048: Mark Bittman – Author & Food Activist

What's Burning

Mark Bittman has been writing about food since 1980, and has been a leading voice in global food culture and policy for more than a generation. He has written thirty books, including the How to Cook Everything series, Food Matters, VB6 (the first popular book about part-time veganism), and, in 2021, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food from Sustainable to Suicidal, which The New York Times called “epic and engrossing.”

Bittman spent three decades at the Times, where he created “The Minimalist” – a weekly column that ran for thirteen years without interruption – and had a five-year stint as the Sunday Magazine’s lead food writer. At that same time – 2010 to 2015 – he became and remained the country's first weekly opinion writer at a major publication to concentrate on food. His influence on mainstream attitudes about food and agriculture during that period is immeasurable, and he is still consulted frequently by politicians, policy-makers, academics, NGO and non-profit leaders, and others concerned about the future of food. He continues to produce books in the How to Cook Everything series, the general cooking bible for a quarter-century, and has hosted or been featured in four television series, including the Emmy-winning Showtime series about climate change “Years of Living Dangerously” and “Spain ... On the Road Again,” with Gwyneth Paltrow. He has won countless awards for journalism, books, and television. . Bittman was a regular on the Today show from 2005 to 2010 (and still appears occasionally, as recently as this past October), and has been a guest on countless television and radio programs. His 2007 Ted Talk, “What’s wrong with what we eat,” has been viewed five million times, and he was among the opening speakers at this year’s Aspen Ideas Institute, where he spoke about Community Kitchen. He is a fellow at Yale and is on the faculty of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. Bittman is currently the editor-in-chief of The Bittman Project, which produces a newsletter, website, and the podcast “Food, with Mark Bittman.”

Mark lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with his partner, Kathleen Finlay, who runs the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming and is the founder of Pleiades, a national network of women leaders addressing environmental and social justice. He is the founder and current leader of Community Kitchen, about which more information is forthcoming months.

On this episode, Mark joins host Mitchell Davis and discusses improving the industrial food system in America, developing a national network of non-profit restaurants, and why nutritious food is a human right.

Follow Mark on Instagram @markbittman, Facebook @markbittman and Twitter @bittman

For more on Mark and his work, visit: www.markbittman.com