TTT Interviewee: Marion Nestle Session #3 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: June 29, 2009 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. I am with Marion Nestle. It’s June 29, 2009, and we are about to start another interview. One of the things that we didn’t get to in the detail before was talking about the field of food studies, how you built this department, what influence that might have had on the field in general. I know we talked a little bit about the beginning, but could you just start from the beginning and try and follow how it’s grown, changed, what you think of it? Nestle: Let’s start from its home economics origin. It was a Department of Home Economics and Nutrition until 1990, when everybody felt like we needed to get rid of home economics, because nobody was teaching it anymore, so the department’s name was changed to Nutrition, Food and Hotel Management, to reflect the programs that were then in the department, which included nutrition and dietetics at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral level. Then there was also a food service management program. It was called food service management, but it was being run at the undergraduate and the master’s level and, in fact, doctoral level as a hotel management program. So even though it was called food service management, it was really being run as a hotel management— Q: That was the context people understood. Nestle: I don’t know if it was a context people understood, but it was what students wanted Ph.D.’s in. So some very important people in the hotel industry came to get doctoral degrees, because this was the only way they could do it, even though their degree said “food service management.” At the undergraduate level, it was called food service management, but we were able to change its name to food and hotel management, to reflect the actual content that was being taught. Now, I had my doubts about the quality of the program, and those doubts were realized when I went to a meeting in Washington that put up people who were attending in one of those horrible out-of-town Washington, D.C. hotels that would accept government rates. This one was at some highway near Tyson’s Corner. It was just an awful place. I arrived there very late one night because my train was delayed or whatever, I can’t remember what happened. But I walked into the hotel at midnight and I was greeted by name when I got up to the desk. I was very shocked by that. I thought, “Hmm. How does this guy know what my name is? Am I the only person who’s left to arrive?’ I thought maybe he’s done that by the process of elimination. But, no, he said he was a graduate of our program. And I thought, “We’re training students at NYU to be front-desk clerks at hotels like this on the night shift?” I thought, “No, no, no, no, no. We really shouldn’t be doing this.” Q: Was he very young? Nestle: It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. We should be training students to have better jobs than this, or at least in better hotels. This is a terrible hotel. It was an inexpensive hotel, but would accept government rates. So I was not predisposed to be very happy about this program, and also the faculty member who was in charge of it seemed to me to raise a number of problems about academic integrity, and she was not herself trained in hotel management. We were running a hotel program without a license to do so, which in academic institutions is not a very stable situation. So I wasn’t very happy about that. So what happened then—this was now heading into the mid 1990s—the School of Continuing Education (SCE) at NYU began to be interested in hotel programs, and they decided that they would start a hotel program in continuing education at the master’s level, and here was this undergraduate hotel program sitting over here, and they wanted consolidation of those programs. We tried for a year, not a very pleasant year, to figure out how we could work together. Having two schools work together at NYU was really quite difficult. Q: I’m sure it is. Nestle: Because of the tub-on-its-own-bottom situation, and there are all kinds of horrendous problems, and also the students in our department were better than the students in continuing education. I mean, that was a problem too, although not that much better. But SCE wanted it. So we spent a year trying to figure out how to coordinate this, and I would go to these meetings and explain what this program was doing in our department, what we were teaching, and how it was organized, what a coordinated set of programs would look like, and I could tell I was just talking to people who had no idea what I was talking about. And I’m pretty good at this kind of stuff. No matter what I said, nobody understood what I was talking about. Q: It’s dispiriting. Nestle: Which was dispiriting. So at the end of that year, the dean called me in and said, “Look.” She said, “I cannot have a conversation with the president of this university without him saying he wants something done about the hotel programs.” She said, “I’m tired of arguing with him about it. I’m tired of trying to defend it. He really wants the hotel program in the School of Continuing Education. How would you feel about transferring the hotel program over there?” And I said, “It depends on what I get.” Because this program, horrible as it was, generated a million dollars in tuition for the department a year, a million dollars a year in the department, so we would be giving away a million dollars a year of income for the department and, therefore, the school. And that was a lot to give up. And she, being a very good administrator, came right back to me with, “What do you want?” And to my enormous surprise, out poured a laundry list. I wanted to develop a food studies program. I wanted a faculty position. I didn’t want to lose our faculty position. I wanted a faculty position for it. I wanted the kitchen redone in the department, because we