In celebration of her new memoir, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics, join nutrition and food studies pioneer Dr. Marion Nestle in conversation with journalist and author Laura Shapiro, as she reflects on her late-in-life career as a world-renowned food politics expert, public health advocate, and a founder of the field of food studies after facing decades of low expectations.
In her engrossing memoir, Marion Nestle reflects on how she achieved unexpected success as a leading advocate for healthier and more sustainable diets. Slow Cooked recounts how she built an unparalleled career at a time when few women worked in the sciences, and how she came to recognize and reveal the enormous influence of the food industry on our dietary choices.
Copies of Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics are available for purchase with tickets and at the event from our partners, Kitchen Arts & Letters.
Virtual ticketing option is available.
MARION NESTLE
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 earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley. Previous faculty positions were at Brandeis University and the UCSF School of Medicine. From 1986-88, she was senior nutrition policy advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. Her research and writing examine scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice and its consequences, emphasizing the role of food industry marketing.
She is the author of prize-winning books, including 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); Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) in 2015; and Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat (2018). She also has written two books about pet food, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (2008), Feed Your Pet Right (also with Dr. Nesheim in 2010). Her most recent books include Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health (2020), and Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics (2022).
LAURA SHAPIRO
Laura Shapiro was a columnist at The Real Paper (Boston) before beginning a 16-year run at Newsweek, where she covered food, women’s issues and the arts and won several journalism awards. Her essays, reviews and features have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Her first book was Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986), which the University of California Press reissued in 2009 with a new Afterword. She is also the author of Something from the Oven: Revinventing Dinner in 1950s America (Viking, 2004), named in the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books on American food; and Julia Child (Penguin Lives, 2007), which won the award for Literary Food Writing from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. During 2009-10 she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her latest book is What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Viking), which Susan Stamberg of NPR called "seriously and hilariously researched culinary history."
THE GREENE SPACE
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KITCHEN ARTS & LETTERS
Kitchen Arts & Letters is a bookstore devoted to food and drink, with titles imported from around the world. They emphasize works on food culture and innovation