Mark Bittman - Vegan Before 6PM

Full transcript: Mark Bittman on London Real

4:12 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mark Bittman, the award-winning food journalist, author, and former columnist of The New York Times for nearly two decades. You’ve written 20 acclaimed books, created more than 17,000 recipes, and have just published the 10th edition of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. You’re known for fusing your politics with your expertise on food, and have starred in four television series, including Showtime’s Emmy Award-winning climate change documentary, Years of Living Dangerously.

4:49 You’re currently a writer for New York Magazine’s Grub Street. Mark, welcome to London.

4:55 Mark Bittman: Thank you for telling me who I am and what I do. It’s a very nice summary.

5:00 Brian Rose: You’re welcome.

5:01 What are you doing in London, and what is it like when you get off that plane and kind of come into the city? What are some of the feelings you get, or what do you see?

5:13 Mark Bittman: You know, so I’m doing a series of trips to look at food policy and food production around the world, because I’m working on a book that involves that. So the idea was that I was going to go to Haiti, Brazil, London, India, maybe Thailand. I got thrown out of Brazil.

5:33 So, or that is not led into Brazil, because I didn’t have a visa. So I went Haiti, Brazil, New York, a few days at home, and then came here for a couple extra days, because I had the time, since I had scheduled the time to be in Brazil. So I got here five days ago, and I realized that it was 50 years since my first trip here. It was exactly this year, January 1968. I was 17 years old, and I was here for three weeks.

6:05 Not only in London, it was a college trip. We took a coach ride around the country, and I’m pretty sure we flew to Edinburgh for a couple days. And I remember some of it well, and some of it I don’t remember at all. And it jumbled with a couple of other trips. But it’s the first, you know, it was the first city abroad that I ever came to, and I have incredible fondness for it.

6:33 I’ve come a zillion times since it’s the city I’ve spent the most time in, other than New York and maybe San Francisco. But it’s just always nice to be here. It’s nice to be here in January, because it is cold as hell at home. And so you come here, and it’s like rainy and drizzly, but at least it’s 45, 50 degrees, so you’re not just shivering all the time. So anyway.

6:56 Brian Rose: And what is the food like here today, and compared to, say, 50 years ago when you first got here?

7:02 Mark Bittman: Well, I don’t remember specifics 50 years ago, and I’m in a much different position because there are people who want to impress me. And also I have good friends who know a lot about food here, so I get sent to the right places. So for those reasons, I think, you know, I eat really well when I’m here. And I ate at friends’ houses.

7:23 When I was here 50 years ago, I mean, honestly, I think we were eating pub lunches, you know, you’d have a plowman’s lunch, or, you know, I just don’t remember. But I do remember thinking it was, of course I remember thinking it was bad, but this is why I started cooking, because the food – I went to college in Worcester, Massachusetts – the food was terrible there also. And I came from New York where the food was actually pretty varied. Like, in those days, I think New York was more international, cosmopolitan than London.

8:05 I think the immigration laws were similar, but what New York had was the United Nations. So every country had some kind of outpost in New York, and every country had a restaurant that at least served the diplomats of that country. So in high school – I was vaguely interested in food – in high school I got to eat in Indonesian restaurants and Korean restaurants and Indian restaurants. And in the rest of the United States, that kind of stuff was very, very hard to find.

8:38 Brian Rose: I imagine you could have found it in D.C., but certainly not in Worcester. Right. And you grew up in New York City. Yeah, I did grow up. What happened? What was that like?

8:47 Mark Bittman: Well, it was – you ask anyone what their childhood was like, and they say, was my childhood? It’s what I knew. It’s normal. I grew up in a – you know, what you’d call council housing, or what they’d call council housing here. I grew up in a huge project in Manhattan, post-World War II project.

9:07 Brian Rose: Where? Stuyvesant Town. Okay, yeah.

9:10 Mark Bittman: So it was an interesting place. When I look at it now, I think it looks like prison.

9:18 But there was greenery. I had lots of friends. I went to pretty good schools. It certainly wasn’t a hard life. I wasn’t – you know, New York when I was growing up was the 50s.

9:35 It was more – it looked more like it did in the 30s. It looked like it did in Cary Grant movies than it looks now. It felt very urban to me, and there’s some comfort level I have with that kind of density. I can’t say that I like it, but I feel very at home in it. So that’s why – I don’t know why growing up there was – It was dangerous. You see the movies of the 60s and 70s and mean streets.

10:09 I mean, I did get mugged a couple times, but – I think The French Connection is what I’ve ever seen. Right. I remember feeling like it was dangerous. Or the Black Splittation movies is when I think of New York then and The Warriors. I mean, I once got told to stay off of a block.

10:31 I once got my bike stolen. I once was literally assaulted. But somehow it was like part of the deal. It’s funny. It just didn’t – it wasn’t scary to me.

10:44 And then in the 70s when I think the crime rate was pretty high, it was also like, well, if you’re going to live here, you’re going to live with that. You can leave if you want to, but that’s how it was. I don’t know. I was lucky. I think I had a, in retrospect, very quiet upbringing.

11:04 And I think relied on my friends a great deal, more than my relatives, let’s say. And I’m still friends with a lot of my friends from childhood. And then I went away to school and things got going. Right. And you should – But I will – if we’re going to talk about food, because I think it is interesting.

11:28 By my third semester in college, by the first semester of my sophomore year, I had been here. I had been to California. I hadn’t really been anywhere else. I started cooking. And I started cooking because I did grow up in New York, and I knew that good food existed, but I didn’t know how to find it.

11:49 So I started cooking it, and I was 20 when I started cooking.

11:53 Brian Rose: And your parents had never taught you how to cook.

11:57 Mark Bittman: Well, you know, I grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household. There was a kind of cuisine that my grandmother cooked. My mother was much more of a post-war American cook, so it was a lot of sort of steak and potatoes one night and a pork chop and potatoes another night, a salad every night, and cornflake chicken or something like that, a hamburger.

12:22 I mean, just really straightforward what used to be called American food. I don’t know what you call it now, but it’s not the way I eat now, that’s for sure. But when I started cooking, I think my second or third cookbook was an Indian cookbook. I was fascinated by Indian food. I have no idea why.

12:49 I still have that cookbook. It’s a little tiny paperback from some Indian restaurant in Chicago. But I obviously had the Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking and James Beard books, and that sort of was classic 60s French American kind of. I mean, James Beard was more Western American. And went from there.

13:19 Not a lot of men cooking back then. Not a lot of men in the supermarkets, I can say. I used to go to the supermarket, and aside from the stock clerks, I was the only guy in the supermarket. I mean, literally in the late 60s, early 70s, I’d go to the supermarket and be the only man in there. That’s obviously changed.

13:36 Brian Rose: Was that hard to push through some of that? Did you know?

13:40 Mark Bittman: No, I mean, I thought it was… I just was into it. It wasn’t a political statement. I mean, to some extent it was, because I was hanging out with women who were into…

13:53 You know, we were all political, so we were all anti-war. We were all pro-women’s rights. We were all anti-racist. You know, we were trying to work on doing the right thing. What we saw was doing the right thing.

14:08 So part of cooking, I think, was that at one point I was living with a bunch of people, I think it was three women and two men, or vice versa, and we kind of all did everything. And before that, I think I felt like… There was part of me that thought that it was right for men to learn how to cook. But really, I enjoyed it. I really liked it.

14:35 And I still do. It’s one of my favorite things to do.

14:39 Brian Rose: And for you, the food and the politics, or the policy, or the morality, and the ethics always went together.

14:47 Mark Bittman: Well, I don’t think I saw the connections in the 70s. As I said, I think there was a little bit of sort of wanting to be pro-women’s liberation that was part of cooking.

