like? Nestle: I was born in the mid thirties, 1936, someplace in Brooklyn. I don’t remember where. My family lived in Brooklyn until I was two or three, and then moved out to Long Island, first to Northport, where we lived, oh, until I was five, probably, and then we moved to Great Neck, where I lived until I was nine, and then we moved to Manhattan, and I don’t have much memory of anything except Northport. I remember some things about Northport, which was then a small fishing village on the north shore of Long Island, with pristine water that I remember swimming around the docks downtown where there were starfish on the posts. No more. No more. Then we moved to Great Neck, where I went to kindergarten, first, second, and third grade, and then in the middle of the third grade we moved to Manhattan, 115th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive. So my father was a kind of a public relations person, who had jobs intermittently; he didn’t work very steadily. And my mother was a housewife. I suppose the most interesting memory that I think about the most when I think about what it was like to live on upper Broadway in those days was that I walked to school from 115th to my school on 109th by myself twice a day. I came home for lunch and then went back, and that’s a quarter of a mile, and I was six, seven, eight at the time, and that was considered perfectly acceptable. Q: And perfectly safe. Nestle: And perfectly safe. And after school I would get my bicycle or go out with friends, and go out and play. I had piano lessons in the Village, and with a nickel I took the subway down to the Village. I went to my piano lessons by myself from the ages of seven through eight, by myself, or rode my bicycle in the park, and was completely free to go around the city by myself from the age of eight on. Q: What were your parents like? Nestle: Well, they were members of the Communist Party, although very low-level members, so they were very involved in political activity, but at a very low level. So they were never threatened or involved in any of the stuff that came later. And they didn’t get along very well, so there was a lot of fighting in the house all the time, and I was an only child, except that when I was ten years old, my mother adopted an eighteen-year-old. A couple of years later, I guess in 1946, right after the war, my father got a little money. He had a job that paid and he bought a car, and we went across country and he visited his brother who lived in Los Angeles. My father thought it was the Promised Land. There were bananas growing on trees. He just couldn’t believe it. So two years later, we moved to Los Angeles, where he had a job, but that job fell apart quite quickly, and he died a year later, and my mother decided not to come back to New York. Q: And you were how old when you moved out there? Nestle: Twelve. And then he died the following year when I was thirteen, and my mother decided not to move back to New York. The adopted eighteen-year-old, then nineteen or twenty, very quickly got married and moved out, and then my mother moved into some other place. I survived, barely, junior high school and high school, and then I went to Berkeley. Q: Were you going to public school the whole time? Nestle: Yes. Well, the public schools were different in those days. So I went to junior high school with movie stars. There were movie stars who had kids in my class, and child actors were in my class, and they went to public school just like everybody else. Q: What was the atmosphere surrounding food in your family? Nestle: Well, you know, there was food. I don’t remember very much about it until I went to summer camp, and I went to summer camp in—I’m a little vague on exactly the years, but I think when I was eight, ten and twelve, or nine, ten, and thirteen. I don’t have it quite right. But the camp that I went to was run by a couple who had spent many years in China during the war, and before the war they ran a newspaper, an English-language newspaper in China, and they cooked Chinese. Q: This was an American couple? Nestle: An American couple, and they were very interested in fresh local seasonal ingredients, and the camp had a vegetable garden. If you were good, you could go out and pick vegetables for dinner, and my childhood memory of that was that it was revelatory. You would go out and the green beans would be hot from the summer sun. So when you put a hot green bean, one for the pot and two for me, and I just couldn’t believe that vegetables tasted like that. I’d never tasted anything like it, and I was very, very impressed by that. And then there were berries, wild berries, growing all over the place, blueberry, raspberries, blackberries, just all kinds of things, and we would go out first thing in the morning and pick berries, and then the woman who ran the camp—it was a very small camp—would turn them into berry pancakes and things like that. And that established a taste for food that, you know, I kept looking to try to reproduce that. I was very interested in food always, and I just loved going to this camp because I loved to eat what they had there, which was all fresh, everything fresh. Then when I went to college, by that time we had moved to Los Angeles and I went to college, and somebody who was a friend of my mother’s, who was a cookbook collector, suggested that I do something about studying food, but there were only two options. You could go into agriculture or you could go into dietetics. I was a city girl. Agriculture was out of the question, and I didn’t get that agriculture had anything to do with food at all. I mean, I just absolutely didn’t get it. And dietetics, I was, “Well, what is a dietetics major?” And I lasted precisely one day. Precisely. I went to my first home economics classes, which is what they were, and I went to my first chemistry class, which was a chemistry class that was the same as the class that was taken with chemistry majors and pre-meds and other people like that. I thought, “This is ridiculous. If I’m going to be taking these classes, I’m not going to do home ec.” So I ended up as a science major and dropped the food idea, and never really got back to it until I was teaching years and years and years later. Q: It’s interesting to me that the food idea really took with you that early. Nestle: Oh yes. I wish I had those books. The library would love them. Q: Do you have any idea why your imagination was caught up in it? Nestle: Well, it was something I liked. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I had no options. Let me put it another way. I didn’t think I had any options. Nobody in my family had ever gone to college, so I was pioneer. I got good grades in high school and junior high. In high school it was clear I was going to go to college. I went to a high school where everybody went to college, so that was what you did, and the girls went to college to get married. That was what everybody did in those days. I mean, we’re talking about the fifties. I had a few friends who had very clear ambitions. There was one woman in my class who was interested in physics and wanted to study physics, but she ended up marrying a physicist and never did anything with it. My best friends in high school, one of them wanted to marry a rabbi, one of them wanted to marry a scientist, one of them wanted to—I mean, they all did marry exactly who they wanted to marry, but none of them did anything. And when I went back to my twenty-fifth reunion, there was only one other woman in the class with a Ph.D., and none of the others had jobs. They were working with their husbands, and the average employment in the class was real estate agent. This was in Los Angeles. So I had no support or help for that. I mean, I actually sent a query letter to Barnard and to Radcliffe about going to either of those, and was invited to a tea for the Seven Sisters colleges, and I went to it and I was excruciatingly uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to wear. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. And my mother said, “I’m not going to give you the money to apply to these places.” It would cost twenty-five dollars to apply, and we had no money at all except for what I earned, you know, working in little jobs at eighty-five cents an hour. She said, “I’m not going to give you the money. I don’t want you to go to those places. It’s cold in the East Coast. You won’t like it.” And everybody in my school said, “Don’t go to the East Coast. You won’t like it. It’s cold.” And there had been one person in the year before who had gone to Harvard and he committed suicide. So Berkeley was as far as I could get to. I applied to Stanford, but I didn’t get in. Q: Let me just go back to the food for a second. What was the food like at home? Nestle: It was okay. It was standard home cooking. I don’t remember anything particularly good, bad, or indifferent about it. Q: And in terms of your parents’ attitudes, were they at all involved in weight issues? Nestle: My father was extremely fat, and the reason that he died at the age of forty-seven was that he was a 350-pound, three-pack-a-day smoker. Q: Wow. Nestle: As we would say, multiple risk factors for coronary artery disease at a time when they didn’t know how to treat it. Q: Is that one of the things your parents fought about? Nestle: Oh yes. My father had lost a hundred pounds on somebody’s diet. I don’t know what it was, but he lost a hundred pounds, and he went out to California and gained it all back, and we came out to California some months later to join him, and the first thing my mother said to him was, “Oh, you got fat again. So, yes, it was one of the things that they fought about, but mostly they fought about money. Q: In terms of your own eating habits, did his weight in any way affect your choices? Nestle: I don’t think so. I don’t remember anything about it at all. I mean, I weigh now what I weighed then. I must be one of these people who really doesn’t put on weight very easily. My father’s family had two kinds of physiology. He had one sister who was also very fat, and the rest of them were okay and didn’t seem to have so much trouble with it. But he also smoked this enormous amount. I mean, he was a chain smoker. So that combination is pretty deadly. And he was five-ten, so he was enormously overweight and yo-yoing, going up and down and doing that kind of thing. And there was a lot of stress in his life because he didn’t have a steady job, and he was married to somebody who yelled at him all the time. I mean, that was kind of my memory of it. I actually don’t remember him very well, and Eva, the person that was adopted when she was eighteen and I was ten, said, “Well, of course you don’t remember him. He was never there.” So he wasn’t around much. He supported the family. I don’t know very much about that. It seemed to be he would get jobs and get some money and spend it, and buy expensive or relatively expensive things, and my mother would go berserk. But after he died, she had to go to work and was very resentful about it, because although she came from an abjectly poor family where there were five children, parents, and grandparents living in two rooms above a store in Newark, which was the family that she grew up in, she was very beautiful, and therefore must have been treated like a princess and thought she was a princess and thought the world owed her a living. And was very, very resentful about having—had married my father