Marion Nestle answers your questions about eating meat, industry influence, and lab-grown protein

Yesterday, we hosted our first Meat Month Q&A with renowned food scholar and writer Marion Nestle.

Nestle is a professor emerita in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University. She is the author of Food Politics (2002)—a book that helped make the economic and political structure of the American food system a mainstream concern. Nestle’s writing and research has focused on the way industry groups have used their power to influence national nutrition policy. Eating meat, as we reported, comes with a host of ethical, environmental, and economic conundrums. If there’s anyone who could help us make sense of them, it’s Marion Nestle. And she did.

If you couldn’t make the discussion, don’t worry—we’ve recapped it below.

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Our first question came from a vegetarian who wanted to know the circumstances under which “cheating” is okay:

Nestle’s response:

Many Q&A participants were curious about Nestle’s take on lab-grown meat:

To sum it up: Lab-grown meat, like conventional meat, is complicated.

That complexity extends even to which regulatory body ought to govern it:

Nestle’s verdict? The FDA.

One of the key focuses of Nestle’s research and writing centers around the way that big food companies and trade groups influence nutrition policies. So we wondered:

It’s a bit of both:

Which leads to another question about big food companies and their influence:

You won’t be surprised to hear that a lot of labels are pure marketing.

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Now you’re all caught up! Thanks to Marion Nestle for a great Q&A. And stay tuned: We’ll be hosting more #CarnivoresDilemma discussions all throughout the month of July.