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Mark Bittman, a sixty-five-year-old born-and-raised New Yorker, currently resides in Berkeley, arguably the capital of California cuisine. As a columnist and food writer for the New York Times, Bittman made a thirty-year career writing about the wide world of food for various sections of the paper and the paper’s magazine. With his Dining section column, “The Minimalist,” Bittman crafted recipes and rallying cries for the home cook to get in the kitchen. As a contributor to the Opinion section from 2011 until late this summer, Bittman wrote about food as it related to national policy, agriculture, health, and the environment. In August, Bittman told his editors that he planned to leave his post, and in September he wrote his last column. These days, Bittman is a cofounder of The Purple Carrot, a plant-based meal-kit company based just outside of Boston. Bittman has also written seventeen books, including the bestselling How to Cook Everything, and made all sorts of television appearances as a correspondent on the Today show and as a host of four other series. Bittman made the move from New York to Berkeley to be a distinguished visiting fellow at UC Berkeley, where his friend Michael Pollan also teaches. During his time at Berkeley, Bittman has been a part of the Berkeley Food Institute, a conglomeration of more than one hundred Berkeley faculty members committed to working toward more sustainable and ethical food systems. With Alice Waters, Bittman runs Berkeley’s “Edible Education 101″ course, and may soon teach a journalism course. He continues to live in a part of town known by locals as the Gourmet Ghetto because of its proximity to Chez Panisse, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Monterey Market, the Acme Bread Company, and other seminal Berkeley food businesses. His house has a bungalow kitchen blessed by plenty of natural light. As I arrive, he gathers last-minute items around the house and we set out for Sonoma. We spend the day visiting two Sonoma-area vineyards, exceptional for their growing practices as much as for the wine that they produce—Preston, of Dry Creek Valley, and Sei Querce Vineyards, across the Russian River from Geyserville. In the afternoon we head to Shed in Healdsburg, where Mark gives a ticketed talk and reads from A Bone to Pick, one of his books. Along the way, and well into the night, we talk about the importance of eating more plants, the Obama administration’s successes and failures, and Bittman’s belief that we should start carding kids who want to buy soft drinks. As we drive across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, Bittman tells me about a class on social movements where he recently guest-lectured: “I got emotional. It brought me back to the old days—my own being in social movements.” What kind of activism were you involved in when you were younger? When I was a junior in college it was 1969–70, and that was the hottest year in student activism. It was the year after the U.S. started bombing Cambodia illegally, the year of the Kent State and Jackson State killings, the year of the big march on Washington to end the Vietnam War that half a million people turned up for. That was, of course, more compelling than school. That was where it was happening. I grew up in New York, where the food was very varied, in a house where my mother was sort of disinterested in cooking, so I wound up eating a lot on the street and in restaurants, and I developed a very broad palate. My mother did cook every night so I learned by example that cooking was a reasonable thing to do or an expected thing to do. And then I went up to Massachusetts to go to college and there was no food at all. Nothing. It was 1967 and cafeteria food was abysmal and the food on the street was abysmal and I wasn’t in a family. There was no one who was going to cook for me, so I started to cook when I was a sophomore in college. After that I went back to New York and I fell in with some people who cooked, and really started cooking seriously, and then I returned to Massachusetts. I lived in a commune there for a while, and I said, “I’ll cook and you guys can share the other jobs.” I just became more and more into it, and then when it came time to start writing, no one was interested in anything I wrote about until I started writing about food. Why are you such a proponent of a more plant-based diet? Is that more important to you than eating organic or eating local? I think there are two things that have to happen. One is people really need to understand how simple an okay diet can be and how there doesn’t need to be a thousand rules. It doesn’t need to be “Eat this, not that,” in a granular way. You just need a couple of really big rules, and I’ll get to that. And number two is that there needs to be official governmental agency. It’s important for that behavior to be present on every level—state, federal, city—in schools and everywhere else. You don’t need to know anything else about food. If you have money, if you have time, then maybe you want to talk about organic, local, and pesticide-free. I’m all in favor of talking about these things. It’s how I make my living, and it’s all important, but those first two things are what people should start with when they start thinking about how to eat. So, the two rules are: number one, figure out what food is, because there’s a lot of stuff that’s being sold as food that really isn’t food. You put that stuff to the side and say, “I’m just not going to eat very much of that stuff because I know it’s bad for me.” And rule number two is, eat more foods from the plant kingdom this week than you did last week, and this month than you did last month, and this year than you did last year, and repeat. It’s as simple as that.