because he had a steady job at the time, and thought that he would support her. This is by her report. I’m not making this up. This is what she told me. Q: It becomes reality in any case. Nestle: Well, this is what she told me when I interviewed her about that, and so she really resented having to work and also resented the fact that she had had to go to work right after she finished high school to support the family, because her older brother had gone to college and did not support the family when he was in college, although during the Depression he was a school principal, and he was the only one with a job and supported everybody. So when she married my father, she stopped working, which she greatly preferred, and then had to go back to work. She had a friend in Los Angeles who had a mannequin refinishing company, and she worked for him for a while, and then went to work for the Hain Celestial Foods at a time— Q: How amazing. Nestle: Isn’t that amazing? At a time when they were a big health food company. We used to have a lot of avocado oil in the house and things like that, but I wasn’t interested in it at the time. I just don’t remember much about food at all, except that it tasted good and I liked it. Q: It’s interesting to me that you did decide to go into science when you got to college after that day with those first two classes. Were there a lot of women at Berkeley in the sciences at that point? Nestle: No. Very few, and I found it challenging. You know, I had no idea what I could do and what I couldn’t do, and I had no idea what I was interested in, and I had had a lot of that beaten out of me growing up. Q: What do you mean? Nestle: This was the fifties. You know, women had no options then, or if you thought you had options, it was because you came from a family—you know, all of the research shows you came from a family with a father who really supported you. I didn’t have any support from my father. He wasn’t around, and I had a mother who constantly said, “You can’t do this. You can’t do this. You can’t do this. Girls don’t do this. You’ll get into trouble. Nobody will want to marry you.” You know, that whole litany of things. So I went to college and got married right away, to prove that I could. So that was my trajectory. I was married at nineteen. Q: Oh my. Nestle: Oh my. And so there I was in school, that was after my second year, and I went to eight weddings that summer. All my friends got married in the summer between their sophomore and junior years. I did too, and went to live in Monterey because my husband was in the army, and he was stationed at Fort Ord. When I was at Fort Ord, I took science classes at Monterey Peninsula College, and I had a fabulous teacher, just the most amazing teacher, who just made me very excited about marine biology, particularly. We were in Monterey; it’s got this wonderful marine life. And I took every course this guy taught. When I went back to Berkeley the following year, I looked at what my credits were, and if I put all my science credits together, I could graduate most quickly in bacteriology, and that’s what I did. Q: And you wanted to graduate quickly because? Nestle: I was bored. You know, I was married. I was bored. I’d been in school too long. I didn’t get it. It didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Nothing caught fire. I didn’t know how to think about what I wanted. So I went back and finished in bacteriology and then had kids. Q: When you were studying bacteriology, did you think that there might be a job eventually one day that— Nestle: No. I mean, I had very low expectations for myself. So I was preparing myself to be a lab technician, and you could take all these courses and then qualify as a lab assistant or a lab technician, and as soon as I graduated, I went to work, interestingly enough, in the School of Public Health in Berkeley, in a laboratory that was studying western equine encephalitis, and I worked in the lab doing lab tests for western equine encephalitis. I worked there for two years. Q: Did you have any mentors throughout all that? Nestle: Never. Never. Never. Never. Other thing that happened was in my second year, my sophomore year, I took a public health class from the man who was then head of public health at Contra Costa County, another very dynamic, charismatic kind of teacher, and that class was so easy for me, so easy for me. I didn’t have to do anything in it. In fact, there was some guy I was interested in that I kind of liked and met him for coffee on the day of the final. I came to the final an hour late, took the final, finished it in an hour, looked around. Everybody else was still struggling, and I was done, turned it in, got an A on it. Then after that, that instructor said, “You know, you really ought to go into public health.” But it had been so easy, I thought if it was easy for me, it must be trivial, and somehow I never put together that it wasn’t so easy for other people. It just never occurred to me that I had an automatic comfort with public health, that public health thinking was something that came naturally to me. It just never dawned on me. Q: Did it dawn on you that you had a very good mind? Nestle: No. Q: Interesting. Nestle: No. Q: And you didn’t think about it one way or another? Nestle: No. It was a struggle. I mean, everything was a struggle, and if it wasn’t a struggle, it didn’t mean anything. It was like getting to a club that would take you in as a member kind of thing, and I had nobody saying to me—I mean, for example, the one that I look at is the crucial decision about where to go to college. There was not one single person in my life, not anywhere, who said, “Why don’t you apply. You know, just apply. If you don’t get in, nothing’s lost. If you do get in, then you can decide.” Not one. Not one person in my school, certainly nobody in my family. Nothing but negatives. Q: So why did you apply? Nestle: I didn’t. I never filled out those applications to Barnard or Radcliffe. I never filled them out. My mother wouldn’t give me the money, so I would have had to pay for it myself. I didn’t have a lot of money, and I got no support. Absolutely none. And I had no self-confidence. Q: I was wondering how you could possibly. Nestle: How would I go to the East Coast and do this all by myself, even though I had loved New York and knew after my father died that we should move back to New York. Many years later, I found letters that I had written saying, “Why don’t we go back to New York? We really should go back to New York.” I had very good instincts, very, very good instincts that life would be easier for the kind of person that I was in New York. Not that Berkeley wasn’t wonderful; I had a great time there. It was an easier place to grow up. I mean, I don’t know what it would have been like to have gone to either Barnard or Radcliffe, but it would have been different. You know, it would have been different. So I ended up as a science major, worked for a couple of years, and then stayed home and had kids. Q: Did you have any humanities courses in that mix? Nestle: Oh yes. Loads. Oh, loads. Sure. I sailed through Berkeley. I was Phi Beta Kappa. Again, never occurred to me that not everybody could do that. I thought if I could do it, it probably didn’t mean much. Q: That is pretty astounding. Nestle: I had nobody telling me. I had no outside input whatsoever into this, and lots and lots and lots of criticism, lots of criticism at many different levels. My husband wasn’t very useful through all of this. So then I had kids and I stayed home for a couple of years and went insane. Q: How many children do you have? Nestle: I have two. I have two. I read the Feminine—no, not that one. What was the book that— Q: You mean Betty Friedan? Nestle: No, before that. Q: I don’t know before that, actually. Nestle: Simone de Beauvoir’s book. Q: The Second Sex. Nestle: The Second Sex. I read The Second Sex, and then in the middle of all of that, The Feminine Mystique came out, and so I was one of these people who was blown away by The Feminine Mystique. At that point I had a friend who kept saying, “Go back to school.” I had one friend who said, “Go back to school. Go back to school. Go back to school. Go back to school.” And I picked molecular biology. Q: For? Nestle: Because when I was a bacteriology major, I had had one professor who I thought was just the most brilliant man I’d ever met. He was in molecular biology, and I thought that if he was in molecular biology, it must be worth studying, and that’s what I did. So I did molecular biology for the next five years, once again, never taking myself seriously because when I applied to the program, I had very good grades as an undergraduate, and the faculty advisor, who I think would die if I told him this, he would deny it to his dying breath, said, “Well, you have a fellowship, and we’ll give you a fellowship, but that’s because this is the first year of this new program and no men have applied. But as soon as a man comes in, we’re going to take your fellowship away and give it to a man.” So I thought, “Okay. I’m here on borrowed time. They’re not going to take me seriously. I’m not going to take myself seriously.” And I picked somebody who seemed relatively easy to work with. I got my degree in five years, which was pretty normal. I have a few papers from it. And then in the middle of all that, life got much more complicated. But twenty years later, I saw my faculty advisor at Berkeley for the first time after a twenty-year gap. There was a dinner party and he spent the dinner party telling everybody what an absolutely extraordinary student I had been. I wish he had said something like that to me when I had been in his lab. But that’s the story of my life, is nobody ever said it. Ever. Nobody ever said it. So I had no reason to think there was anything special at all. I had no reason whatsoever. It took years. Q: How did studying all that mesh with taking care of your family? Nestle: Oh, I did it part-time. You know, in those days women didn’t work, and so I was right at the leading edge of women going back to the work force, and I was able to use my NIH fellowship to pay for it. It went totally for a babysitter, and then my husband made enough money to support the two of us, but you could live on practically nothing then. You know, I mean, it cost nothing to live. Rent was a hundred dollars a month, and if you made three hundred dollars a month, you could live very nicely. Q: How did you know about the NIH fellowships? Nestle: They gave it to me in the department. I didn’t have to apply for it. They gave it to me. They had a training grant, and so they had fellowships. So, I mean, I never paid for my schooling, ever. Everything was on scholarship all the way through. My family had no money. I mean, I went to undergraduate, oh, I made about three hundred dollars in the summer and my mother gave me three hundred dollars, and I had a three-hundred-dollar fellowship. That took care of it as an undergraduate. And then in graduate school I had fellowships all the way through. Q: What was your family eating at that point? What was your cooking like? Nestle: You know, I don’t remember much about it until the early sixties when my kids were very young. I started [hanging around with] a group of other graduate students or sort of people who were foodies, and we did competitive home cooking. Q: Interesting. Nestle: I mean seriously competitive home cooking, everybody making dinner parties to