Fresh Air - Nutrition, SNAP & Why We Need A Food Revolution

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Food policy expert and nutritionist Marion Nestle's 2006 book, ‘What to Eat,’ became a consumer bible of sorts when it came out, guiding readers through the supermarket while exposing how industry marketing and policy steer our food choices. Now, two decades later, she's back with ‘What to Eat Now,’ a revised field guide for the supermarket of 2025.Also, Justin Chang reviews Joachim Trier’s new film, Sentimental Value.’  Follow Fresh Air on instagram @nprfreshair, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for gems from the Fresh Air archive, staff recommendations, and a peek behind the scenes. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, it's Carrie. Our co-host, Tanya Mosley, and I will be doing an end of the year Fresh Air Plus bonus episode answering listener questions about the show and about ourselves. You can send the questions now to Fresh Air Plus at NPR.org, with Plus spelled out. That's Fresh Air Plus at npr.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, my guest is Marion Nessal, the molecular biology. turned nutritionist and food policy scholar, whose voices helped decode for decades what we eat

and why it matters. Her well-known book, What to Eat, became a consumer Bible of sorts when it came out in 2006, guiding readers aisle by aisle through the supermarket while exposing how industry marketing and policy steer our food choices. Two decades later, she's back with What to Eat Now, a revised field guide for the supermarket of 2025. where ultra-processed foods, plant-based meats, corporate organics, and our ability to have food delivered to our very doorstep have rewritten the rules. Nessle's journey began in the classroom. When she first began teaching a nutrition course in the early 70s,

she says it felt like she was falling in love with the subject. She went on to serve as Associate Dean for Human Biology at the University of California, San Francisco, and as staff director for nutrition policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped shape dietary guidelines for Americans in the 1990s. Nessel is the author of 15 books,

including Safe Food, the Politics of Food Safety and Soda Politics. We recorded this conversation last week as courts in Congress were battling over SNAP benefits for more than 42 million Americans during the government shutdown. And Marian Nessel, welcome to fresh air. Oh, glad to be here. Well, Marion, before we dive in, I want to talk to you a little bit about what's happening with SNAP benefits.

Food banks are already reporting that they have been inundated with people in need of food. I want to know what you're thinking about in this moment, what this moment reveals maybe about how fragile our food system here in the U.S. is right now. Well, I think what it reveals is how fragile our economy is. We have 42 million people in this country, 16 million of them children, who can't rely on a consistent source of food from day to day and have to depend on a government program that provides them with benefits that really don't cover their food needs, they only cover part of their food needs. and this amount of money is under attack and is looked at as a cash cow that will, instead of paying for people's meals, will pay for tax cuts for people who have lots and lots of money to begin with.

It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. It's unprecedented. We have never punished the poor as badly as we're punishing them now. You know, when you first began your journey in nutrition, I think I heard you say that people actually questioned whether food and politics went together, that, like, food is not political. People were really surprised by that. You went on then to talk about how in America, we don't have a problem with a lack of food. It's about poverty. It's about policy. How are you seeing these forces play out right now in the way the government, is approaching nutrition assistance. Well, when I wrote my book Food Politics in 2002, the first question I got asked was, what does food have to do with politics?

Nobody asks me that anymore. Part of that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and what he's doing, which is so obviously political around food, and everybody can see what's happening with food assistance. When I look at what's happening at food assistance, I'm just stunned at how similar this is to what happened in the 16th century when the English passed the English food laws. And they were passed with the idea that the poor were poor, not because of bad luck

being born into the wrong family or circumstances beyond their control, but the idea that the poor were poor by choice and that what they wanted was to live on handouts. And the idea that hundreds of years later were still thinking the same way is just shocking to me. RFK Jr. is at the HHS talking about toxins and ultra-processed foods. Many of the issues that you also talk about, too, you guys seem to be aligned on many things. Do you see a genuine opening here for food policy reform? Well, I was very hopeful when he was appointed because he was talking. about let's get the toxins out of the food supply. Let's make America healthy again. Let's

