Quotes from Mark Bittman

People need help to change the way they eat... this is what government is for in my opinion.... We should make food an issue for everyone who runs for office.

This evidence is overwhelming at this point. You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer.

The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness.

It's good to have a short memory because it keeps life fresh.

The USDA is not our ally here. We have to take matters into our own hands, not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone - and that's the hard part - but by improving our own. And that happens to be quite easy. Less meat, less junk, more plants.

I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly

Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now.

Let me pose you a question. Can farm-raised salmon be organic when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth?

The legendary wheat-field triumphs came from financial incentives, irrigation, and the return of the rains, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long-term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change, [and] the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.

Our demand for meat, dairy and refined carbohydrates - the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day - our demand for these things, not our need, our want - drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us.

I live full-time in the world of omnivores, and I've never wanted to leave. But the Standard American Diet (yes, it's SAD) got to me as it gets to almost everyone in this country.

We need real farmers who grow real food, and the will to reform a broken food system. And for that, we need not only to celebrate farmers, but also to advocate for them.

I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly.

The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness.

Let me pose you a question. Can farm-raised salmon be organic when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth?

The USDA is not our ally here. We have to take matters into our own hands, not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone - and that's the hard part - but by improving our own. And that happens to be quite easy. Less meat, less junk, more plants.

1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.

Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.

America's food system is broken.

Ecologists recognized that resources are finite, and that nature is in charge. That's basic science. Capitalists believe that nature exists to be exploited by humans, a tenet perfectly in tune with Western religion.

We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it's only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.

Teach a cook a recipe and he'll cook for a night; teach a cook a technique and she'll improvise for a lifetime.

As Michael Pollan says, "a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food")

And it should not come as no shock that Big Food, along with the pharmaceutical industry and its scientists for hire, has promoted confusion in the media and in the mind of the American consumer to contribute to our culture of overconsumption.