America’s food system is broken.
Ten years ago, that statement would have been met with blank stares: Most of us didn’t know exactly what a “food system” was, let alone that ours wasn’t working: after all, we have an affordable, abundant, and mostly safe food supply. But as issues of how our food is produced and consumed, and the impact of both on our health and the environment, have crept further into mainstream culture, media, and politics, more of us are realizing what’s at stake, and are joining the conversation. And when it comes to recognizing, assessing, and fixing the shortcomings of our food system, there is a whole lot to talk about.
What you’ll find in the following pages is drawn from the writings I have contributed to that conversation. All of it comes from the New York Times, mostly from my weekly opinion column, the rest from the Sunday Magazine. These articles explore a range of topics as vast and varied as food itself: agriculture, environment, labor, legislation, health, hunger, diet, cooking, food safety, and more.
Taken together in this way the columns form a kind of mosaic, one that’s tiled with problems and solutions alike. The problems are numerous and complex, and these are just some of them: Our fossil fuel–and chemical-dependent system of agriculture robs the land of resources in the name of feeding the world. At least a billion people globally—including many millions of Americans—still go hungry. Animals are mass-produced and effectively tortured, and food system workers don’t have it good, either. The standard American diet—too much meat, sugar, and hyperprocessed junk—is fueling an astronomically expensive epidemic of preventable lifestyle diseases for which we are all paying. And to top it all off, the politicians who hold the most power for positive change are all too often in the pockets of special interests that fight and spend to preserve the status quo.
Solving these problems requires the kinds of sweeping changes that are only possible through collective action, consciousness-raising, rabble-rousing, and political reform; voting out the bad and electing the good is only a part of the solution. We need activists on all levels, people doing the right thing independently of government, and that goes from cooking regularly to making sure school lunches aren’t poison to labor organizing to supporting farmers.
Following you’ll find my first column for the Times Opinion section. Though now four years old, it remains as good a summary of the current domestic situation as I could muster then, or now. But as I write this—just after Election Day 2014—there are reasons to be both optimistic (Berkeley has passed a soda tax; the school lunch program is better than ever; food workers lead the fight for a better minimum wage) and pessimistic (the Farm Bill is as bad as ever; clean water and air and food safety are all under attack; antibiotics are still used routinely in raising animals). But one thing is certain: There is plenty of good work to do.
I’m lucky and privileged to have a platform from which I can say these things, and hope you find reading this collection as inspiring and energizing as I have found the writing of it.
—MARK BITTMAN
NEW YORK, FALL 2014