make America's kids healthy again. Let's do something about ultra-processed foods. Let's do something about mercury and fish. And a lot of other issues that I thought, oh, how absolutely terrific, that we're going to have somebody who cares about the same kind of issues I do. This is very exciting. And when President Trump introduced his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on social media, President Trump talked about the food industrial complex. I nearly fell off my chair. I thought, here's the president sounding just like me. What's going on here? So then we had the first Maha report, the first Make America Healthy Again report, which talked about a lot of these issues and put in an aspirational agenda. We're going to work on this, this, this, this, this, and

this. All of that sounded terrific. And then the second report came out, and they had backed off on nearly all of the things that I thought were really critically important. You have been skeptical of his anti-vaccine rules. Oh, from the beginning. I'm a public health person. I see vaccination is one of the, well, first of all, I'm old enough that I remember what it was like when we didn't have vaccinations. You know, I remember what it was like to be a kid in the era of polio. You couldn't go swimming in the summer. You couldn't play with your friends in the summer. It was terrifying, absolutely terrifying. You never knew when something absolutely terrible was going to happen and paralyze you for life. I remember what it was like before measles vaccines.

When kids were sick, kids died, just like kids are getting sick and dying now. And to go back to that makes no sense to me at all. What were some of the things that were the most important to you that you felt like were dropped in that second run? Oh, marketing to children, reduction of ultra-processed foods, cleaning up food in schools, getting the toxins out of the food supply at the production level, and other kinds of things that there were things that had to do not only with health and human services, but also with the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. But these things didn't happen.

What did happen were declared Maha wins. And the Maha wins are companies voluntarily agreeing to remove artificial color dyes from their products, which I'm in favor of. I think that's great. But fruit loops with vegetable dyes are still fruit loops. M&Ms with vegetable dyes are still M&Ms. It's not going to make a big difference in the food supply. On ultra-processed foods, they've said they want to define them, but that's all they've said. They're investigating the possibility of looking at marketing. to children, but with no sense at all that there are regulatory initiatives that they're considering, and they declared a big win when Coca-Cola said it would substitute cane sugar for high-fructose corn syrup, something that I termed nutritionally hilarious, because they're basically the same biochemically, and they're not going to make any difference at all. If you want to reduce obesity in the United States and help people.

eat more healthfully, you've got to do things like change the agricultural subsidy structure. You have to stop the ability of food companies to market ultra-processed foods, especially to children. You need better school food. You need universal school meals. You need much more money in school meals than presently exists. You have to look for ways to make healthy foods an easier and less expensive choice and look for every public policy that you can to do those kinds of things and I don't see that happening.

You've worked inside of governmental agencies so you kind of know a bit about how the machine works. What do you think happened between that first Make America Healthy Again, guideline, a proposal, and the second one, why they were so drastically different, why the priorities changed in such a stark way?

Well, they found out what lobbying was about. You know, I mean, they were hit with, and there's a fair amount of evidence, that they met with agricultural producers. They met with food industry representatives, and the food industry representatives and agricultural producers told them what the effects of these kinds of changes would be on the bottom lines of these industries. I'm sure they talked about job losses. I'm sure they talked about having to move their businesses overseas. I'm sure they had all kinds of lobbying threats like that. I wasn't there. I didn't witness it, but I can assume that that's what happened because that's what always happens.

Do you think that when it comes to public health, there seems to be, I don't know if you would call it like stratifying or siloing. Like there are vaccines, there's food, there's medicine. And why don't you think the government looks at it in a holistic way as a holistic approach? Well, because there's so many, there's so much private industry involved in this and so much ideology. This is a government that has an enormous amount of ideology with some very ideology-based views of what public health is about. you know, the idea that natural immunity is better than vaccination immunity or that fluoride is poisoning children or that seed oils are poisoning America or that high fructose corn syrup is poisoning America.

