New York Times bestselling author and food expert Mark Bittman talks about the history of human food consumption and how industrial agriculture has serious impacts on pollution, racism, and water degradation. Plus, he shares the first steps we can take to move away from destructive practices.
New York Times bestselling author and food expert Mark Bittman talks about the history of human food consumption and how industrial agriculture has serious impacts on pollution, racism, and water degradation. Plus, he shares the first steps we can take to move away from destructive practices.
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Heather Reisman:
Hi, I’m Heather Reisman, and this is Well Said, a podcast on the art and science of living well. This podcast is brought to you by Indigo.
My guest today is an expert on something that deeply affects us all: food. Mark Bittman writes all about what we eat, what we should be eating, and how we came to eat the way we do. He is the author of over 30 books on food, including The New York Times bestselling series How to Cook Everything. And he has been a leading voice when it comes to talking food for decades. His latest book is titled Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal. There’s lots to discuss today, and I’m delighted to welcome Mark to our podcast.
Mark, thank you so much for being here.
Mark Bittman:
I’m happy to be here, Heather. Thanks for having me.
Heather Reisman:
OK. Let’s start with the title: Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal. We rarely see all these words together in a sentence, let alone a title. So set the table for us, so to speak. What do you want people to take away from this book once they’ve read it?
Mark Bittman:
I would like everybody to consider what is food for. Because if you ask yourself what food is for, or what agriculture is for, the answer is to nourish people. That’s why we grow food: to nourish people. So if you start with that, and you look at the food system, and you say, “Is it meeting its goal?” the answer is “No.” So then what has to be done to make the answer closer to “Yes”? What do we want from a food system?
Heather Reisman:
So what is it we want from a food system?
Mark Bittman:
So what do we want from a food system? We want to provide as many people as possible with nutritious food with a minimal impact on the environment and, let’s say, minimal impact on other species. I think we also want to be fair to workers. So the short version of that is you want food that’s fair, affordable, nutritious, and green. It pretty much boils down to that. That’s four pillars—we rarely see even one in today’s food system. Workers are treated barely; we’re poisoning the environment; hundreds of millions of people are being sickened by the food they eat, that is developing chronic illness; it’s affordable, so we’ll give it that, it’s largely affordable.
Heather Reisman:
That’s actually a very helpful way for us to think about the food we are choosing to buy—under four pillars or headings. Is it: fair, affordable, nutritious, and green? And as I’m saying these, I realize that—I guess you did this without intention but—you’ve created an acronym for us: fang, F-A-N-G; fair, affordable, nutritious, green. OK, it’s in my head now.
So let’s move a little bit forward in your thinking and explore this issue of junk food. What do you consider junk food, and why is it junk?
Mark Bittman:
I mean, I call it junk. You can call it ultra-processed food or hyper-processed food, or fake food, or whatever you want to call it. But junk food—and you know, we’re talking about sweetened breakfast cereals, we’re talking about white bread, we’re talking about chicken McNuggets, snack foods, soda—that stuff was invented mostly in the 20th century. It was literally invented. After eating the same food for 10,000 years or longer, we invented a bunch of new stuff in the last 100 years. And that’s the stuff that’s making us sick. The net result is that a third of the American population is diabetic or pre-diabetic, many of us have chronic diseases that are diet-related. All of this stuff comes from the way we grow, process, and eat.
We know what real food is. Real food is usually a single ingredient, or a product made from two or three ingredients, that’s been produced by humans for thousands of years. We’ve been doing agriculture. We’ve been cooking for millions of years. We’ve been doing agriculture for 10,000 years.
Heather Reisman:
So what constitutes good food or what we sometimes call real food? What should we be filling our shopping carts, our tables, and our bodies with?