outdo what everybody else was doing. Q: This was post-Julia [Child]? Nestle: It was just on the cusp, and then when Julia came out, we cooked from Julia. We cooked from Julia. Everybody did in this crowd. I had friends then who had grown up in a foodie family. They were in a family where, when their daughters came home from school, they were given lobster and other kinds of exotics. There were fresh vegetables, fresh ingredients, the whole works, and so I was kind of in that. So we were doing a lot of very serious cooking, and I was a pretty good home cook. But I was busy, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, so I specialized in things that could be done in a half hour that looked like they took much longer. Q: Do you remember what some of them were? Nestle: No, not really. I mean, I don’t know, but it mattered. Then as my kids got older, they acted out their adolescent rebellion by becoming picky, and my son would never eat anything green, and my daughter became a vegetarian, and that was very, very difficult to deal with. Q: Now you balance so many things in your life, I’m just wondering were you always disciplined in terms of a certain amount of time for your studies and for the things at home? It’s a lot to manage, two kids and classes and— Nestle: Well, I was only gone five hours a day. Q: But you still had homework. Nestle: I was very efficient. Q: That’s what I’m asking. Nestle: Yes, I was very efficient. I remember going to school for an eight o’clock [a.m.] physical chemistry class, and there was a guy in my class whose wife had just had a baby, and we used to compare notes on how little sleep we’d gotten the night before. I had a six-month-old at that point, and I’d say, “Well, I got six hours last night, in three shifts,” that kind of thing. So I was just very, very efficient about what I was doing. Q: On purpose? Knowingly? Nestle: Couldn’t do it any other way. Q: So when did you do homework, for example? Nestle: Well, I couldn’t do it at home, because I learned early on that trying to work at home with kids was too stressful. So I did it when I was in that five-hour period, whatever I had to do I did. So you’re not in class for five hours a day. But the babysitter came at ten and I went home at three. Q: And how far away did you live? Nestle: It was Berkeley. Everything was close. Q: I see. All of it in Berkeley. Nestle: Everything in Berkeley was very close, so that wasn’t a problem. There was no big commute or anything like that. Q: So you got your bachelor’s degree originally in ’59, is that right? Nestle: Yes. Q: And then your doctor’s degree— Nestle: I was home with kids for two years, I worked for two years, and then I went to graduate school in 1963 and finished in ’68. Those, of course, were the years of the Free Speech Movement and student protests. Q: It was busy there. Nestle: It was busy. It was busy, and I was never arrested because I had two kids to take care of. I understood why women were not revolutionaries. Q: I couldn’t understand what your thesis topic was. I mean, I read the words, but I didn’t know what that meant. Nestle: Purification and properties of an extra cellular nuclease— Q: So what was that about? Nestle: —Serratia marcescens. It was a biochemistry project. I was an early nucleic acid enzymologist before there were restriction enzymes, and anybody who does nucleic acid enzymology will break up and laugh hysterically at the mere thought. So I purified an enzyme that was excreted by a bacterium called Serratia marcescens, which has the unusual property of being a gorgeous red color. It’s just beautiful, and it’s a particularly stable enzyme so you could do everything at room temperature. It was really easy to work with, and it was standard biochemistry. You extract the enzyme from the bacteria—actually [the bacteria just excrete the enzyme] so I just had to extract the enzyme from the broth in which the bacteria were grown. [The broth] was bright red. Then you had to purify the enzyme and test it on DNA and RNA to see how it worked, and that’s what I did. I had two papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which I thought nothing of. It was this really boring biochemistry journal, but my thesis advisor twenty years later told me it was really impressive. Q: And you did those papers because you were asked to or what? Nestle: Well, you always write up your research if you’re a graduate student. Q: But you don’t always submit it to somebody for publication, do you? Nestle: Oh, of course you do. Q: Always? Nestle: Well, if you want a career in science you do. Q: Aha. So let’s get back to that. Nestle: I could have had a job, see. This was a job. It was clear that if I had a Ph.D., I would get a job, that I would do a postdoc and then I would have a lab or I would work in somebody else’s lab. I mean, this was to earn a living. Q: And the postdocs were a necessity as well to earn a living? Nestle: You usually needed further training, and I had a postdoc arranged in a lab run by a man named Allan Wilson, who was an evolutionary biochemist, and a very well-known one. I mean, that was the path not taken. I didn’t do that because I got married again, and my husband had a job at Harvard, and we moved to Boston. Q: When did you get divorced the first time? Nestle: [1966.] Q: I mean how old were your kids, ballpark? Nestle: Three and five. Three and five. So ’66, maybe We separated in ’66, and I met my next husband in ’68 just before I was finishing my degree, and we moved to Boston together and I got a postdoc at Brandeis, a rather unsuccessful one, and I worked in a lab there, but I had a fairly difficult time. I never really realized why I was having such a hard time until the famous swimming pool incident, the epiphany. When my kids were taking swimming lessons at Brandeis on a Saturday morning and one day there was a double swimming lesson for some reason, and I went to my lab and walked into my lab and everybody was there on a Saturday morning. I had no idea. I didn’t know everybody in the lab was there [on Saturdays]. The lab director, his wife, the technician, the graduate students, the other postdocs, everybody was there. I had never been there on a Saturday morning, and even if I had wanted to be there on a Saturday morning, there was no way in the world I ever could have done it. And that was the end of my scientific career. It ended that day, because it was perfectly clear to me that I couldn’t do it. I had an offer to go work in David Baltimore’s lab. He was somebody who later had a Nobel Prize. But my husband said, “You can’t do that. You can’t do that. You’ll need to work twenty hours a day. You can’t do that.” And I couldn’t. There was no way I could do that and take care of kids at the same time. So I gave up any thought of a scientific career and I took a teaching job. Q: Did you resent it at all? Nestle: I didn’t think I had any choice. There just wasn’t any choice. You know, there was absolutely no way that I could raise two children [and work 20 hours a day]. I should say my kids were at the age which I consider to be the most demanding, which is that seven to eleven age, when they’re too young to do anything on their own and they’re not old enough to be left, and they’re exploring. So I would get called home by whatever the babysitting arrangement was, because my daughter stole something from the local drugstore. My son set a fire to leaves behind the house. My son pulled the pants down of the girl across the street, and her parents called the police. My daughter got her fingers caught in a car door. I mean, there was something every day, and there was no way that I could not be available to come home and deal with this stuff. I mean, these were object lessons, teaching lessons, teaching kids about what you can and cannot do, socializing your exploring children. So there was no way I could do it. Q: Did you ask for a teaching job at Brandeis? Nestle: Yes. I started looking for a teaching job, and I got one at Brandeis, and I got one, and what that did, it wasn’t any less work, but it allowed me to work at home and on my own hours, and make some of my own hours. So I ran the pre-med lab class and taught undergraduate zoology and botany for five years. I was teaching cell biology as a lecture course, and we had a rule in the department where you could not teach the same class more than three years, and you had to teach anything that was required by the department, regardless of whether you knew anything about it or not, and I was handed a nutrition course to teach. Q: At what point was this? Nestle: This was in year eight, probably, of my Brandeis life. It was in the last year I was at Brandeis, so the summer before my last year. Q: Seventy-five, maybe. Nestle: That would have been ’75. I was told I would be teaching nutrition the next year. Q: Looking through Food Politics again, I didn’t read every word of it again, but just noticing what else was going on in the world at that point, I wondered if any of it had crossed your mind? The Hunger in America. Nestle: No. I missed that completely. Q: I would think you would, actually. Nestle: I didn’t see it at all. I’m not a television watcher anyway, but I didn’t see it until a few years ago. The library has a copy. It’s an extraordinary document. I used it in class once. I was aware of Jane Brody, who was starting to write for the Times. I was aware of Linus Pauling and [Vitamin C and] the Common Cold, and I was aware of Diet for a Small Planet. Diet for a Small Planet had an enormous impact. So I was offered human physiology or human nutrition as courses to teach because students were asking for something human, and I picked nutrition because I thought kidney function was really hard, acid-based balance is really complicated, and I didn’t want to spend time doing that. So I picked the nutrition class, and I thought, “Well, it’ll be interesting to read Linus Pauling and [Vitamin C and] The Common Cold and see if there’s anything to it,” and let students kind of go at that. I went to Harvard, where they were teaching nutrition, and I talked to Jean Mayer, not a very nice man, who later became president of Tufts, and he was appalled at the idea that somebody who didn’t know anything about nutrition would be teaching it. That’s another story of my life. But he told me what books they were using, and I got a copy of every nutrition book I could get my hand on. I opened them all up to the page on which they listed human nutrition requirements, and guess what, none of them were the same. They were all different. I thought, “Isn’t that interesting.” So I went to the library and I got the Recommended Dietary Allowance book, which is this little book that was published by the National Academies of Sciences that listed all the information, summarized the information that was known then about human nutrition requirements for specific nutrients. I opened the book at random and I picked thiamine, you know, at random, and started reading it, and then I was in the library, and Brandeis library is really good. I just went to the library and started pulling papers off the shelves, and the first paper that I read about thiamine… was a study that was done in a mental institution in the South, in which six young women were put on a thiamine-deficient diet, and one of the assays for thiamine deficiency was how well they cooperated with cleaning chores around the hospital. I thought, “Ooh, isn’t this interesting.” When they were absolutely