I mean, these are not ideas that are backed by science, but we're in an era in which science is just considered just one way of looking at things. And people have different sets of facts that they believe. And this is part of food politics now in a way that's very troubling. So first off, I want to say your method. You approach this book like an investigative journalist. You visited stores wherever you traveled. You interviewed managers. You make a point to say, though, that supermarkets are a business. They are not in the business of nutrition at all. And I think that when you say it out loud, it's, of course, but I think there may be maybe an implicit thing or a subconscious idea that I'm going to the grocery store and there

have been good choices that have been picked out for me for the good of my health and nutrition and not necessarily because it's about selling things. But there are some things that really set for us what we see when we walk into a grocery store, the things that are at eye level for us like slotting fees. You call them suspiciously like bribes. What are slotting fees? Sorry about that. What are they? And how do they impact what we encounter when we walk in the grocery store? There are payments that food companies make to grocery stores to stock their products where people will see them. You know, there are rules about sales in supermarkets. The more products you see, the more you're likely to buy. Therefore,

the products that are organized so that you cannot miss them are in prime supermarket real estate. And companies pay the supermarkets to place their products at eye level at the ends of aisles. Those have a special name, end caps, and at the cash register. When you see products at the cash register, they're paying fees to the supermarket by the inch of space. And that's how supermarkets make a lot of their money is through slotting fees. And, of course, what this does is it keeps small producers out because they can't afford to make those kinds of payments. Because these payments are pretty expensive. Very expensive.

I mean, we're talking about thousands or, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And every single product that is in a supermarket is placed where it is for a reason. There is research, I mean, what I can't believe, and just can't get over, is the amount of research that goes into it. the amount of consumer research, focus groups, camera research, every kind of social science research that you can think of is used to plot out how people are going to walk through the stores, where the items are placed, what people are going to see, what they're most likely to buy.

And what you want to do, of course, is you want to place the most highly profitable items where they're going to get the most viewers. And it's not in, you know, the joke is, of course, if you want a bottle of milk, you've got to go to the far corner, the furthest corner from the entrance. The purpose of that is not only to keep the milk cold because the refrigeration is along the wall,

but also to get you to walk through the store, preferably through as many aisles as possible. Because it's a staple, so they know you're going, for milk and eggs and meats so to have to walk through the entire store to get there, then you go through all of that ultra-process stuff and all of the package stuff. It's great for your

step counts. You mentioned something about camera research. This is so fascinating. When you say camera research, you mean the cameras that are in the store, but also the cameras that are in the self-checkout. Well, and also there are studies that

are done where they put cameras, where they watch customers and just watch what people do and set up different experiments within the store and check the way people respond to them. The purpose of a supermarket is to sell as much food as possible to as many people as possible, as often as possible, at as higher prices they can get away with. I can't say that enough. That's its purpose. You have this handy little list of the top grocers in the U.S., and the list is from 2023, but I think the list still stands even in 2025. And the names won't surprise many. Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Publix. But there's also one on the list that's relatively new, and that's Dollar General. How did Dollar Stores get into the

food business? Well, they started out by selling the most popular ultra-processing. foods. If you want to buy an ultra-processed food, you go to a dollar store because there it is. They're going to have chips. They're going to have sugar-sweetened cereals. They're going to have every junk food you could possibly think of. That's what they make their money off of. They will have a few fruits and vegetables, a few sad bananas, a few sad apples, maybe some pears, may be some green vegetables, but not very many. And they'll be in a case off somewhere because they have to offer those. Because they're taking SNAP benefits, they're required to meet the stocking requirements

of the SNAP program, which requires them to have a certain number of fruits and vegetables. It's just been raised to seven varieties in order to be allowed to accept electronic. benefit transfer, the benefits for SNAP recipients. And they're just everywhere. And during the pandemic, particularly, they just proliferated like mad. And they undercut local stores. They're cheaper. They have poorer quality food, but the prices are lower. Price is an enormous issue. These dollar stores, they're everywhere, but they're also concentrated in very specific places and poor and urban neighborhoods? Well, yes, because large grocery chains don't want to be in those neighborhoods. But, you know, if you want a Trader Joe's or a Whole Foods or a Wegman's