Mark Bittman:
Real food starts with food that doesn’t have any labels at all. Broccoli doesn’t have labels; meat doesn’t have labels; dairy doesn’t have labels. Plants, no plants—you don’t need a label on dried beans, you don’t need a label on brown rice. And so on. We’re talking about single ingredients, mostly plants, and that’s what we know we should be eating the most of. But we’re talking about things that were not invented in the last 100 years, things that have existed for 10,000 years or millions of years.
Heather Reisman:
That’s easy. You want us to buy food that we know has existed, essentially, for thousands of years: what people have always eaten.
So while we’re on that subject, how do you feel about frozen food? I mean, assuming that what we’re freezing falls into that category that you just mentioned of food that has existed, is that OK?
Mark Bittman:
It’s great. You know, processing is not necessarily a bad thing. When we say junk food, we mostly mean ultra-processed, hyper-processed, over-processed, whatever. But canning vegetables, putting fruits in jars, that’s processing too. Frozen food is great. And we’re talking about—just to be clear—we’re talking about taking an ingredient and freezing it—like frozen peas. We’re not talking about frozen peas with weird cheese sauce that’s sold by Birds Eye or Green Giant or whatever.
Heather Reisman:
OK. Let’s turn a bit now to how we make food, and in particular the big point you’re making in the book about how our modern industrialized farming and our food processing system has actually become quite problematic. What are the issues, exactly?
Mark Bittman:
You can’t pin a date on when industrialization began, but it began in earnest in the late 18th, early 19th century. And farms were industrialized very soon after that. And farms became factories in the 19th century. The terrible genius of early industrialization was that workers could be unskilled, and that workers could be replaced as easily as parts on a machine. That was the idea. And that happened in farming also.
And in farming it has not had good results. We’ve seen that agriculture has contributed to gender differences, to slavery and racism. It’s contributed to the deterioration of our environment. It’s contributed to the acceleration of the use of resources. It’s contributed to pollution—not only through the use of fossil fuels but through the use of pesticides, which are targeted, or supposedly targeted, but which are chemical killers. It’s contributed to the degradation of water. It’s contributed to a huge public health crisis.
Heather Reisman:
So basically, you’re telling us that our current industrial food manufacturing system, perhaps not initially conceived to cause so much harm to our health and the planet, actually needs to be rethought, almost from end to end.
So let’s go to the next big idea in the book. What you are suggesting is a better way for us to be growing and processing our food—something you call “agroecology.” Tell us about that.
Mark Bittman:
It’s a very 20th-century concept. People talk about sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture. Agroecology is the best term I know to describe where we need to go in growing food. It’s the combination of agriculture and ecology. It’s understanding the impact that agriculture has on everything else and trying to use that understanding for everyone’s benefit.
Heather Reisman:
So if I could understand, when you talk about “everything else”: the impact of agriculture on the quality of our soil, on our environment, on the people who are affected, and the people who eat it. Would that be a fair way to think about it?
Mark Bittman:
It is fair; it’s a good start. But I mean everything from rocks to you and me. I mean, agriculture affects everything on Earth. I mean, there are billions of species; we’ve made extinct millions of them, much of that through agriculture. We’re threatening to make more of them extinct. And we threaten our own lives. We’ve polluted water; we’ve polluted air. We have eroded soil and polluted soil. We have tortured animals. We’ve done all of these things in the name of feeding ourselves. And in part we’ve done it out of a notion of progress but also out of ignorance.
But now we actually understand the impact of agriculture. We understand the impact of feeding ourselves. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. It’s time for us to say, “We know what the impact of agriculture is, and what it could be, and it’s time to start moving in the direction of doing it better.” We really haven’t done that.
Heather Reisman:
What about food waste? How big a problem is food waste? I was quite shocked, recently, to read that the average household of four is throwing away approximately $1,800 of food a year. So how big a problem do you think food waste is, relative to the larger environmental issues which you raise?
