Now, the government shutdown has put millions of Americans at risk of losing their SNAP benefits, crucial for putting food on the table.

Now, so far, the Trump administration has shown little sympathy with its request to block a lower court's ruling for funds to be paid in full for November, rejected again by a federal court this weekend.

Now, meanwhile, the Agriculture Department directed states to, quote, "immediately undo food stamps for those in need."

Author Marion Nestle says she's shocked by how low-income families are being used as pawns in this political chaos, and she joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the impact.

And her new book is What to Eat Now.

Paula, thanks.

Marion Nestle, thanks so much for joining us.

Your most recent book, What to Eat Now, it is kind of an update on a book that you wrote back in 2006, on what to eat.

So why did you feel you needed to write this?

Why did you feel you had to do it now?

What's changed?

Well, I thought it was going to be a really quick project that I could just whip off.

And here we are four years later.

It turned out to be an enormous job looking at everything that has changed in the last 20 years.

The big ones are online ordering, plant-based, ultra-processed, the introduction of international foods into every section of the supermarket, the substitution of water for full sugar sodas.

I mean I could just go on and on and on.

In every section of the supermarket there have been profound changes that occurred.

I just wasn't paying close enough attention.

What's interesting is that you kind of look at this supermarket through the lens of decisions that most consumers don't know might have shaped the food that they're seeing on the aisles, what aisles they're seeing it, what height they're seeing it at, right?

Right.

I mean, this is a book that sort of exposes the obvious fact that supermarkets are not social service agencies and neither are food companies.

They're businesses with stockholders to please.

Their purpose is to get you to buy as much food as you possibly can, as often as you possibly can, at as high a price as they can get away with.

You've got nothing short of what, 44 chapters about every possible section, every possible subcategory in the aisles.

You know, one of the examples that you point to that I don't think most people think about is just bottled water.

I mean, how profitable has water become for the industry?

And I guess, what are the societal costs for the rest of us as we seem to embrace this shift?

One of the things I did was to go to a water treatment plant in upstate New York to look at how they monitored the quality of water coming out of the tap.

Boy, it's pretty impressive.

And nowhere near that kind of monitoring goes into looking at bottled water.

And one of the things I do in the book is I do price comparisons.

So I look at the price of water that comes out of the tap, which is less than a tenth of a penny per gallon, and then look at how supermarkets sell water.

And you can buy bottled water for a dollar a gallon if it's tap water that's just filtered.

Or you can spend up to 40, 50 or more dollars per gallon if you buy bottled water in fancy bottles with additives of one kind or another.

And the whole thing is crazy.

This is just water.

You kind of really look at the design of a supermarket as something that companies have figured out how to maximize profit, not necessarily health.

So give us an example of something that a supermarket shopper should become a little bit more conscious of, and then maybe they can change their behavior accordingly.

Well, first of all, the supermarket is designed to get you to do as much exploring of the real estate as you possibly can, because the rule is the more products you see, the more products you buy.

So one objective is to get you to look at as many products as possible.

And companies pay supermarkets to put their products in places where you can't miss them.

So this would be at eye level, and it would be at the end of aisles, that has a special name, end caps, and at the checkout counter.

When you see products at a checkout counter, let me tell you, those are not there in any random order.

Companies have paid many, many thousands of dollars to get those products placed in the checkout counter so that while you're checking out, you just kind of mindlessly grab whatever that's there.

And this is all done based on the most astonishing amount of research.

I can't believe the amount of research that goes into trying to figure out what makes people buy products.

And this has to do with the color of the packaging, the size of the packaging, the placement of the packaging, the lighting in the store, the way the aisles are designed.

Nothing in there is random.

You're making it sound like a casino where there are no clocks, there are no windows by design, right?

Well, and the company always wins.

That's right.

So, you also write that as much as 40% of the food produced in America is thrown away.

So we actually have the ability to provide calories for people who need it, but it's kind of how we're designing these calories, what kinds of food we're putting them in, that really you're saying that waste is built into our system today.