in your neighborhood, you've got to have hundreds of thousands of people within walking distance or quick driving distance who make very, very good incomes or the stores aren't going to go there. They're going to close the stores that are not performing well, meaning having lots and lots of people spending lots and lots of money at them. And so as the big grocery stores have closed in inner city neighborhoods, the dollar stores moved in. You know, I grew up with a grocery store chain in the Detroit area called Farmer Jack, and it was there for many, many decades, and then poof. I think it was the early 2000s. They just disappeared. And it seemed to be that way throughout the country and places and major cities. When did we start to see these family run stores like that close? It was before the pandemic. Oh, it was long before the pandemic. I mean, the tendency has been, you know, it's the same thing everywhere in the economy, get bigger, get out. So that the top three chains in or three or four grosses. industry chains own more than half the business, 60, 70% of the business. And whenever you have a highly concentrated industry, like the meat industry, for example, where three companies

own 85% of the meat, they get to set prices. They get to set the rules of the game. They get to go to Congress and to the president and say, we don't want dietary guidelines to say anything bad about our products. And we want the president to keep meatpacking plants open during the pandemic, even though it's killing lots of people. Our guest today is Marian Nessle,

author of What to Eat Now, and one of the most influential voices in food politics. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is fresh air. Keeping up with the news can feel like a 24-hour job. Luckily, it is our job.

Every hour on the NPR News Now podcast, We take the latest, most important stories happening, and we package them into five-minute episodes so you can easily squeeze them in between meetings and on your way to that thing. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast. Now. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and we're talking with Marian Nessel, whose new book, What to Eat Now, explores how our food system has changed from the rise of ultra-processed foods to the shifting politics of what's on our plates. Okay, Marion, you identify three nutrition concepts that have emerged since your first run of what to eat in 2006, and those three things are the food systems have changed, ultra-processed

foods, and triple duty diets. And I want to slow down and talk about all three, but I want to first have you give us a brief understanding of each. So in 2006, you wrote about processed foods, few years later, we were introduced to ultra-processed foods. Give us some examples of ultra-processed foods. Just remind us of what's the difference. Oh, well, ultra-processed is a specific category of food named by Carlos Montero, who's a public health professor in Brazil, who came up with the concept. And it's, these are industrially produced foods that contain large numbers of color, texture and flavor additives that you don't necessarily have access to in supermarkets or in your home kitchen. And they're now associated, consumption of a lot of them is now associated in literally

hundreds of studies with poor health outcome. Those studies are observational and they cannot prove causation, but we now have very, very well controlled clinical trials, at least three of them so far that show that people who eat a lot of ultra-processed foods take in more calories than they otherwise would if they were eating unprocessed or minimally processed foods. And the easiest example to explain the difference is corn on the cob is unprocessed, canned corn is processed, and Doritos are ultra-processed. Okay. Yeah, they're designed to be irresistible, basically addictive. Like you can't stop eating a bag of Doritos. You can't eat just one.

One of the things that's so fascinating is you write that ultra-processed foods are responsible for as much as a third of the environmental damage from food in wealthy countries. First of all, explain that, and why is that? Well, that has to do with the cost of production of the ingredients, plus the packaging, plus the waste, plus everything that goes into. taking a food, transforming it industrially, into something that doesn't look anything like the food to begin with, and then you've got all that packaging to deal with. I want to talk about the food system a little bit, too, because it's so relevant to this. The easiest way to describe the food system is, again, with corn. Because if you look at the 12 billion bushels of corn that are produced in the United States every year,

roughly 45% of them of that corn is used to feed animals. Another 45% is used to make ethanol for automobiles, and don't even get me started on that. I think it's just crazy. Leaving maybe 10% of the corn that's produced in the United States is food for people in all its forms. not only corn on the cob, but corn ingredients, high-fructose corn syrup, all of that falls into that 10% category. We don't have a food system that's aimed at producing food for people.

We have a food system that's aimed at producing feed for animals and fuel for automobiles. But the emphasis on animals is not very good for our environment because beef are the production of beef causes the largest release of greenhouse gases of any other food in the food system by a very large margin. So we would be much better off eating diets that had more plants and less animal, not no animal necessarily, but certainly a lot less. And that's where the triple-duty dietary advice comes in because the diet that is best for preventing hunger, preventing obesity and its consequences and preventing climate change is one in the same diet, which is to eat real food, processed as little as possible, with a big emphasis on plants.