14:59 But really, the political work that I was doing was I was part of an organization that did primarily tenant organizing. We did some other, I think, valuable stuff also. But primarily tenant, and I ran the newspaper. So I was learning how to write and edit and take pictures actually, and work in a dark room. I mean, I did cutting and pasting when cutting and pasting meant scissors and wax.

15:32 All of the letter set, you know, letter press, all of that stuff. But the food didn’t seem so much a part of it then. I moved to Connecticut, and in the 80s and 90s when I was raising my kids, there were some farms in Connecticut. I became friendly with some farmers. But I also saw farms disappearing as Connecticut became more suburban, and I think what’s called exurban.

16:03 I mean, part of Connecticut is New York suburbs, but part of it is just small cities that grew and grew and grew. And the rural part of Connecticut, for the most part, is not farms anymore. It’s either McMansions, horse farms were really wealthy people, wealthy suburbs, or there are some old summer estates, but also some farms are big pieces of property that have been in families for years and years in the eastern part of the state. But in any case, I could see food getting worse and worse and worse.

16:37 I could see less food coming from farms. I could see supermarkets having fewer and fewer types of food. When I got to New Haven, which is where I lived, when I got there, the neighborhood I was living in was African American, Hispanic, Latino. There were still some old Jews around. I don’t know, it was a mix, and some young people moving in.

17:06 And the food in the supermarkets represented that. So you could certify, maybe I didn’t say Italians, but there were a lot of Italians. So you could find real Italian stuff, and you could find things that African Americans cook with, you could find Latino food, you could find all of that. And then as American cooking, no, I was going to say cuisine, but as American cooking became less and less interesting, which I really think it did for many years, at least what you could buy in supermarkets was more and more.

17:43 Wasn’t limited, there were thousands of items, but they were kind of all the same. It’s like half the stuff in supermarkets is not even food at this point. So seeing all that happen, and in the late 90s, Fast Food Nation came out, which is really Eric Schlosser’s book, a really seminal book, still meaningful, terrific book, pointed out all the contradictions in the food system that we still see today. Some of these you covered in your TED Talk. Some of that is in my TED Talk, some of it is in my book Food Matters.

18:19 Brian Rose: I watched your TED Talk today, and ten years ago almost, you’re forecasting things that were then made, documentaries were made five years and six years after that. I mean, you’re talking about something that was in Cowspiracy, and you’re bringing up methane and the production and the cows.

18:32 Mark Bittman: I mean, there’s actually… I’m not going to take a lot of credit for it. It’s a good talk.

18:36 Brian Rose: I like it. Good talk. Those were early ideas that then later became embraced and now are kind of mainstream.

18:43 Mark Bittman: Yeah, they are more mainstream.

18:45 Brian Rose: And you had…it was a pretty…

18:47 You were very opinionated in there, and you’re like, this is a big problem, you really put a line in the sand, and it’s a pretty good talk.

18:55 Mark Bittman: Well, thank you. I’m not going to say it’s not a pretty good talk. I will say that I worked hard on it, and…but a lot of the ideas had been expressed by other people.

19:04 Brian Rose: Sure, but that was pretty controversial at the time, I’m sure.

19:08 Did you get a lot of blowback from those ideas?

19:12 Mark Bittman: I got so much positive feedback. It was unbelievable.

19:16 Brian Rose: And you’d been thinking about that stuff for a while. Well, as I said, I think starting in 97, 99, I started to see that there was a way to write about these things and a way to think about them differently, and that food really was a political thing, that food was as important as many other issues that people were talking about, and that I wrote…started to write How to Cook Everything Vegetarian because I thought…not because I was a vegetarian because I’m not, but because I thought I wanted to know more about the world of plants.

19:56 Mark Bittman: And that sort of led to my thinking about, well, what is the world going to be like? How does agriculture work? And so on. And then in 2006, or I think in 2006, maybe 2007, there was an FAO report called Livestock’s Long Shadow that documented the relationship between industrial animal production and greenhouse gas production. And so you put that together with all the nutritional stuff about red meat being…let’s say, red meat being not good for you.

20:36 It’s hard to say that it’s bad for you, but too much red meat is probably bad for you. And also the whole hyper-processed food thing. And we were at that point already in the middle of what’s sometimes called the obesity epidemic. In any case, many more people weigh much more than they used to. And that’s largely because of surplus of non-nutritional or low nutritional calories and a super aggressive marketing campaign by the food industry.

21:07 And you put all that stuff together, and it’s a pretty damning picture. And it’s hard to be hopeful about this sometimes. And there are a lot of people who think we’re headed for… you know, nutritionally we’re in rough shape, and there are twice as many. At this point there are twice as many.

21:31 There’s two kinds of malnutrition. So there’s still close to a billion people in the world who are malnourished in the more classic sense of they’re not getting enough micronutrients. There are stunted children, and there are people who are underway, and there are people who have nutritional deficiency diseases and so on. But there’s two billion people in the world who are malnourished. And another way, which is to say they eat way too much bad food and as a result are overweight and or have chronic diseases that are avoidable, preventable.

22:08 And they’re preventable by a decent diet. And yet it’s so hard to… You know, I could ask you this question. I ask everybody this question, which is, how do we make sustainability? How do we make a cooperative society in which we understand that resources are limited, in which we understand that equality among humans is and needs to be a real thing, in which we understand that growth is not the primary goal of society?

22:43 How do we make that a hip concept? How do we make that a concept that people believe in and act upon? I’m not saying no one does. Yeah, but people are talking about it more. People are talking about it more.

22:55 But if you listen to Bill McKibben or other climate change experts, we’re… You know, this is becoming a juggernaut that’s going to be, at some point, impossible. Maybe we’re already past the turning point, but at some point impossible to stop. And sea level rise is already a real thing, but it’s going to get worse. And meat demand coming out of China and this new class coming up.

23:21 And as we’ve seen in movies like Cowspiracy, you can do everything but tell people what not to eat. You also have trouble telling them what not to drive. I mean, there’s a lot of things you can’t tell people to do. And I think food is one aspect of this thing. People don’t like to be told what to do, and I understand that, but I think it’s also worth understanding that government began as a cooperative effort among people and that it will work if it’s a cooperative effort among people.

23:50 It doesn’t work if it’s an oligarchy, which is what we see here and in the States and in so much of the world. So, you know, food isn’t… To me, at this point, when I started my time’s opinion column, I saw food as an end to be able to talk about other issues. I mean, it’s certainly worth talking about food. I still think it’s worth talking about cooking, for that matter.

24:16 But food is also a way to address the environment and labor issues and immigration issues and almost every serious issue you can think about.

24:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, most people, if you say food and politics, they would be like, what are you talking about? My meal is my meal, and what does it have to do with a president or a migrant worker? But when you start talking about it, it starts to become really clear. Well, you know, there is this argument about the true cost of food and what does a cheeseburger really cost and then environmental costs and labor costs and…

24:47 They say a Big Mac costs 12 bucks or something.

24:50 Mark Bittman: Well, I did the math at one point… Maybe it’s eight. But there’s a lot of ways of looking at it. The government subsidy, the pollution, the healthcare issues.

24:58 Exactly, exactly. It’s actually a great new book by my friend Raj Patel called… I hope I get this right, he’s going to be mad at me. But seven cheap things. And it sort of outlines labor, life, healthcare, food, whatever the other three things are, land, I’m sure, and how it’s all interrelated and how we need to be valuing things at what they actually cost.

25:30 And, you know, there’s this phrase, natural capital, which is kind of… I think it’s a little awkward. But, you know, what is land really worth? Because we only have this much of it. What is water really worth?

25:45 What is our health really worth? And so on. And when you look at true costs of food, as you say, environmental costs, labor costs, healthcare costs, you’re looking at, you know, food appears to be cheap, but someone’s absorbing the… We are absorbing those costs in a different way. Society’s absorbing those costs in a different way.

