If food system isn’t fixed, we face disaster, author says

Mark Bittman already disappointed in President Biden’s administration

Few people have had as much to say about the American diet as Mark Bittman.

Between his bestselling cookbooks, four television series and 30-year run covering food for The New York Times, Bittman, 71, entrenched himself in America’s kitchens. But his latest tome goes further than teaching readers what to eat and why. With a multi-millennial sweep, he uses cuisine to track the evolution of Homo sapiens through imperialism and colonization to today.

The central takeaway from “Animal, Vegetable, Junk” is that if society doesn’t fix its food system — and everything tied up in it, including the environment, human rights and democracy itself — it faces disaster.

Bittman spoke recently about history, the future and what he hopes the Biden administration will do to change it.

’em or you don’t. Think of soil as a pantry. If you have a pantry, and you keep taking things out of it, and you don’t put new things into it, it runs out. When we do monoculture and grow one crop at a time, we don’t really pay attention to replenishing the soil. The soil then becomes less and less healthy and eventually production drops no matter how many chemicals you pour into it.

To say things like the earth is finite in its gifts sounds a little woo-woo, but the earth is finite in its gifts.

A: Slavery too. Sugar is very labor-intensive, and as sugar moved west, so did slavery. Often indigenous people, indentured servants, prisoners of war and anyone who could be forced to do sugar growing and sugar processing was forced. When those people ran out — and in part they ran out because indigenous people in North and South America died — that’s when the slave trade began.

Mark Bittman, author of “Animal, Vegetable, Junk”: “To say things like the earth is finite in its gifts sounds a little woo-woo, but the earth is finite in its gifts.” NIKKI KAHN/WASHINGTON POST 2013

By Mark Bittman; Mariner Books, 384 pages, $28

A: Not a great number of Americans go hungry, but many are malnourished. They’re eating calories of the wrong type that promote disease rather than health. We know there is overuse of antibiotics in the food supply, and people are getting sick. But they could get sick at a much greater rate because of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. There are carcinogenic pesticides being used indiscriminately, and those pesticides are going to kill a certain number of us. Same with industrial production of animals. They poison land and water. They’re making land uninhabitable.

A: In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission was really ramping up to rein in marketing of junk to children. That was the heyday of “Gee, maybe we don’t want to encourage our kids to believe that Tony the Tiger is their best friend, that Coke is the optimal drink and that McDonald’s is the funnest place to eat.”

The fix is a more responsible federal government, but I don’t feel like Joe Biden has a sense of urgency around these things. [Secretary of Agriculture] Tom Vilsack doesn’t talk about it. He was a terrible appointee who believes that this is the consumer’s responsibility. That everybody should be hypervigilant about how they’re feeding their kids and feel guilty all the time if they’re not doing it well. Not everybody has the time, the money and the inclination to do that. Not everybody’s even able to feed themselves well.

A: As long as a profit motive is running everything, I don’t think you can count on Big Food. If you’re going to make money selling food, you’re going to cheat somebody. You’re going to cheat workers, farmers, the environment or the customers. In the case of McDonald’s, it’s all of the above. In the case of Sweetgreen, it’s less, but the system is still the system.

A: Squarely in the middle. They are ultraprocessed. You can’t count on them for doing good agriculture, for making good food available to more people. Big Food — it’s just not their nature. It’s not what they do. What they do is sell junk.

Impossible [Foods] and Beyond [Meat] have not had a visible impact on the sales of meat in this country. What is going on is increasing consumption of really junky burgers. I don’t think that the fake meat thing is really taking us in the right direction. It’s like a red herring in a mystery novel.

It’s just not going to be relevant in the long run.