A self-described culinary multitasker, Evan Kleiman has been a chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and today is known most readily as a longtime podcaster and KCRW radio host of “Good Food.” Her guruship and thoughtful transmissions with likeminded connoisseurs and chowhounds — from cooks and farmers to artists and scientists — has earned her the title as the “fairy godmother of the L.A. food scene,” according to one prominent and devout listener.
Kleiman is bringing her conversational interviewing style to the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) at UC Santa Barbara for a sitdown with Marion Nestle, a pioneering food-policy scholar and author of “Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America’s Favorite Breakfast Food” (University of California Press, 2026). Their talk, “Food and the Body: The Politics of What We Eat,” launches the IHC’s “Bodies Politic” speaker series. Free and open to the public, the event begins at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29 in the McCune Conference Room on the sixth floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Building.
“The book is about food marketing and the history of food regulation using cereal boxes to illustrate the stories,” Nestle said. “The cereal industry is in decline, mainly because Pop-Tarts and bagels are more convenient but also for all the reasons the food industry is in trouble: (Health and Human Services Secretary) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ‘the food industry is poisoning America,’ ultra-processed foods, GLP-1 drugs and inflation. Cereal companies are scrambling to keep up.”