Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, in the department she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She holds honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky and the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.

She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of sixteen books, several of them prize-winning, most notably Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002); Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (2003); What to Eat (2006); Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, with Dr. Malden Nesheim (2012); Eat, Drink Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics (2013); and Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) in 2015. She also has written two books about pet food, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (2008) and Feed Your Pet Right in 2010 (also with Dr. Nesheim). She published Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, in 2018 and a book of short essays with Kerry Trueman, Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health in 2020. Her memoir, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics, was published in 2022. Her most recent book is a thoroughly revised edition of What to Eat retitled What To Eat Now (North Point Press, November 11, 2025). Her current book project is Sugar Coated, a book about U.S. food and nutrition policy as illustrated by cereal boxes (University of California Press, 2026), co-authored with Lisa Sutherland.