Sugar Coated

Marion Nestle in conversation with Cari Borja We are what we eat. Or so the saying goes. But what determines what we eat in the first place? Who decides? And how much of what we think of as personal choice is shaped long before we ever reach for something on the supermarket shelf? For more than half a century, Marion Nestle has been asking these questions ~ about food, nutrition, public health, politics, corporations, and the systems that determine what ends up on our plates. Now, at 90, she remains one of the clearest and most influential voices in American food studies. Her newest book, Sugar Coated, takes on one of the most ubiquitous and contested ingredients in our food system. Moving beyond whether sugar is simply “good” or “bad,” Nestle examines the powerful industry built around it and the ways corporate interests, marketing, science, public policy, and our deeply human attraction to sweetness shape what we eat. It is a subject that reaches far beyond dessert. From her iconic Food Politics, which exposed the food industry’s influence on nutrition and public health, to the newly updated What to Eat Now, Nestle has spent a lifetime asking: Who benefits from the way our food system is organized? How are our desires shaped? And how free are our choices? But this evening at Clio’s will go beyond any one book. Cultural anthropologist and Clio’s founding member Cari Borja will sit down with Nestle to talk about her life’s work: what has changed, what stubbornly has not, the questions that continue to sustain her—and what she sees differently at 90. Their conversation will also turn to how we learn to eat. If we are what we eat, when do we begin becoming what we eat? From children first discovering food, to teenagers and college students making choices independently, who, or what, is doing the teaching? Drawing from Nestle’s decades as a professor at NYU and Borja’s work as a senior advisor to Alice Waters with the Edible Schoolyard Project, School Supported Agriculture, and the larger movement of edible education, including UC Berkeley’s Edible Education 101 ~ they will consider what happens when we teach young people not simply what to eat, but how to understand the cultural, ecological, economic, and political systems behind what is on their plate. Because perhaps “we are what we eat” has never simply been about nutrition. What we eat carries culture, memory, pleasure, identity, agriculture, economics, and power. Beginning with Sugar Coated and moving across an extraordinary lifetime of thinking, teaching, writing, and questioning, Nestle and Borja will ask: How do we choose what to eat in a world constantly trying to choose for us? And after a lifetime devoted to understanding food, what does Marion Nestle believe matters now? Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College (2016). In 2023, she was awarded The Edinburgh Medal for contributions to science and society.