26:06 So, you know, it’s sort of little by little, we make the changes we can make. But I really… And, you know, I’m not a… I don’t know if I think marketing is an evil thing, but it has been used for, to a great extent, for evil purposes. And I’m really curious if…

26:31 Brian Rose: I’m not as curious as some other people, but a lot of people talk a lot about how do we market a good society? You know, how do we market a better way of eating? How do we market a more fair society? How do we make people buy into that stuff, as opposed to saying, I’m going to drive whatever I want. I’m going to live however I want.

26:51 I’m going to eat whatever I want. There’s some balance between freedom and collective responsibility that we don’t quite get. And, you know, maybe 200 years ago, or even 75 years ago in the States, and here when there was a welfare state, there was an inkling of how this worked. But, of course, it wasn’t done perfectly, and it went against the interests of very powerful people. And now it seems that those people are so entrenched that it’s going to be hard to move the pendulum in the other direction.

27:28 Mark Bittman: I mean, look at who’s the president of the United States. It’s completely weird. No one would have believed this 18 months ago.

27:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah. What were you hoping to find in Brazil?

27:38 What did you see in Haiti? And what are you expecting to look for in India, and as you continue your tour?

27:46 Mark Bittman: Well, there’s kind of two… I’m reluctant to go into a lot of detail about this because it’s, in a way, it’s material that’s better written than talked about, but I don’t want to shortchange you either.

28:01 Brian Rose: I mean, you wrote a blog about your Haiti tour.

28:04 Yeah, yeah. Because you’ve always had a bit of connection to the Haitian community, even back when you lived in Massachusetts.

28:10 Mark Bittman: Not really. It’s just something I’ve been interested in, or well, even fascinated as strong. I’ve long wanted to visit Haiti, so I had the opportunity to do it, so I did it.

28:19 But the travel is for two things, primarily for two things, and they’re both a bad food. One is, where is their food policy that makes more sense than what we have in the United States? And, you know, the fact that you now have a national soda tax, however small and however new, and you also are either talking about or have just started doing exclusion areas around school where you can’t build a fast food restaurant within 400 meters of a school or something like that.

28:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are not at that place.

28:53 Mark Bittman: I mean, I’m traveling because it’s hard to see examples of good food policy in the United States. To the extent that they exist, I kind of know about them. So that Brazil has had an interesting history with food policy in the last 10, 15 years, and I wanted to go there to see that.

29:10 And it will get a visa and go back. Okay, okay. That was a mistake. Haiti, you know, Haiti is an independent nation. It was the second republic in the Western Hemisphere.

29:26 It had a revolution that ended in 18… successfully ended in 1804 with a formation of republic. The revolution was largely, I think, inspired by the French Revolution. This had been a French colony. And Haitians expected to be welcomed with open arms by the rest of the world’s republics, by the United States and France.

29:53 And instead it was like, I don’t think we were bargaining for an African republic in the Western Hemisphere. You know, and they were subsequently, let’s say, not supported by France or the United States or Great Britain. You know, who still act as if they believe in colonialism or a form of colonialism. The rhetoric is not colonialist, but the actions of the G7 countries, the big powerful economic powers are… Yeah, we still need there to be an undeveloped world where we can use as markets and from which we can take resources and so on. So Haiti has been, let’s say, globally oppressed for 150, 200 years.

30:56 And also has had bad luck. And I think, you know, there’s some saying about luck making itself, but I mean, part of the bad luck is that it’s been treated badly as a country, as have many Caribbean nations, but it’s had kind of overabundance of bad luck. Yeah, and some national service. The earthquake of 2010 killed 200,000 people. So that’s a big number.

31:23 Brian Rose: I had Wyclef Jean here and he talked about going down there and what he saw.

31:29 Mark Bittman: So I was only there for three days, which in effect is two days. But I wanted to see… There’s been this phenomenon of, as in many countries, of people moving into the city, but there’s not work for everybody in the city and the city is very crowded. And then because it’s been such a poor country for so long and for other reasons as well, the hillsides, the mountainsides have been denuded of trees, and there’s been a lot of erosion.

32:06 I mean, this has happened all over the world. This happened in Texas. I mean, it’s not only Haiti, but it happened in Haiti. But there’s been a resurgence of people in the villages, staying in the villages, doing agriculture, the kind of really small shareholder farming, peasant farming, that I think I’ve seen elsewhere in the world, that I intend to see elsewhere in the world, which is, to some extent, subsistence farming, but also subsistence plus. So growing enough to eat and then enough to sell some also.

32:47 And then markets become a problem and an issue. And it’s an evolving situation. And so it’s early in my travels. And when I go to India, I’m going to see this kind of farming is increasingly being called agroecology, but it’s called different things by different people. And it could be called organic farming.

33:10 In India, there’s a movement to call it, what they call it, a zero budget, Z budget, excuse me, Z budget natural farming. But basically what it means is reduction or elimination of pesticides and chemical fertilizer. Which is where we need to go. Building of the soil, which is really important. Careful use of water, really important, and so on.

33:33 And growing food that’s right for the people who are growing it. So I think I’ll know, Haiti, I think, was just a taste of this. I think I’ll know a lot. And I’m spending two weeks in India, so I think I’ll know a lot more then than I do now. And then I’m going to keep traveling and keep looking at stuff.

33:56 And when people say, what are you looking for? I say, I’m looking for things that make me hopeful, which is really what I’m looking for, is things that make me hopeful. So it’s this combination of agriculture that feeds people rather than the global machine and food policy that encourages that kind of agriculture and encourages better eating. Because that’s, you know, we have a two-headed monster here. One is that, environmentally, we’re doing terrible things and the other is that, nutritionally, we’re doing terrible things.

34:32 Brian Rose: Your book and concept, Vegetarian Before 6 p.m., where did that come from? Because it’s very interesting, and I’ll be honest, the last three to six months I’ve had more people talking about plant-based diets and a lot of people from different angles, and it’s just something that I’m becoming more aware of and practicing myself, but I hadn’t really heard of this concept before 6 p.m., but it sounds doable.

35:01 Mark Bittman: Well, that’s the thing. It’s a trick. So I wrote How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and I was already convinced, but I was more convinced that I and everybody else should be eating a more plant-heavy diet.

35:15 And this was a while back. This was also about 10 years ago.

35:19 Brian Rose: And you weren’t vegetarian then.

35:21 Mark Bittman: I’m not vegetarian now.

35:23 Brian Rose: So you’re kind of forcing yourself to try something.

35:26 Mark Bittman: Right. Well, I needed some rules. I do better with… I do better with… And then this is a personal thing. Everybody’s different.

35:39 Or at least there are several different personality types, and I’m of the personality type where I do much better if I have rules for myself. And so I could say I’m going to eat more moderately or I’m going to eat less meat, but if there’s no structure, then it just doesn’t happen. So I did this. I thought, well, why don’t I… A couple people, including one of my doctors, suggested that I become vegan, and I was overweight at the time, and I’m more overweight than I am now, had sort of borderline high blood pressure and borderline high blood sugar.

36:15 It was like every number was moving in the wrong direction. So a couple people suggested that I become vegan, and I thought, you know, I’m never going to do that. It’s not going to happen. So then I thought, well, I should figure something out, because that’s probably the direction. And it’s…

36:34 It’s not that there are no overweight vegans. I mean, I think, in the end, vegan, Coca-Cola and French fries are vegan, but if you start concentrating on eating whole foods, whole grains, largely unprocessed foods, more vegetables, legumes, nuts, and so on, you’re going to have… It’s a healthier diet. This is indisputable. So I thought, well, why don’t I just eat like a vegan fanatic until 6 o’clock every day and then do whatever the hell I want to do for dinner?

37:06 And I did that. I still do that. I lost a lot of weight, and all my blood numbers went in the right direction, and then I wrote a book about it. But it wasn’t an intellectual concept, really. It was kind of like a practical experiment on myself, and it worked.