Mark Bittman:
I’m not encouraging people to throw food out. And I try not to throw food out. And believe me, I was brought up not to waste food. I try not to waste food, I cook leftovers, I cook from leftovers. And so I don’t want to encourage people to waste food. By all means, use all your food; don’t throw food out, etc. And I also don’t want to make it our problem that the state of Iowa—one of the most powerful agricultural states, the most powerful agriculture state, maybe aside from California, in the United States—is essentially wasting most of its land in growing corn and soybeans for junk food, for animal feed, and even for gasoline for our cars in the form of ethanol. I mean, that is a serious waste; we’re talking millions and millions and millions of acres. I mean, if the average person wastes a pound or two of food a week, that is a shame but that’s not a waste on the scale of wasting huge landscapes in order to grow things that aren’t good for us.
Heather Reisman:
You do write about how our concepts of social structure are deeply related to the evolution of agriculture—from the idea of patriarchal societies, to class-based societies, and even the disenfranchisement of Indigenous people. How did moving from foraging to our current, or evolved, form of farming lead to all of this?
Mark Bittman:
Agriculture is about 10,000 years old. When agriculture became successful, or more successful, populations grew and surplus grew. And surplus encouraged the formation of accumulation and of really a ruling class, a class structure, an elite group within society. It encouraged the development people who work for others, and also people who enslave others.
I mean, you can pick almost any subject you want. If you want to talk about slavery, sugar was developed in Asia, and as sugar moved west—through the Mediterranean, through the Atlantic, across the Atlantic to the West Indies or the Caribbean, and to North America and South America—as sugar moved west, slavery moved west with it. Sugar production is extremely labour intensive. No one wants to do it unless they are forced to. It uses soil very quickly, and so it has to keep moving. And it uses labour very intensively. And so since it is so profitable, it became a business where wealthy people used slaves in order to produce sugar. And this led to the slave trade, as we know it—the sort of triangle between Africa, the so-called New World, and the so-called mother countries, mostly England but others as well. And that lasted for two or three hundred years.
Heather Reisman:
I feel like you want us to understand, and you’re helping us understand, that in our evolution, and in particular to modern day industrialized agriculture, the driving force was ever greater efficiency, ever greater value creation for the people at the top who owned the industrial capabilities, at the expense of the people who were doing the work, and at the expense of the environment.
Mark Bittman:
That is spot on. I think it’s not a coincidence that we’re North Americans, you and I and most of the people listening to this, but this was ground zero for industrial agriculture. That’s the formation of wealth in the 20th century, and that’s the foundation of our food system in the 20th century—was land being used to grow crops for profit by white men, and mostly for the benefit of other white men.
Heather Reisman:
Of the foods we eat, which are, in your view, most harmful to the planet?
Mark Bittman:
Well, there’s no question there. And that’s cattle kept in feedlots. They use the most resources to produce the beef that we eat. And they produce the most greenhouse gases of any animal or any form of agriculture, as far as I know. In order of environment damage, it’s kind of: cows, pigs, chicken, fish. Those are the most damaging to the environment. And maybe not as bad for our health as we originally thought, but overeating of animal products is a problem in the United States.
Heather Reisman:
And what’s your view about organically grown food—not just in terms of our own diet but in terms of being respectful of the planet? And that is, you know, we’re talking about farming that does not use pesticides, or farming that is very conscious of crop rotation as opposed to monocultures. How important is this?
Mark Bittman:
Now we can refine the conversation. What makes food even better? An organic food is, generally speaking, better than not-organic food. It’s better for the Earth; certainly better for the workers who are exposed to fewer pesticides; it’s better for eaters who will have less pesticide residue on their foods. But it’s important to remember that organic junk food is still junk food.
I want to go back to the term agroecology. Because agroecology encompasses organic, it encompasses regenerative, but it also recognizes that the first steps in making a good form of agriculture—the first steps indeed are reducing pesticide use, treating the soil better, using more compost, and so on—but good agriculture also means treating agricultural workers well. Good agriculture also means producing nutritious food for people that everyone can afford. And organic does not really address those issues. And it’s important to see the development of good agriculture as an evolution.
