From Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. These are not normal times. For the last few weeks, the only issue that's been in the news or really on anybody's mind has been the coronavirus. Consequently, we've really been trying hard here on Deep Background to bring you updates from the leading experts on the medical side, on the economic side, and on the constitutional political side, to try to make sense of what's happening. We promise to keep on doing that. This episode is a little different. It's about a topic that turns out to be of central importance in a moment of pandemic with everybody staying at home, namely the topic of food, what we eat, why we eat it, and how we think about the supply chains associated with the food that we put on the table. But this episode was not recorded in the middle of the pandemic. This episode was recorded before people started staying at home. Nevertheless, we think it's really important to bring it to you right now, because in the circumstances of pandemic and social distancing, we're sitting around our houses thinking about how to put food on the table for ourselves and our loved ones, and that entails cooking, cooking not purely for pleasure, but cooking because it might be the only way you're actually going to have a properly prepared meal. We know that by virtue of the fact that so many restaurants are closed in so many parts of the country, and also by virtue of the fact that so many grocery stores have had their shelves emptied as people go out to buy food in anticipation of possible long quarantines. So today we're going to hear from a person who has taught many of us how to cook, someone who has had a huge impact on my life and that of many others, the food writer Mark Bittman. There's a good chance you own or have seen at least one of his cookbooks. His most famous one is called How to Cook Everything. That book taught millions of people how to cook, and I have the feeling that it may be teaching many more how to cook in the weeks and months ahead. Recently, Mark released an updated twentieth year anniversary edition. He's also written Fish, The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, a book that had a big impact on my relationship with my mother, as will explore, and a diet book called Vegan Before six Pm vb six, and beyond that almost two dozen other books on various aspects of food. He was a food columnist for The New York Times for thirteen years, and he's now editor in chief of the food publication he did. I talked to Mark about the transformation he has seen over the course of his career in how he talks about food and how we think about it. Thank you so much for doing this. I really I appreciate it tremendously. I mean looking forward to it. If I could start on a personal note, I just want to say that your Fish book has played a central role in my relationship with my mother over many, many years, involving a complex polemic about whether it's okay to undercook the fish or, as you would put it, okay not to overcook the fish. Right, I have to say that fish is tricky, Cooking fish is tricky, and every general rule is pretty much wrong. So the thing is that some fish wants to be cooked for a long time, and most fish barely wants to be cooked all. So that is that was the first book I did. It was published in ninety four and the publisher wanted me to redo it. I said, it's impossible to write about fish now. There's so many moral mine fields ethical mine fields that anything you write, if someone wants to trash you, they can trash you. And it just it's not it's hard to encourage the eating of fish, even though it's good for people, because the sustainability issues and other issues are so fraught that I just kind of decided I wasn't going to write about it. Yeah, that's extremely fascinating. And the sense that there's a moral compunction that interferes with, you know, going back and even doing a second edition of the book or a further edition of the book raises a question that I've been really struggling with and thinking about our conversation advance. And here's what it is. I feel as though when you started writing as a food writer, the genre, not yours in particular, but the way the genre worked was still very much a kind of life improvement. If you will cook this recipe in this way, it will taste good, so you'll feel better because you're eating better food, and your life will be better because the people around you will also enjoy this. And now the genre, including very much your work has evolved so that very often you're also telling us what's good for the world, not just what's good for you reader in cooking or in eating, but how the world will benefit. And so the problem with eating fish, for example, as you say, it might be great for you, but it might be really bad for the world. So how do you think about that those those two roles. Obviously they can be mixed, But first of all, do you think that has changed over the course of your career? And more importantly, how has it changed for you? Well? You is a wonderful analysis and totally true. And I started cooking in the seventies and we were ignorant. So those questions weren't raised because we in general were more ignorant. I in particular was way more ignorant. So things did start to change, but they changed very slowly. People didn't talk about climate change, people didn't talk about waste, and it's taken until now. You know, we want to we people who are striving to have food being taken seriously on a grander stage in a I mean not just hunger, but all of the issues that we talk about, malnutrition and sustainability and the impact of agriculture on the environment and climate change and all of that stuff. We, I guess, me and my comrades whatever think that food has gotten underplayed in its role in these huge issues. And I still think that's the case, although more and more people do talk about food and agriculture in that bigger sense. But and you're out there talking about all as are as. You say, your comrades, but you know, I'm just one voice, and not a particularly loud one. But yeah, back in the sixties and seventies, you ate food because it tasted good, and you cooked because it tasted better, and you kind of didn't You might think about good ingredients, but if they were there, you saw them and you ate them, but you didn't go talking about them all the time. I don't think even so, even within the doing good for the world, there's still two different parts. There's the health part and then there's the global health part, the sustainability. You know that the planet as it were, as the as the patient, well, well we're the happy and sad circumstance here, and quite possibly unique or at least unusual, is that what's good for you is good for the planet, and vice versa. That the way to eat for your body's optimal health happens to be the way that good agriculture would be providing you with food and protecting the health of the earth. So and is that genuinely by accident? I mean, this is something I'm puzzling over very much. I mean, God, right, so exactly. So, I mean we're actually going there, believe it or not. We're going to God in this conversation one way or another. But you know, the vegans, the hardcore vegans, would say, yeah, it's not a coincidence at all, and a lot of them would offer it. Not all, but some of that would offer a kind of what I would call a secular theology in which we are in some way in communion with the earth, and therefore it's not a surprise that that which is good for our bodies is grown out of the earth. You know, I don't think I'm making this out to be much more mystical than a lot of a lot of vegans would describe it as as being. And I should say, I'm not a vegan. I'm trying to channel that at that point of view here. Well, I mean vegan or not, because you can believe that animals and even eating animals are part of this system. I don't think you have to be a vegan to believe that that there is some kind of system that nourishes both the planet and people. So I don't think this needs to be a vegan or non argument. In fact, it makes more sense from that's real a cosmic perspective to be an omnivore. Insofar as you think there's some evolutionary component to this, you know, it's probably not a coincidence that