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Mark Bittman on GMOs, farms, raising healthier kids, and establishing a minimum drinking age for soda. (This is part two of a two-part interview. Read part one here.) I have a lot of ideas, and ideas are cheap, but humor me. We could bring back home economics in school—that would be a start. We could start with nutritional literacy in school—that would be an important thing. We could start a civilian cooking corps. We could have ten thousand people employed to teach cooking in ten thousand locations around the country. This would take federal funding, of course, but not all that much, and it’s a pretty good idea. We could have soda taxes or the like in places where a soda tax would actually make money. And then that money could be spent in countering the consumption of junk food. Part of countering the consumption of junk food would be subsidizing fruits and vegetables and teaching people how to cook them. You could give away or sell cheap local fruits and vegetables in schools. Everybody in the United States has access to a school, so by doing that you also address the so-called food-desert problem that people talk about so much. You could have cooking classes in schools and libraries and post offices. There are public places that everybody has access to and we could use these places for access to food. It will be argued, correctly, that some people are never going to cook, some families are never going to have a member who can cook—so I’d like to propose that, just as we have communal swimming pools in some cities, we have communal kitchens. They would be nonprofit organizations where good food would be cooked locally and could be purchased as inexpensively as possible because it would be subsidized. I know that this sounds like communism, but so be it. Do you see any significant positive change in terms of food in the U.S.? I think significant positive change is what the Obamas put in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act. Sadly, it didn’t fund the fairly strict nutritional standards it encourages, so it’s a struggle for a lot of school systems to implement. That said, the changes have eliminated some junk food, and the required percentage of whole grains in food being served in the lunch program is another really nice change. We all know from our own personal experiences that it’s very hard to change our own eating habits, and that means that it’s key that children learn good eating habits. If we can teach children how to eat well, we’ll have grown-ups that eat well. I hadn’t realized before reading your latest book, A Bone to Pick, and one of your New York Times opinion pieces in it, that junk food is advertised on school buses. I think that it still is. The crux of that piece is the question of how you limit the marketing of junk to kids if the marketers are able to claim that it’s their First Amendment right to do that marketing. There are a lot of decisions that we make because we think children are irrational or not yet fully formed grown-ups. And, of course, we know that fully formed grown-ups don’t always make rational decisions. But kids, we don’t even expect to make rational decisions. That’s why we don’t let them drink alcohol; that’s why we don’t let them, in theory, take drugs. We don’t stop kids from driving until they’re sixteen because they’re too short; they don’t drive because they’re too dumb. We don’t let them vote; we don’t let them join the army. We don’t let them do lots of things, and some of this is because they’re physically immature, but most of it is because we just don’t think that they’re capable of making reasoned decisions until they’re of a certain age. We all know that we form many of our habits when we’re young, and we also know from our own experience that it’s hard to change habits. If you’re going to allow marketers to teach children that sugary foods are a way to be happy, you’re allowing those habits to be formed. The result: unhealthy grown-ups who have habits that they want to break but have a lot of trouble breaking. It’s really the equivalent of saying smoking cigarettes makes you really cool. When you’re fourteen and you want to be cool, you should start smoking cigarettes. We don’t allow that anymore. We stopped that, and that was a very wise thing for us to do. We need to do the same thing with junk food. So what kinds of things can we do to make it harder for kids to drink Coca-Cola? I can think of two offhand. One is you don’t market it to them. You put restrictions on the ability of marketers to target young people. Now that seems to be a First Amendment issue and that’s a struggle, but it’s a struggle that we have to be involved in. The second thing is you make it harder for young people to buy sugar-sweetened beverages. I suggest we start discussing carding kids when they go to the counter to buy a Coke. In other words, you have to be sixteen to buy a Coke, because we don’t think that you’re able to make a decision about how much soda you can drink until you’re sixteen. Really it should be twenty, but I’m compromising because it’s such a far-fetched idea. But it’s not a wrong idea, it’s a right idea. A lot of people are switching to sugar alternatives such as agave or stevia. What do you think of that? The whole thing about agave juice or any of that is total nonsense. No sugar is better for you than any other sugar. It all raises your blood sugar levels and it all causes insulin to be secreted into your bloodstream, so most of these things are pretty much the same. Maybe there are trace elements of something marginally beneficial in one or another, but that’s all beside the point. Your body recognizes and treats all sugar pretty much the same.
