the map village street editors

Growing up in New York City, roaming the streets in search of childhood adventure and fuelled by the exotic ethnic foods of the metropolis’ street vendors, Mark Bittman developed his appreciation for food early in life. His passion for cooking, however, was born out of necessity, when he headed off to college in Massachusetts and found that any access to good food had vanished completely. Realising that if he wanted to eat well, he had to make it himself, Mark soon began to explore his love of cooking and seized the opportunity to write about it as a journalist. Specialising in simple recipes from basic ingredients, Mark soon found great success publishing cookbooks based on this premise. While he never formally trained as a chef, his minimalist take on food earned him great trust with gourmets across the United States. Now, as the award-winning author of the much-praised New York Times column ‘The Minimalist’ and with a new book, Food Matters, on the way, Mark is on a mission to educate the world about the importance of eating ethically and the effects that industrial food production has on the planet.

Why do you think people have come to appreciate your particular take on food?

In the 1980s, when I first started writing about food, I was good at writing but no-one was interested in my recipes because they were way too simple. So I would write stories and gather recipes from chefs – I would write a story about shrimp and call twenty different chefs and get five recipes from each of them and that would be the story. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the pendulum swung the other way and people were in the market for simple recipes again. By then I had been cooking and writing about food for almost 15 years and I really knew what I was doing, so I was able to put together really simple recipes and they were in demand. I published my first cookbook, called Fish, in 1994, and it won a Julia Childs Award and was very popular. Then I started work on How to Cook Everything. My publisher and I agreed that a good new basic cookbook was in order and that I was the right person to write it – so I did and that kind of cemented everything. It was published ten years ago and it sort of established me as someone who was good at writing simple recipes and could organise things in a pretty intelligent way (if that’s a not-too-immodest way to put it!).

You clearly have a conscience for how food production is degrading the planet – is this something you’ve always been passionate about or was there a particular event or discovery that awakened that consciousness?

Both. In the 1970s, I certainly understood that the ecology of agriculture was problematic but I wouldn’t have called myself an activist in those days. I had an organic garden in the 1980s and 1990s, when I lived in the suburbs. I would say that I had a limited but ongoing consciousness about the political side of agriculture and eating, but over the past few years it’s become so much more obvious that industrial agriculture is taking a huge and undesirable toll on the environment and the planet. I just think it’s getting worse and worse and I do have this consciousness about the history of food. About five years ago I had this idea that vegetarianism was going to be very important in the future in terms of the way people eat and so I proposed the book How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. But my publisher didn’t think it was as good an idea as I thought it was, so I kind of forced them to do it – and at this point they’re very happy that I did! I guess the signal event was the 2006 United Nations report called Livestock’s Long Shadow, which revealed that 18 percent of greenhouse gases come from the production of livestock. To me, it just seemed like things had gone far enough and that I had the opportunity to do something about it. So I started to talk about it and now I’m writing a book about it called Food Matters, which covers that discussion.

What’s your opinion on living a locavore lifestyle in an urban environment like New York City?

I don’t think it’s someone’s obligation, but I think it’s nice if you can eat locally as much as possible – I do. There are still significant numbers of functioning farms within 150–250 kilometres of New York City. Even if you go 450 kilometres – which is still less than a day’s drive – you’re getting way into New York State, Pennsylvania and even Vermont, where it’s quite rural and there are subsistence farmers who are selling stuff, or medium-sized farms that are far from industrial. Food from those places is absolutely wonderful, but I should point out that that food, more often than not, isn’t organic. There are two questions here: do you eat local food or do you eat organic food? The two are very different. It’s more important, and usually preferable, to eat well-raised local food than it is to eat organic food, especially since nowadays a lot of organic food is industrially raised. But having said all of that, I do think that what we eat is far more important – both for the health of individuals and for the planet – than where it comes from. For example, it might be a corny thing to say, but I think it’s a good idea to eat an apple a day. Does it matter
to me if that apple is from New York State or from Chile or New Zealand? Yes, it matters, but I would rather eat the apple from New Zealand than a hamburger from New York. I think that eating local food is a good idea, wherever it’s possible, but I think to make it a guiding principle in life is a mistake. Here, in the United States, things become trendy. But the problem is that trends go away, so what are you going to take seriously? The need to eat well and raise food well is not something we can afford to be just a trend – it’s something that has to be taken seriously. If we look at locavorism as a trend, then it probably means that it’s won’t be around in a year or two.

What was your childhood dream?
I think I wanted to be an astronaut, like everybody who grew up in the 1950s! I also wanted to be a writer – so to that extent, I’m certainly living my dream. But believe me, when I grew up in the 1950s in New York, there was no-one who was sitting around saying ‘I want to be a food writer’. There were no food writers – it wasn’t something that you could aspire to.
What has been your greatest challenge to date?
It’s taken a long time, but I wouldn’t even say that that’s been particularly challenging on a daily basis – I was doing pretty much what I wanted to do. I don’t want to say that ‘it was sweetness and light and enjoying every minute’, but there were no long-term frustrations or challenges. I was doing what I wanted to be doing and I was pretty happy about it.
What would you say has been your greatest achievement?
Talking at TED, the piece I wrote for The New York Times called Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, and my blog are the first inklings of me being more political about this and the opportunity to have these kinds of discussions. To be public about it, and be taken seriously, is very exciting for me. But my greatest achievement, really, is probably writing How to Cook Everything because a lot of people wouldn’t have gotten into cooking otherwise and I think that’s really fabulous.

Who inspires you?

They’re really not food people for the most part. James Hansen, who was one of the first to describe the dangers of Global Warming, inspires me. Also, good journalists and people who do good thinking and who try to figure out world issues in a way that makes them easily understood by those of us who are not involved with them on a daily basis. I tend to admire really good scientists and journalists more than other types of people. And the people who do the kind of research that we journalists need in order to figure stuff out!

What inspires you?

There are three things that get me out of bed in the morning. One of them I like to call ‘God’s work’ (even though I’m an atheist), in that if you can do good, then that’s really cool. The second is to have fun, because if you can have fun then that’s really cool. Then the third is to make money because, like it or not, having money is better than not having it. I think those are my three guiding principles.

Where do you find peace in life?
The ‘where’ is not as big a question for me as the ‘how often’. I have a fair amount of downtime, whether it’s watching a movie or walking on the beach. I do think that in the early 21st century,
for people who are involved in interesting daily work where downtime can be defined as disconnected off-the-grid time, it’s hard to get enough of that. I do try for a day a week – no matter where I am – with no email, no internet and no television.
What is your dream now?
I think I’m living it. I want to get this message out about overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food in whatever medium I can do that – that’s my goal and that’s what’s driving me. I’m also 58 years old and so I’d like to figure out in the next seven or eight years what the last stage of my life is going to look like!

What are your words of wisdom?
Eat well.

Interview by Mikki Brammer