It’s an evolution from, say, the level of eliminating pesticides or reducing pesticides, but at the other end of the spectrum is getting land into the hands of people who want to farm it well; treating people who were working the land well; restoring dignity to agriculture; producing affordable good food for everyone; and so on. And that’s a far cry from what organic means.
Heather Reisman:
Are you optimistic at all that we will see an increasing move away from our mass love affair with hamburgers, hotdogs, steak, etc.?
Mark Bittman:
I guess I would say I’m hopeful. I’m not blindly optimistic, or sanguine I guess is the word. But I’m hopeful. I don’t expect to live to see massive changes in our diet. But I think there are changes that could happen in the next few years that will point the way towards doing things better, and hopefully they’ll encourage people to take the next steps.
We do know what the first steps are. And they’re cutting back on pesticides. They’re regulating the consumption of junk food. They’re teaching children about food. They’re producing less carbon. They’re making more land available to farmers who want to farm well.
Heather Reisman:
So help us here, Mark. Give us some steps, some specific steps of what we can do.
Mark Bittman:
Support your local farmer. Join a CSA. Eat better, as we’ve been discussing—all those kinds of things that you can do personally. Don’t aim for global change but show that change is possible around food. So some of the things I was just talking about—a higher minimum wage, justice for Black farmers, better treatment of farm workers in general, broader availability of fruits and vegetables—those kinds of things are achievable now, in the next one to five years, say. And they will show us what the next logical steps are after that. Until we get onto this road, we don’t know what’s 100 yards down the road. We’re barely on the road; that’s the problem.
Heather Reisman:
Well, that’s why we love your book. And that’s why I think it’s so important that people take the time to really excavate this entire idea around the food system.
[music]
Heather Reisman:
Before we finish, just a few fun questions.
Mark Bittman:
I’m up for some fun.
Heather Reisman:
What are you cooking right now? Like you’re home, you’re in COVID mode, what’s your go-to food that you’re making?
Mark Bittman:
Well, it’s winter. So there’s a lot of mashed roots in my diet these days. I actually feel this kind of odd affinity to my freezer and to the root vegetables that are in my refrigerator. And I wind up eating a lot of that. So I do a lot of cooking and it’s kind of what’s in the refrigerator. So I try to live by the principles we were talking about before. I try to eat seasonally and regionally. And I try to eat food that’s really close to the source.
Heather Reisman:
Last question. What does purposeful living, living with intention, mean to you?
Mark Bittman:
Well, I think that goes back to this thing about both ecology and about ignorance. I think we know a lot more than any humans who have ever lived. And we need to apply that knowledge. That knowledge has come to us largely through science, and through a study of history. And we need to apply that knowledge to society at-large and to our daily lives as well. So a lot of that is about diet. But, you know, the original meaning of diet was what we would now say lifestyle: how do you live. And I think if we live with intent, we think about what we want and how we want to live on this Earth, and try to live that way. It’s not always easy but that’s the best we can do.
Heather Reisman:
I love that answer.
Mark Bittman:
Good (laughs). Good.
Heather Reisman:
We’re in this moment when we can be deliberative and make a decision to come out of this pandemic with more intention. And I think people are feeling that. So thank you.
Mark Bittman:
Yes, I hope so. I hope so.
Heather Reisman:
It’s been a joy to talk to you, Mark. I am so grateful that you invested the time to write this book. And it’s a book that will have a long life. So thank you. Thank you for doing it.
Mark Bittman:
I hope you’re right. And thank you for saying that. It’s been a great interview, really enjoyable.
Heather Reisman:
Thank you for tuning in to our conversation with Mark Bittman. For more ideas to help you live well, including the book featured in this episode, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, visit indigo.ca/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Well Said was produced for Indigo Inc. by Vocal Fry Studios and is hosted by me, Heather Reisman.