37:27 So, you know, I never say to people, you’ve got to do vegan before 6. I say vegan before 6 is a strategy for eating more plants and less junk food and less meat, but that any strategy that works for you is fine with me. I don’t care how people do it, but most people in wealthy industrialized countries could stand to eat a more plant-based diet. I don’t know that that means that everybody needs to become vegan. I don’t think it does.

37:59 But I think it’s safe to say that most people need to eat fewer hyper-processed food and fewer animal, less hyper-processed food and fewer animal products. And this is one way of doing that. But any way that works is… Yeah, I had Dr. Michael Greger in here a couple months ago, and he has the book, How Not to Die, and The How Not to Die Cookbook.

38:23 And he has some very convincing arguments, and he’s a really interesting guy. I think a lot of us here have started going down that path. Right, but I think there’s a spectrum, and the spectrum is… I once met a guy who literally lived on carrots and celery. I don’t know for how long, but that’s what he was doing.

38:43 And then you have the super-sized meat diet. And obviously you don’t want to be over here, but I don’t think you need to be over here. I think the closer you get to eating a more plant-based diet, the better off we all are. And the wonderful coincidence is that what’s good for you is good for the planet. So a more plant-based diet is good for people, and a more plant-based diet is good for the environment.

39:14 So again, how do you make that hip? I don’t know. Obviously if you and all your cronies here are doing it, that’s good.

39:22 Brian Rose: It’s getting there. Yeah, something’s happening.

39:25 If you hear this message over and over again, and from different people’s perspectives, it starts to make sense. It’s just difficult because the budget… The budget for lobbying for hyper-processed food, the big food lobbying budget in the United States is about the same as the lobbying budget for the Department of Defense. So those are the two biggest lobbying budgets in the U.S. The marketing budget for big food, whatever you want to call, is one of the biggest marketing budgets in the world.

39:56 Mark Bittman: You and I can sit here talking all we want, and how many people are going to see us? Some hundreds of thousands maybe? That’s right, right? Not millions.

40:06 Brian Rose: Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions because I’m such a huge draw.

40:10 But not compared to what they’re doing. Not compared to what Coca-Cola is going to do during the Super Bowl. Where billions of people are going to see it over and over and over. Somehow we have to counter the notion that life is better with Coca-Cola, that life is better with McDonald’s, that life is better with convenient food that’s actually not that convenient and really bad for you. That notion has to be countered…

40:40 Mark Bittman: I don’t have that key. It’s just work. We just have to keep saying it, working on it, talking to people, trying different approaches, poking at the balloon and seeing where it bulges. Hopefully make some small changes that will convince more people that this is a direction to go in.

40:58 Brian Rose: Can I ask you about the food scene in New York City?

41:01 If you had to describe to someone, maybe who’ve never been there or never lived there, what it was like when you started writing for The Times and where you saw it evolve over those next 20 years. I got there in 93 and I remember just trying to experience it. But how would you describe it to someone?

41:19 Mark Bittman: I’m the wrong person to ask that question. I’ll answer it.

41:22 But first of all, I don’t live in the city anymore. I know. Second of all, you did. But even when I did, I cooked almost every night. Okay.

41:33 So my interest is more in shopping for food in New York City than in eating in restaurants in New York City. Right, because you weren’t a restaurant critic and you weren’t a chef. And I have been a restaurant critic, but not for a long, long time. 20 years probably, 15 anyway. I find restaurants chronically disappointing.

41:58 And I think if you think about what makes a successful restaurant, and successful means profitable. That is, successful doesn’t mean making you happy. It means getting you to come back and getting your friends to come back. So there’s three factors, three costs, and basic costs in running a restaurant. Those are rent, labor, and food.

42:24 So in New York, and this may well be true here too, in New York rents are really, really high. And there’s not a lot of things that most restaurants could do to get around that. Restaurants leave their homes all the time because they can’t afford their rent. Union Square Cafe. The prime example.

42:42 So rents are pretty, pretty high. And that’s a fixed cost. There’s nothing you can do about it, except you can move out of Manhattan. And for years, I think more interesting food has been found in Queens and Brooklyn than in Manhattan. Now Brooklyn is expensive too.

42:57 So then your other two costs are labor and food. You can’t cut back on rent, so you either have to mistreat your working, mistreat your staff, or skimp on food or both. So if I’m cooking at home, I’m the labor. Sometimes people help me. But no one’s being abused or maltreated.

43:22 And I’m lucky enough to be able to spend money on ingredients. I wouldn’t say at will, but I can buy good food and cook it. And it’s a quarter of the cost of eating in a restaurant because I already pay rent and I’m the labor, so I’m just paying food costs. That’s what I’m into. That being said, there are some incredible restaurants in New York.

43:47 Having said that, there are some incredible restaurants in New York. But I think fewer than there were 10 or 20 years ago. I think there’s a lot of me tooism.

43:56 Brian Rose: Going with the trend? Yeah.

43:58 Mark Bittman: And there’s a lot of upscale American bistro kind of thing, which is a lot of very generic stuff. I think chefs are being more stamped out by cooking schools. Back in the day, and we’re talking a long time ago, people who opened restaurants either had trained with other chefs or really had it in their heart. And it’s still the best restaurants are people who come to it with their heart. They learn from their family or from someone else.

44:36 They’re not cookie cutter chefs. So I think the scene’s okay if you go to small places, if you go to what used to be called mom and pop places. I don’t know what the right term is now, but I think that the classy restaurant scene, the high-end restaurant scene is just not that interesting. What was it like? I think it’s a little more interesting in Brooklyn than it is in Manhattan.

45:06 I think it’s a little more interesting here than it is in New York. But I think in general, I think this in principle, but I also think that if you want the best food you can have, in general, you’re better off cooking it yourself. I know not everybody can do that, but certainly most people who eat in fancy restaurants can do that.

45:26 Brian Rose: Right. What was it like working for The New York Times?

45:29 Do you remember your first year there?

45:32 Mark Bittman: Well, my first year there, I started freelancing in the mid-80s, so it was sort of like just even to go into the building was a big deal. And I was in my 30s then, so relatively young. At that time, the reputation in The New York Times was the same as today. Yeah, it was the place.

45:52 So I was very impressed by myself, even though I had to work very hard to get every single assignment. And then by the mid-90s, people knew me. I think my work was okay, was respected. So I was writing more frequently. And then the big change was 97, so that was 20 years ago when I got my weekly column, which was called The Minimalist.

46:16 And yeah, it was quite a thrill, and it was really fun. But then in 2007, 2006 or 2007, the paper, as I guess we call it, moved to the new building. And I didn’t really have a good space in the old building. I was on contract. I was essentially a glorified freelancer with a column.

46:42 I had a desk, but it wasn’t sort of a communal desk. It wasn’t appealing for me to go there. In 2007, I both moved to the city and we moved to the new building, and it became very much a community. For five years, it felt like really home. That was the Times Square.

47:02 Brian Rose: Community, yeah.

47:04 Mark Bittman: Well, we were in Times Square before, but we moved to a different part of Times Square. And it really felt like a community to me.

47:15 Brian Rose: What was the culture like there?

47:18 Mark Bittman: Same as most other workplaces.

47:21 Some people worked really, really hard and did great work, and some people didn’t work so hard or didn’t do such great work. But I was very lucky. I was surrounded by people who were interested in doing great work, wanted to do good work. I had really good friends there, still do. But, you know, I was in the older…

47:44 I’m an older guy, and I was in an older crowd, and I did start writing for the Times back in the 80s, and it’s a much younger organization now. And it’s gone in different directions. There’s a lot of pressure, has been, was a lot of pressure to do video and to do certain extra… Which you did. I did.

48:03 Brian Rose: And you cooked on video.