adamant about not doing any more cleaning chores, that kind of correlated with low thiamine levels, and they started giving them more thiamine back in the diet, and they started being willing to clean around the hospital again, and then everything was fine until they were told they couldn’t leave the hospital until they finished the study, and then they got all upset. I thought, “This is amazing.” So then I opened [the RDA book] to Vitamin C, and the first paper I pulled was a study done on six prisoners in a Kansas State penitentiary; maybe it was Iowa. During this study, same study, put them on a Vitamin-C-deficient diet, but during the study two of the prisoners escaped. So this raises the question, how well controlled is this study? I was hooked. I was completely hooked. I thought, “This is amazing.” Because I had been teaching cell biology to undergraduates, which is so abstract and difficult for undergraduates to grasp. This anybody could get. You could give any student this paper and ask them what alternative hypothesis can you suggest for the results of this study, and they would all be able to think of problems with the study. So it would be a great way to teach critical thinking in biology to undergraduates who might not know anything about science. This would be a terrific way to teach science to undergraduates. So that’s what I did. Q: So you were teaching science and you started teaching nutrition when that option came up? Nestle: I had a nutrition class. I was still running the lab class, and then I ran this lab class and then I ran one lecture class. Q: And the lab class was about? Nestle: It was this undergraduate class, the undergraduate lab for pre-med students. I was on the pre-med committee and did all that stuff, and the lab class was undergraduate biology, zoology, and botany. Q: What was nutrition at that point? Nestle: There wasn’t any. Q: So how did you teach a nutrition class? Nestle: Well, I had these books. So I had these books, and what I was most interested in teaching was critical thinking in biology. So I gave students original papers to read. I had them as their term project go out and read some book like Vitamin C and the Common Cold and do the research on it, and write a paper on whether they thought the research backed up the contention. There were fifty people in the class, and it didn’t matter what they were reading or what they were writing their papers about; the papers were identical. They all said, “Two few subjects, not enough research, inadequately controlled, much too much anecdotal evidence and not nearly enough real science.” And that kind of informed my thinking about the field right from the beginning, and I had these fifty review papers of probably thirty different topics. So that started—I mean, I had in-depth reviews of the kind of thing that I was interested in on thirty different topics. They were very good papers. In those days, students could write research papers. They can’t now, but they could then, and they were very well trained to do that. So they wrote really good papers. I learned a lot from them. Then they liked the class so much that twenty of them wanted to take it again, and so I ran an advanced section the next semester, and there I started getting into agriculture issues. I went back and looked at my reading list for that, and I was surprised to see that I had given out a set of essays in the New York Review of Books written by a man named Geoffrey Baraclough, that talked about the relationship of food to the economy, to climate change, if you can believe it, because we’re talking about the mid seventies. And so there all that stuff was, and those were the kinds of issues that we were talking about in that class, and that completely informed the way that I think about these issues. So right from the beginning I was starting to begin to see how the agricultural system related to economic issues, political issues, nutrition and health issues, and they were all very tightly linked, and the students who took that class were reading about that. We read Diet for a Small Planet and some of the other books. Oh, and there was this terrific book that Michael Jacobsen and somebody on his staff had written, which was a compendium of readings that came out in about 1975 on agriculture, food, nutrition, and health issues, way, way ahead of its time. [Food for People, Not for Profit, edited by Catherine Lerza and Michael Jacobson]. Q: What was he doing then? Nestle: He was head of Center for Science in the Public Interest. Q: Back then, yes. Nestle: Yes. I mean, there he was doing that, and this book was just terrific. That was our main text for the course, and they read the whole thing. So they got the whole picture from agriculture to food, to nutrition and health, and with all of the politics thrown in. Q: But was there any standard or basic syllabus that other people used for nutrition courses? Nestle: Oh, there probably was, but I didn’t know what they were. I didn’t have any idea what they were. I made up my own. I was teaching critical thinking in biology, that’s what I was teaching. This was a course not necessarily for majors, although most of the students in the class were biology majors, but there were others who weren’t. I didn’t expect them to have a big science background in order to be able to do that, but they needed to read these papers and decide whether the research really backed up what was being said. Well, I thought that was really worth teaching. And then another big life change. My husband got a job in San Francisco, so at the end of that year, we moved to San Francisco. Q: Before you move, let me just ask you, it’s interesting that you were interested in teaching critical thinking. Nestle: Well, that’s what you learn in molecular biology school. What you learn in molecular biology school is to think of alternative hypotheses to account for the results that you get, and to the extent that you can criticize your own experiments, you’re doing a good job. Otherwise, you get creamed. If you present your work to your peers or to your instructors, the first thing they’re going to do is look for alternative hypotheses. So you need to control for those and you need to think through what those controls would be. So you’re always critically thinking about your own work. That’s what you learn how to do. I learned it really well. Useful skill. Q: Who was funding the few nutritional studies that there were? I mean the prison one or— Nestle: I think those were probably government-funded studies in those days. I think. I don’t remember. They didn’t declare funding sources in those days, so, hard to know. Q: But the impetus was there to discover some of these things? Nestle: Well, because they were interested in human nutrition. So these studies were designed to determine standards for food consumption, to evaluate whether the population was deficient or getting enough of different kinds of nutrients. This was the golden age of nutrition research, in the forties, fifties, sixties. So there was lots of research going on in nutrition departments and lots of interest in vitamins and minerals and all of these kinds of things. Q: What kind of students were attracted to it? Nestle: Well, they were biology students who were interested in human biology. They were interested in themselves. They were just the kind of students who are interested in it now. So this seemed closer to their own lives than cell biology, which is miserably abstract. You start talking to people about cell biology and their eyes glaze over. You talk to people about food, everybody is interested in food, everybody eats. So it was fun to teach, and I had a great class, an absolutely great class. They were really interested. They felt like they were pioneering. It had never been taught before, and it was fun. You know, it was really interesting and fun. Q: By then did you have any sense of your capacity as a teacher? Nestle: Well, I was getting there. I was getting there. I was teaching and getting reasonable evaluations, and very involved with students in a way that’s no longer the case, alas. So, yes, and also I was learning on my own. So what I was learning how to do was to sit down and read vast amounts of material and try to put it into a coherent way that students could understand, and I had been doing this for five or six years by the time. I was into this. Q: That’s a very difficult skill to— Nestle: It’s my skill. It’s my skill, is to be able to read lots and lots of stuff and put it together in a way that is very honest about the science, but also simple enough for people to understand. Q: And synthesizes it in that way. Nestle: And synthesizes it. Yes, that’s my skill. And I was doing that when I was writing, and also I was learning because I was running a lab course. The skill in lab courses is to be very precise. First you turn on the computer. Oh, that I wish people who wrote computer manuals would learn what I had to learn. Oh, that I wish. How do you turn it on? That’s the first thing you have to do. So that I was very, very good at writing lab manuals that gave step-wise instructions to students that they could actually follow and do the experiments unambiguously, and have the experiments come out. So I was good at that. Q: And did you know that? Nestle: Oh, I could see that. Yes, I could see that. I was doing it all the time. I ran that class for five years. By the time I was finished with it, I was bored to death with the class, but the lab manual was really good. It was really good. It makes me very impatient with computer manuals. Q: Now you’re faced with going back to California. Nestle: So here we go to California. Right. Different husband, different life, and— Q: Wait a minute. What do you mean, different husband? Nestle: Well, I had gotten married again. Q: But this is the second husband. Yes. Right. Nestle: I got married again, and we were in California, and I had a job as associate dean in the medical school in San Francisco, which sounds very fancy, but, in fact, was quite meaningless. Q: Was it difficult to get that job? Nestle: I got it because I was his wife. Q: And he was? Nestle: He was going as head of the neurobiology department. He was a lab scientist and was going to have a great scientific career, it looked like, or certainly he had a great scientific career as a scientific administrator. He ended up as head of an NIH institute at one point. He’s retired now. But I went there as his wife, and that was a big problem, although I didn’t realize what a big problem it was at the time, and I was given a title as associate dean, without any line responsibility, and I was the only woman associate dean of eighteen associate deans in this huge medical center. I taught nutrition half-time to medical students, and on the other half I ran the M.D./Ph.D. program. That’s what I did. So I had to learn clinical nutrition in order to teach medical students, and so that again meant reading vast amounts of material and putting together lectures for medical students. I had a group of lectures in the first-year biochemistry class, I ran the first-year biochemistry class for a while, and then went on, and I don’t know, my job kept shifting around and eventually it all fell apart. Q: Was that part of the job that you got because of your husband? Nestle: Yes. Q: Who constructed that job? Nestle: The dean of the medical school. Q: But presumably according to your own skills at that point? Nestle: Yes. They