Right. Triple duty diets, it's a diet that simultaneously addresses hunger, obesity, and climate change. Yeah. And it's the same diet as the one that's best for health. Isn't that nice? I mean, it's really, it's really, It all works out, you know, and easily, easily summarized by Michael Pollan in his famous seven words, Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. I took 700 pages to do the same thing. Well, I mean, okay, that solution seems clear. Eat more plants, eat less beef. But you write that the American food supply provides twice as many calories at the same time as needed,

while 40% of food produced is thrown away. And we're talking about this right as we also are understanding that there's global hunger. 800 million people face global hunger. So how do we talk seriously about triple-duty diets addressing food insecurity when the fundamental structure of our food system is designed to overproduce and waste food? Well, that's why I think food systems thinking is so important. If our food system in the United States produces 4,000 calories a day for every man, woman, and little tiny baby in the country. That's roughly twice what the population needs on average.

So waste is built into the system. It's built. Yeah, why? Because that's how the subsidies work. The agricultural subsidies encourage food producers to produce as much food as possible because they, get paid for the amount of food that they produce. 10% of the waste occurs at the supermarket level, surprisingly little. Supermarkets have gotten really good at inventory control.

They're very, very good at it, and there's very little supermarket waste. You think there's going to be a lot. They're going to be throwing away a lot of produce, but they really don't. And then 20% of it is at home, and that's something we can do something about. But it's only a small part of the problem. It's a much bigger problem. It's a system's problem because it's built into the system. Is there a country or countries that have successfully implemented anything close to this triple duty dietary approach?

Not that I can think of offhand. You know, the European, they're countries in Europe that can, they're much smaller than us. And they are somehow able to manage these kinds of things a lot better than we do. We have a lot to learn from countries in Europe along those lines and a lot to learn from countries in Latin America about how to prevent obesity and its consequences through labeling rules and rules about marketing and that sort of thing. But we're Americans. We don't listen to anybody else.

There is something that you write about when it comes to ultra-processed foods that I was really surprised by that some of those same products are flooding into rural areas where hunger is highest here in the United States, but also in parts of Africa and Western Asia and the Caribbean. And they're pushed by these aggressive marketing tactics and these low prices. Help us understand what's going on here. Are wealthy nations essentially creating these foods then exporting them to the world's poorest regions? Well, of course they are. I mean, you have an American product with American aura of modernity and identity. And these products are not so expensive that nobody can afford them. They're cheap enough so that even poor people can afford them.

And they're sold in these countries. I mean, when I was writing my book, Soda Politics, was right at the time that Coca-Cola, there were only a couple of countries in the world that still did not have Coca-Cola. One of them was being... Myanmar, formerly Burma. And there was the effort that Coca-Cola made to introduce Coca-Cola into Myanmar was astounding to me. First of all, they had to teach people how to like cold drinks because there was no history of drinking cold drinks in that country. And so they would teach people how to drink cold drinks. They had to I mean, they had to go through educational efforts, putting an enormous amount of money

into having the country open up to Coca-Cola. And, you know, and I saw this on a trip to India some years ago. There was a box of an American breakfast cereal on a shelf. And it was marketed as having the nutrition of two chapatis and being, better than Indian breakfast foods. So these are deliberate attempts to try to replace traditional foods in these countries with American ultra-process products. And that's a form of food colonialism. I don't know what you would call it. But it's certainly not good for the health of the people in those countries. Let's take a short break. If you're just

Joining us, my guest is Marion Nessel, a longtime food policy scholar, an author of What to Eat Now. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air, and today we're talking to Marian Nessel, a molecular biologist turned food policy advocate whose research and writing have shaped how Americans think about nutrition, marketing, and the power structures of the food industry. Have you done any research or study on the sufficient? of marketing to children today. I have a 12-year-old, so they don't watch TV. They're not in the same ways that I used to be marketed as a young person. It's not the same anymore. But they have

their favorite YouTube celebrities or their games, their video games and gamers. And are there any regulations about those spaces? And have you done any research about that type of marketing? I haven't personally done the research, but there are research studies coming out. one after another after another, a lot of them from the Rudd Center on food policy that looks at digital marketing to children, and it's horrifying. I mean, it's just absolutely gasp-inducing because we don't see it. As adults, we don't see it. We're not watching social influencers.

