Mark Bittman
Mark Bittman examines the intersection of food, farming, and public policy, urging a rethink of agriculture to tackle chronic health issues and steep healthcare costs. He’s the author of 30 books and hosts the podcast “Food with Mark Bittman.”
Transcript
Mark Bittman:
At no point did someone say, "I have this evil notion, I'm going to invent food that makes people sick." It was: we can grow more food, we can make more money, we can be more efficient, et cetera, et cetera, if we do these things. But the ultimate upshot of these things has been a supermarket filled with food that really you don't want to eat.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. I love to cook and unfortunately, I'm not a great cook, so I have to rely on experts to help and maybe no one more than Mark Bittman. My copy of "How to Cook Everything" is well-worn and heavily bookmarked. But while I'm no stranger to his cookbook, it is Mark's writing on sustainability and food policy that make him such a great guest for our podcast. Make no mistake---food is political. The systems behind how we feed ourselves impacts almost everything including our health, climate, labor, and agriculture in this country. Beneath every conversation about restaurants or recipes, there's a deeper discussion to be had that often isn't happening. Mark is well known for his work with the New York Times, he's authored 30 books, won six James Beard Awards, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Bittman Project, where he explores what's broken in the food world and how to change things for the better, and that's exactly what we discussed in this episode. I think you'll really enjoy what's coming up.
Mark, thanks for joining us. I'm thrilled to have you on and I'm going to show you why I'm thrilled to have you on is because I have this here--- "How to Cook Everything."
Mark Bittman:
I know it well. Oh, nicely done.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Highly marked, just to prove that it's been used. That is one of the reasons I'm so excited to talk to you, is that this is the Bible in my kitchen.
Mark Bittman:
I'm so glad to hear it. Thank you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You, Mark, started as a general assignment reporter and ended up writing a cookbook and that, I think---and tell me if this is wrong---was sort of a major deviation in your career in that it led you down that path. And I'm wondering what drew you to food initially?
Mark Bittman:
In the early seventies, I was part of a group that did tenant organizing, community organizing in Somerville, Mass, and I was a terrible community organizer. I don't really like to talk to strangers, which is really, so I was a failure and someone asked me if I wanted to do the newspaper and I learned a lot, including how to write and edit. It wasn't like someone strapped my career to a rocket ship. It took a long time of plotting away and writing stories about everything, from the Yale strike in New Haven in 1984 for Business Week. And in the same year I wrote about home lock repair. I mean, just all kinds of all over the place, crazy stuff, but always there was food and wine and travel sort of in the same part of the same package and gradually that became where I focused.
Ted Roosevelt V:
But was there something about food, travel, and wine that sort of sung to you in particular?
Mark Bittman:
Well, I mean the perks are a lot better than writing about labor or strife, I can say.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Fair enough.
Mark Bittman:
I did love cooking. I do love cooking. I still cook just about every day and it's got something to do with steadying me down and keeping me sane.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What's interesting about your career is that it was food that I think initially started to cause your success, but as you continued, you widened the aperture. And you've described food as a linchpin issue before, that it impacts almost everything: climate, economics, health and labor... Was that part of a plan or was that sort of something that happened gradually over time?
Mark Bittman:
I mean, I wish I could say it was a plan, but when I was writing exclusively about food and travel, there were a few years where I felt like I wasn't doing the best work that I could possibly be doing. And then I'd say after 10 years, 15 years of doing it, I thought, actually teaching people how to cook is a really noble thing to do. It took me a while to figure that out, but then in the late nineties, early two thousands, the links between the way the food system had gone and personal health had become stark, and then not long thereafter, the links between agriculture and climate change became stark, and then it didn't take too long to put all of these things together and to see one of the most important systems and industries that humans have created agriculture and it's contributing to chronic disease at an unprecedented rate. It's one of the biggest contributors to climate change and other environmental damage. Seven of the ten worst paying jobs in the United States are in or related to food. And you just saw that this industry had gotten to a place where the profit motive had gone so haywire that the growing and producing and delivering and cooking, et cetera, of food--- the only question that was really being asked was, how much money can we make? Not, what's the benefit to the people? And this is not the same as furniture or cars or anything else. This is essential to life and we're producing it in a way that makes us sick. That's just completely backwards.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah. How is food making us sick these days?