looked and they had had students sitting in in the dean’s office wanting a nutrition class. I was teaching a nutrition class. Here again, same sort of thing, I went to Berkeley to meet with the people in the nutrition department and to talk to them about how I was going to be teaching nutrition in the medical school, and, you know, did they have any advice. Doris Calloway, who was then head of the nutrition department at Berkeley and is since deceased, and was my partner’s sister-in-law, deceased sister-in-law—it’s quite funny—said, “I can see, since they hired you, that they’re not interested in teaching nutrition at the medical school.” [She was married to Robert Nesheim, my partner Malden Nesheim’s older brother]. Q: What did that mean? Nestle: “Don’t call on us.” Q: Oh my. How did you interpret that? Nestle: That she was furious that she or her colleagues hadn’t been asked to teach nutrition at the medical school, and she wasn’t going to give me a break, which she never did until I was fired, and then she did. [We served together later in the 1995 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which she chaired]. So I was not going to get any help from anybody at Berkeley, so I was on my own. There were a group of students, the ones who were sitting in, and they met with me and they said, “We just can’t even tell you how disappointed we are that they hired somebody who didn’t know anything about nutrition to come in here and teach us.” And I said, “You know, I’m a very quick study, and I may not know a lot about nutrition, but I’m a quick study, and I’m really, really, really good at getting things done in institutions. I really know how to do that. So why don’t you just tell me what you want me to teach.” Q: This was before you had constructed the course? Nestle: Yes. I said, “Why don’t you just tell me.” Q: And what did they tell you? Nestle: They told me how to do it. I did exactly what they told me. Precisely. Q: What kinds of things had they been wanting that weren’t taught at that point? Nestle: They wanted basic information about nutrition applied to clinical practice. What are the major nutrition-related problems that patients have, and how do you deal with them? So that’s what I did. It wasn’t all that hard. So I gave lectures on nutrition and heart disease, nutrition and cancer, nutrition and bone disease, da, da, da, da. I ran lecture series. I had lectures within the first-year biochemistry class, which was mostly biochemistry and what the different nutrients did. Then I had a public lecture series that used to get four hundred people coming to it. I would bring in outside lecturers or I’d do the lectures. I thought I was much better at them than the outside lecturers. I worked very closely with these students, and we constructed a third-year clinical elective. So I ran a third-year clinical elective. [One of my students was] Richard Carmona, who was the last surgeon general who was in [the George W. Bush administration]. That was amusing. So by the time I left, I did grand rounds, I did ward rounds. I would go on the wards with family practice residents and talk about nutrition problems on the wards. I mean, by the time I finished there, I knew a lot of clinical nutrition, really a lot. So I had already had the basic science. I learned clinical nutrition, and then I was sort-of fired, when things got really, really bad. Q: What happened? Nestle: Well, a new dean came in, who thought that having somebody’s wife as associate dean was pretty ridiculous, and what did I do anyway, and there was no way in the world I could explain to him what I did that was useful. So he did things like he kept moving my office further and further away, and finally there was a big blow-up, and finally somebody told me what I had to do. Finally I acquired a mentor, finally, and that was Phil Lee, who was the head of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF at the time, and had been an assistant secretary for health, and became assistant secretary for health again in the Clinton administration. He said, “You have to resign. There’s a new dean. He gets to choose his own senior staff. You have to resign.” That made me cry, because what was I going to do? And he said, “Here’s how you do it.” He said, “Go tell him that you’ll be gone in two years if he’ll support you for two years.” And he said, “I think you should go back to school and get a master’s in public health.” Q: Before you did that, during this period of time when you were teaching, did you publish papers of some of the things that— Nestle: Very little. Very little. A few things. Book reviews, a few review kind of things, very, very little. I wasn’t doing research. And the new dean, when he came in, said, “I don’t understand. You don’t have a medical degree and you’re not doing research. What are you doing here?” It was a good question. So there was very little publication, and when I was fired or when things got so bad that I resigned, I was forced to resign, basically, I wrote a book. Q: But did you take his advice about going back [to school]? Nestle: Oh yes. Q: And how long did that work? Nestle: It was a year. I did it in a year. It was actually thirty-six credits in a year, and some of them I never finished, but never mind. [laughs] Never mind. The faculty signed off on it. And then on the basis of that and with Phil Lee’s help, I got the job in Washington, and went to Washington as a senior nutrition policy advisor. Q: Explain that job, how they knew about you. Nestle: Which job? Q: In Washington. Nestle: Oh, that was Phil Lee. That was Phil Lee. First of all, my marriage broke up at the same time all of this was going on, so that was also very difficult. So I went back to school. I wrote this book. Q: And which book was that? Nestle: This was Nutrition in Clinical Practice, which came out in 1985. I did the public health degree. I went to Southeast Asia over the summer to do my [public health school field work]. That was when I thought, “Ah, life is going to get better.” I was in Southeast Asia the whole summer, teaching a class in Shanghai, and doing this project for AID in Bangkok and Jakarta. Q: How did those things come about? Nestle: When I interviewed for jobs in Washington, I met the AID nutrition person [Marty Forman] and I told him I was interested in international nutrition. He said, “That’s ridiculous. You don’t have any experience.” I said, “I’ve got ten weeks this summer and I have to do block fieldwork, and I’ve got a salary,” because the university was still paying me. I said, “I have a salary. Why don’t you give me some experience?” And he, for reasons that I never understood, sent me on a consult to Bangkok and Jakarta. I had a great time, learned a lot. Q: Your children were how old at this point? Nestle: By this time they were in college. They were on their own. Q: And why were you looking for a job in Washington? Nestle: I wasn’t. I couldn’t get a job in San Francisco. Q: I see what you mean. Nestle: There were no jobs in San Francisco. I had to leave the medical school. You know, when my marriage broke up, there was no reason for anybody to keep me. I couldn’t keep the job in the dean’s office because the new dean couldn’t see any reason to have me there and really didn’t understand what I was doing. He apologized to me a year or so later, but at the time he wanted to put in his own people. He had the right to do that. It was like politics, like a political appointee. I was a political appointee, but I was the only one of the eighteen associate deans who did not have tenure. I was the only untenured one and I was the only woman. So I was in a very awkward position. We should go back. Remind me to tell you about the women’s thing at Brandeis, because I was involved in a case. Q: Well, let’s talk about that now, then, as long as we’re on this track. Nestle: You want to go back? Q: Yes. Nestle: The women’s stuff was there, and when I was at Brandeis I got a call one night from a friend of mine in Boston who was in a women’s group. This was the era of women’s consciousness-raising groups. She called and said, “Guess what my consciousness-raising group talked about last night?” I said, “What did they talk about?” She said, “We talked about your salary at Brandeis.” I said, “Explain, please.” And she said, “Well, Jonny Kabat-Zinn’s girlfriend, Myla, is in my [consciousness-raising] group, and she came in and said, ‘I know something that I don’t know what to do with, and that is that my boyfriend, who has just gotten a job at Brandeis, is getting 25 percent more salary than Marion is, even though they’re doing exactly the same job, because he negotiated for it.’” Q: Ah. Nestle: So I said, “Thank you very much,” and called the guy. He’s also become this great health guru, Jonny Kabat-Zinn. He’s a great guy. I called him. He confirmed it, and I went to see the chair of the department the next day, and said, “I understand you’re paying him twelve thousand, and I’m only getting nine.” And the chair of the department got furious, and I said, “I have to tell you. I don’t want to make a federal case of this. Fix it. I do not want to make—.” That was my mantra for the next year. “I do not want to make a women’s case of this case. I do not want to make a case of this. Fix it.” And it took a year. Q: Why didn’t you want to? You didn’t want to use your energy that way? Nestle: Oh, I could see what happened to people who were doing cases, and in any case, I thought this one was so clean. This was so clear and so clean. I had had more experience than he had. We were equivalent in the jobs that we were doing. Neither one of us had a research lab. We were both teaching. It was perfectly clear. He had told the department chair that he and Myla intended to have children, and that was why he needed more money. I had two children. The chair of the department said, “But you’re married.” And I knew that I had everything on my side, that this was clean as a whistle, there wasn’t anything ambiguous about it, and that I was going to win this. I knew I was going to win it. Q: Did other people know you were doing this? Nestle: Oh, sure. Oh, sure. I mean, eventually it went through all—then the chair changed, and I had to do it again with the new chair. It went to the dean. Same mantra. “I don’t want to take this to the Affirmative Action Committee. I don’t want to have to make a court case out of this.” And women were winning court cases in those days and they could see. So at the end of the year, I got a salary increase. I got a retrospective raise. I got $500 a year more than him and I got a better title, and that was very important to me. So I had a title as assistant professor instead of instructor or lecturer or whatever I was. So that made it easier to get the job in San Francisco, and in San Francisco, after everything fell apart, I hadn’t had a merit increase for a while. I was then in the family practice department, the family medicine department, and I asked the chair of that department if he would put me up for a merit increase, and he said, “Oh, I’m going to do much better than that; I’m going to put you up for a promotion.” So I left UCSF as what was an adjunct associate professor, with adjunct having a very different meaning there than it has here at NYU. It was a full-time job there, but that made it possible that when I came to NYU they could give me a full professorship because I had been an associate professor in my previous job. So all of that worked out okay