We're not watching AI algorithms. We're not watching any of this stuff aimed at. at getting kids to want products. And the level of sophistication of the marketing is extraordinary because it's algorithm run. And they can tell by the kinds of things that kids click on what they're interested in, and they feed them more and more about what they're interested in. And there are now influencers who were paid to market products, but they don't have to declare it. They're supposed to declare it, but they don't.

always, and there's very little monitoring of it. I mean, I think what's going on digitally is so beyond what most people can comprehend. Certainly it's beyond what I can comprehend. And I'm somebody who's been deep faked, where there's a deep fake ad going around on the internet that I didn't have anything to do with. And it looks like... That's you? And it looks like me, and it sounds like me, and I didn't do any of it. and what is it marketing it's marketing some kind of product um to or or an idea that you should fast and not eat breakfast i mean it's really weird um and it's impossible to get it taken down and it's all over the internet and it's not me but it sure looks like me and sounds like me

sort of um and so you know you have kids dragged into this and they're not capable of until they're 12, 14, 16 years old, really, of telling the difference between marketing and real content. You know, I know people always ask you, what do you eat? But I actually think I want to ask a different question, because I know that you've said that you're a total foodie who views food as one of life's greatest pleasures. I mean, and we all eat. But how do you maintain that joy while knowing everything that you know?

I just really love the taste of food. I really love it. I always have since I was a young child at a summer camp where I got to pick vegetables from a garden and discovered what real vegetables taste like. I've just loved them ever since. And, you know, good food is available everywhere, and I'm lucky enough and privileged enough to be able to afford. I don't eat that much anymore because I'm ancient, and I don't have much metabolism left. So my metabolism is so slowed down. I don't eat much, but I love to eat. But in general, I think you can eat healthfully at any grocery store in America. If it's got any kind of variety, you just have to know what to choose and know how to pick. But it asks a lot of the customer.

You have said something pretty astounding that's kind of been staying with me. I've heard you say this a couple of times that our food system is unfixable without a revolution. What would that revolution look like? Well, I think it would start with transforming our agricultural production system to one that was focused on food for people instead of animals and automobiles. We would need to change our electoral system so that we could elect officials who were interested in public health rather than corporate health. We would need to fix our economy so that Wall Street favors corporations who have social values and public health values as part of their corporate mission. those are revolutionary concepts at this point because they seem so far from what is attainable

but I think if we don't work on that now if we don't do what we can to advocate for a better food system we won't get it and it's only if we advocate for it that we have a chance of getting it and you never know sometimes you get lucky I mean, you know, it seems so daunting when you say all of those things, especially at this moment in the political climate that we're in at this time.

And I just wonder, what do you tell people on an individual level as they think about, well, what are the things that I can do to actually be a part of a bigger revolution to fix our food systems? Well, I tell people that they can't do it on their own, you know, that even the act of going into a grocery store and trying to make healthy choices means that you as an individual are up against an entire food system that is aimed at getting you to eat the most profitable foods possible, regardless of their effects on health and the environment. So you have to join organizations. You have to join with other people. who are interested in the same issues and concerned about the same problems and get together with them to set some goals for what you'd like to do

and then work towards those goals because if you don't do it, who will? Marian Nessel, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Marion Nessel is the author of What to Eat Now. Coming up, our film critic Justin Chang reviews the new film

sentimental value. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Four years after their Oscar-nominated comedy, the worst person in the world, the Danish-born Norwegian director Yol Kim Treir, and actor Renata Reitzvay, are together on a new drama, Sentimental Value. The movie, which also features Stellin Scarsguard and El Fanning, won the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and will represent Norway and this year's Oscar race for best international feature. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. Few filmmakers are as attuned as Joachim Trier to the inner lives of young people. In superb movies like Repreys, Oslo August 31st, and the worst person in the world, he has probed the artistic dreams and frustrated