We see waste as a food system problem because in the United States, our food supply supplies 4,000 calories a day for every man, woman, and little tiny baby in the country.

That's food produced in the United States plus imports, less exports.

It's not what people are eating.

It's what's available for consumption.

Food companies have to sell that food.

So they are trying to sell twice as much food as the population actually needs.

So waste is built into the system.

But that waste is not equitably distributed throughout the food system.

70% of the waste occurs at the farm level, at the production level.

You know, it's due to bad climate, it's due to bad crops, it's due to all kinds of problems that occur.

Only 10% of it occurs at the supermarket level.

Supermarkets are really good at inventory control.

And they manage their waste pretty well.

20% of it occurs in the home.

It's the extra vegetables that got rotten in the refrigerator.

It's the cheese that got moldy.

It's the milk that was there too long.

And that you as an individual could do something about.

But that's only going to be 20% of that 40%.

But still worth working on.

We've had conversations on this program before about ultra-processed foods and how essentially people eat more calories when they're ultra-processed calories than if, you know, just was a bag of carrots, so to speak.

So explain for us like how it is that now more than half the calories, according to the CDC that we're eating are ultra processed food calories.

Well, this occurred because of that 4000 calorie a day problem.

You have to sell food.

So one way to sell food is to make it irresistibly delicious.

So food companies have figured out ways to make foods that you can't resist and put those foods in places where you can't miss them, and also provide foods in larger portions that have more calories.

If I had one concept to get across, it would be that larger portions have more calories.

It's not intuitively obvious.

But the ultra-processed food thing is really a new concept.

It's a new way of describing this category of foods.

And it refers to industrially produced foods that don't look anything like the foods that they came from.

And they're formulated with a lot of additives for texture, flavor, and color that kind of cover up the idea that they're not real foods anymore.

And now there's research that shows that eating a lot of them is very bad for our health.

And that for reasons that are not yet fully understood, they encourage us to eat more calories and not realize it.

And not only a few more calories, but tons more calories a day.

No wonder everybody's gaining weight.

During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

's confirmation hearings to become the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, he called ultra-processed foods "poison."

Some of this concern seems to have decreased when it comes to now, I guess, what the government is going to be trying to do, whether it's even trying to decrease them or just define them, what the health guidelines and dietary guidelines are going to be.

That date has been pushed back now until December.

Well, you know, he got hit by lobbyists, just like everybody in government did.

You know, Kennedy is a complicated, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

is a complicated figure, because when it comes to food, because on the one hand, he has been calling for reduction in ultra-processed foods, make America healthy again, let's get rid of some of the harmful additives that are in food, let's get rid of mercury in fish.

A lot of the things that he called for seemed to me to be really good ideas, and he scored two wins, two big, maybe three wins so far.

One of them is he's gotten food companies to agree to take artificial color dyes out of food products, but if you take the color dyes out of a sugar sweetened cereal, it's still a sugar sweetened cereal.

If you take the color dyes out of candy, it's still candy.

I don't think that's going to make a big difference to health.

On the chemicals, he's gotten the FDA to say that it's going to do a better job of deciding which chemicals are generally recognized as safe.

So those are wins.

I'll grant that.

Another Maha win is that Coca-Cola has agreed to substitute cane sugar for high fructose corn syrup.

That is nutritionally hilarious.

It's not going to make any difference at all.

The calories will be the same, the sugars will be the same.

So this is all very complicated and must be taken in the context of Kennedy's destruction of the public health system, destruction of the CDC, making the FDA a dysfunctional agency and destroying the research apparatus, not to mention what he's done about vaccinations, which I consider to be one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century.

So, complicated.

Right now, we are, as we record this conversation, still in the middle of a government shutdown and that has disrupted supplemental nutrition SNAP payments and then there's new rules, really even blocking grocery stores from offering any other discounts to SNAP recipients.