in both cases, but those were my women’s battles. I keep forgetting about them. Look what you’re reminding me about. This is so much fun. I haven’t thought about this stuff in years. Q: Can we talk about the HHS job? Nestle: Yes. So that came about because when I was in public health school, I was looking for a job, and there was nothing on the West Coast, and I was heartbroken at having to leave. My kids were there, my friends were there, my lifetime friends, and the thought of taking a job someplace else was really terrifying. I interviewed in Utah. I can’t remember where I interviewed. I interviewed at a bunch of places and just couldn’t imagine. And finally Phil Lee said, “You know, you really ought to talk to Mike McGinnis at HHS. He’s got a big project coming up that I think you’d be perfect for.” And so he arranged for me, when I was at the public health meetings in Washington, to meet with McGinnis, and then at the same time that was when I met with the guy from AID. So I was hired to edit the “Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health,” which was a project that they were working on, right after I had just published a book on nutrition and everything for medical students. So, in fact, I was really qualified for this. I have famous stories about that too. I read some of the chapters that had been prepared on my way moving to Washington, and came into the office on the first day and said, “What do I do with these? They’re really awful. There’s no public health in them. They’re unreadable, and they don’t really talk about what the important issues are.” He’s a very unusual man, Mike McGinnis, and so his reaction to that was not, “Oh, tell me what’s wrong with them,” but, “How dare you suggest that anything is wrong with these when you don’t know anything. When you’re here for a while, we’ll have this discussion, and in the meantime, let me tell you that I just want you to write the policy parts of this, and let me tell you right away that this report will never say ‘eat less meat,’ because that would cause too much trouble.” That was my first day in Washington, and I couldn’t go back. I’d burned all my bridges. My stuff was in a truck being moved across country. Q: You also described the things that you learned right away you could not say. Nestle: Yes. You couldn’t say “eat less meat.” Right. You couldn’t say eat less of anything. You couldn’t say eat less of anything. Q: How was that made known to you? Nestle: Oh, he said it directly. Q: And what did you say? Nestle: I said, “Oh.” It was my first day on the job. I had just moved from California. My things were in a truck. I didn’t have anyplace to live because my apartment wasn’t ready. I was living in a hotel [The Tabard Inn]. Q: The parameters of the surgeon general’s report at that point— Nestle: It had been in the works for two years, and it had gone through at least two project officers, at least two. Both failed. It was under enormous pressure because nobody wanted it. It was going to cause nothing but trouble. The individual agencies of the government had written the various reports, and depending on how seriously they took it, they either had good people or terrible people write it, and many of the reports were written by researchers who had very narrow focused areas, like Vitamin A deficiency in rat’s teeth, for example, was one of the ones that leaps to mind. There was this collection of papers. Q: What was the impetus for it in the first place? Nestle: There had never been a report on diet and chronic disease risk, and the history was that in the mid 1970s a Senate committee had come out with the report, “Dietary Goals for the United States,” that talked about diet and chronic disease risk. It was very controversial. The idea that you needed to lower saturated fat and cholesterol and sugar and salt was very controversial, and there was a lot of argument in the nutrition field about those kinds of recommendations, and so the person—who was running the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion [Mike McGinnis]—he’s still alive, but a very difficult person to work for, but very good at getting things done and hires really good people, and identifies very important problems—had figured out that a research report that would summarize the research would calm down some of these things and allow everybody to move forward to try to improve the health of the public and so forth. I mean, his mantra was always “We want to make people healthier. We want to improve the health of the American public.” Q: Was he a career person? Nestle: Yes, a very unusual person. He’d been head of that office through several political administrations, and he was a political appointee in the Public Health Service. Interesting guy, very talented in a lot of ways, but not much fun to work for. So it was a while before— Q: To whom would this be disseminated, the final report? Nestle: Oh, everybody. I mean, it’s a great big book. I’ve got a copy of it here. Q: But the intention was to produce this— Nestle: To set policy. Q: To set policy and make it available to anybody who wanted it? Nestle: To anybody who wanted it, and, in fact, there were a couple of additions that came out as books for the general public, but it was designed to push nutrition policy in the direction of healthier eating. Q: And the impetus for that came from? Nestle: Well, there had been a lot of previous reports that were very controversial, and so this was to summarize the research base. It made a lot of sense, and the National Academy ended up doing exactly the same thing a year later. So two reports came out at exactly the same time, and there was a third one that was done in Europe. So three reports came out. In 1988 and 1989, three reports came out, all saying exactly the same thing, all with the exactly the same message. Q: Which was? Nestle: Eat less fat. Those were the “eat less fat” days. Q: And it made no distinctions between the kinds of fat or not much? Nestle: Well, the idea was that if you ate less fat, because meat and dairy products were the major sources of fat, that you would automatically reduce your saturated fat and calories. Nobody, nobody, nobody suspected that the food industry would then make low-fat products that were full of sugars, and that people would think that those were license to eat more calories. I mean, so I think they were naïve. They weren’t stupid; they were naïve. Q: So what did you do every day during this period of time? Nestle: I wrote this book. Q: From the papers that had been amassed? Nestle: Yes, and eventually I rewrote the papers. Eventually. I organized a read-in in the office that I was in. Q: What was that? Nestle: Well, I asked people in the office if they would help me with this problem that I was having with this guy that we all worked for, and they all offered to help. They said, “Why don’t you let us read the chapters.” So I distributed all of the chapters to individuals, with no instructions. I said, “Just give me comments.” And every single one of them said the same thing: “This isn’t about public health. It’s way too specific. It’s not written for a general audience. It needs a complete rewrite.” So I put all that together and handed it to him, and he was furious, and said, “How dare you do this subversive thing.” And then eventually he came around and said, “Okay, rewrite it.” Q: Could you assign other chapters or get other— Nestle: Oh no. I did the whole thing. No, everybody else had other things to do. I did the whole thing. A couple of the chapters were okay. The cancer and heart disease chapters didn’t need any work. The way that we did it was we worked out a format. So the chapters had to be fit into a format, and because of that, that gave a lot of license to write, but there were some that I wrote from scratch. But I had just written a book. You know, I had all the information at hand. I had everything I needed to do it. Q: How do you actually store your notes from various projects? Nestle: They’re behind you in those file cabinets. And now they’re online. Q: Your very own notes are online? Nestle: Well the documents. I don’t do notes; I do documents. For years I’ve kept files of “nutrition and.” And I often don’t look at them, but then if I need them, there they are, and so the papers are all there. I mean, right now, I’ll give you an example, I’m writing a column for the San Francisco Chronicle, and it’s a Q and A, and the last Q was on gluten intolerance. Well, I don’t really remember much about gluten intolerance, but I’ve got a file on it, and now, of course, everything is online, so it’s real easy to do this kind of research. I just went right to my file and there was everything I needed. Q: You started those files approximately when? Nestle: When I was at Brandeis, and certainly when I was at UCSF. When I was at UCSF and preparing lectures on heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, I accumulated. I read everything that there was to read on those things. So I had all those papers filed in some reasonable order, and then at some point, probably ten years ago, I had a research assistant to reorganize the files and we threw out a lot. I’m trying not to use them so much anymore, because I’m trying to use my blog as a file cabinet, because it’s time-consuming. Q: Time-consuming to use them? Nestle: To tear out articles. It’s much quicker to have a file than to look it up online. Q: I would think, yes. Nestle: It’s much quicker, but the filing process is very cumbersome, and there’s a limit to how many file cabinets you can have, and each new topic requires a huge—you know, the pet food book has four or five file boxes full of materials. Most of those are stored up in Ithaca so I don’t have to deal with them here. Q: What was your confidence level at that point, when you were in Washington? How did you see yourself? Nestle: Well, I could see that I was the ideal person to do this job, and there was really nobody else who had that kind of generalist overview of all of these topics, where I could read one of these chapters and know in a minute whether they had read the right literature or not. So then I knew that I was the right person for this job, but I spent at least a third of my time fighting with my boss, who was in my way all the time. I mean, it was inexplicable. Everybody else in the office had the same problem, but mine was the hot-seat project during the period that I was there, so it was difficult. It was another difficult situation where I was constantly being torn down and argued with. It was very nice to come to NYU. It really was. Q: I bet. Nestle: At long last. Not that the department was any different. Oh, my god. Is anybody going to read this? Not that the department was any different, but it was all right. It was okay. I was the boss. It made a big difference. Q: When you were writing this, did you have a strong sense of yourself as a writer? Nestle: No. I just knew that I wrote clearly. And it was hard. I learned how to write in that office. Let’s give [McGinnis] credit for lots of things, this guy. He really taught me how to write, because I would come in in the morning and there would be a little list of things on my desk saying, “Do this, this, this and this by close of business, COB, today.” That meant five o’clock. Q: Wow. Nestle: So I would sit down—that’s what staff in the government do—and so I would sit down and I would look at the list and I’d think, “This one is easy. Let me knock it off first.” He