Marion Nestle on late starts, unhappy families and her war on food myths

Send us Fan MailIf you sometimes fret that your opportunity to make your mark on the world has passed, take a leaf from Marion Nestle’s career.  At 50, she found herself divorced, out of a job, and not able to get a credit card. Despite that she persevered, going back to school, publishing her career-changing book, Food Politics,  at the age of 66. It changed her life. Now aged 86, Nestle is still very much a full-throated advocate for debunking popular food myths, and exposing the links between dietary misinformation and a rapacious food industry driven by the bottom line. In her new memoir, Slow Cooked, she recounts both her difficult upbringing as a child of a loveless marriage, and the various twists and turns that lead to her epiphany that food and nutrition was to be her subject in life. The book she has chosen to talk about in this episode  is Sidney Mintz’s groundbreaking study, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.