Mark Bittman Quotes

50-100 years from now we are all going to be eating a plant based diet. Whether that happens through a catastrophe or a peaceful sustainable life giving way is based on whether we make the right choices now and how we fight in this struggle together.

The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness.

We need real farmers who grow real food, and the will to reform a broken food system. And for that, we need not only to celebrate farmers, but also to advocate for them.

I live full-time in the world of omnivores, and I've never wanted to leave. But the Standard American Diet (yes, it's SAD) got to me as it gets to almost everyone in this country.

It's good to have a short memory because it keeps life fresh.

Let me pose you a question. Can farm-raised salmon be organic when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth?

Meatless Mondays is a dead-simple strategy. Anyone can do it, and it doesn't require major sacrifice. Even if you eat a typical American diet replete with processed, junk and fast food the other six days of the week, going meatless on Mondays will still cut your carbon footprint, improve your health and reduce demand for factory-farm meat.

Anyone can cook, and most everyone should.

If you embrace moderation, eat whole foods instead of junk, live within your physical, monetary, and environmental budget rather than constantly exceeding it, you will lose weight, tread more lightly on the planet, and gain satisfaction from these things.

[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.

Your 'Pringle' contains 30% potato, that yoghurt has the same amount of sugar as ice cream, that whole grain cereal bar may be no better for you than a snickers.

Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now.

I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly.

The truly healthy alternative to that chip is not a fake chip; it's a carrot.

(As Michael Pollan says, "a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food")

I got into cooking out of self-defense.

This evidence is overwhelming at this point. You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer.

We need to demonise soda, the way we've demonised cigarettes.

The USDA is not our ally here. We have to take matters into our own hands, not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone - and that's the hard part - but by improving our own. And that happens to be quite easy. Less meat, less junk, more plants.