would come in fifteen minutes later and say, “Which one are you doing first? I don’t want you to do them in that order; I want you to do them in this order.” And at the height of my powers, at the real height of my powers, I could write a twenty-page testimony in a day on a subject I knew nothing whatsoever about, and the policy issues connected with it. I could write speeches for the surgeon general, the assistant secretary for health, the secretary for health, and my boss. In two days I could write speeches for both of them. One of the most bizarre experiences of my life was going to the press conference on the release of the Surgeon General’s Report, and listening to C. Everett Koop channeling my words. It was so weird. It was so weird. I thought, “If I had known he was going to read my speech word for word, I would have made it much tougher.” Q: Did you mind doing those things? Nestle: Yes. Yes, I didn’t like it at all. I fled back to the university. I fled. I was in trouble all the time when I was in Washington. I knew that there were things that I didn’t know about how to get this job done, but I didn’t know what they were, and nobody could tell me. Nobody could tell me what I didn’t know. Q: You mean strategic things or— Nestle: I didn’t know anything about what I had landed in the middle of, other than what people in the office could tell me. So the only way that I thought I could get my job done was to let people know who I was and let them help me, and lots of people did. I mean, it was a strategy that got me into trouble, but, boy, did it work. It really worked. People would come up after meetings and say, “I can see that you need help. Here’s how I can help you.” “Thank you very much.” And, actually, I ended up at the end of those two years with only one thing I hadn’t known that I needed to have known, only one, and I thought that wasn’t so bad. Q: And what was that? Nestle: I didn’t know that Koop had two staffs in two different places, and I had been terrific about keeping his downtown staff in the loop on absolutely everything, but I didn’t know about his other staff. Q: Where was that? Nestle: Parklawn. They found out very, very late in the game about a chapter that they were particularly interested in at a time when it was basically finished, and they were furious about something. What they were furious about was something that I agreed with. I thought they were absolutely right, and if I had known about it earlier, I could have done the chapter with that material in there. It was an area I didn’t know very much about, and could have made it a much, much stronger chapter, but I didn’t know. So there I was at war with them because this thing was supposed to go to press, and the press conference had been scheduled. So there was a big kafuffle about it, and it all got worked out, but I could have headed that off if I had known that. Q: When did you find out? Nestle: When they complained. Q: Oh, I see. All that said, it sounds like an extraordinary amount of work to get done in a relatively short period of time. Nestle: Yes. I’m good at this stuff. Efficient. I also wrote fourteen papers while I was there. I was so angry about the way I was treated, that whenever I had any spare time, I did my own work, and I was living alone. I wasn’t dating. I had plenty of free time when I wasn’t in the office. Q: But you used it so productively, and by now you know that not everybody does that. Nestle: Yes. Yes, but I needed a job, and I knew I wanted to go back to a university, and if I was going to go back to a university, I had to publish. I already lost a job because I didn’t publish and I perished, and so I knew I had to publish. So every opportunity that I had when I was in Washington, I published, and I came out of there with fourteen papers. That was quite helpful. Q: Do you have exceptional powers of concentration? Nestle: You know, I guess I do. I can write on airplanes. I can write in airports. I can write on buses. I just tune it all out, and I like it. Oh, I never finished about how he taught me to write. Q: Go ahead. Nestle: So the punishment for not finishing what you needed to do by close of business was much, much greater than the punishment for doing it badly. Q: An important discovery. Nestle: An important discovery. So it was much better to get it done badly by close of business than not to get it done. So I learned how to write fast. Remember these were the early days of computers. When I came to that office, I would write everything out in longhand, type it into the computer, print it out, edit it, retype it, edit it, retype it, edit it, with printings in between. When I left the office, I never used paper. I was paper-free by the time I left the office. So he taught me that fast was better than perfect. Q: Did that bother you? Nestle: No, not at all. I could see it was a great lesson. It was a great lesson. I could see that most of the work that I turned in was acceptable just the way it was, and that if it wasn’t acceptable, he would send it back. And sometimes he would actually say what it was that wasn’t acceptable about it, and if he didn’t, you could go ask him, and say, “Could you give me a hint?” And he would give you a hint maybe of what it was that wasn’t acceptable, and I could rewrite it. Q: So how different would that work had been from the way you were proceeding before that? In other words, to make it work that you thought was good. Nestle: I think I suffered over it a lot more. I fussed with it a lot more. The ability to write, I mean, one of the things that computers did was to give you the ability to edit constantly. So to be able to edit and re-edit and re-edit and re-edit and re-edit, and every time you read it make changes, is just wonderful, to be able to move text around, to be able to do all that. Q: You were doing that for the quality of the writing, to make it clear, what? Nestle: Yes. Clarity. Always clarity. I don’t do anything style. I’m not Michael Pollan. Oh, how I wish. You know, oh, how I wish I could write like that, but I don’t write like that. I just try for clarity. That’s all I do. I think that nutrition is so confusing for people, and it’s so easy to write in passive voice and be ambiguous about who’s doing what to whom, that clarity is what really matters, and that’s all I try for. I just don’t worry about style at all. Q: What about the speeches? Nestle: Well, the speeches were in my voice. I don’t know how to write any other way. I really don’t. So, you know, they covered different topics, but they’re all in the book and they’re all in the press kit, and there they were and everybody read them word for word. I think Koop changed five words in the speech that I wrote for him. Q: The presentation of material in speech form, though, is a little different from— Nestle: Well, I tried to write the way I thought he would talk. I mean, for everybody in that. It was an amazing experience. I didn’t like it at all. I’ve talked to speechwriters in Washington, and they love it. They’re thrilled to see their words being mouthed by the president or some high official. I would rather say it myself and take the consequences of it, because if I was saying it, I would make it much stronger. Koop had said that he didn’t want to get involved in nutrition. He did not. He had too many issues on his plate. HIV, that was his big one. Smoking, a big one. He was being harassed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. That was driving him nuts. He didn’t want to get involved in nutrition. He thought that was nothing but trouble. He didn’t know anything about it. He wasn’t comfortable with it. He would speak at the press conference, provided he could walk out the door the minute his speech was over with, which is exactly what he did, and then everybody else took over. But that was enough to give it surgeon general’s imprimatur. It was very important, symbolic. And I had an enormous amount of respect for him and everything that he did, and that was a terrific thing that he did. It was sort of funny, because Malcolm Gladwell was the reporter who was covering all that. It is sort of funny to think about that now. Q: Had you signed a contract for a specific period of time? Nestle: I don’t think there was a contract. I don’t remember. Q: In other words, you knew that once this project was over, the job was over? Nestle: Yes. There was talk in between about staying on for a period, but we just didn’t get along that well, and finally he said, “You’re just too difficult to work with. Go away.” So I said, “Fine. I’m leaving.” And then they were furious because I left before the end. Actually, I had to stay. Q: The end meaning? Nestle: Well, I had to stay until October 1st. I wanted to leave at the beginning of September, when school starts. So I started a month late, and that cost me a month’s salary here, and it meant I missed the beginning of the semester. That turned out to be great because there was a strike and I was very happy to have missed that. I came after the strike was over. Q: How did you get this job? Nestle: I interviewed for it. Q: The department existed at that point? Nestle: The department existed as Home Economics, and they had had an acting chair for three years, Judith Gilbride, who was an assistant professor. What happened was, there was a previous chair who had been chair for twenty years of the Department of Home Economics, and she took an early retirement when they did a buyout. There was a buyout. There were big financial problems in the late eighties, and she took a faculty buyout, as did a couple of other faculty members, and there was nobody left to chair except an assistant professor. Not a nice thing to do to an assistant professor, but she was good at it. They had recruited somebody, Adam Drewnowski [as chair]. I mean, this is lost on everybody, but he’s now the chair of the department in Seattle, and at the last minute he got a better job offer and he reneged. So then the job was open again. By that time everybody knew I wanted to come to New York. I had figured out fairly early on in my tenure in Washington that Washington was not—you know, the world divides into people who like Washington better than New York, and vice versa. I had figured out really early on that I loved New York, and that I would be normal in New York and it would be a great place for me. So I was looking for jobs in New York. Q: But you hadn’t lived here since you were a kid. Nestle: No. No, but I had a cousin who lived here on Christopher Street [Robert Moss] and I had a friend [Joan Pearlman] who had come down from Boston and had rented an apartment on Charles Street, but was living with her boyfriend [Peter Kivy] on 12th Street, and mailed me the keys to her Charles Street apartment, which she was not using. So anytime I wanted to come, I had keys to a New York apartment on Charles Street in the West Village. It was lovely. So I could come anytime I wanted. I came up here often. I started looking for a job right away and did a lot of interviewing around, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing, and then this job was advertised, and I must have had a stack this high on my desk of people who sent me copies of that job ad, saying, “Marion, here’s your job.” And so I applied for it. Q: How was the job described? Nestle: It was described as chair of the Department of Home Economics and Nutrition. Q: In the school of? Nestle: In the school of what was then SEHNAP, the School of