had this 1950s home economics kitchen that was dirty and smelled bad and was full of vermin. I thought if we were going to be teaching this, we needed to have a food service facility that was really top of the line and that met our needs for the continuing education program we were running at the time, for student courses, for being able to produce events out of that kitchen, and so forth. And I also wanted a laboratory, because we had a faculty member who was a bench scientist and really didn’t have a place to do that. I thought we could convert the ladies’ room on the tenth floor into a laboratory without too much expense, and that would work out okay for the kind of work that she was doing. The dean said she thought she could give me all, if not most, of that, and what she ended up getting for us was the right to start developing a food studies program when we’d get a faculty position that we could recruit for. Q: That’s great. Nestle: We got $350,000 to redo the kitchen and the rest of it, so that was a one-time lump-sum payment for this program that brought in a million dollars a year, with the idea that we would then build food studies into something that would regenerate that income. I should say—I forgot about this—that a couple of years earlier, or about three years earlier, we had actually hired somebody else to run the undergraduate food and hotel management program, who actually had some experience in the field [Marcia Raftig]. She was a very interesting black woman, not very well academically trained herself, but a lot of practical experience. She was wonderful with the students. When this program was transferred over to the School of Continuing Education, she left. She quit. She didn’t want to do that and she did not want to stay in the department, so she’s gone off and done other things. Q: Were you able to keep her slot? Nestle: We kept her slot. We kept her slot, and that’s how we were able to recruit Amy Bentley. This was where Clark Wolf came into the picture, because he and I went to a book-signing party for some Marian Burros book, that was up in the seventies, and it was a beautiful night and we decided to walk down to the Village. I didn’t know Clark very well, and in that conversation he said, “You know, I’m really interested in getting involved in the department and helping you with it. I think you’ve got a lot of possibility there. But,” he said, “you know, there’s one thing that blocks me from doing that.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he mentioned the name of the faculty member who was responsible for overseeing all of this food and hotel MM stuff, not the black woman who ran the undergraduate program, but the one who had tenure and was in the department. He was the first person in my what was then almost six or seven, eight years at NYU, who had ever mentioned to me that there might be something less than perfect about her, and she was the one that I was so concerned about, because she was, I thought, trying to undermine everything that I was doing and made secret deals with students and was really very difficult to deal with. So that was love at first sight. At last somebody I could talk to about my extraordinary—besides my therapist—about my extraordinary problems with this particular faculty member. So that just kind of took away all the barriers. Then I told him what I was interested in doing, that I had been hanging around with this group Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust in Boston. I’d been going to all these meetings, I knew there was this tremendous interest in food studies, and I had suggested to the dean that we start a food studies program here, although I didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about doing it. He said, “I can help you with this.” I said, “How can you help me?” And he said, “Watch.” Q: That’s great. Nestle: So at that point I thought, okay, this is interesting. I happened to go to a meeting of Les Dames d’Escoffier, or I had just been inducted into Les Dames d’Escoffier, and I asked the ladies who were sitting around the table what they thought of Clark Wolf, and they said, “Oh, my god, don’t touch him with a hundred-foot pole.” And I said, “Why not?” And they said, “Oh, you can’t trust him. You don’t do anything. You can’t do anything with him.” I said, “Could you tell me a little bit more?” Q: What you mean. Nestle: “What you mean and what the problem is?” And they said, “Well, first of all, he’s going to want credit for everything.” Q: Fine. Nestle: “And secondly, there are going to be big problems with money.” And I thought, “I’m not paying him. He’s doing this on a pro bono basis. We’re not going to have any problems about money because there’s no money involved. And I don’t care if he gets all the credit. This is fine. He can have all the credit he wants.” And so he put together this advisory committee, and the advisory committee met once and looked at the food service program that we were doing at the master’s level and said, “Great program. You’re teaching them a lot of great things. You’re not teaching them nearly enough about food.” So I was able to take that report and go down to the dean and say, “Here.” Now, I’m not sure exactly the sequence of events here. That may have occurred before the hotel program went away, but whatever it was, these things were all happening at the same time. Q: Within a small time frame. Nestle: It was in the summer of 1995 all of these things were happening. So the result of it was, the dean said, “Okay, go ahead. Create these food studies programs. We can do that.” The department agreed to it, and it went through the university and state procedures. Then in June or July of 1996, Marian Burros wrote about it. Clark told Marian that the state had approved it, and she called and said, “I’ll write about it,” and did. The day that it came out in the Food section of the Times, we had students in our offices that afternoon, holding copies of