Mark Bittman:
Every single, original, traditional diet, and you have to go back at this point---in much of the world, you have to go back 100-150 years to see what a traditional diet looks like---but every traditional diet leads to better health at this point than the contemporary American diet. So something is wrong. Some combination of forces has made it so that diet-related chronic disease---and that's led by diabetes, which the rates of which have tripled in our lifetimes. Type two diabetes used to be called adult onset diabetes because kids never got it, and kids--- now it's called type two diabetes because kids get it and kids get it from eating something, and it's not one magic ingredient. It may well be the whole category called ultra-processed foods, but what is clear is that if we ate fruits and vegetables and meat from... that's not industrially raised meat and less of it and wild caught fish and nuts and seeds and that kind of stuff, as close to a natural state as possible, we'd be better off. That much is clear. "Why" is not entirely clear, and to what extent do you need to move in that direction isn't entirely clear.
Ted Roosevelt V:
First of all, I love the framing that we don't exactly know what the implications are because it's easy to come up with villains and to sort of misdirect the response as a result of having come up with villains.
Mark Bittman:
Sure.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Some of the origins of ultra-processed foods comes from when the tobacco companies bought some of the food manufacturers and they were very effective at identifying fat and sodium, hyper-palatable foods, and it created that addictive urge to go have another Oreo, even though you were probably full. Is that where you feel like the industry of food started to go wrong or did it happen before that?
Mark Bittman:
It happened before that. I mean, that's the sophisticated, 21st century started late 20th century marketing. For sure they've adopted the tobacco companies' playbook, not only in figuring out how to make the food hyper-palatable, but also in marketing to children and marketing to people who are inclined to buy junk food. There's a way in which you could say it started innocently enough as so many things have. There were problems with famine, with people finding enough food to eat, and you can trace that back to the invention of agriculture. There's a hilarious piece by Jared Diamond written 30-40 years ago called something like "The Biggest Mistake Humans Ever Made," and it's the invention of agriculture. And then in the late 19th century, when chemical fertilizers were invented. So the problem with growing lots and lots and lots of food is that the soil becomes tired, and if you don't let the soil rest, then it's less productive and you ultimately have smaller and smaller, worse and worse crops.
Chemical fertilizer at least temporarily reversed that situation. So you could say, wow, we have this chemical, put it in the soil, we can grow stuff forever. That turns out not to be true, but we'll put that aside. What happened was there are surpluses of grains and the question became what to do with all of these grains? And part of that became milling and processing and the nutrients were separated out from their original ingredients and the products that we were eating. And this began with Wonder Bread---I mean, wonder Bread's always the sort of perfect example---but white bread, it's a mixture of highly, highly refined flour with the nutrients put back into it, but in chemical form and some sugar to make it palatable and some preservatives to make sure it lasts for a long time. At no point did someone say, I have this evil notion, I'm going to invent food that makes people sick. It was: we can grow more food, we can make more money, we can be more efficient, et cetera, et cetera, if we do these things. But the ultimate upshot of "these things" has been a supermarket filled with food that really you don't want to eat.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It makes me think of one of the framings I'm sure you've heard, is this idea that we have industrial agriculture and the food industry that we have because it lowers the cost of food and that if we didn't have it, the cost of food would be higher and maybe unaffordable for some people. It strikes me that might be a false narrative.
Mark Bittman:
It's an incomplete narrative. Let's suppose that all of that's true. If we grew food better, it would be more expensive. Our healthcare costs, which are $5 trillion a yea, would decrease proportionally to the amount of money that we're spending on food. So my contention, and actually I've started a nonprofit to sort of try to demonstrate this, but my contention is for every dollar that you spend on making food better, you're saving a dollar or more on making people healthier. And if 60% of our healthcare costs are the result of chronic disease and is diet related, and I think both of those numbers are defensible, then you're talking about trillions of dollars that are being spent on disease that results from people from us, all of us eating badly.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And just for listeners that might want to learn more about this, you mentioned your foundation. Are there other groups that have done good work on this that they could go research?
