“1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.”
―
Mark Bittman,
Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes
“Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.” ― Mark Bittman, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good
“[C]onvenience is one of the two dirty words of American cooking, reflecting the part of our national character that is easily bored; the other is 'gourmet.' Convenience foods demonstrate our supposed disdain for the routine and the mundane: 'I don't have time to cook.' The gourmet phase, which peaked in the eighties, when food was seen as art, showed our ability to obsess about aspects of daily life that most other cultures take for granted. You might only cook once a week, but wow, what a meal.” ― Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food
“America’s food system is broken.” ― Mark Bittman, A Bone to Pick: The good and bad news about food, with wisdom and advice on diets, food safety, GMOs, farming, and more
“Ecologists recognized that resources are finite, and that nature is in charge. That's basic science. Capitalists believe that nature exists to be exploited by humans, a tenet perfectly in tune with Western religion.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
“We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it’s only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.” ― Mark Bittman, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good
“Teach a cook a recipe and he’ll cook for a night; teach a cook a technique and she’ll improvise for a lifetime.” ― Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food
“Regina Schrambling is both hero and villain. My favorite villain, actually. The former New York Times and LA Times food writer and blogger is easily the Angriest Person Writing About Food. Her weekly blog entries at gastropoda.com are a deeply felt, episodic unburdening, a venting of all her bitterness, rage, contempt, and disappointment with a world that never seems to live up to her expectations. She hates nearly everything—and everybody—and when she doesn’t, she hates herself for allowing such a thing to happen. She never lets an old injury, a long-ago slight, go. She proofreads her former employer, the New York Times, with an eye for detail—every typo, any evidence of further diminution of quality—and when she can latch on to something (as, let’s face it, she always can), she unleashes a withering torrent of ridicule and contempt. She hates Alice Waters. She hates George Bush. (She’ll still be writing about him with the same blind rage long after he’s dead of old age.) She hates Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Frank Bruni, Mark Bittman … me. She hates the whole rotten, corrupt, self-interested sea in which she must swim: a daily ordeal, which, at the same time, she feels compelled to chronicle. She hates hypocrisy, silliness, mendacity. She is immaculate in the consistency and regularity of her loathing.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
“(As Michael Pollan says, "a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food")” ― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes
“And it should not come as no shock that Big Food, along with the pharmaceutical industry and its scientists for hire, has promoted confusion in the media and in the mind of the American consumer to contribute to our culture of overconsumption.” ― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes
“In any case, the principles are simple: deny nothing; enjoy everything, but eat plants first and most. There's no gimmick, no dogma, no guilt, and no food police.” ― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes
“To quote the philosopher Max Roser: “Three things are true at the same time. The world is much better; the world is awful; and the world can be much better.” There is plenty of good work to do.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
“It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
“Thank you American Library Association for naming The Gluten-Free Revolution one of the "Top 10 Food Books of 2014" Thrilled to share this honor with Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, et al” ― Jax Peters Lowell
“A story by Alice Park on the aging effects of fat on kids' bodies drew some pointed comments about parental accountability. "Your story is horrifying," wrote Susan Stafford of Berkeley, Calif. "But no one gains weight out of nowhere. People live in denial about food. Parents eat garbage and feed their kids the same." Diabetic Peter Baxter of Brighton, England, advocated for home cooking to combat ubiquitous ads for meals "that will kill children." Meanwhile Katy Steinmetz's TIME.com piece on state initiatives to ban big soda was widely shared on Twitter, where food writer Mark Bittman wrote, "The soda wars escalate.” ― Anonymous
“In what's usually referred to as "the Columbian Exchange" -one of history's great misnomers, given the genocide that followed - Europe took so much of value from the Indigenous people of what became known as North and South America that it was able to rule most of the world until the mid-twentieth century.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
“It would take Western science centuries to develop a truly rational branch of thinking, one that recognizes that everything is connected—the body, the natural and spiritual worlds, the wondrous and the inexplicable and the irrational.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
“Domesticated animals were often too valuable to be eaten. Indeed, the amount of meat consumed per person may well have gone down with the advent of farming as wild animals became scarce, at least near villages. (In fact, it’s safe to say that meat consumption has fluctuated greatly throughout history and throughout the world, and that, with very few exceptions, until recently it was mostly eaten occasionally.)” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
“The third most abundant substance in breast milk is an oligosaccharide. Babies don’t digest it directly. Rather, it nourishes a bacterium called Bifidobacterium infantis, transmitted through vaginal birth and wiped out by antibiotics, and now thought to be missing in most American babies. B. infantis is essential in programming our metabolic operations. Those who maintain a healthy population of the bacterium are less likely to become overweight, experience allergies, or have Type 1 diabetes. But the majority don’t, which leaves them prone to numerous autoimmune diseases, colon and rectal cancers, allergies, asthmas, Type 1 diabetes, and eczema. All of these conditions have increased as breastfeeding has declined.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
“Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.” ― Mark Bittman, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good
“[C]onvenience is one of the two dirty words of American cooking, reflecting the part of our national character that is easily bored; the other is 'gourmet.' Convenience foods demonstrate our supposed disdain for the routine and the mundane: 'I don't have time to cook.' The gourmet phase, which peaked in the eighties, when food was seen as art, showed our ability to obsess about aspects of daily life that most other cultures take for granted. You might only cook once a week, but wow, what a meal.” ― Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food
“America’s food system is broken.” ― Mark Bittman, A Bone to Pick: The good and bad news about food, with wisdom and advice on diets, food safety, GMOs, farming, and more
“Ecologists recognized that resources are finite, and that nature is in charge. That's basic science. Capitalists believe that nature exists to be exploited by humans, a tenet perfectly in tune with Western religion.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
“We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it’s only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.” ― Mark Bittman, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good
“Teach a cook a recipe and he’ll cook for a night; teach a cook a technique and she’ll improvise for a lifetime.” ― Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food
“Regina Schrambling is both hero and villain. My favorite villain, actually. The former New York Times and LA Times food writer and blogger is easily the Angriest Person Writing About Food. Her weekly blog entries at gastropoda.com are a deeply felt, episodic unburdening, a venting of all her bitterness, rage, contempt, and disappointment with a world that never seems to live up to her expectations. She hates nearly everything—and everybody—and when she doesn’t, she hates herself for allowing such a thing to happen. She never lets an old injury, a long-ago slight, go. She proofreads her former employer, the New York Times, with an eye for detail—every typo, any evidence of further diminution of quality—and when she can latch on to something (as, let’s face it, she always can), she unleashes a withering torrent of ridicule and contempt. She hates Alice Waters. She hates George Bush. (She’ll still be writing about him with the same blind rage long after he’s dead of old age.) She hates Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Frank Bruni, Mark Bittman … me. She hates the whole rotten, corrupt, self-interested sea in which she must swim: a daily ordeal, which, at the same time, she feels compelled to chronicle. She hates hypocrisy, silliness, mendacity. She is immaculate in the consistency and regularity of her loathing.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
“(As Michael Pollan says, "a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food")” ― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes
“And it should not come as no shock that Big Food, along with the pharmaceutical industry and its scientists for hire, has promoted confusion in the media and in the mind of the American consumer to contribute to our culture of overconsumption.” ― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes
“In any case, the principles are simple: deny nothing; enjoy everything, but eat plants first and most. There's no gimmick, no dogma, no guilt, and no food police.” ― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes
“To quote the philosopher Max Roser: “Three things are true at the same time. The world is much better; the world is awful; and the world can be much better.” There is plenty of good work to do.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
“It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
“Thank you American Library Association for naming The Gluten-Free Revolution one of the "Top 10 Food Books of 2014" Thrilled to share this honor with Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, Ruth Reichl, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, et al” ― Jax Peters Lowell
“A story by Alice Park on the aging effects of fat on kids' bodies drew some pointed comments about parental accountability. "Your story is horrifying," wrote Susan Stafford of Berkeley, Calif. "But no one gains weight out of nowhere. People live in denial about food. Parents eat garbage and feed their kids the same." Diabetic Peter Baxter of Brighton, England, advocated for home cooking to combat ubiquitous ads for meals "that will kill children." Meanwhile Katy Steinmetz's TIME.com piece on state initiatives to ban big soda was widely shared on Twitter, where food writer Mark Bittman wrote, "The soda wars escalate.” ― Anonymous
“In what's usually referred to as "the Columbian Exchange" -one of history's great misnomers, given the genocide that followed - Europe took so much of value from the Indigenous people of what became known as North and South America that it was able to rule most of the world until the mid-twentieth century.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
“It would take Western science centuries to develop a truly rational branch of thinking, one that recognizes that everything is connected—the body, the natural and spiritual worlds, the wondrous and the inexplicable and the irrational.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
“Domesticated animals were often too valuable to be eaten. Indeed, the amount of meat consumed per person may well have gone down with the advent of farming as wild animals became scarce, at least near villages. (In fact, it’s safe to say that meat consumption has fluctuated greatly throughout history and throughout the world, and that, with very few exceptions, until recently it was mostly eaten occasionally.)” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal
“The third most abundant substance in breast milk is an oligosaccharide. Babies don’t digest it directly. Rather, it nourishes a bacterium called Bifidobacterium infantis, transmitted through vaginal birth and wiped out by antibiotics, and now thought to be missing in most American babies. B. infantis is essential in programming our metabolic operations. Those who maintain a healthy population of the bacterium are less likely to become overweight, experience allergies, or have Type 1 diabetes. But the majority don’t, which leaves them prone to numerous autoimmune diseases, colon and rectal cancers, allergies, asthmas, Type 1 diabetes, and eczema. All of these conditions have increased as breastfeeding has declined.” ― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
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