So there's right now millions of Americans who might only receive possibly up to half their SNAP benefits.

Judges said that the administration has to fully fund these.

I mean, what kind of what are the consequences, especially to this population who might not have access to healthy foods in the first place?

And the SNAP benefits are part of a real crucial part of how they get nutrition?

Well, yes, and we're talking about 42 million people here who are beneficiaries of SNAP.

Most of them are people who have jobs, but their jobs don't pay enough for them to support their families and feed their families adequately.

And the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, is a lifeline for them for food and the idea that the government shutdown has cut off those funds is quite shocking.

And even more shocking is the Department of Agriculture's decision to punish retailers who are trying to help the poor with maybe giving them discounts or doing something that will make it a little bit easier for their dollars to go further.

It's quite shocking to use the poor as a pawn in this ridiculous political situation that we're in now.

I think we've known about this for a while, but I think it's becoming a more sharp relief that there's a direct correlation between the cost of a calorie and how nutritious it is, the cheaper it is, the worse off it is for you.

I mean, you can kind of find out when you go to, you know, a dollar store, for example, which are real huge, huge parts of rural America, and even in general food deserts, where technically if that's the only kind of grocery store you have, versus a store that might have fresh produce, it is very likely to have a very different effect on your body if the bulk of your calories are coming from the dollar store versus from just a grocery.

Well, it's not just likely.

We have an enormous amount of research that shows that people whose diets are based on ultra-processed foods are not as healthy as people who eat more healthfully.

The dollar stores have to have some fruits, vegetables, grains, fresh foods, because in order for them to accept SNAP benefits, they're required by the Department of Agriculture to have a certain number of fresh foods.

But I've been to dollar stores, and oh my goodness, you don't want to buy your produce there.

really doesn't look very good.

So we need to have a food system that serves people better in the United States.

And that's why, you know, that's why I think food is political.

Because these are political issues, they're political choices.

We could feed everybody in America, we could give everybody in America a universal basic income, we could have universal school meals for kids, we could have restrictions on marketing of ultra-processed foods to kids and mourning labels on some of these foods like they do in other countries.

There are a lot of things that we could do politically that would help people eat more healthfully.

I think one of the most important ones would be to subsidize healthier foods instead of the foods that we are subsidizing.

These are political choices.

The pushback against this relatively simple idea of saying, "Hey, tax the things that are unhealthy and encourage the things that are healthy," is that we hear this sort of political backlash saying, "Look, look, I don't want to live in a nanny state.

I don't want to be told what cookies I can eat and what I can't.

This is against the core values of America and independence."

What's the flaw in that thinking?

Well, I think we already live in an environment in which choices are made for us.

And we just don't realize this.

So it's not a question of imposing some kind of new order on the population.

It's a question of tweaking the existing order to promote health rather than the current system.

I don't see anything that's wrong with that.

That seems just fine to me.

You still have a choice.

It's just that the easier choice will be healthier.

What's wrong with that?

Seems like a really good idea to me.

One of the things that you ask for and end the book with is kind of a call to action and reminding people that this isn't just sort of a health choice, that there are personal choices, political choices that all get rolled up into this.

What does taking action look like on a consumer level, on a societal level?

If you're trying to eat healthfully in today's food environment, you are fighting a multi-trillion dollar industry all by yourself.

I mean, you can't do that.

You can't.

You're not going to.

You can make healthy food choices for yourself and your family.

That's terrific.

But to do more than that, you must join with other people.

Advocacy requires as many people as possible to be working towards the same goal.

And that means joining organizations that are working on these issues.

It means writing your congressional representatives.

It means running for office.

Please run for office.

If you want political power, that's what you have to do.

And we have learned recently in the United States that some people can win elections, even if they have ideas that don't seem mainstream.

So it can be done, and the recent election should be an incentive and an inspiration for lots of other young people to run for office.

Please, we need you.

>> The book is called What to Eat Now.

Marion Nestle, thanks so much for joining us.

My pleasure.