Mark Bittman:
Marion Nestle's written extensively on this kind of stuff. Michael Pollan of course--- his "Omnivore's Dilemma" is seminal, but you could go back to Francis Moore Lappé's "Diet For A Small Planet." 1971, she saw this coming and basically said, we can't feed everyone on the planet the way Americans are eating. That can't be way things go because it's ecologically unsustainable and it's bad for our health. So a lot of this is not new, but the thinking around it is becoming, I think, more nuanced, more sophisticated
Ted Roosevelt V:
Referencing people talking about this in the seventies, and we're 50 years later now, how hard it is to get people to change their food behavioral patterns that not only are they sort of habits that get formed over time, not only are we playing on things like hyper-palatable foods, it's started to become a political identifier in some ways. You know, "Do you eat a lot of red meat? Are you a vegan?"... Do you have thoughts about why that's happened and why it's so hard to get people to change their eating patterns?
Mark Bittman:
How do you get people to change their habits around anything is a tough question. You would get to some kind of conclusion like, well, you tax junk food and you use those taxes to subsidize the development of more real food. And I think that is one way of looking at it. I think it's less about people's demands and people's wants and people's behaviors than it is about supply. And the more that we allow big farmers to grow corn and soybeans, the more we build our infrastructure around just two or three or four crops, the more important it is for the industry to then find products to make out of those two or three or four crops and the farther away from a natural state those crops are. Even if an industry is cooperative and the food industry has not been, but there have been some, let's say, well-intentioned boards of directors and CEOs within the food industry, it's almost impossible for them to change because the whole infrastructure is built around processing these very few ingredients, turning them into hyper-palatable food, selling them inexpensively at high profit margins and in great quantities.
And that's a very, very complicated system to unmake and it has to be unmade through policy. We agree that it's important that people in this country eat well. What does eating well mean? What does agriculture have to look like for us to do that? They are tough, long range questions that have to be carefully considered and are along the lines of: how do you turn around climate change? How do you build a transportation system that doesn't damage the planet? How do you do all these kind of big picture things that many of which we've gone about in kind of the wrong way to protect the environment and to protect our own health?
Ted Roosevelt V:
Another piece of legislation that passes traditionally every five years is probably one of the most important bills that Congress passes that nobody ever or a lot of people don't talk about, is the Farm Bill.
Mark Bittman:
No one understands either.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Nobody understands it, but it has a massive influence. Talk about the Farm Bill. Talk about why it's important.
Mark Bittman:
Marion Nestle, who I mentioned before, who was really the doyenne of understanding food and politics in this country, told me that she once taught a course on the Farm Bill and she felt like she understood it less well at the end of the course than she did at the beginning. So it's really complicated stuff. I mean, it's a fundamental piece of policy that determines what gets encouraged to be grown and what doesn't. It is a vehicle by which we could change things if it were to be treated as a new piece of legislation. It doesn't get passed every five years. It's supposed to get passed every five years, usually gets passed every six years, and I think this time around it's going to be seven years---but it almost always has only cosmetic changes. And that's because the SNAP program, the food stamp program is integrated into the Farm Bill. And so the mostly farm state Republicans who want to keep the Farm Pill pretty much at status quo because their constituents, or their wealthiest constituents, are big farmers support the bill for those reasons. And the mostly coastal urban Democrats who do not want to see the food stamp program dismantled or lessened, defend the farm bill for that reason. So there's been this great compromise for generations at this point around the Farm Bill that has made it so that nothing more than cosmetic changes are ever made to it. It's a bizarre circumstance.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Are there obvious changes to the Farm Bill if you were to put on a legislator's hat that you would like to see happen?
Mark Bittman:
Well, sure. There are billions of dollars being given in subsidies to people who just own land and don't farm it, or to big farmers who don't need subsidies. The biggest thing historically--- USDA is the research and development king of agriculture. On top of everything else it does, it determines to a large extent, is support the development of the kind of agriculture that's most efficient and certainly most profitable. The kind of agriculture that led to the Dust Bowl, the kind of agriculture that has led to consolidation of farms and to an ever increasingly large agricultural industry. Bery, very little money crumbs off the table has been put into researching what agriculture might look like if it were done, A) to minimize environmental impact and B) to produce crops that made people healthy and research is needed to figure that out.