humans have evolved to be omnivorous. Right, It's not a that we can say, I think with some assuredness. But um, it's hard because if you're going to put a layable on it that it's mystical or spiritual, then it's difficult to make that argument. You kind of either believe it or you don't. But if you're gonna put a label on it, if you're gonna say it's not a coincidence that what's good for the planet is good for the people who live on the planet, that doesn't have to be a mystical or spiritual argument. That can be a pragmatic argument. I just don't know that I'm prepared to make it it's a great prefer the question. Well, fine to say right exactly. Yeah, I think that it's true. It is hard to believe it's a coincident, like it just happens to be that way. I don't know that anyone's made the argument that growing the plants that nourish your body are by necessity the plants that are good for stewarding the land. And it is that way. But it's not because of teleology or God or something but it and it's not because of nature, because we're literally talking about his culture, which originally is like the culture. The word culture comes from agriculture. It's about growing stuff. So it's a self conscious thing. It's not a hundred gatherer picture. It's not a paleo diet account whereby the things we really should eat would be just the things that we happen to find, because if that were the case, we really wouldn't be able to sustain anything like the global population that we do. We need to grow some stuff, Well, we don't know that we are sustaining it, and we do know that populations that are five thousand years old have sustained themselves by doing more earth friendly forms of agriculture. So the biggest and oldest populations in the world, which are in Asia, eat mostly plants and always have and have done agriculture that could be argued is sustainable. And if something has proven itself over five thousand years. We're talking about rice culture now, right, yeah, kind of kind of but we culture too, but culture where there have been water challenges and weather challenges and challenges to the civilization themselves, but that the food culture has been sustained. There's no Western food culture that's been sustained for anything like that period of time, and certainly not in North America. I mean, everything that we've done in the last say, one hundred and fifty two hundred years, is only that old. That's how old it is. Yes, you can't call that sustainable, even if at the moment it appears to be working. It's not long enough to say, oh, yeah, this is You know that it's funny to get into the kind of philosophical or interesting to get into the kind of philosophical side of things, because when people argue that industrial agriculture is the way to do it, because how else are we going to support them doing air quotes? How else are we going to support ten billion people blah blah blah, and that anything else is a pipe dream. The pipe dream is to imagine that industrial agriculture is sustainable, because there's so much evidence that it isn't. And the reality is to say, we need to make it better. How do we make ag culture better? That's not a pipe dream to say how do we make agriculture better? It's a pipe dream to say we figured out agriculture. No, we haven't. Quite the opposite. We figured out how to erect the earth and how to cause a public health crisis by force feeding people junk food. So what is the answer? You know, the answer is it has to be better. The answer is it has to change. We'll be back in just a moment. I want to ask you about the process whereby food writers and then the people who read them came to see the world in the way that you're describing, came to care first. I would say, probably in order, first about taste, then about health, and then about sustainability and the world. And the reason I want to ask about that is that I think the answer may have something to do with a very particular elite, you know, upper middle class for lack of a better term. You know New York Times reading, and you know, I'm guilty as charged, you know, as as a reader and sometime contributor. And the reason I'm asking this is, when the history of this is told, will they say, you know that it was something about pretty rich people who nevertheless had some or maybe because they had the money, were capable of thinking ethically that drove this this kind of process. Because if that were true, I don't know if that's a true story or a fair story, but if it were a true story, it does come from a certain kind of excess and excess of wealth and excess of you know, elite cultural position, and then it comes to seem like good common sense with you know, people like you functioning as kind of the profits of the story, you know, the ones who are who are telling this story and telling us, you know, what we ought to believe. And then it's not a coincidence that you start by telling us what we ought to eat because it tastes good, and then you move through that to telling us what to eat in order to make the world a better place. You know, there are many other factors that you haven't mentioned, but I think one thing you're overlooking in this story is that let's say one third of the world has been eating according to the tenets of sustainability forever, and they're not New York Times readers, and they're not white elites. But they may not have been doing it in order for it to be sustainable. They may just have been doing it because it worked for them. Come on, that's not sustainability. I mean it worked for them for five thousand years. Yeah, but people don't always I mean, just to push back a little bit, I mean, I hear what you're saying, but people don't always do something because they know that it's always worked. I mean they people do things on a daily basis for all kinds of ordinary reasons. Sometimes failing to change something that's people. You know, take some oppressive structure that we've that's been around for five thousand years, I don't know, sexism or something like that, people say, well, we always have done it this way, so we stick with it. And then a critic wants to say, yeah, but you know, you think that works, but it doesn't work for half the people, and so, you know, I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the antiquity of a practice shows that it's necessarily a good one. Well, except when people switch from traditional diets to contemporary Western diets they get chronic disease. Yes, there's no question that is the truth. So I think that it's arguable and demonstrable that traditional diets work and that we're not discovering anything new here when we're saying eat a diet that's heavy in plants and light in anything else. What we have done that's new is in the last one hundred, one hundred and fifty years, is invent a bunch of food that makes people sick that didn't even exist before that. And yeah, I think maybe it takes public intellectuals or whatever. The shortcut version of what you said before is to recognize that first, a lot of it is an academic comes out of academia. But the marketing of that junk food targets everyone, but it targets less well off people disproportionately, and it targets everyone to the extent that it can, and it targets us so well that it's almost as if there's no choice but to eat junk food. So rebelling against that or recognizing that is not easy, and many people are just simply too busy you know, they're just like trying to get some food. And there's a wealth and a class element obviously there as well. It's you have to live in a neighborhood where there are shops that's self fresh food. You have to be able to afford to buy them. Although of course ideally it would be just as affordable as other food, but it isn't at the moment. You have to have the time to actually put the food on the table. And I recognize that lots of people who have free time to say they don't when they really do. But on the other hand, there are people who are working two or three jobs and are genuinely at the margins economically who really don't have the time. Right I used to say, I used to argue that people everybody should cook, and that it was ironic that people would watch cooking on television and say they didn't have time to cook at home. Yes, but there are so