her article and saying, “I’ve waited all my life for this program.” Q: That’s thrilling. Nestle: So we had a class in the fall. We had fifteen students in the fall, just like that. Blessings to the New York Times. So that was it. By that time, we had recruited Amy Bentley. We spent that year recruiting. Q: What was Amy supposed to be teaching? Nestle: Amy was, at that time, an instructor, a non-tenure-track instructor at University of Colorado. We put out ads saying we were looking for somebody to run our food studies programs, and she was a historian who had written a book about food in the Second World War, and applied. So did several other people. We actually had some very interesting candidates for it. But she had had so much university teaching experience and so much experience with students and with the way universities work, and she was, herself, and is, a very elegant person, that I thought she could walk in and do it from day one. I mean, she was a really superb hire, as far as I’m concerned. Q: What was food studies? How was that defined at that moment? Nestle: Well, it didn’t have a definition. There was one university, Boston University, that had started a gastronomy program a few years earlier, something that Julia Child had wanted, that she organized with Jacques Pépin. They got that started in the Continuing Education School at B.U., and it was a master’s of arts program, but it was in Continuing Education, and they called it gastronomy, which I thought was a very bad mistake. Universities don’t do gastronomy; universities do studies. And here at NYU we have African studies, film studies, women’s studies, environmental studies. Everything is studies. So I thought food studies. It works. There was a little problem in the department about it. They wanted to call it food science, but we don’t do food science here. This was to be a program that would look at food from a cultural perspective, and it started out with two tracks, one in food management and one in culture and food. So we would take the existing—part of it was to make it look as if it was building on existing material, which in some sense it did. So it built on the existing food service management program, and then created food studies at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral level. We had doctoral applicants as well. So everything happened. You have an article in the New York Times, everybody knew about it, and it was the zeitgeist. It was the time. Everybody was interested in food, and people signed up immediately and they all had really good reasons for doing it. So here we were. Then we started out with that, and after a few years, I mean, we already had Jennifer Berg, who was here. She was working on her doctorate and running the student side of the program. This thing was all pieced together with smoke and mirrors. Q: What was Jennifer’s doctorate on? Nestle: She did a food studies doctorate. She signed up in the doctoral program, so she was working here and she’d been teaching as an adjunct in the department for a long time. She’s wonderful with students. She worked on her doctorate, which I thought was very sensible. The number of students expanded, and then over the years we were able to recruit Krishnendu Ray, who was another first-rate appointment, and then Gabriella Petrick. So there are now four Ph.D. faculty members in the food studies program. We’ve graduated four doctoral students, and there are nine others in the pipeline. We told our doctoral applicants that there was no chance they would ever get academic positions, because food studies didn’t exist as a field anywhere else, but they all have academic positions, except for Mitchell Davis, who just got his degree and is with the James Beard Foundation. Q: You didn’t think that they could get positions because there weren’t enough positions? Nestle: There weren’t food studies programs, and academia is very field-specific. So if you’re not trained in history, you don’t get a job in the history department. But they’re all teaching in one way or another, except for Mitchell, who’s vice president of the Beard Foundation. We think they’ll get jobs, and also because food studies programs are now opening up everywhere. There are five or six in the States now. There’s one in Australia. There’s one in Italy. I mean, they’re all over the place. Two universities in New York have just added programs, so those are programs that are starting this fall. Yes, they’re competition, but they’re also places where our doctoral students can get teaching jobs. So we’re for it. Q: Do the different places functioning now have different focuses? Nestle: Oh yeah. I mean, there’s one that’s out of an anthropology department and one that’s out of something else. I mean, everybody makes do with the resources that they have available. I think the other point about this is that one of the things we started very early on was a colloquium. You’ve attended. That colloquium that you’ve been attending, it’s been going on for ten or twelve years now, and that was started because doctoral students from anthropology, history, American studies, Jewish studies, all over the university were coming to us and saying, “We don’t have anybody in our department to talk to about our doctoral dissertation. We want to do doctoral dissertations on food, and there’s nobody there who knows anything about it. Can we come and talk to you?” So we started this colloquium, which was originally to be doctoral-trained faculty and doctoral students. And now everybody can do food doctoral degrees. Everybody can. I mean, this is an enormous change in ten years, and I think we started it. I don’t think B.U. started it, because they were in Continuing Education. Q: It was a different focus. Nestle: It was a different focus and more on cooking. But I think we did, we made it respectable, we gave it academic respectability. Our students publish like mad, which is what counts. Our faculty are doing really