Mark Bittman: Why We Need a Food Police
In more than 30 years of writing about food, Mark Bittman has influenced millions of home cooks with easy-to-replicate techniques and recipes that demystify and take the fear out of cooking, well, just about everything -- to paraphrase the title of his most famous book. His credo is simplicity, exemplified during the more than a dozen years writing his New York Times column "The Minimalist." But his big idea these days is surprisingly maximalist: We need to eat less meat, and governments should make us do it.
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"You know, one good thing about being an authoritarian state," says Bittman of China, "is that if you want to do something, well, you can just do it." And with an estimated 350 million new people expected to join the Chinese middle class by 2030 putting strains on food production, Beijing just might have to. "The current state of meat production -- and everyone wants to eat meat now, just like Americans -- is unsustainable," Bittman says. "It simply cannot last."
"More than 50 percent of corn is fed to animals to produce beef, or turned into ethanol," Bittman says. "It's inefficient at best, and simply unsustainable at current levels of production. But you can make beef sustainable, as long as we agree that we're going to eat less of it."
So how do you get to that point? "You need the rule of law. If you want to prevent oil shocks, if you want to prevent destruction of the environment, if you want to slow global warming, then you have to move to a sustainable agriculture," Bittman says. "If industrial agriculture and massively subsidized meat production is destroying the environment, why can't there be laws preventing it? But today we have anarchy. We have a system of food production with no sense of the global public health in mind."
It seems a somewhat incongruous argument for someone who's made a career of educating readers on how to grill the perfect marinated flank steak or make a sublime roasted leg of lamb. But Bittman's moved away from a meat-centric diet these past few years, authoring a follow-up book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.
"I've seen food get worse. When I grew up, things were much more local. Today, it's all industrialized. It's all agribusiness. $2.99 lamb or $1.29 pork is unbelievable. It represents nothing close to its real costs." So what to do if governments won't step up and enact laws to encourage more sustainable food production? "On a personal level," says Bittman, "people can move away from junk and processed foods and animal-central products. Even eating 10 percent less of these things could make an enormous change."
But Bittman avers that he's no saint. "I was just driving recently and had to stop for gas. And I was so hungry. I only had a dollar in my pocket and I was starving so I bought some Cheetos. They were awesome."
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