If that research were done, I'm quite sure we could start to turn this ship around. Having USDA be impartial in this struggle and say, okay, we're not going to side with big food or whatever you want to call it. We're going to just look at how can we do the best food system possible. We're going to start doing that research. That would be a huge, huge step. It goes back to organizing: how are we organizing, how we get representatives who really represent us and care about what's right and want to make this planet and country habitable and healthy and a place where there's wellbeing for most people. It's a lot about food, but it's obviously not only about food.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I hear you focusing back on federal policies as a significant determinant in how we allocate these resources, and I feel like that invites RFK Jr into the room, and I'd like to understand how you think about him and the way that he's talking about things like ultra-processed foods.
Mark Bittman:
I don't think he has a plan for tackling ultra processed foods. I don't think he's thought about the kinds of things I was just talking about, about supply and regulation. I think what's likely is he will attack poor people's ability to buy food in the way that they want to, and he'll do that by saying, "you can't use food stamps to buy soda or you can't use food stamps to buy junk food." Now, that's a nuanced argument and there's some logic in saying, this is federal money. We don't want it being spent on junk food. But if you're that anti-junk food on a federal level, then you have to go much deeper than saying, we're going to restrict poor people's freedoms or the freedoms of people who are dependent on SNAP dollars or food stamps to buy food because we don't think they should be entitled to buy the same food that everybody else is buying. If that food is bad, let's address that issue. And I don't think he's credible. And even if he was credible, I don't think he'd be allowed to be credible because no one in the administration is going to be veering far off of the party line. And we've seen that it's only six weeks since inauguration, and we've barely seen any deviation from anybody on that side of the aisle as they used to call it. Everybody's fallen into line. And he will, or he'll be fired.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah, I mean, we did have a moment in US history with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which did lead to Theodore Roosevelt passing the Pure Food and Drug Act, which became the origins of the FDA, which helped set a standard for food safety. Maybe looking back on that, it was---it's trite to think of that problem relative to the problems we're facing now in food industry, but there have been moments where significant things have happened from the federal government that have changed the course of the food industry.
Mark Bittman:
I mean, that 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act was really an alliance between industry and the federal government because there were people in industry who wanted things to be standardized because it was to their advantage. So fine, whatever the motives were, a good thing came out of it. But now you're not going to have that kind of alliance between industry and the federal government that says, let's modify the food system so that it produces better health for Americans. It's got to be an alliance between the population and the federal government. It's got to be that we put in place a federal government that prioritizes the majority's wellbeing over industry's wellbeing.
Ted Roosevelt V:
We've talked a lot about grains, less about meat, but that's as a big a part of the problem--- and it may a bigger part of the problem. Certainly from a climate perspective, I would argue it's a bigger part of the problem.
Mark Bittman:
Something has to happen with all of those grains that are being grown. They have to go someplace. So here's where they go. In the United States, 40% of corn goes to make ethanol. So the renewable fuel standard is a subsidy for corn growers that doesn't do anyone any good. No one, except for the people who are making money off of it. And then about 30% of all grains go to produce animal feed, and about 30% go to produce junk food---not even really ultra-processed food, but we're talking about Doritos and Cheetos and bubble gum and stuff. If you're going to build an agricultural system that's reliant on grains, then somehow those grains have to be put to use. And in a way, one of the most convenient things you can do with those grains is to feed them to animals because animals concentrate the grains and concentrate their value. So there's a reason a pound of beef is 10 times as expensive as a pound of corn. You have to put that corn into that beef to sell that beef. Living animals have become a convenient way to use the grains that are being grown in such proliferation and then turn them into product. So we have, as a result, very, very--- on a global comparative scale---very inexpensive meat. From an environmental perspective, it's disastrous because the estimate for industrial production of animals in terms of greenhouse gas production is in the two digits. It's from 15 to say 30 or 35% of greenhouse gases come from industrial production of animals. So you could argue that meat isn't bad for you and on an individual scale that's right. I do think that's right. But it's bad for us, collectively. It's an industry that's harmful to the planet and ultimately harmful to our personal health.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, it's interesting--- you talk about the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that come from livestock production, and it's close to the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions that come from transportation. We talk about transportation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions all the time. It's much less common a conversation that you hear about reducing the meat production.