well. Amy got tenure. Krishnendu and Gabriella will be up pretty soon; they’ll get tenure too, I would imagine. Everybody is doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The students love the program. Not everybody, but a lot of them really love it. They go off and do really interesting things. Q: Are there any subjects that they must take? Nestle: Oh yeah. There’s a curriculum. Q: What are the— Nestle: You can get a copy of the handout for the program and you’ll put that in the record. Q: Okay. Nestle: I don’t need to do that, and it’s changed and I don’t have anything to do with it anymore. So I teach an occasional class, as I am in the fall. I’m teaching food sociology in the fall. Q: Where did you get the money for the additional faculty? Nestle: Well, as the student population increased, we have a tuition-driven resource allocation system, so as the numbers of students in the program increased— Q: Somebody’s keeping track. Nestle: Oh, believe me, they keep track to the penny. You can’t run a program with 150 students with one faculty member; that’s impossible. So you have to have more faculty, and as the program expands, you can argue for more. Q: Were you responsible for finding the faculty members? Nestle: Just Amy. I stepped down as chair after that, fairly soon after that. Q: To focus on your own work? Nestle: I had been chair for fifteen years. There was a big change of administration. Q: That’s a long time. Nestle: The faculty was very tired of my administrative style, for good reason, I think, and it was time for me to do something else. Fifteen years is a very long time for department chairs in academic institutions. Q: Have you been following the ASFS thread recently? Nestle: No, I don’t follow threads. Q: Well, I don’t follow very many of them, but there is one that’s basically asking—people perceived it as where are there food studies programs, but what this woman was really asking was where are there anthropology departments where people are— Nestle: There’s been one at Penn for a long time. Q: But it’s just amazing, because every day people pop up with something else. I don’t know. Why do you think it’s grown so much? There are obviously many reasons. Nestle: People are interested in food. It’s the zeitgeist. It’s Michael Pollan. I think Michael Pollan has a great deal to do with it. He has two books on the bestseller list, one which has been on the bestseller list for more than ninety weeks. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve seen who’ve read his books and say, “I want to do this.” I hear it all the time. So he has opened up this kind of approach to food to an audience that was never possible before, a bestselling mass audience of millions of people. I don’t know how many books he’s sold, but it must be millions. Q: Extraordinary. Nestle: Yes. And they’re coming into it for the right reason, and this is the right place to come, because last year we started this food systems. We dropped the food management, finally, and picked up food systems, which makes perfect sense. So we’re now looking at it at the urban agriculture side and on the food and culture side, and students specialize in one or another. Q: And the food systems is the urban agriculture? Nestle: Yes, mainly. This makes sense to do urban agriculture here. And it’s very interesting to me that in Marian Burros’ initial article about the program, she interviewed Alice Waters, and Alice Waters said, “They’re not teaching about agriculture.” And I thought, “Amazing. Look at where we are. What are we going to do, grow farms in Washington Square?” Well, what do you know. We’re growing farms at NYU now. What do you know. Q: It’s amazing. It really is. Nestle: It’s amazing. Alice was way ahead of her time. And there it was in that article. An amazing document, that article. Amazing. Thank you, Marian. It was lovely of her to do that. Q: And thank you, Alice, who is certainly strong-minded. Nestle: Right. Yes. Q: When you point out to her that certain things that she suggests might be a little hard to actualize, was she being perhaps unrealistic? She basically says somebody has to be stalwart. Nestle: Well, she’s absolutely right. I mean, here we were so proud of getting this thing through, and she said, “You’re not doing enough. You’re really not getting it.” And it was the point. Took me a long time to catch on to this point, but her point was that we really weren’t getting it, that you can’t teach about food and culture if you don’t understand agriculture. And here we are with a gardener at NYU who is trying to use NYU open space to plant vegetables. Bless him. Q: How did that happen? Nestle: I don’t know. He got in touch—I mean, I only just found out about it, but he got in touch with me a couple of months ago and asked if I would help, calling a meeting this summer of everybody who’s working on these urban agriculture projects at NYU and throughout the city. I mean, most people are away in July, but we’re going to have a meeting at the end of the month, to try to give him some help and focus in what he’s doing, and getting through the university bureaucracy so that he can use some of the land that’s available. I mean, there’s some very funny things about it. The biggest piece of open green space at NYU is around Silver Towers, the faculty housing. It’s an I.M. Pei building that has just been landmarked. Q: I didn’t realize it had been landmarked. Nestle: It’s just been landmarked. So to do gardens there is impossible, and he’s been told that you’re going to need permission from the Pei firm. I mean, it’s just ridiculous. Right now it looks like a deserted minefield. Q: Can you work with the city programs, the urban spaces that are— Nestle: I mean, he’s trying to. Under his purview he’s got eighty-four planter boxes, and if you’ve seen the planter boxes along Green Street, there are vegetables in them. They’re quite pretty. Q: And how might that be related to the food studies program? Nestle: Well, I think our students could get involved in some of these things, in looking at the way urban agriculture can be done. Everybody is growing food these days. This is the year. The seed companies say they can’t keep seeds in stock. Q: That’s amazing. Nestle: And I look at it, this program started in 1996 and here we are, thirteen years later, and it’s a completely transformed issue in academia, where everybody is writing about food. Marvin Taylor says the English department is the biggest user of the materials there. That’s a big change from thirteen years ago. Q: That’s huge. Nestle: The anthropology department, everybody thinks these food dissertations were fabulous. They were fabulous, actually. Everybody’s doing it. Q: How much did you know about agriculture, the agricultural system, before this happened? Nestle: Oh, not much. Not much. I’m a great devotée of Joan Gussow. Q: Yes. Fabulous. Nestle: And so I had heard Joan speak, and I had the same view about Joan for a long time that I did about Alice Waters, that they were right, but really this was impossible. Well, it was not impossible, and they were absolutely right. I first heard Joan speak about these kinds of problems that are completely normal now, that everybody knows about these kinds of agricultural problems. I heard her speak about them in 1980 for the first time. Q: She lived the life. Nestle: She lives the life, but beyond that, she’s such a clear thinker about how nutrition is related to agricultural production. And I didn’t get it for a really long time, but I did eventually. I get it now. Q: And do the students get it now? Nestle: Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. They’ve read Michael Pollan. Q: You have to read more than that. Nestle: Yes. They’ve read Michael Pollan. They get it. Q: Could you compare the interest that there was among your students in the farm bill this go-round, to any last farm bill? Nestle: I don’t think there was anybody who knew about the farm bill the last time. Q: Yes, that would be my suspicion. Nestle: There were a lot of people who were looking at those kinds of issues. They’re in the food studies program. The students who are interested in those kinds of things are largely in food studies. They’re not so much in public health. There’s a public health nutrition program, but it’s still very focused on dietetics. So the nutrition people haven’t quite gotten this. There are a few students who have, but not many. Q: How do you see food studies developing and growing? Agriculture is a very specialized subject. It’s a large subject, but if it doesn’t fall within the— Nestle: Oh no. Oh no. Agriculture is tied into everything. It’s tied into climate change. It’s tied into poverty. It’s tied into—I mean, anything that you can think of. It’s absolutely integrated. Q: So those departments could— Nestle: What departments? Q: Departments that dealt with the environment or had courses in— Nestle: They all are. They all are. I mean, I can’t believe this invitation list to this meeting that the gardener is calling, or that I’m calling for the gardener. I can’t believe the departments that are represented, the programs that are represented. I didn’t even know they existed. Q: Tell me what some of them are. Nestle: Well, turns out NYU Medical School has a glass garden. What’s that? I have no idea. There’s all these environmental things that I didn’t know anything about. There’s a whole bunch of student groups. There are green groups that are trying to green-up the campus. There’s nutrition, food studies and public health. Q: That’s very exciting. Nestle: It’s very exciting. And could the gardens be a place where all of these people could come together? I think so. I think so. NYU could be a leader in using urban agriculture to further its mission in teaching, research, and public education, public service, which is what the university is about. Greening-up the campus will be lovely for community relations. The community hates NYU. Q: I probably shouldn’t put this on this, but I’m going to. I have thought for some time that—I mean, the world is such a horrible frightening and challenging place in terms of things you cannot do anything about, whether it’s the wars or— Nestle: Yeah, you can do something about food. Q: That’s what I mean. I have— Nestle: You can do something about food. Every time you go to a store and buy food, every time you make a choice about what you’re eating, you’re voting with your fork. And everybody gets it. The other thing is, these issues are so accessible through food in a way that they’re not accessible any other way. You can talk to people about the most complicated worldwide issues and do it through food and they get it. They absolutely get it. So then there’s no end of resources. That pile of books over there are the books that I went through to pick out the books I’m going to use this fall in my food sociology class. It was really difficult to choose among them for this. I tried to keep them all within the last year or two and pick ones that I thought were really, really good. I hope the students like them. Q: The kinds of questions that you get on your blog, do they reflect a wider interest and knowledge of? Nestle: Oh yeah. I mean, I don’t know how many people read my blog. I don’t think it’s all that many. But I mean, there’s just a huge interest in it. It’s probably a huge interest in 10 percent of the population, but it’s— Q: That’s a lot. Nestle: But it’s young. It’s young people. They get it. They get green, they get environment, and they get that the way you grow food and the way you deal with food has a lot to do with public health and with the environment. So these things are all integrated and there’ll be lots and lots of these courses taking place in lots of different places. It would be nice if they were coordinated, but that doesn’t always happen. Q: What do you think the future of this department is? Nestle: I have no idea. I really have