desires of characters trying and often failing to figure out who they are. Trier's thoughtfulness is a parent, even in his more middling films, like the Jesse Eisenberg drama, louder than bombs, and the supernatural thriller Thelma, both of which were keyed in to the profound ways our families can mess us up. Complicated parent-child relationships are also at the heart of sentimental value, a new drama that many have hailed as Trier's best movie to date. But I've seen the film twice now, and although it's thoughtfully crafted and well-acted, it strikes me as one of Trier's lesser efforts, the kind of lofty, self-consciously mature work that often gets more praise than its richer, livelier predecessors.

Renata Reincefe, the radiant star of the worst person in the world, here plays Nora, an accomplished stage actor whose mother has recently died. As she grieves with her younger sister, Agnes, wonderfully played by Inga Ibsdaer Lilius, Nora must deal with the return of their long-estranged father, Gustav, played by Stellan Scarsguard. Gustav, a film director of some note, abandoned the family when the girls were still young. Now, years later, he surprises Nora by presenting her with a new script

and asking her to play the lead role. Nora turns him down, and so Gustav casts a Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp, played by L. Fanning. Gustav's movie is being financed by Netflix, which allows Trier to introduce some delectable film industry satire. Rachel is game, and loves Gustav's work, but she's clearly ill at ease with the material,

partly because she isn't Norwegian, and partly because the character seems based on Gustav's mother, who died tragically when he was just a boy. In this scene, Rachel meets with Nora, hoping to gain more insight into not only the role, but also Gustav's family dynamics. Why didn't you want to do the role? I can't work with him.

Why? We can't really talk. But he wanted you to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I just can't. I can't get a handle on her, you know?

The more that I study her, the more lost I feel trying to be her. It's like her sadness is, it's such an overwhelming part of her. In this scene and many others, Trier directs us to pay attention to his actor's shifting experience. expressions and silences. All the pointed things they leave unsaid. When Nora has an unexplained

attack of stage fright on the opening night of her play, we wonder if it's rooted in a certain ambivalence about acting, a profession that connects her to her father, whether she likes it or not. Agnes and Gustav get along better, possibly because she starred in one of his films when she was a young girl, a brief bonding experience that her sister never had. Gustav, it seems, is the kind of father who can only parent through a camera lens. It's bittersweet that he treats Rachel with a paternal warmth, that he seldom shows his own daughters. In the uniformly strong cast, I liked Fanning the best.

Her character has a bracing and very American directness that cuts through all the Rye Nordic Reserve. Trir clearly respects the audience's intelligence, which earns our respect in return. But for every sensitive, perceptive moment in sentimental value, there's another that feels coy, even complacent. Trir and his regular co-writer, Esquivote, seemed strangely and curious about their character's art.

I wanted to see more of Nora's acting, and to hear more of Gustav's script. In lieu of this, the movie floats a lot of whispery notions about how art and life converge. Even when artists turn out to be lousy parents, it suggests, art itself can be a vessel for reconciliation and healing. This idea is not exactly the stuff of revelation, and the movie basically rubber stamps it without developing or dramatizing it anew. A big part of the story involves the beloved family house where Nora and Agnes grew up, and which Gustav wants to use as the shooting location for his new film.

We're meant to see that our homes become repositories of memory, filled with the ghosts of generations past. But there's something a little precious about these themes, just as there's something pat and predictable about the way the drama resolves. In building toward a redemptive ending, sentimental value lets everyone off the hook too easily, especially Gustav. You can't blame Scarsguard, who plays the role with his typically irresistible, irascible charm. But it's hard not to feel that Trir, in indulging this character, is favoring the priorities of art over the tougher questions of life. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, a profile of Laura Lumer, the MAGA conspiracy theorist, who describes herself as President Trump's chief loyalty enforcer.

The New Yorker's Antonia Hitchens discusses how Lumer forged a close-eastern, alliance with Trump, got a Pentagon press pass, and loomered high-ranking government officials. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air. Freshire's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director, and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Baudinato,

Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaliner, Susan Nakindi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shurak directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.