many people who have transportation challenges and two job challenges and scheduling challenges and childcare issues and da da da dada, on and on and on. I don't think it's right to say that anymore. I probably wasn't right to say it in the first place. Um, although it's a good line, and it's a great line, and it's and there are people who watch TV instead of cooking. I mean, maybe they're exhausted, pistending about exercise. You know, if you're watching sports on television, why an't you out there working out? And right that in theory that makes good sense. People's realities are are complicated, right, I think the real the real issue here, the real I don't think the real tragedy is that junk food marketers target everybody and they're very, very sophisticated. That kind of marketing, which is scientific and algorithmic and way beyond my understanding at least, you know, gets us to eat all kinds of things that we know we shouldn't be eating, and there's there's no question about whether we should be eating them the way quantities we are. And everyone has that experience. Everyone has the experience of looking at some piece of junk food and thinking, I know, I'm not supposed to eat that, and then eating it. Right, probably even Gwyneth Paltrow sometimes. But the point is that I don't think that that's the thing that doesn't get talked about. It gets talked about a lot, but it doesn't get talked about enough because that is the thing that's wrecking both our health and the health of the planet. So one solution to that is regulation, and I went to it. I'm down with that. Yeah. And when Mike Bloomberg was mayor of New York, he went big time into some versions of that. I mean, I suppose from some perspective they were pretty modest. You know, you can't buy soda in a fort. You know, he tried to get a soda taxs past and fail and so so, but that was a backup plan. And you know, there was some backlash to the Bloomberg approach. You know, people talked about the nanny state or the nanny mayor. That's something that may or may not follow him, you know, in his political future. How do you think about the possibilities, the real world possibilities of the kind of regulation that might be necessary to deal with the big corporations, because, as you point out, it's not enough just to educate people, because not withstand the education, there are all these other pressures on us. I mean, you're asking me to predict the winner of the twenty twenty election, because you're not going to make progress when you have a president who's trying to dismantle the EPA and every other progressive or potentially progressive arm of government. So we are at the point where we're trying to defend regulations that exist. Well, let me ask a simpler question that, or maybe it's simpler. I mean, do you think that disclosure regulations of the kind that require you know, chain restaurants to list the number of calories and their dishes and things like that are I mean, there's some data suggesting that they have some effect at the margin, So I'm not asking you about the data. What I'm asking is whether, at an instinctive level, you think, yeah, you know, if we do a whole lot more labeling will be much better off, or if your instinct is no, labeling is not going to be enough to go against the kind of sophisticated marketing. What we need is some actual legal rules that say, you know, certain kinds of food can't be sold to kids, or can't be sold in certain packaging, or can't be advertising in a certain way, which is what we've done with tobacco. I guess I think the answer is both. I think that there's that incremental change is necessary at this point, even if it's just symbolic or representative. And I think food labeling, putting calories on, I mean, there is some data that says that it's useful, but it's certainly not revolutionary. But if you say more information is better, more truth is better, more actual truth is better. And we're starting by saying, you know, a whopper has a thousand calories or whatever, and you might want to know that that's something when you get to real transparency, when you can say we're going to have video cameras everywhere that that animals are confined, and we're going to show you on a minute to minute basis. You want to know where this burger is from. Here's how you can trace. I mean that's doable. We can trace the history of any any piece of food you like. You can see where it's from, how it's raised, how it was processed, and so on. That I think will help change consciousness. But I think some form of recognizing that sugar is the tobacco of the twenty first century, that junk food is damaging our health, and that government's job is to protect the public health, and to recognize that just like government's job is to recognize that vaccines are public health tools. If people don't think that, that's really unfortunate. But they're wrong. So now what do you want government to be about. Well, in facts, the case of vaccine, though, at least to my mind, is a pretty clear case where the law ought to dictate. Part of the reason for that is that they're such a big spillover effect on everybody else if I don't vaccinate my kids, So, you know, without talking about the case of the genuine religious objector you know, the core case of you know, the person who's it's like, well, I just don't want to do that. I think it's probably not healthy. I myself am very comfortable saying the law should mandate that. It's a teeny bit harder to say that in the case of sugar, because although bad eating has spillover effects in the sense that I need more healthcare and then other people have to help pay for that healthcare, it doesn't have the same insignificant which is not insignificant, but it doesn't have quite the same immediate spillover effects as non vaccination. I mean, there's no argument you're eating yourself to death is not going to kill me, but it is going to inconvenience me. And there's a spectrum here. So you start with vaccines, you move to tobacco, which has the second hand smoke arguments, suppose, and then you say, well, your ability to drink ten cans of coca day or whatever actually does or may affect my children's health because my children can't think about this stuff in a way of supposedly thoughtful grown up can. And by keeping the mark getting of coke, for example, unlimited, by not joining sides and trying to rein in the rapacious marketing of people who are trying to sell sugar sweetened beverages to everybody all the time, you're threatening the life of my children, for example. Sure, and I you know the argument it's wearing your arm ends where your fist meets my face kind of thing. Yeah, well, I mean it's it's appropriate that you that you mentioned that adage because that's also where you hit the real objection from libertarians, you know, where they say, well, we have to draw the line somewhere, and that line is at my chin, you know, and this is only metaphorically affecting you know, me or my kids. And I think you also have to add to that the kind of often class based reaction that says, look, I have few enough pleasures in my life, and you really want to take away from me this the pleasure of having this coke. And you know, then the educated person quote unquote says, well, you don't understand. You only like that coke because the marketing has made your brain like that coke. And that's about the point where in the ordinary person might want to punch you, you know, you know well, but can't because the libertarianism. Right, But you see what I'm saying. I mean, I think I do think there is a kind of instinct to say. One of the things that's wrong in our society is that educated people think they know what's best for us. And you know, I'm going to make my own decisions, and don't tell me that I only have these decisions because I'm deluded into it by corporate advertising. Well, even though you and I may think, yeah, you are, yeah, But also if you say I don't want educated people to make decisions that affect me, you're sort of implying that you want uneducated people to democracy. Right, That is called democracy and educated people. But if they're more uneducated people, they make the decision. That's right, and that's the position we're in now. And that's why when you started