no idea. I’m not the future of this department. Q: I realize. Nestle: I’m not the future of this department. I really have no idea. Q: But do you have a sense of what kind of students are— Nestle: All I know is they get better and better. Q: You can’t do better than that. Nestle: You can’t argue with that. I don’t know. I mean, I’m really not involved in the management of the programs anymore. Q: But you observe who comes through, in terms of students. Nestle: Yeah. I get to know the students who are in my class, so I get to know twenty-five students a semester. Q: But the colloquium is interesting, too, because it seems to bring in a faculty and even not faculty, doctoral students from other universities. So that seems to be a spread. Nestle: Yeah. It’s doctoral students, doctorally trained faculty members from universities all over the New York area, and food writers, sort of high-level food writers. It’s not open; it’s invitation only. There’s a quite large mailing list, but usually about twenty people come. And it’s been going on for a very long time, which is, in itself, amazing. We had a grant. We applied for a Humanities Council grand. I mean, that raises the whole business about the fact that this is in the Steinhardt School, which is one of the—there’s a class system of schools at NYU, and this is not one of the upper-class schools, so in order to get that grant, we had to have somebody from Arts and Sciences be the P.I. on it, and that was Susan Rogers, who’s in anthropology. Then Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett also, who had been teaching a food and culture course for a very long time. So the three of us had done those original grants, and then when the Humanities Council changed the way they did the grants, the group decided they didn’t want to do it. They wanted to keep going exactly as it was, and now I think they’re going to try to ratchet it up a notch again. I think it’s about time to do something a little bit different. Q: What about the Food Politics book, the other part of that book [Safe Food], and What to Eat. Don’t you think that’s had an impact? Nestle: I’d like to think I had an impact on Michael Pollan. Q: Aha. Nestle: Without any question he certainly incorporated a lot of my ideas, not in Omnivore’s Dilemma as much as in In Defense of Food. So in that sense, my ideas, Joan Gussow’s ideas, were given a much, much wider voice than either she or I could do. I consider him to be the best student I ever had. So, yes, they were influential. I’ve taught in his program a few years ago. Q: At Berkeley. Nestle: At Berkeley. I was teaching in his program. I did that for two years. He’s heard me speak numerous times and takes those ideas, mixes them with others, and then puts them together in this elegant way. Q: Yes, he does, and he’s a— Nestle: Extraordinary writer. Q: —good speaker. Nestle: And communicator. Fabulous speaker. And he’s opened up this whole—I think, for this generation of students. I was interviewed by something or other, and somebody said, “Do you think he’s influential?” [laughter] That was my reaction. That was my reaction. This was just after—it was the week in which Washington State University had bought 2,000 copies of his book for entering students. I can’t remember what the number was; 5,000, I think. Five thousand copies of his book for entering students, and then obviously because members of the agricultural board of trustees complained, they decided not to give them out. This was going to be the book that all freshmen read. Q: They complained because? Nestle: Well, it was anti-industrial agricultural, and Washington State’s right in the middle of—it’s in eastern Washington, and it’s right where the big agricultural places are in Washington State. They denied that, but there’s no other reason why—they’d already bought the books. So there could be no other explanation for it. A lawyer in Seattle, who represents clients who had been victims of food poisoning cases, that’s how he’s made his living, Bill Marler, of Marler and Clark, Washington State heard that they couldn’t afford to bring Michael Pollan to the campus because of the budget cuts, and he said, “I’ll pay for it,” and offered to cover the $40,000 that they were missing. So there was this enormous brouhaha about it, and the net result was they gave the books out to the students. They were extremely embarrassed. They denied it had anything to do with pressure and so forth and so on. All of that happened at exactly the same week that I was asked this question, and I said, “There are going to be 5,000 undergraduates at Washington State, many of whom come from agricultural families, who are going to be reading Michael Pollan’s book and are going to know that the university tried to suppress it.” Q: Not good. In terms of the books that you’re thinking about using for— Nestle: My class? Here’s the pile. Q: Of course. These books might not have been written at another time period. Nestle: Oh, not in the profusion that are coming out now. I can’t keep up with them. Q: This is Mark Winne’s, Closing the Food Gap. I don’t know what Farm City is. Nestle: It’s a brand-new book. It’s one of Michael Pollan’s students who has written a book about urban farming in Oakland, California. It’s gotten fabulous reviews. They have to read at least one of my books, so they’re reading Pet Food Politics. Bottlemania is a book by a woman who’s written terrific polemic about the need to protect public water supplies. Stuffed is a book about how obesity isn’t all the problem it’s cracked up to be. Q: Really? Nestle: Well, I believe in a little controversy. Everybody can’t say the same thing. The World is Fat is Barry Popkin’s discussion of international obesity issues. Let them Eat Junk is a really interesting analysis in which this author, who I don’t know, but I have a blurb on the back, talks about how capitalism, how our current capitalism, the system of capitalism creates hunger and obesity. So