48:05 Mark Bittman: I did 200 videos, I think, for the Times.

48:08 Brian Rose: I watched a lot of them. And, you know, extra online stuff. I mean, you watched the shift to digital.

48:15 Mark Bittman: Well, that, you know, digital is still writing. I don’t have a… I’m a very digital person myself. I’m traveling for three weeks, four weeks here. I have one piece of paper with me.

48:28 It’s my Indian visa. Everything else is on, you know…

48:31 Brian Rose: But you watched the New York Times go from, you know, from analog to digital, really.

48:37 Mark Bittman: Right, but I was writing. And that’s what I want to do.

48:40 Brian Rose: But was that a strange thing for a lot of people to get their head around?

48:45 Mark Bittman: I think that I’m kind of an idiot when it comes to forecasting trends, so that when the internet became clearly the way of the future, I was probably saying, I don’t believe in this internet stuff. But it didn’t affect me that much. I mean, in the long run, it did. And, you know, being on camera, video is…

49:05 It’s definitely different than writing. And frankly, I don’t like it as much.

49:09 Brian Rose: But you were good on camera.

49:11 Mark Bittman: Well, thank you. I don’t think so.

49:13 Brian Rose: They kept putting you on camera.

49:16 Mark Bittman: They did. They did. I just did a show with this guy. So it was like a six-minute video, heavily edited, brilliantly shot.

49:27 And I thought everything about this video was terrific except for me. So he said, you know, the director said, what did you think of that? And I said, you just did such an amazing job. And I’m so sorry that I was so inarticulate and seemed so awkward and I’m never looking in the right place. And he said, you’re…

49:48 I mean, sorry, I don’t mean to be self-promoting. He said, you were amazing. You have it. You’re so good. But it doesn’t seem that way to me.

49:58 And if I don’t enjoy it so much, even if I am good at it…

50:02 Brian Rose: You enjoyed writing the opinion stuff.

50:05 Mark Bittman: I loved writing the opinion stuff.

50:07 Brian Rose: How long would it take you to write one of those opinion pieces?

50:12 Mark Bittman: Some took months and some took two hours.

50:15 The weekly deadline, when I started writing… I mean, I had a weekly deadline in the minimalist column, but it’s a cooking deadline and I always cooked and the writing wasn’t hard. So I’m not saying I didn’t work hard at that. I did. But it came naturally and there wasn’t as much pressure.

50:30 When I took the opinion column, Frank Rich, who, you know, was… certainly one of the most important opinion columnists the Times ever had, said to me, this is like a windmill, standing under a windmill. The blade’s coming straight at your head. You duck and get out of the way. You stand up again and there’s another blade coming straight at your head.

50:53 That’s what a weekly column is like. There are people who do it twice a week, which I didn’t do. But I did do it weekly and it was a lot of pressure. It was really a lot of pressure. And my deadlines were Tuesdays.

51:14 Saturdays, I mean, I’d always be reading and always be thinking. Saturdays, I would start to worry. Sunday, Monday, I was in a complete panic. Tuesday, it was kind of, usually by then, sort of done and cleaning up. And Wednesday, there was this huge sigh of relief, but by Thursday, it was sort of tension start.

51:34 What am I writing about? It’s always, what am I writing about next week? Do I understand this well enough to write? Is it important enough to write about it? Do I understand it well enough?

51:43 Can I get the facts right in time? Can I have an opinion that matters? Because it’s not just, you know, sometimes people talk about news analysis or opinionated news stories or reported opinion, but all of our columns, all the opinion columns or most are reported. I mean, you don’t just start making stuff up. You want to start with a set of facts, and you need, I wanted to very much feel like I had my facts straight.

52:22 And I think 95% of the time I did. And then I wanted to feel like, is this actually, do I believe this? I mean, it’s an opinion, but is it actually coming from my heart to actually believe this? And so that was a lot of self-imposed pressure, I think. Which made the work good, probably.

52:47 Probably made the work good. I was very proud of that work. I was really happy about that, but I also felt worn out by it. I don’t know how people do it for 20 or 30 years. I think obviously some of them are younger than me.

53:06 Some of them have way different personality types. Some of them are probably more skilled. But for me, it was not easy. I was very pleased with it, but I could also, it felt like a lot of pressure, and I felt like – But having said that, when I started freelancing in 1980, I had weekly deadlines or sometimes thrice weekly deadlines from 1980 until 2015. And that’s enough for any person.

53:36 Brian Rose: So that’s why you had enough.

53:38 Mark Bittman: Yeah, I mean, that’s enough. And when I stopped writing weekly, and I really tapered off, because I had a magazine column and the opinion column, and I first cut back on the magazine column, and then I cut back on the opinion column, and then I left, when I first had weeks go by without a deadline, I felt like a different person. And when I took weeks – this actually goes back to what I said about my personality type and VB6.

54:10 When I took weeks off from writing the column, I had a lot of trouble getting back into it. So in a way, it’s the same thing. The rule is deadlines on Tuesday, deadlines on Thursday, whatever it was, I can live with that rule. Once you take the rule away and it becomes right when you feel like it or right when you have something important to say, I think I’d rather cook, actually. Or, you know, I mean, I do – obviously I still write, but I don’t write as much.

54:42 Maybe I think more, and as I said, I’m working on this book that I feel quite devoted to, so engaged with.

54:49 Brian Rose: How was the transition to digital when you were at The Times, and how do you kind of rate it, because they’ve had some success. A lot of newsrooms are shrinking, as The Times is as well. How do you see that playing out, and what was it like to watch it?

55:06 Mark Bittman: It happened very gradually, so it wasn’t – it was exciting in a way, because you could say, let’s look at the homepage.

55:14 And for years and years, the first site I looked at when I woke up and the last site I looked at when I went to sleep, and ten times more during the day, was The Times. And in part it was because it was the best news site, and maybe still is, but it was also because I felt a part of it, and that was fun. So I watched that happen, and that was fun. The video stuff, I understood that it was important for us to get people in different ways, and I was willing to do that.

55:43 They experimented a lot with video, with different types of formats. I’m still experimenting. It’s just nice to see them doing that. I guess you have to do that. I don’t know that The Times has solved how to stay alive doing great journalism.

56:00 It’s probably more successful than anyone else. I think it might be more successful still if it were a nonprofit or if it were owned by a real billionaire. A real billionaire. I think that The Washington Post experiment – I’m not an expert on this. I’m not saying anything definitive, but I think The Washington Post experiment certainly hasn’t gone as badly as some people feared.

56:27 Like Jeff Bezos is going to buy The Washington Post. This is the end of the world. The Washington Post has become a better paper since Jeff Bezos has been involved in it. Because they’re not so worried about the bottom line, and Jeff has stayed out of it. Both those things have happened.

56:42 Certainly, even better, I think, if The Times can survive without a knight in shining armor or whatever you call that, a white knight, but I’m not sure that can happen. If you look at the last couple of years, some people say, oh, The Washington Post is eating The Times as lunch. I don’t think that’s the case, but I think the difference between them, because I think five years ago, The Times was a much, much more powerful news organization than The Post, and I don’t think that’s true.

57:18 The Post is gaining ground. I think The Post is gaining ground. And The Times is the world battle. I’d like to see The Guardian gain ground myself since I’m more partial to that than either of them. Okay, but it’s not necessarily as much.

57:29 Brian Rose: And what’s it like when a sitting president kind of attacks a place like The New York Times? Is that a weird thing?

57:37 Mark Bittman: Well, I don’t consider myself part of The Times family. I mean, it’s part of my heritage. But I mean, I can be candid, right?

57:45 This guy’s just an idiot. The Times is – it’s not completely impartial. It has made mistakes, but its news reporting is 95% to 98% brilliant. So if you’re going to attack that and then think that Fox & Friends is really the source for real news, I mean, that’s just asked backwards. So he gets a lot wrong, Donald Trump.