this conversation and said you're asking me to predict the winner of the twenty twenty election, because yeah, you know, our food habits and desires are formed at a really young age. If we don't take control over what our children see and eat when it comes to food, what they see in how they're marketed to and what they wind up eating as a result of that, if we don't have some kind of intervention in that arena, we are going to have generation after generation after generation of unhealthy adults. Because we all know how hard it is to change are you said it before? We all want to eat a whopper now, and then we all know how hard it is to change the way the way that we eat. And that's because when we were four years old, or now even two years old, we were being bottle fed kool aid, or you know, encouraged to drink coke or to eat candy or sweeten the breakfast cereal and obvious one and so on. I don't think you can make that stuff illegal, certainly not in the current climate, but you can rein it in a little bit I think let's talk a little bit, if we could, about cooking as a discipline, either a self discipline or a pleasurable activity, or some combination of those things. So you've just reissued the twentieth edition right of the wonderfully named How to Cook Everything, And I presume that your own thinking about what it means to cook has changed from the time that you wrote that book until today. If so, maybe I'm wrong, Maybe it hasn't changed. Do you think about the purpose of cooking the same way now as you did that I'm so much less obsessive about it and so much more easy going about it. And people still seem to like the food that I'm not even talking about the books. The books speak for themselves, But when friends come to my house or I cook somewhere else, people still seem to think. I know what I'm doing and the food is good, and I think it's pretty good, but it's not sweated over, it's not obsessed about. And I used to do that, and then I realized people love it when you cook for them. They're so happy that you that you're cooking for them. They're so grateful. Everybody loves to have someone say I'll cook for you, Yes, so this the bar is not that high. But you know you're cooking for somebody, you already have the benefit of the doubt. And the fact is that most of the food out in the world is so bad that when you are cooking for your friends or your family or whatever, you're usually producing stuff that's much much better than what they're getting for lunch or dinner days that they're not being cooked for or not cooking themselves. So I think I'm more laid back about it. Did you originally have some of the the artisans or the artists love of the undertaking or was your view always some version of the important thing is that you're taking some kind of fresh ingredients that and cooking them. Well, I think at the beginning, I really like I still really like steep learning curves. So at the beginning I knew nothing. So I could make a boiled lobster or or some French fries or a whitebread of the kind that I wouldn't even consider eating, let alone making now and be ecstatic yes at the craft of doing it. Yes, but I kind of know the craft now. I mean I'm not. And you've also done a lot to teach people some basic techniques. I mean, to me, that was the most transformative aspect of your whole approach. And that's how I think had a huge influence on many other food writers and on many other cookbooks. And forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think you might have been the first person to sort of present it to the reader in that way. You know, learn this suite of techniques, which isn't actually that enormous. It'll take you a long time to get good at them. But if you get competent in these suite of techniques, you can kind of cook. Yeah, I can think of people who did that before me, but you know, I was the first person to do it after a while of no one having done it, So fair enough, that's good enough. It feels that way, and I was adamant about doing it that way, and all my books look like that, and so it's my style. And I'm happy about that last question. And I'm really grateful for your time. When you think about, you know, what an addition of how to cook everything would look like if you did it again in ten years or even twenty, how do you imagine it evolving in the future. Well, I mean, if you there have been three editions of Had Everything, the first yellow one and then a red one, and then the second pale or yellow one. And a lot of the changes are cosmetic. That is, people wanted photographs from the beginning, so now we have photographs, and we have more charts, and we have more graphics. I mean, it's a more interesting book all around. But the biggest change is that there's less meat and more plants. And I think that in ten years there'll be less meat still and more plants still. And I think in twenty years the same. I think that I think the world will follow you. It won't just be your movement there. I'm following. I'm not setting trends. I'm following trends or I'm seeing trends. I don't. This is not me. I mean, of course, there's there's a given take, right, there's a boomerang effect or whatever. But I think I'm representing what's happening. I speak to crowds all the time, and I always ask who here is eating less meat than they were ten years ago. And there's a few cantankerous people who want to prove their independence who don't raise their hands, but everybody raises their hands. Everybody's eating less meat than they were ten years ago, and that's true in every audience I go to. More than ninety percent of people raise their hands. I don't know, so I'm asking you because you might are their bigger picture of statistics supporting that, or is that like people who are buying your books and coming to listen to you. Well, I think there's very much of us speaking to the preaching to the choir aspect of this, for sure. But you know the fact that and it's a whole separate conversation about the fact that Burger King is selling a vegan burger I think I think speaks to that too. I think people are looking for ways around eating meat. The fact that they are readily changing through a different form of junk food, as in the impossible burger is maybe a good thing and maybe not. It's very complicated. Might be bad for them, but good for the world. Satisfy one of our central goals, but not one of the others. Right, But they could be eating falafel and be good all around in a way. It's just that no one's about their marketing falafel in that way. Well, there you go, there's your business. Opportunity. Yeah, I might be working on it, except I'm not so, thank you very much. Yeah, it was fun. The conversation I had with Mark was really eye opening, at least for me, and thinking about the changes in how we interact with the whole topic of food. I think we're going to have a lot more opportunity to reflect on that in the days and weeks ahead. I'm certainly looking at what's in my refrigerator very differently than I was before the coronavirus. Not only is there a lot more of it, had to be really mindful about choosing what was going to go in there, what could be frozen, what could be preserved, what would be good, how I get fresh vegetables. And we also have to think much more seriously than usual about the supply chain of how food gets onto our tables. After all, in a world where we're all social distancing, real human beings have to be out there doing their jobs full time and taking on the corona risk just in order to get food continuing to come to us. The centrality and importance of food workers has never been clearer in my lifetime. If you're at home practicing social distancing the way most of us are advised to do. Good luck with it. I hope you're managing. I hope the food on your table is tasty. If you're out there doing your job trying to enable the rest of us to stay home and stay safe, please accept my thanks and all of our appreciation. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott, with studio recording by Joseph Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Godwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Backslash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com Backslash Podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.

From Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. These are not normal times. For the last few weeks, the only issue that's been in the news or really on anybody's mind has been the coronavirus. Consequently, we've really been trying hard here on Deep Background to bring you updates from the leading experts on the medical side, on the economic side, and on the constitutional political side, to try to make sense of what's happening. We promise to keep on doing that. This episode is a little different. It's about a topic that turns out to be of central importance in a moment of pandemic with everybody staying at home, namely the topic of food, what we eat, why we eat it, and how we think about the supply chains associated with the food that we put on the table. But this episode was not recorded in the middle of the pandemic. This episode was recorded before people started staying at home. Nevertheless, we think it's really important to bring it to you right now, because in the circumstances of pandemic and social distancing, we're sitting around our houses thinking about how to put food on the table for ourselves and our loved ones, and that entails cooking, cooking not purely for pleasure, but cooking because it might be the only way you're actually going to have a properly prepared meal. We know that by virtue of the fact that so many restaurants are closed in so many parts of the country, and also by virtue of the fact that so many grocery stores have had their shelves emptied as people go out to buy food in anticipation of possible long quarantines. So today we're going to hear from a person who has taught many of us how to cook, someone who has had a huge impact on my life and that of many others, the food writer Mark Bittman. There's a good chance you own or have seen at least one of his cookbooks. His most famous one is called How to Cook Everything. That book taught millions of people how to cook, and I have the feeling that it may be teaching many more how to cook in the weeks and months ahead. Recently, Mark released an updated twentieth year anniversary edition. He's also written Fish, The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, a book that had a big impact on my relationship with my mother, as will explore, and a diet book called Vegan Before six Pm vb six, and beyond that almost two dozen other books on various aspects of food. He was a food columnist for The New York Times for thirteen years, and he's now editor in chief of the food publication he did. I talked to Mark about the transformation he has seen over the course of his career in how he talks about food and how we think about it. Thank you so much for doing this. I really I appreciate it tremendously. I mean looking forward to it. If I could start on a personal note, I just want to say that your Fish book has played a central role in my relationship with my mother over many, many years, involving a complex polemic about whether it's okay to undercook the fish or, as you would put it, okay not to overcook the fish. Right, I have to say that fish is tricky, Cooking fish is tricky, and every general rule is pretty much wrong. So the thing is that some fish wants to be cooked for a long time, and most fish barely wants to be cooked all. So that is that was the first book I did. It was published in ninety four and the publisher wanted me to redo it. I said, it's impossible to write about fish now. There's so many moral mine fields ethical mine fields that anything you write, if someone wants to trash you, they can trash you. And it just it's not it's hard to encourage the eating of fish, even though it's good for people, because the sustainability issues and other issues are so fraught that I just kind of decided I wasn't going to write about it. Yeah, that's extremely fascinating. And the sense that there's a moral compunction that interferes with, you know, going back and even doing a second edition of the book or a further edition of the book raises a question that I've been really struggling with and thinking about our conversation advance. And here's what it is. I feel as though when you started writing as a food writer, the genre, not yours in particular, but the way the genre worked was still very much a kind of life improvement. If you will cook this recipe in this way, it will taste good, so you'll feel better because you're eating better food, and your life will be better because the people around you will also enjoy this. And now the genre, including very much your work has evolved so that very often you're also telling us what's good for the world, not just what's good for you reader in cooking or in eating, but how the world will benefit. And so the problem with eating fish, for example, as you say, it might be great for you, but it might be really bad for the world. So how do you think about that those those two roles. Obviously they can be mixed, But first of all, do you think that has changed over the course of your career? And more importantly, how has it changed for you? Well? You is a wonderful analysis and totally true. And I started cooking in the seventies and we were ignorant. So those questions weren't raised because we in general were more ignorant. I in particular was way more ignorant. So things did start to change, but they changed very slowly. People didn't talk about climate change, people didn't talk about waste, and it's taken until now. You know, we want to we people who are striving to have food being taken seriously on a grander stage in a I mean not just hunger, but all of the issues that we talk about, malnutrition and sustainability and the impact of agriculture on the environment and climate change and all of that stuff. We, I guess, me and my comrades whatever think that food has gotten underplayed in its role in these huge issues. And I still think that's the case, although more and more people do talk about food and agriculture in that bigger sense. But and you're out there talking about all as are as. You say, your comrades, but you know, I'm just one voice, and not a particularly loud one. But yeah, back in the sixties and seventies, you ate food because it tasted good, and you cooked because it tasted better, and you kind of didn't You might think about good ingredients, but if they were there, you saw them and you ate them, but you didn't go talking about them all the time. I don't think even so, even within the doing good for the world, there's still two different parts. There's the health part and then there's the global health part, the sustainability. You know that the planet as it were, as the as the patient, well, well we're the happy and sad circumstance here, and quite possibly unique or at least unusual, is that what's good for you is good for the planet, and vice versa. That the way to eat for your body's optimal health happens to be the way that good agriculture would be providing you with food and protecting the health of the earth. So and is that genuinely by accident? I mean, this is something I'm puzzling over very much. I mean, God, right, so exactly. So, I mean we're actually going there, believe it or not. We're going to God in this conversation one way or another. But you know, the vegans, the hardcore vegans, would say, yeah, it's not a coincidence at all, and a lot of them would offer it. Not all, but some of that would offer a kind of what I would call a secular theology in which we are in some way in communion with the earth, and therefore it's not a surprise that that which is good for our bodies is grown out of the earth. You know, I don't think I'm making this out to be much more mystical than a lot of a lot of vegans would describe it as as being. And I should say, I'm not a vegan. I'm trying to channel that at that point of view here. Well, I mean vegan or not, because you can believe that animals and even eating animals are part of this system. I don't think you have to be a vegan to believe that that there is some kind of system that nourishes both the planet and people. So I don't think this needs to be a vegan or non argument. In fact, it makes more sense from that's real a cosmic perspective to be an omnivore. Insofar as you think there's some evolutionary component to this, you know, it's probably not a coincidence that