these are, I think, interesting books. Q: Interesting to talk about. And Appetite for Profit? Nestle: That actually came out a few years ago, but I really like it. It’s a book on how to fight the food industry by a lawyer in San Francisco, and it’s about marketing to kids. Also a very clear thinker. And the one book I’m sorry about and I can’t use is Janet Poppendieck’s new book about school food, because it won’t be out in time. They can’t promise. I called the publisher and they cannot promise me they can have twenty-five copies by the time the semester is under way, even though it’s coming out in January. So, next class. Three, four, five, six. There’s one more. I’m missing one. I don’t know what it is. Q: Do you have any idea how many students will be in the class? Nestle: Ah, this one. I’m using this. Food, Inc. And I’m going to have them see that movie and another movie. But this is very good. It’s got a bunch of essays in it, including one from me. It has one from Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan. It’s got the whole works in it. So they’re very current. Except for Appetite for Profit, they’re all out in the last year or two. They’re all worth reading. Q: Has everybody King Corn by now so you don’t have to— Nestle: I’m going to talk to them about movies, and I have copies of all of these. We can arrange for showings. I can’t show them in class because the classes aren’t long enough, but we can find a time to do—if they haven’t seen them. I think everybody should see King Corn. Q: Oh, it’s wonderful. Nestle: It’s wonderful. And the King Corn guys are making a movie called Truck Farm. Do you know about that? Q: No. What is that? Nestle: Oh, Truck Farm. They are growing a farm on the back of a pickup truck in Brooklyn. Q: The two of them or the three of them? Nestle: Actually, two of the three are living in Brooklyn and they have a pickup truck that they are growing vegetables in the back of, and they’re selling it as a CSA. So for $20 I bought a share. Q: Where in Brooklyn? [Red Hook] Nestle: I don’t know. Q: They’ll deliver or something? Nestle: Yes, they brought the truck out and parked it in front of my building and cut off my lettuce and delivered my lettuce and my herbs, and they said the tomatoes are coming. Pretty funny. It’s going to be a wonderful movie. They have a sense of humor. Q: They do. It’s just a different world that you probably couldn’t have imagined when you started all this. Nestle: Absolutely not. I mean, did it ever occur to me that I was going to get one e-mail message a week asking me to be in a food movie? I had no idea. Michael Pollan does them; I don’t do them. I don’t do very many of them. No, that seems amazing. I cannot believe the number of books I’m asked to blurb. I can’t believe the number of books that are coming out about these same issues over and over and over. Look, I’ve got twice as many over there that were hard choices. Q: And your speaking schedule must be daunting. Nestle: Oh no. I’ve cut way back. Q: But the invitations must be— Nestle: Yeah, they’ve slowed down a little bit and my price has gone up, so that’s helped it a little bit, but, yeah, there’s no end to it. I mean, there seems to be absolutely no end. It’s been like this since Food Politics came out. One of the reasons I wrote Food Politics was I wanted better speaking invitations, and I’ve got to put that down, you’ve got to be careful what you ask for. Q: Is there anything else we haven’t talked about that you would want to talk about with regard to this? Nestle: I think that’s the critical one. Did we talk about the beginning of the library? I can’t remember. How the library came about, the food studies collection. Q: Not precisely, no. Nestle: The two things at NYU that I’m most proud of are the food studies program and the food studies collection in the library, in addition to what’s happened to the department in general. It’s really a lot better than it was when I came. We didn’t talk about that, the business about being offered a bound set of Gourmet? Q: No. Nestle: Well, let’s tell the story. This is another before-and-after. In the early 1990s, there was a man who was a restaurant reviewer—no, who was a copy editor for Nation’s Restaurant News, and he ended up with thirty or forty books a year, and he wanted to give them to the library in honor of his mother, who had gone to NYU, a very beautiful woman, and he was very fond of her. I spent three years negotiating with the library to try to get them to take these forty cookbooks. They really didn’t want them, and they eventually took them, but they required him to give them money for the cataloging. They were really quite uninterested. Sometime in that period, somebody got in touch with me and said they had a complete bound set of Gourmet and would the library want it, and they said, “Oh no, we don’t have room for that.” So then a few years later, I got an e-mail from an historian friend of mine [Ruth Rosen] who was then at UC-Davis, and she was on a listserv for a bunch of historians, and one of them was a guy in New York who I actually knew, who said his aunt had been a food writer for Associated Press, and she was in her nineties and they needed money for her full-time care, and she had a lot of cookbooks and they were looking for a home for her collection. He wasn’t sure how many there were; he thought maybe 8,000. Q: That’s a lot. Nestle: That’s a lot. And so she forwarded it to me. So I forwarded it to somebody at the library, and the people at the library who deal with our department change all the time and I can never remember who they are. This time the librarian came back and said, “Oh, you ought to talk to Marvin Taylor about that. He’s interested in food.” So I forwarded the message to Marvin Taylor, and his immediate reaction was, “Oh, my god, go look at it.” It was on Jane Street, and I went over. Q: That’s very convenient. [laughs] Nestle: It was extremely convenient. And I knew the