58:15 Brian Rose: And the reaction – He did get elected president. And the reaction of the people that you still know there is they just keep going forward.

58:22 Mark Bittman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s work to be done, and people believe in that work. And people do that.

58:27 No one does that work to get rich. Everybody does that work because they believe in – whether they’re news gathering or writing opinion or whatever – they believe in that stuff. And when it comes down to – And it’s hard work. It’s not easy. And it’s the same thing I said before.

58:42 You want to make sure that your facts are good. So you don’t just make stuff up, unlike Donald Trump, who does make stuff up. So in a way, it’s just he flails and he attacks, and it’s all obfuscation and disguise. And what do you call it in magic? Distraction, I guess.

59:09 Brian Rose: Yeah. And when it comes time for someone – Look over here, you know? And when it comes time for someone to actually break some big story, whether it’s WikiLeaks or whether it’s the Russian doping thing, I mean, people – they go to The Times, right? I mean, they may go to The Guardian, too, if they need to answer. They go to The Guardian, they go to The Post, they may go to The Times, but they go to an established news organization, not only newspapers.

59:31 I mean, there are established television news organizations. There’s the AP, which doesn’t really have a physical newspaper, never did. I guess you go to whoever you think is going to give you the best exposure. Yeah. Back to food.

59:47 Mark Bittman: I assume you saw the Edward Snowden movies, which were, you know, really interesting from that perspective, negotiating with The Guardian, negotiating with The Times. Yeah. Really interesting stuff. Yeah, I’ve had some people in here that were part of that on The Guardian side as well. It was very interesting.

1:00:02 Brian Rose: I can imagine. Very tricky.

1:00:04 Mark Bittman: Yeah. Very tricky because they’re balancing MI5 and legal issues and it gets –

1:00:09 Brian Rose: Right, and it’s trickier here, too, because the freedom of the press is not quite as solid in the UK as it is in the US. Yeah.

1:00:17 I think I had someone in here that was dealing with Assange and it was just, yeah, getting really dicey there, you know, because, yeah, there were some real legal implications if he decided not to do what he said he was going to do. So that’s interesting. Just quickly back to food. What do you think the Brits do right? I know you’re going to be eating tomorrow at a nose-to-tail place.

1:00:37 What do you think that – were you either ahead of the curve on or when you come here it’s like, ah, okay, they’re doing this right?

1:00:48 Mark Bittman: Well, I spent a lot of time in the west, west of England, in the late 80s, early 90s, and you could see that people were taking their land and taking growing food seriously. Now, you know, I’m not an expert on this either, but I do think that dairy and dairy products, veg – really, I mean, this is going to sound like everything, but it’s easier to get good dairy here.

1:01:18 It’s easier to get good vegetables here. It’s easier to get good beef here.

1:01:23 Brian Rose: Why is that?

1:01:24 Mark Bittman: And it’s easier to get good fish here. So sometimes those things are more expensive, so that’s an issue.

1:01:31 Brian Rose: The climate for the vegetation.

1:01:33 Mark Bittman: Well, I think – you know, actually, I think Jamie Oliver has had some success and some of the people in that crowd have had some success in popularizing organic. And I know that the consumption of real chicken here is much higher than the consumption of real chicken in the States. I think it’s leveled off, and that’s a problem. But I think people – let’s say more people are willing to spend more money here for better ingredients, a higher percentage of the population than in the States, and yes, the climate.

1:02:07 So, I mean, you have – it’s not a California climate here. It’s not a Mediterranean climate, obviously, but it is a year-round growing climate. And I think that’s advantageous. Of course, we have year-round growing climates in the United States. In the West, and the ingredients there are generally better than the ingredients in the East.

1:02:29 You know, the East from May to October, you can’t beat it. It’s incredible. But a lot of the farms are gone, and it’s land that’s quite expensive, and it’s hard to get into farming. And a lot of people who’d like to get into farming think they can’t make enough money doing it, and they may well be right. So there’s a lot of factors mitigating against young Americans becoming farmers.

1:02:59 But to the extent that they do, we’re seeing better ingredients there also.

1:03:04 Brian Rose: Yeah. You mentioned Jamie Oliver earlier. What do you like about him, or what do you see?

1:03:09 Mark Bittman: I mean, I think, you know, to be a – I haven’t talked to him in probably five years, and I don’t really know what he’s up to.

1:03:17 But, you know, to be a successful celebrity chef, obviously making a lot of money, and then go out on limbs and take not necessarily popular positions on things, I thought took guts. I liked the guy. But as I said, I haven’t talked to him in a long time. But yeah.

1:03:35 Brian Rose: Do you have any other celebrity chefs that you like?

1:03:39 Mark Bittman: Let’s not do that, because then I’ll leave people out, and then –

1:03:42 Brian Rose: Okay. What about the concept?

1:03:44 Mark Bittman: I love Fergus Anderson, but, you know, yeah.

1:03:46 Brian Rose: Because he’s St. John, right?

1:03:48 Mark Bittman: Yeah, he is St. John.

1:03:49 Brian Rose: Okay. But you may be dining that, right? Yeah.

1:03:52 The concept of celebrity chefs. Do you like that? Did it go too far?

1:03:58 Mark Bittman: You know – Well, as I said, I think – Again, it’s what’s a celebrity chef, what is this about? And to some extent, it becomes, how many restaurants can I open and run successfully?

1:04:14 That’s not the same question as, how great can I make my restaurant? And, you know, I’ve seen chefs make the choice between running one or maybe two restaurants and running them really, really well, or becoming essentially a small or even a big chain. And the trend among successful chefs, which I think is what celebrity chefs, is to open 10, 20, 30, as many restaurants as you can. And we’ve seen that – we see it in the States all the time. And I know you see it here, too.

1:04:56 And I don’t – that’s not a good – from an eater’s perspective, that’s not what you want. Because, as I said before, what you want are restaurants with heart. And how does it – I mean, maybe the owner, the successful chef running the place, gets lucky and hires fabulous executive chefs who really believe in what they’re doing and do an incredible job. But I think more often it’s like, here’s the menu, go execute this, executive chef, right? Here’s what you need to be doing.

1:05:33 And then you’re cooking someone else’s food. There’s not so much reason to be passionate about it. You may try to cut corners to meet budget and so on. All I know is, as an eater – and I’m not an analyst of this industry, but as an eater – when chefs run chains, they’re usually not the best places to eat in. You made television series about climate change.

1:05:59 Brian Rose: Is there more of that coming in the future for you? But that was very important for you to do for a good part of your career to talk about that.

1:06:08 Mark Bittman: Well, I’m not talking about it, but you’re referring to years of Living Dangerously, which was a big series and I was a small – I wasn’t a tiny part of it, but it wasn’t my series by any means. I was in, I think, two out of the first ten episodes. I played a big role.

1:06:25 But that was really – that was the most fun I ever had doing television. It really felt important. But I’ll just keep saying this. I am a writer and I want to be a writer. I think – I love an interview like this, by the way, because there’s a lot of opportunity for reflection.

1:06:53 One learns about oneself by hearing oneself talk. And I’m sure other people say that to you, that a long interview is great for that. And one of the problems with television and one of the beautiful things about radio is that there are more long interviews. So I do appreciate this. I’m not trying to sound ungrateful, but I want to write.

1:07:16 And I think I express myself better in writing. And yeah, I like the – I like becoming completely tongue-tied, talking about becoming tongue-tied. You like the art of working on something. I like getting something, as I said before, I like getting something that I think is right. And I can’t do it.

1:07:40 I can’t do it verbally. Even if I said to you, I need a minute between every question to think, it wouldn’t come out right. I’m in any writer, accomplished writer who’s going to say this, seeing it on the page, on the screen, and being able to take this sentence and stick it over there and see how that feels, or just juggling some words and then taking words out and saying things shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. It becomes a puzzle and it’s really fun for me.