humans have evolved to be omnivorous. Right, It's not a that we can say, I think with some assuredness. But um, it's hard because if you're going to put a layable on it that it's mystical or spiritual, then it's difficult to make that argument. You kind of either believe it or you don't. But if you're gonna put a label on it, if you're gonna say it's not a coincidence that what's good for the planet is good for the people who live on the planet, that doesn't have to be a mystical or spiritual argument. That can be a pragmatic argument. I just don't know that I'm prepared to make it it's a great prefer the question. Well, fine to say right exactly. Yeah, I think that it's true. It is hard to believe it's a coincident, like it just happens to be that way. I don't know that anyone's made the argument that growing the plants that nourish your body are by necessity the plants that are good for stewarding the land. And it is that way. But it's not because of teleology or God or something but it and it's not because of nature, because we're literally talking about his culture, which originally is like the culture. The word culture comes from agriculture. It's about growing stuff. So it's a self conscious thing. It's not a hundred gatherer picture. It's not a paleo diet account whereby the things we really should eat would be just the things that we happen to find, because if that were the case, we really wouldn't be able to sustain anything like the global population that we do. We need to grow some stuff, Well, we don't know that we are sustaining it, and we do know that populations that are five thousand years old have sustained themselves by doing more earth friendly forms of agriculture. So the biggest and oldest populations in the world, which are in Asia, eat mostly plants and always have and have done agriculture that could be argued is sustainable. And if something has proven itself over five thousand years. We're talking about rice culture now, right, yeah, kind of kind of but we culture too, but culture where there have been water challenges and weather challenges and challenges to the civilization themselves, but that the food culture has been sustained. There's no Western food culture that's been sustained for anything like that period of time, and certainly not in North America. I mean, everything that we've done in the last say, one hundred and fifty two hundred years, is only that old. That's how old it is. Yes, you can't call that sustainable, even if at the moment it appears to be working. It's not long enough to say, oh, yeah, this is You know that it's funny to get into the kind of philosophical or interesting to get into the kind of philosophical side of things, because when people argue that industrial agriculture is the way to do it, because how else are we going to support them doing air quotes? How else are we going to support ten billion people blah blah blah, and that anything else is a pipe dream. The pipe dream is to imagine that industrial agriculture is sustainable, because there's so much evidence that it isn't. And the reality is to say, we need to make it better. How do we make ag culture better? That's not a pipe dream to say how do we make agriculture better? It's a pipe dream to say we figured out agriculture. No, we haven't. Quite the opposite. We figured out how to erect the earth and how to cause a public health crisis by force feeding people junk food. So what is the answer? You know, the answer is it has to be better. The answer is it has to change. We'll be back in just a moment. I want to ask you about the process whereby food writers and then the people who read them came to see the world in the way that you're describing, came to care first. I would say, probably in order, first about taste, then about health, and then about sustainability and the world. And the reason I want to ask about that is that I think the answer may have something to do with a very particular elite, you know, upper middle class for lack of a better term. You know New York Times reading, and you know, I'm guilty as charged, you know, as as a reader and sometime contributor. And the reason I'm asking this is, when the history of this is told, will they say, you know that it was something about pretty rich people who nevertheless had some or maybe because they had the money, were capable of thinking ethically that drove this this kind of process. Because if that were true, I don't know if that's a true story or a fair story, but if it were a true story, it does come from a certain kind of excess and excess of wealth and excess of you know, elite cultural position, and then it comes to seem like good common sense with you know, people like you functioning as kind of the profits of the story, you know, the ones who are who are telling this story and telling us, you know, what we ought to believe. And then it's not a coincidence that you start by telling us what we ought to eat because it tastes good, and then you move through that to telling us what to eat in order to make the world a better place. You know, there are many other factors that you haven't mentioned, but I think one thing you're overlooking in this story is that let's say one third of the world has been eating according to the tenets of sustainability forever, and they're not New York Times readers, and they're not white elites. But they may not have been doing it in order for it to be sustainable. They may just have been doing it because it worked for them. Come on, that's not sustainability. I mean it worked for them for five thousand years. Yeah, but people don't always I mean, just to push back a little bit, I mean, I hear what you're saying, but people don't always do something because they know that it's always worked. I mean they people do things on a daily basis for all kinds of ordinary reasons. Sometimes failing to change something that's people. You know, take some oppressive structure that we've that's been around for five thousand years, I don't know, sexism or something like that, people say, well, we always have done it this way, so we stick with it. And then a critic wants to say, yeah, but you know, you think that works, but it doesn't work for half the people, and so, you know, I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the antiquity of a practice shows that it's necessarily a good one. Well, except when people switch from traditional diets to contemporary Western diets they get chronic disease. Yes, there's no question that is the truth. So I think that it's arguable and demonstrable that traditional diets work and that we're not discovering anything new here when we're saying eat a diet that's heavy in plants and light in anything else. What we have done that's new is in the last one hundred, one hundred and fifty years, is invent a bunch of food that makes people sick that didn't even exist before that. And yeah, I think maybe it takes public intellectuals or whatever. The shortcut version of what you said before is to recognize that first, a lot of it is an academic comes out of academia. But the marketing of that junk food targets everyone, but it targets less well off people disproportionately, and it targets everyone to the extent that it can, and it targets us so well that it's almost as if there's no choice but to eat junk food. So rebelling against that or recognizing that is not easy, and many people are just simply too busy you know, they're just like trying to get some food. And there's a wealth and a class element obviously there as well. It's you have to live in a neighborhood where there are shops that's self fresh food. You have to be able to afford to buy them. Although of course ideally it would be just as affordable as other food, but it isn't at the moment. You have to have the time to actually put the food on the table. And I recognize that lots of people who have free time to say they don't when they really do. But on the other hand, there are people who are working two or three jobs and are genuinely at the margins economically who really don't have the time. Right I used to say, I used to argue that people everybody should cook, and that it was ironic that people would watch cooking on television and say they didn't have time to cook at home. Yes, but there are so