At this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, two of the most influential, and opposed, voices in American food policy shared a stage for a conversation. Calley Means, a senior advisor to the White House and a driving force behind the Make America Healthy Again movement, sat down with Dr. Marion Nestle, the NYU professor emerita whose writing on food politics predates the current administration by decades. What starts as a discussion of “wellness” quickly becomes a sharp debate over the new federal dietary guidelines, the saturated fat cap, and whether the guidelines’ first-ever acknowledgment of ultra-processed food represents a genuine turning point or a document undermined by scientific errors. But it’s also unexpectedly collaborative: pressed by an audience member to name common ground, both panelists point to the same priorities, from reducing ultra-processed food to fixing chronic disease at its root. Moderated by Corby Kummer, executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute.

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Read Ellen Brown’s commentary, What Emerges Is a Food Agenda, Not an Argument: Removing the Friction From A Contentious Aspen Panel

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