Mark Bittman's Opinion Page Debut: A Food Manifesto

Mark Bittman in the New York Times:

For decades, Americans believed that we had the world's healthiest and safest diet. We worried little about this diet's effect on the environment or on the lives of the animals (or even the workers) it relies upon. Nor did we worry about its ability to endure -- that is, its sustainability.

That didn't mean all was well. And we've come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions, and animals are produced as if they were widgets. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system.

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Comments

[Kali03]

10:22 AM on 02/05/2011

Yay, Mark Bittman!

This and messages like it need to be pounded home in all venues before Monsanto and their ilk take over the planet.

As much as I miss his Minimalist column, I am glad that Bittman is turning his considerable charm, intelligence, and passion for good food toward the question of ethics and sustainability.

Good for Mark Bittman for writing this, and good for us to read it.

Kali

[gdw1961]

07:50 PM on 02/04/2011

I'm right there with you, Mark, until you say "At the same time, we must educate and encourage Americans to eat differently. It’s difficult to find a principled nutrition and health expert who doesn’t believe that a largely plant-based diet is the way to promote health and attack chronic diseases, which are now bigger killers, worldwide, than communicable ones." There are plenty of "principaled" physicians and nutritionists who are treating obese and diabetic patients with high-fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diets which include animal products and they are seeing fantastic, life-saving results. Please investigate a little more thoroughly before you post sweeping - and inaccurate - generalizations.