1:08:13 Whereas on camera, speaking, whatever, I always feel like I’m screwing up.

1:08:18 Brian Rose: What advice can you give to people starting off in the writing industry? Is there food or not? These days, everybody’s a blogger, which isn’t a bad thing because everyone can work on the craft of writing, which I think isn’t a bad thing. But obviously, some people can get further than others.

1:08:38 What advice would you give?

1:08:41 Mark Bittman: Writing can be learned. Writing is difficult. Writing is, in a way, it’s like cooking. It’s a craft.

1:08:52 The more you do it, the better you get at it. When someone says to me, how do I have a career like yours? It’s the silliest question because you start writing and you start making $50 a week or whatever the equivalent of that is now. And you keep at it despite the fact that you worry about bills and you don’t have enough money, etc., etc., all the time. And you keep doing it and you keep doing it and you refuse to do anything else.

1:09:21 And then maybe you get lucky and you actually get paid for it at some point. And that’s what happened to me. I got lucky and I started to get paid for it. I wouldn’t still be writing if I was still making the equivalent of $50 a week. I would have found some other way to make a living, I’m quite sure.

1:09:36 But I did… You know, the old line about 80% of success is just showing up. I just kept showing up. Craftsman, you built it and you created that mess. You know, I have a facility with it now.

1:09:53 I can write a mediocre or halfway decent piece really, really fast. But if I want to write a good piece, it still takes time. But I’m older, I’m successful, I do get paid for it. Like I said, a few people get rich. I’m not one of them.

1:10:15 But very few people get rich writing. But I’ve been lucky enough to make a living doing what I set out to do. So that’s awesome. I don’t know how to tell other people to do that. But if you feel that you want to do it, you have to do it.

1:10:28 And you can’t give up in six months, you have to really do it.

1:10:32 Brian Rose: Do you miss New York City?

1:10:34 Mark Bittman: I get there plenty, believe me. Do I miss it at this moment? No, I’m very happy here.

1:10:39 And when I’m home, I live 50 miles away. It’s the Hudson River Valley.

1:10:44 Brian Rose: Beautiful train ride. I never went there. It’s a beautiful place.

1:10:48 Beautiful place, beautiful train ride.

1:10:50 Mark Bittman: I’m incredibly lucky. I go to the city twice a week. I complain about it constantly. Everybody says to me, you don’t have to go there twice a week.

1:10:59 And I think that’s probably true. So there’s some weird messed up psychology going on there, which we don’t need to get into. Stockholm syndrome. Or it’s like, you know, there’s something about the intensity. I don’t like it, but I may need it.

1:11:19 You know, many people, I’m going to Delhi at the end of my trip to India, and I’ve been to Delhi, and I really liked it. And nine out of ten people that you say, to whom you say, Indians and non-Indians alike, nine out of ten you say, I’m going to Delhi, and they say, that’s the stupidest thing you could possibly do. And then I said, could it have changed so much in 15 years that it went from a place that I liked? I don’t care if anyone else. I liked it. I liked being there.

1:11:49 And now no one does. But yesterday I met a friend who had just been and said, oh no, that kind of energy and as an outsider, as an observer, there’s just so much going. It’s so energetic and so charged. And I think that New York, you know, like it or not, and obviously we’re not talking about paradises here. We’re not talking about Arcadia.

1:12:23 We’re talking about tough, gritty cities that have lots of problems and lots of people who are being mistreated and so on. But from a wow, this is amazing perspective, yeah, I think I still get some of that out of New York. I must, because I know I don’t enjoy it. So it must be something I’m getting that fulfills me in some way.

1:12:47 Brian Rose: Yeah. When you think of the word successful, who comes to mind?

1:12:51 It could be someone alive, someone dead, someone who comes to you.

1:12:58 Mark Bittman: Now I do have to think. Well, there are some writers, I’m going to answer this in two ways. There are some writers I’m envious of who I think are way more talented than I am and way more thoughtful and have done better work. So I would tend to define those people as successful.

1:13:26 But you know, some people like that don’t define themselves as successful. So then it’s like, how are you defining success and how are you defining success for yourself? So then the answer to that question is, are you doing work that you like doing and are you doing work that you feel good about, that makes you feel good? And how’s your life, by the way? And so by those standards, I’m successful.

1:13:57 And I can’t really speak for other people. I mean, if you define success as making a lot of money, then Michael Bloomberg is successful. If you define success as writing a great novel, then David Foster Wallace was successful. But he killed himself. So he must not have thought he was that successful.

1:14:16 So there is all that stuff about successful people feeling like imposters. I don’t know what that syndrome is called, but it exists. So it’s hard to sort of say, well, someone else is. It depends how they define it for themselves, I think.

1:14:31 Brian Rose: Yeah. Is there a specific way that you kind of start your day or anything that you changed about your life 10, 20 years ago that you found?

1:14:40 Mark Bittman: Wow. When I do this, I’m a successful anything, human writer.

1:14:44 Brian Rose: Best day of your life, worst day of your life.

1:15:01 Mark Bittman: Oh, man, please, really? Yes. Thank you later.

1:15:18 I will? Yeah. I mean, it’s also corny. I don’t like favorites. I’ve had many, many… I’m lucky to have had many more good days than bad.

1:15:33 I can’t sing. I can’t single out either. I do know that, you know, I do know that there are… I’ve had a lot of good days. Many of them have involved my children or my partner.

1:15:56 The bad days, the bad days are usually when I screw up. And I am really my own worst critic and I will churn around inside for a long time on a bad day. But I honestly have… I don’t think I’ve ever been depressed for more than a day at a time. Which I think probably means I’ve never really been depressed.

1:16:22 And I had a really good shrink for a couple of years when I was living in Berkeley and sort of dealt with the anxiety that gave me bad days. I didn’t deal with it. I haven’t dealt with it perfectly, but I can… I think I have a little bit of a bigger picture now. Maybe part of that comes with age, but I don’t let…

1:16:43 I don’t let things eat at me, not me the way that I used to. It may also be that I’ve managed to shed some of the things that caused me anxiety and it’s also that I don’t become anxious about things that used to make me anxious.

1:17:00 Brian Rose: What was 9-11 for you?

1:17:01 Mark Bittman: I was there actually.

1:17:03 Brian Rose: I was there too.

1:17:04 Mark Bittman: I walked home that day. It was a fascinating day actually. I was supposed to be my first appearance on The Today Show. I had a new book coming out. So I was in the green room at NBC.

1:17:24 And there was a guy on the air, so I was watching the monitor, and I was up next I think. I don’t know. There was a guy on the air. And he was talking about a book he’d written about Howard Hughes. And he said Howard Hughes was probably the most important American or one of the most important Americans who ever lived.

1:17:48 It’d be fun to go look at this tape and see if my memory is even remotely accurate. So this is the story that I tell. Now 17-year-old story, right? 16-year-old story.

1:18:02 But I’ve told the story enough so that I don’t know whether it’s true or not. That happens. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. I don’t know how much it’s tape. But in my memory, I’m sitting in the green room.

1:18:12 The guy says Howard Hughes was the most important or one of the most important Americans who ever lived. And Matt Lauer, this part I totally remember, Matt Lauer presses on his IFB. Somehow I think Matt Lauer is going to say to the guy, that’s the stupidest thing anyone said. That was mud. And instead he says we’re going to go to our rooftop camera because we have a shot of the World Trade Center and something’s going on down there.

1:18:36 So there’s a camera on top of Rockefeller Center. And they show the picture that we’ve all seen a million times. And Peter Greenberg, who was NBC kind of travel correspondent, but he was a sort of transportation expert. Also, Peter Greenberg’s in the green room at the same time, or he comes into the green room. And I said, is that a private plane or what?