Mark Bittman:
Yeah, that was a turning point for me was that recognition that beef especially is just almost as big a contributor to greenhouse gases as cars. And that came to my attention in 2006 or 7. Now, that's 20 years ago, and not much has changed.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So I talk to a friend of mine who's more conservative than I am, and he's open to sort of all conversations around climate change, but the one that shuts him down the fastest is when I talk about meat consumption and the idea that he might have to eat less red meat.
Mark Bittman:
"Man, you're going to take away our cheeseburgers."
Ted Roosevelt V:
"You're going to take away my cheeseburger," and "I'll give you solar, I'll give you wind, I'll give you whatever you want, but I'm not giving up my cheeseburger." [laughter] And I am sort of intrigued by how polarizing that food and red meat---maybe it's red meat in particular, but how polarized it makes people.
Mark Bittman:
People take their diet personally, for sure. There's an old saying, which is kind of grim, but I somehow am attached to it, which is: progress happens one funeral at a time. If we educate children about what real food is and what a sane diet is, then before we know it, they're going to be 40 year olds and they're going to be the people who are determining what a common diet is. I don't expect your friend or you or me or most people we know to suddenly turn around and say, okay, I'm giving up meat, or I'm only eating totally unprocessed foods because we were brought up to eat a certain way and those are really hard habits to shake. I think this is a 50 year struggle. We created industrial agriculture, we created this food system. We can uncreate it, but it's not like anyone's going to snap their fingers.
That's the sort of RFK illusion, is this: "oh, here's this guy who really cares about industrially produced food or ultra-processed foods, he's going to fix it." He's not. It's going to take a serious look at what are diets like, what our public health system is like, how we want to raise people, and how we want to raise food. And that's got to start with a long series of serious conversations that we really---I mean, you and I can have them, and I have this conversation all the time, but it's got to start with these conversations being elevated to a policy level. What do we want the healthcare system to look like in the United States 50 years from now, and how can we get to that place? And the answer to that primarily is grow good food. We don't even have a sophisticated western-style health system in place yet. But when we do and when we look at it and we say, what if we don't want to spend five or 10 trillion a year on healthcare, what's the number one thing we could address to raise people who are going to mature into healthy adults who are still healthy in their forties and seventies and even eighties? And the answer to that is good diet. And the answer to that is, what's our agricultural system look like?
Ted Roosevelt V:
Mark, we started this conversation with your seminal cookbook, "How to Cook Everything." Why I was excited to have this conversation is that your looking at all this started with a very narrow focus on cooking and expanded to something that is much larger and as your voice has become a powerful one in this conversation, and so you've taken something as---I'll call it, as simple as a cookbook, but I know it wasn't simple to do---but as simple as a cookbook, and it has really catalyzed you to be what I'll call a good citizen, because it's the name of the podcast, but to be a good citizen. And I'm wondering what you think it is to be a good citizen.
Mark Bittman:
It's so corny, but I honestly think at this point it means being involved in local affairs and involved in national affairs. And that means talking to people who are running for office or running for office yourself and making sure that they have the kind of values that you believe in. I'll say that for the first time, I talked to my---and I live upstate in a really, really small town, a really small county---and I talked to our local party chair just to say, where do we start? How do we rebuild this thing? And I think the question of wellbeing for everybody is the underlying question. It's somehow getting past your own self and thinking that "rising tide lifts all boats" thing really is true, but it's not a trickle down thing, it's a bottom up thing. It's like--- if everybody does well, then we're part of that everybody that's doing well, and how do we get to that place?
Ted Roosevelt V:
Mark, I have really enjoyed this conversation. I'm not surprised by how much I enjoyed this conversation, but I very much did. So thank you very much, Mark.
Mark Bittman:
Thanks for having me. I could tell it would be good. So I'm glad it was fun for both of us.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That was such a great discussion. Thank you, Mark, for joining me and sharing your expertise with us. I know I'm going to be thinking a lot more about the deep connections among food culture and American politics. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, you'll also want to follow Mark's podcast, "Food with Mark Bittman." Check out his writing on food and books like "How to Eat" and "Animal, Vegetable, Junk," and of course, pick yourself up a copy of one of Mark's numerous cookbooks. I can speak from experience when I say you won't regret it.
Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.
