Mark Bittman on what's wrong with what we eat. Fixing Our Food Problem. Nothing affects public health in the United States more than food. Gun violence kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes kill more than a million people a year — nearly half of all deaths — and diet is a root cause of many of those diseases. And the root of that dangerous diet is our system of hyper-industrial agriculture, the kind that uses 10 times as much energy as it produces. We must figure out a way to un-invent this food system. It’s been a major contributor to climate change, spawned the obesity crisis, poisoned countless volumes of land and water, wasted energy, tortured billions of animals… I could go on.
How do we do that? This seems like a good day to step back a bit and suggest something that’s sometimes difficult to accept. Patience. We can only dismantle this system little by little, and slowly. Well-cared-for animals will necessarily be more expensive, which means we’ll eat fewer of them; that’s a win-win. Fixing Our Food Problem. Mark Bittman: Food Matters. Bio Mark Bittman Mark Bittman writes (mostly) about food for the Times Opinion pages, and is The Magazine’s lead food columnist. He is the author of “VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00” and “How To Cook Everything.” To download this program become a Front Row member. ZOOM IN: Learn more with related books and additional materials. Encyclopædia Britannica Article vegetarianism Theory or practice of eating only plants. Vegetarianism on britannica.com © 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Mark Bittman on what's wrong with what we eat.
Mark Bittman. Mark Bittman (bittman) Mark Bittman. A Taste of Spring How to ease the transition from cold- to hot-weather cooking. April 13, 2014, Sunday A Cappuccino for Public Safety Infrastructure problems can lead to catastrophes, yet the cost of preventing them would amount to only a few dollars a day. April 9, 2014, Wednesday Butter Is Back The real villains in our diet are sugar and ultra-processed foods. March 26, 2014, Wednesday Some Progress on Eating and Health Let’s be thankful for the decline in obesity rates, curbs on food marketing and transparency in packaged food — and then let’s push for more. March 5, 2014, Wednesday A Busman’s Honeymoon On a trip through France and Northern Italy, my new wife and I learned that “sophisticated” cooking did not have to mean “complicated.” February 23, 2014, Sunday A Valentine for Restaurant Workers Because of something called tipped minimum wage, many servers are dependent — way too dependent — on the largesse of their customers.
February 14, 2014, Friday Just Say No February 5, 2014, Wednesday. On Food - Mark Bittman Blog. How the World Was Supposed to Look in 2000. Improved Conditions for Florida Tomato-Harvest Workers. Mass-produced tomatoes have become redder, more tender and slightly more flavorful than the crunchy orange “cello-wrapped” specimens of a couple of decades ago, but the lives of the workers who grow and pick them haven’t improved much since Edward R. Murrow’s revealing and deservedly famous Harvest of Shame report of 1960, which contained the infamous quote, “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.” But bit by bit things have improved some, a story that’s told in detail and with insight and compassion by Barry Estabrook in his new book, “Tomatoland.” We can actually help them improve further. A third of our fresh tomatoes are grown in Florida, and much of that production is concentrated around Immokalee (rhymes with “broccoli”), a town that sits near the edge of the great “river of grass,” or the Everglades, the draining of which began in the late 19th century, thus setting the stage for industrial agriculture.
The tomato fields of Immokalee are vast and surreal.