many people who have transportation challenges and two job challenges and scheduling challenges and childcare issues and da da da dada, on and on and on. I don't think it's right to say that anymore. I probably wasn't right to say it in the first place. Um, although it's a good line, and it's a great line, and it's and there are people who watch TV instead of cooking. I mean, maybe they're exhausted, pistending about exercise. You know, if you're watching sports on television, why an't you out there working out? And right that in theory that makes good sense. People's realities are are complicated, right, I think the real the real issue here, the real I don't think the real tragedy is that junk food marketers target everybody and they're very, very sophisticated. That kind of marketing, which is scientific and algorithmic and way beyond my understanding at least, you know, gets us to eat all kinds of things that we know we shouldn't be eating, and there's there's no question about whether we should be eating them the way quantities we are. And everyone has that experience. Everyone has the experience of looking at some piece of junk food and thinking, I know, I'm not supposed to eat that, and then eating it. Right, probably even Gwyneth Paltrow sometimes. But the point is that I don't think that that's the thing that doesn't get talked about. It gets talked about a lot, but it doesn't get talked about enough because that is the thing that's wrecking both our health and the health of the planet. So one solution to that is regulation, and I went to it. I'm down with that. Yeah. And when Mike Bloomberg was mayor of New York, he went big time into some versions of that. I mean, I suppose from some perspective they were pretty modest. You know, you can't buy soda in a fort. You know, he tried to get a soda taxs past and fail and so so, but that was a backup plan. And you know, there was some backlash to the Bloomberg approach. You know, people talked about the nanny state or the nanny mayor. That's something that may or may not follow him, you know, in his political future. How do you think about the possibilities, the real world possibilities of the kind of regulation that might be necessary to deal with the big corporations, because, as you point out, it's not enough just to educate people, because not withstand the education, there are all these other pressures on us. I mean, you're asking me to predict the winner of the twenty twenty election, because you're not going to make progress when you have a president who's trying to dismantle the EPA and every other progressive or potentially progressive arm of government. So we are at the point where we're trying to defend regulations that exist. Well, let me ask a simpler question that, or maybe it's simpler. I mean, do you think that disclosure regulations of the kind that require you know, chain restaurants to list the number of calories and their dishes and things like that are I mean, there's some data suggesting that they have some effect at the margin, So I'm not asking you about the data. What I'm asking is whether, at an instinctive level, you think, yeah, you know, if we do a whole lot more labeling will be much better off, or if your instinct is no, labeling is not going to be enough to go against the kind of sophisticated marketing. What we need is some actual legal rules that say, you know, certain kinds of food can't be sold to kids, or can't be sold in certain packaging, or can't be advertising in a certain way, which is what we've done with tobacco. I guess I think the answer is both. I think that there's that incremental change is necessary at this point, even if it's just symbolic or representative. And I think food labeling, putting calories on, I mean, there is some data that says that it's useful, but it's certainly not revolutionary. But if you say more information is better, more truth is better, more actual truth is better. And we're starting by saying, you know, a whopper has a thousand calories or whatever, and you might want to know that that's something when you get to real transparency, when you can say we're going to have video cameras everywhere that that animals are confined, and we're going to show you on a minute to minute basis. You want to know where this burger is from. Here's how you can trace. I mean that's doable. We can trace the history of any any piece of food you like. You can see where it's from, how it's raised, how it was processed, and so on. That I think will help change consciousness. But I think some form of recognizing that sugar is the tobacco of the twenty first century, that junk food is damaging our health, and that government's job is to protect the public health, and to recognize that just like government's job is to recognize that vaccines are public health tools. If people don't think that, that's really unfortunate. But they're wrong. So now what do you want government to be about. Well, in facts, the case of vaccine, though, at least to my mind, is a pretty clear case where the law ought to dictate. Part of the reason for that is that they're such a big spillover effect on everybody else if I don't vaccinate my kids, So, you know, without talking about the case of the genuine religious objector you know, the core case of you know, the person who's it's like, well, I just don't want to do that. I think it's probably not healthy. I myself am very comfortable saying the law should mandate that. It's a teeny bit harder to say that in the case of sugar, because although bad eating has spillover effects in the sense that I need more healthcare and then other people have to help pay for that healthcare, it doesn't have the same insignificant which is not insignificant, but it doesn't have quite the same immediate spillover effects as non vaccination. I mean, there's no argument you're eating yourself to death is not going to kill me, but it is going to inconvenience me. And there's a spectrum here. So you start with vaccines, you move to tobacco, which has the second hand smoke arguments, suppose, and then you say, well, your ability to drink ten cans of coca day or whatever actually does or may affect my children's health because my children can't think about this stuff in a way of supposedly thoughtful grown up can. And by keeping the mark getting of coke, for example, unlimited, by not joining sides and trying to rein in the rapacious marketing of people who are trying to sell sugar sweetened beverages to everybody all the time, you're threatening the life of my children, for example. Sure, and I you know the argument it's wearing your arm ends where your fist meets my face kind of thing. Yeah, well, I mean it's it's appropriate that you that you mentioned that adage because that's also where you hit the real objection from libertarians, you know, where they say, well, we have to draw the line somewhere, and that line is at my chin, you know, and this is only metaphorically affecting you know, me or my kids. And I think you also have to add to that the kind of often class based reaction that says, look, I have few enough pleasures in my life, and you really want to take away from me this the pleasure of having this coke. And you know, then the educated person quote unquote says, well, you don't understand. You only like that coke because the marketing has made your brain like that coke. And that's about the point where in the ordinary person might want to punch you, you know, you know well, but can't because the libertarianism. Right, But you see what I'm saying. I mean, I think I do think there is a kind of instinct to say. One of the things that's wrong in our society is that educated people think they know what's best for us. And you know, I'm going to make my own decisions, and don't tell me that I only have these decisions because I'm deluded into it by corporate advertising. Well, even though you and I may think, yeah, you are, yeah, But also if you say I don't want educated people to make decisions that affect me, you're sort of implying that you want uneducated people to democracy. Right, That is called democracy and educated people. But if they're more uneducated people, they make the decision. That's right, and that's the position we're in now. And that's why when you started