1:19:04 And he said, no, 757, sure of it. It turned out he was right. And then we all watched the second plane hit the second tower and watched the towers collapse. And then I was living in New Haven or outside of New Haven and everybody else was staying local. The city was shutting down. I’m sure you remember that.

1:19:27 Someone came into the green room and said, does anyone need a car? We have one car left. And I go, I would love to get out. And I got a driver to drive me to New Haven. Went home and watched television like everybody else for three days or whatever.

1:19:44 My younger daughter was living with me at the time and she came home and said, I cannot believe you didn’t call me and tell me you were okay. And I was like, oops, sorry. But yeah. But I thought of that, you don’t want to compare disasters, but I was thinking about that when I was in Haiti. You don’t want to think about numbers of people killed because it becomes so abstract.

1:20:12 But it was a terrible, terrible thing. But it seems more terrible because we were there, because we were involved and because it was an attack on American soil.

1:20:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s such a shock.

1:20:27 Mark Bittman: But so many terrible things happen all the time that you have to keep them in perspective, I guess.

1:20:35 Brian Rose: Yeah. What keeps you awake at night?

1:20:38 Mark Bittman: Well, I’ve been waking up. I have not been happy about the state of the world. And I think in part I’ve gotten together with friends who do work like mine and said, what do we have to be hopeful and optimistic about? And this is not a really good time, I don’t think. And I think things have gotten worse, and I think things are getting worse.

1:21:09 And I hate to say that Donald Trump keeps me awake at night, but I think that to some extent Donald Trump keeps me awake at night. I was talking to one of my kids, and she said something like, you know, I feel like the last six or eight months I just have more anxiety than I used to have, and I realized it was our president. And I don’t know how many people in the United States feel that way, but lots. And I don’t know how many people in the world feel that way, and certainly, you know, many countries right now have cruel, unempathetic, cynical, forgive-me-miserable bastards as leaders, so-called leaders.

1:21:52 And this is not a time where the world can afford, if there ever was one, we can’t afford that. So I think we’ve talked a lot about me personally, and I hope it’s clear that I think I have a pretty good life and appreciate that. But there’s your personal life, and there’s the rest of the world. And you can have a good life and still understand that things are not going well. So I think when I talked about learning how to be less anxious, I think that’s a personal issue.

1:22:29 I’m less anxious about the little stuff that used to drive me crazy. But I worry about the state of the world. I can’t help it. And there’s very little I can do about it. There’s very little any of us can do about it.

1:22:44 Brian Rose: Yeah. Keeps you up. Yeah, you’re not alone in that. Mark, I always ask everyone just a few questions at the end of the next week.

1:22:54 Mark Bittman: Okay, but no favorites. Don’t ask me favorites.

1:22:57 Brian Rose: I won’t do that. If you could pick up the phone and call the 20-year-old Mark Bittman and give that young man a bit of advice. I guess he’s in Clark in Massachusetts?

1:23:08 Mark Bittman: Well, when I was 20, I actually went back to New York. I did my junior year abroad in New York as a New Yorker.

1:23:15 Brian Rose: Give him some advice. What would you tell him?

1:23:19 Mark Bittman: Well, I was racked with anxiety when I was that age, just racked. And I just, you know, I think the advice would have been go to a shrink. That’s what I think the advice would have been.

1:23:35 That would have been the best. If I could have had someone convince me, see that I needed help to figure things out. And get me that help. That would have been a really good thing. And you know what? I went to a shrink.

1:23:48 Because I went to a school where I was known for psychology. I went to Clark and psychology was a very powerful major there. When Sigmund Freud came to the United States, he gave his lectures on Clark, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the Clark line. So we had free, I’m pretty sure we had free sort of on-demand psychiatric care.

1:24:11 Because graduate students were there and professors were there and whatever. They were in theory happy to… And I went to a guy and he basically said, you’re fine. He said, yes, so you’re a little unhappy. I don’t understand what your problem is. You don’t really need to see me.

1:24:28 But that was, he was wrong. Well, I mean, I’ve had a good life. So maybe he was right. I worked it out. But it took me many, many years of being sort of fundamentally, I mean, I wouldn’t say unhappy, but I would say filled with anxiety.

1:24:48 And it would be, you know, if you’re a person who’s had a lot of anxiety, it’s really nice to have less.

1:24:54 Brian Rose: How did you end up dealing with that?

1:24:56 Mark Bittman: You know, I did. I went to a number of shrinks over the years. I think my kids totally set me straight.

1:25:01 I think for some people, you know, for some people, I think having kids is a very grounding experience. And I think it was for me. I don’t think I would have had nearly the career that I’ve had if I hadn’t had my kids. I think the routine, I think the responsibility. And when I say routine again, I include cooking.

1:25:22 I think that the fact that we gathered as a family almost every night at 5.30, 6 o’clock, and stayed together until the kids went to bed pretty much. I wasn’t a workaholic in those days. I did, you know, for 10 or 15 years or whatever, and I was really devoted myself to that. That was a very good thing for me. I don’t know if I was a great father. I don’t know what they would say about it.

1:25:55 That’s actually not really what I’m talking about. I’m saying it was a good thing for me.

1:26:00 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. On that same note, best advice you ever received could come from another writer, parent, someone you met along the way.

1:26:08 Mark Bittman: I do remember someone saying to me, this can’t possibly be the best advice I ever received, though. It was the most memorable. It was Ray Sokoloff, who for many years wrote for the Wall Street Journal and wrote for Smithsonian, I think Smithsonian out of common, said to me, write about food for non-food publications. That was really smart, and I actually listened to them. I mostly wrote for non-food publications, but that can’t be the most important piece of advice I ever got, but I remember it.

1:26:47 It’s right up there. People don’t often say to you, do this, and you listen to them. My father was a big one on giving advice, and some of my relatives really liked my father and liked listening to him, but I never found my father’s advice particularly valuable. In fact, we disagreed about almost everything. So Ray wins.

1:27:14 Brian Rose: Ray, yeah, was a great guy. Last part of that question, that 20-year-old that’s watching this right now from somewhere around the world, that wants to hopefully do some things to change our future, and so it’s not going the one way. So we’re not becoming more obese, more diabetic, ruin in this planet, the global warming. What can they do?

1:27:41 Mark Bittman: Oh, we’re not talking to me now.

1:27:43 Brian Rose: We’re talking to somebody else.

1:27:46 Mark Bittman: Good. I think that if people are passionately involved in trying to make the world better, then they’re doing what they should be doing. So I don’t – I want to say a girlfriend to say it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you’re doing something. I don’t think that’s exactly true, but I think if you have a progressive, egalitarian, empathetic worldview and you work towards that, no matter what you do, I think that’s the right life to lead, and I think that actually leads to happiness also.

1:28:25 I think engagement with a good cause, and obviously I have my feelings about what a good cause is, but obviously there are other people who feel equally passionately and disagree, but I think psychologically it probably works the same way. If you’re engaged in work that you care about and you’re working towards a greater good, I think that that’s the powerful thing. And eat more plants. Well, yeah, there is that. Consider that.

1:28:59 Brian Rose: Mark, thanks so much for coming by. I’ve been a big fan of your work. I watched your videos and the Minimalist, and again, you were doing food for a non-food publication and you always had a different angle on it. And again, your TED Talk, I don’t know, really groundbreaking stuff, and the fact that you came out and said this stuff is really important now, and I hadn’t heard a lot of those ideas until about five years ago. So really appreciate the work you’re doing.

1:29:23 Looking forward to your next book coming out, and thanks so much for the time. Thanks for having me. It’s really been fun. And yeah, I’ll see you when that next book comes out that we’ll have to talk about, I hope. Good. Sounds good. As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey.

1:29:36 I wish you well and yours. Stay safe in India, and I’ll see you soon. Okay, thanks.