Education, Health, Nursing and Arts Professions. I didn’t know what it was. So I came up here and interviewed. I was appalled. Q: What were you appalled by? Nestle: How ugly the department was, the physical, how ugly the rooms were, how the department office was all different colors that didn’t match. It seemed really disorganized. I had asked for a description of every program in the department. They were unable to give me one. Nothing like that existed. So I couldn’t figure out what the department did—in fact, it took me a year. I was here for a year before I identified the last program that the department ran. When they brought me over to this building—it was in two buildings—when they brought me over to this building and I got off the elevator where the kitchen was, it smelled bad. The entire floor smelled bad. It had been a Home Economics department, and the floor in this building was an apartment. So there was a living room, a dining room, and this unbelievably filthy kitchen, indescribably filthy. It was green. The kitchen was green, sort of 1950s green. There was grease on everything. There were many, many signs of wildlife, and in the living room the walls were lined with cabinets that had boxes with little squares of material in them that were covered with mouse turds, and there were locked cabinets lining the halls that were filled with magazines that dated back thirty years, also covered with mouse turds. There were mice everywhere, signs of mice everywhere, and nobody seemed to mind or be the slightest bit concerned about it. So that seemed bizarre. I sent in my application, and somebody from here came down to Washington and met with me in Washington, and recruited hard, and said, “This is a really exciting opportunity. You have the opportunity to build a department.” I mean, he was not lying. “You have the opportunity to build the department. The department is financially stable.” That was also true, although I didn’t believe it. “It really needs somebody to come in and bring it into the twentieth, if not the twenty-first century, and you’d be the perfect person to do it.” So that was very good. So I interviewed here a couple of times, and it had many things that I wanted, many things. [It was in New York]. It was the chair of a department. It came with a full professorship. It came with tenure. Ooh, did I want that. It came with a decent salary or what seemed like a decent salary. It came with people who seemed to want to create something that was better. So all of that was really good. What was scary was the facilities, a faculty who seemed really passive and not very academically inclined. That was a worry. And then all this home economics stuff which was just weird. Q: What about the students? What kind of students? Nestle: I didn’t meet students. I didn’t meet them. Q: But as it turned out, what kind of students were— Nestle: Well, they were kind of passive too. They were sort of passive. Just everything seemed so disorganized to me, and dirty and unpleasant and unprofessional. There was something very unprofessional about the whole thing. So then I came, and they said at the last minute, when I met with the deans to negotiate salary and all of that other stuff, they said, “It’s not with tenure, and we’ll appoint you as an associate professor. You’ll come up in a couple of years.” And I said, “You’ve got to be kidding. You want me to come into a department that’s got three tenured associate professors in it and make changes in it? There’s been a big mistake. I would not have considered this without tenure,” and an hour later, whatever the problems about tenure was solved. So I had a one-hour tenure battle. Then I called my old therapist in San Francisco and said, “What’ll I do? This place is just a mess.” And she said, “Marion,” she said, “you never had security in your life. This is security. Tenure’s a really good thing. I think it’ll be really good for you. Why don’t you try it. If you don’t like it, you can always leave.” So I took it. Turned out to be a great job. Q: Before we get you to what that entailed and what you did here, I’m curious to know whether the experience in Washington politicized you about the issues in ways that you hadn’t thought about. Nestle: Well, I went to Washington not even knowing what I didn’t know. I mean, I thought I knew about politics. I was clueless, just clueless, and there were things that I was just naïve about. I mean, my first week in Washington, I was sent off to meet the assistant secretary for agriculture, who was my nemesis during the entire time I was there, and she was this assistant professor from some dental school in the South, wearing a madras dress. I mean, don’t I sound snotty? So snotty. And here she was in this enormous office with black leather furniture, Susie Harris, and I was kind of amazed. Who is this woman? So we were chatting, and I said to her, “It just seems everything is really strange to me here, but maybe it doesn’t feel strange to you.” We had just both come. And she said, “Oh no. My husband is the head of the Republican National Committee.” And I thought, “Oh, okay, that’s how Washington works. That’s how Washington works.” And I didn’t really understand that Republicans played hardball. I mean, that was another thing I didn’t understand. So there was a situation in which I was going to a meeting in Berkeley and there was a meeting on food security, and my boss was really upset that nobody from the Department of Agriculture had been invited. So I got a couple of people from the Department of Agriculture invited. I went out there. I gave my talk. They told their boss what I said. Their boss told my boss. I was in so much trouble, you wouldn’t believe it. I was in so much trouble. My boss was furious at the kinds of things that I had said. As it turned out, it was okay. So I thought, “Ooh, they play rough.” Q: What kinds of things were you talking about that he was upset about? Nestle: I walked into this meeting. I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place, which was a problem, but my mother had fallen and broken her hip, and I had to be on the West Coast anyway. I snuck into this meeting. I really wanted to go to it. And the congressman who was supposed to give the opening address wasn’t there, so they said, “Marion, why don’t you give us a talk on what it’s like to be new in Washington.” So I gave a speech on a beginner’s guide to Washington and what I was observing, and they interpreted what I had said in even more hostile ways than I meant it. So I was, in fact, misinterpreted, although not totally. There was a grain of truth in it, but I was, in fact, misinterpreted. I don’t remember the details, but everybody was really angry. I ran into one of the women who had done this that very afternoon, and I just said, “You know, I got you invited to that meeting, and I’m never going to do that again. I’m never going to do that again. You know, you want to work with me, this is fine, but let’s just understand that if this is the way you’re going to play, I can play that way too.” And by the time I got back to my office, everything was peachy keen, peachy keen. Q: What about that first day and the prohibitions about what you could and couldn’t say? Nestle: I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. Q: Were you also angry? Nestle: No. I was way too scared to be angry. I mean, I had just left California. I didn’t have a place to live. I was newly divorced. My stuff was on a truck. I couldn’t go back. I mean, I was in a stage of life where I was in no position—I didn’t think I was in any position—and this was the only job I got. I didn’t get any of the other jobs I had applied for. I was turned down for them. I mean, it took me a long time to learn how to get a job, and getting this one wasn’t so easy either. I had a couple of turndowns, bad ones that surprised me a lot before I got to NYU. So that by the time I got to NYU, I knew what I was doing wrong and I could fix it, and, in fact, the question that had lost me a job at Buffalo was exactly the same question that somebody asked in my interview here, but this time I had a better answer for it. Q: What was that? Nestle: “What’s your management style?” Please. Q: Presumably you hadn’t thought too much about that before. Nestle: I said, “I like working with people and I like to consult.” They wanted a management theory, and I didn’t know what management theories were. So I went to a bookstore and I looked at management theories before I came up here and interviewed, and sure enough, I was asked exactly the same question. So I could say I was of this theory person. Can’t even remember what they are. Q: So the idea that there were certain things that you couldn’t say, at that point it didn’t disturb you intellectually because you had so much else going on that— Nestle: There was too much else going on. Okay, we’re going to use euphemisms, we’ll use euphemisms, but I didn’t know where this was going. I thought that this was so far at the beginning of the process. He was expecting to publish this thing within three or four months. It didn’t come out for two years. Well, so in that sense I won. Right? It was rewritten. It came out solid. It was consistent with what these other two reports were saying, and nobody every criticized the science, and that’s what I do. You know, I’m very careful with the science so the science doesn’t get criticized. You can criticize the interpretation, that’s fair, but you don’t criticize the science. And I thought the science had to be impeccable or it would never fly, and it was by the time it came out. Q: Did you have to say that to him? Nestle: It didn’t matter what you said to him. I mean, I never figured how to work with him. I figured I spent 30 percent of my time in that office trying to manage him, 30 percent trying to manage Suzanne Harris, who was constantly throwing hand grenades into whatever we were doing, and the rest of the 30 percent writing, and eventually I went home and wrote at home, which, you know, I would stay at home for four or five hours every day writing, and then come into the office and deal with the rest of it. Q: It’s pretty amazing that you got all of that done. Nestle: Oh, yeah. Q: Did you realize that at the time? Nestle: Yes, and he was cracking a whip. “Why can’t you do it faster?” Faster, faster, faster, faster, always. Faster, faster, faster. You know, there were other things going on at the same time. Michael Jacobsen lived in the same building that I was in, and so I would give all this stuff to Michael Jacobsen and we would sit and talk about how to make this stuff better. Then at the same time I was writing testimony. I was writing testimony that my boss would give for Congress, and questions to the congresspeople who would be asking the questions. So I was doing all this staff work. I mean, this was great training, great training. Q: It’s fabulous training, but a whole lot of stuff to get done. Nestle: Yeah. Well, I got it done, because the punishment for not getting it done was greater than the punishment for doing it badly, and even my bad stuff was better than what a lot of people can do. Q: What would that punishment have been? Nestle: Oh, just having to deal with him about it, just really unpleasant conversations and having to deal with him in this really unpleasant way. Not just me; Peggy Hamburg was in that office and she was a big help, [and now she is] our new FDA commissioner. [End of interview] Nestle 1 - PAGE 1