this conversation and said you're asking me to predict the winner of the twenty twenty election, because yeah, you know, our food habits and desires are formed at a really young age. If we don't take control over what our children see and eat when it comes to food, what they see in how they're marketed to and what they wind up eating as a result of that, if we don't have some kind of intervention in that arena, we are going to have generation after generation after generation of unhealthy adults. Because we all know how hard it is to change are you said it before? We all want to eat a whopper now, and then we all know how hard it is to change the way the way that we eat. And that's because when we were four years old, or now even two years old, we were being bottle fed kool aid, or you know, encouraged to drink coke or to eat candy or sweeten the breakfast cereal and obvious one and so on. I don't think you can make that stuff illegal, certainly not in the current climate, but you can rein it in a little bit I think let's talk a little bit, if we could, about cooking as a discipline, either a self discipline or a pleasurable activity, or some combination of those things. So you've just reissued the twentieth edition right of the wonderfully named How to Cook Everything, And I presume that your own thinking about what it means to cook has changed from the time that you wrote that book until today. If so, maybe I'm wrong, Maybe it hasn't changed. Do you think about the purpose of cooking the same way now as you did that I'm so much less obsessive about it and so much more easy going about it. And people still seem to like the food that I'm not even talking about the books. The books speak for themselves, But when friends come to my house or I cook somewhere else, people still seem to think. I know what I'm doing and the food is good, and I think it's pretty good, but it's not sweated over, it's not obsessed about. And I used to do that, and then I realized people love it when you cook for them. They're so happy that you that you're cooking for them. They're so grateful. Everybody loves to have someone say I'll cook for you, Yes, so this the bar is not that high. But you know you're cooking for somebody, you already have the benefit of the doubt. And the fact is that most of the food out in the world is so bad that when you are cooking for your friends or your family or whatever, you're usually producing stuff that's much much better than what they're getting for lunch or dinner days that they're not being cooked for or not cooking themselves. So I think I'm more laid back about it. Did you originally have some of the the artisans or the artists love of the undertaking or was your view always some version of the important thing is that you're taking some kind of fresh ingredients that and cooking them. Well, I think at the beginning, I really like I still really like steep learning curves. So at the beginning I knew nothing. So I could make a boiled lobster or or some French fries or a whitebread of the kind that I wouldn't even consider eating, let alone making now and be ecstatic yes at the craft of doing it. Yes, but I kind of know the craft now. I mean I'm not. And you've also done a lot to teach people some basic techniques. I mean, to me, that was the most transformative aspect of your whole approach. And that's how I think had a huge influence on many other food writers and on many other cookbooks. And forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think you might have been the first person to sort of present it to the reader in that way. You know, learn this suite of techniques, which isn't actually that enormous. It'll take you a long time to get good at them. But if you get competent in these suite of techniques, you can kind of cook. Yeah, I can think of people who did that before me, but you know, I was the first person to do it after a while of no one having done it, So fair enough, that's good enough. It feels that way, and I was adamant about doing it that way, and all my books look like that, and so it's my style. And I'm happy about that last question. And I'm really grateful for your time. When you think about, you know, what an addition of how to cook everything would look like if you did it again in ten years or even twenty, how do you imagine it evolving in the future. Well, I mean, if you there have been three editions of Had Everything, the first yellow one and then a red one, and then the second pale or yellow one. And a lot of the changes are cosmetic. That is, people wanted photographs from the beginning, so now we have photographs, and we have more charts, and we have more graphics. I mean, it's a more interesting book all around. But the biggest change is that there's less meat and more plants. And I think that in ten years there'll be less meat still and more plants still. And I think in twenty years the same. I think that I think the world will follow you. It won't just be your movement there. I'm following. I'm not setting trends. I'm following trends or I'm seeing trends. I don't. This is not me. I mean, of course, there's there's a given take, right, there's a boomerang effect or whatever. But I think I'm representing what's happening. I speak to crowds all the time, and I always ask who here is eating less meat than they were ten years ago. And there's a few cantankerous people who want to prove their independence who don't raise their hands, but everybody raises their hands. Everybody's eating less meat than they were ten years ago, and that's true in every audience I go to. More than ninety percent of people raise their hands. I don't know, so I'm asking you because you might are their bigger picture of statistics supporting that, or is that like people who are buying your books and coming to listen to you. Well, I think there's very much of us speaking to the preaching to the choir aspect of this, for sure. But you know the fact that and it's a whole separate conversation about the fact that Burger King is selling a vegan burger I think I think speaks to that too. I think people are looking for ways around eating meat. The fact that they are readily changing through a different form of junk food, as in the impossible burger is maybe a good thing and maybe not. It's very complicated. Might be bad for them, but good for the world. Satisfy one of our central goals, but not one of the others. Right, But they could be eating falafel and be good all around in a way. It's just that no one's about their marketing falafel in that way. Well, there you go, there's your business. Opportunity. Yeah, I might be working on it, except I'm not so, thank you very much. Yeah, it was fun. The conversation I had with Mark was really eye opening, at least for me, and thinking about the changes in how we interact with the whole topic of food. I think we're going to have a lot more opportunity to reflect on that in the days and weeks ahead. I'm certainly looking at what's in my refrigerator very differently than I was before the coronavirus. Not only is there a lot more of it, had to be really mindful about choosing what was going to go in there, what could be frozen, what could be preserved, what would be good, how I get fresh vegetables. And we also have to think much more seriously than usual about the supply chain of how food gets onto our tables. After all, in a world where we're all social distancing, real human beings have to be out there doing their jobs full time and taking on the corona risk just in order to get food continuing to come to us. The centrality and importance of food workers has never been clearer in my lifetime. If you're at home practicing social distancing the way most of us are advised to do. Good luck with it. I hope you're managing. I hope the food on your table is tasty. If you're out there doing your job trying to enable the rest of us to stay home and stay safe, please accept my thanks and all of our appreciation. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott, with studio recording by Joseph Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Godwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Backslash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com Backslash Podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.