guy. So I wandered over there one day and looked at it, and I was stunned, just absolutely stunned, because what she had done was to take every book that she got at the Associated Press between 1940 and 1980 and organized them. So she had an enormous bookcase full of children’s cookbooks. She had one on wine; she had one on African American cooking. I didn’t know there were that many books on African American cooking. She had shelves and shelves and shelves of books on cheeses. Anything you could think of, books on food in New York, books on food in Italy, books on food in—anything you could think of. The books covered the whole top floor of this brownstone. Every available wall space was filled with books. Bookshelves lined the stairs going down. They were spilling out all over the place. There were books everywhere. Then she had file cabinets, and the file cabinets were filled with letters from James Beard, from the Rombauers, from all of these people that she had corresponded with. She was James Beard’s buddy, talked to him every morning on the phone. I came back and called Marvin and said, “Marvin, you’ve got to go look at this. You’ve got to go look at this. We have to have this.” And we got it. We got it. So it turned out to be 12,000 cookbooks and about 6,000 pamphlets and a lot of really quite wonderful letters and all those kinds of things, because Marvin, who was the new curator of the Fales, had decided that he really needed—he had done the Downtown Collection, and he was looking for another area of special collection, and this seemed really appropriate because the food studies program had started and the excuse was now that they needed materials to support food studies, which of course they did. So we now have 20,000 books and this fabulous brochure, and the collections are pouring in, absolutely pouring in. I mean, it’s wonderful, and it was all because of bound sets of Gourmet. Q: That’s amazing. Is it difficult to raise money to catalog them? Nestle: It’s easier than it used to be. I mean, this is one of these things that’s snowballing. I mean, I have this thing that I do, where if I’m giving a talk for a food industry group, I can’t take the honorarium because of conflict of interest, but I’m not willing to do it for free, so I ask them to donate to the library, and they’re amazingly happy to do it. Q: That’s brilliant. Nestle: So there will be $3000 for a talk I gave last week. It’ll come in eventually. They come in, and I think over the years it’s been 40,000, 50,000 dollars, I think. So you can do a lot of cataloguing for that. And other people are doing it too, like Les Dames d’Escoffier is raising money for the library. That’s wonderful. And I think as people find out about it, as they realize what’s so wonderful about the collection, the fact that it’s open to anybody who wants to do research is extraordinary. You don’t have to be an NYU faculty member or student to use it, means that—I look at it as lasting legacy. Marvin’s wonderful to work with over it. He’s just done this amazing thing, where the sister of somebody that used to work for Clark runs a food bookstore in San Francisco [Omnivore Books]. Clark and Marvin and I were all out there last year, and I told Marvin he had to go look at this book and he had to meet this woman, and he didn’t. He just couldn’t arrange it, couldn’t fit it in. But she [Celia Sack] came to New York a few weeks ago and they fell in love, as I knew they would. I knew they would, because she’s amazing. So he asked her to send him a list of what she had, and he’s buying everything that she can bring in that’s related to the focus of our collection. So she’s now collecting for the library. I couldn’t be happier. Q: That’s thrilling. Nestle: And she’s going to antique book shows. She’s very, very good at what she does, and she really knows the field. She’s a lovely person, just lovely. I knew they would like each other. And her store is charming, Omnivore Books in San Francisco. It’s really a lovely place, right next to a pet food store, which is how I got to meet her. That’s how I met her; she owns a pet food store. She and her partner own a pet food store. So all these things. Every single one of those events at the Fales brings in more collection. Every collection brings in more collection. Everybody who hears about it says, “I know somebody who’s in their seventies and they’re downsizing and they don’t know what to do with their stuff.” And that’s just what you want, is people who cannot bear to give up the collections that they spent all their lives doing, but the idea that it would go into a library and be preserved the way this library preserves those collections makes you think, “Okay, this is where my stuff is going to go.” Q: Which is fabulous. Nestle: I do that in two places in the library. I do my food stuff to the Fales and then my family and political things go to the Tamiment in the library, where I organized a summer camp collection. Q: How wonderful. Nestle: There was a wonderful event about that, and we probably should put on record that there’s a tape of that event at the Tamiment. It took place this spring, and I chaired it. Q: Was it called— Nestle: It was the Higley Hill reunion, Higley Hill summer camps, and about fifty people came who had gone to those camps. The guy at the Tamiment and I did it. It was really wonderful. He said it was one of the best events they’ve ever run. So there’s a tape of that in the library, and I’ve just given the library a tape of one of the “Over Easy” TV segments that I did in 1980 with Craig Claiborne. Q: Oh, great. Nestle: I got the tape, finally. So there’s an archive at San Francisco State of those. I did thirteen segments and they have ten of them that I was in. Q: And next, Pet Food, but we will leave that for another— Nestle: Well, that book will come out in 2010. So it’s now in the works. Q: Thak you. This is great. We can save Pet Food for another— [End of interview] Nestle 3 - PAGE 1