Breaking Bread with Tom Papa - Episode 327 - Mark Bittman

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

This week we welcome legendary cookbook author, journalist, and all around fabulous human Mark Bittman to the pod. He and Tom talk all things food, and more. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Reeses knows a thing or two about great comment. combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously, but there's more than one way to Reese's. From indulgent Reese's big cups with caramel to crunchy Reese's pieces and Reese's miniatures, there's a delicious Reese's for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more ways to enjoy it. So whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Reese's. How do you prioritize food? And so the first argument is why would you prioritize food? And you

prioritize food if you want healthy environment and a healthy body and and and sort of public health and longevity and all these other things so if you agree well food is important then you what's how's the investment what's the investment in food look like and my argument and this is you mentioned community kitchen not by name but our nonprofit community kitchen and but many people's argument is we have a department of education. No one asks it to make money. We have a department of transportation. No one asks, the military. There's all this stuff that we invest in for our common good and we don't invest in food for our common good. And once we do that, we can start to quote unquote fix things. And in order to do that, you have to rest it away

from these gigantic food corporations. Yeah. Yeah. It's breaking bread. This is a real treat. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean, you can't be in the bread world, food world without running across your name for, it seems like decades now. Yeah, the bread is relatively new, but the food world thing, yeah, it is. It's going on five decades. Yeah, five decades.

Like finishing, going on 50 years. Amazing. Yeah, 45 years, I think, 46 years since I wrote my first piece. That's wild. It's a long time. I mean, just telling people that I was, I'm in comedy. It's, you know, there's a lot of comedians that come on this podcast. The real celebrities to me are food people.

And when I mentioned your name, I was, we were going to sit down, everybody pops off with questions. I love that. Yeah. Everybody is very interested and I've got some in my pocket. But I wanted to start with bread because you made famous the no need. process. And made famous somebody else's process. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's how cooking

is. No one invents anything. No, it's bread. I know. It's funny. We have a... This is called Breaking Bread. And Tony Shalube came out with a CNN show called Breaking Bread. And all my fans were irate, as was I. And what was his thinking?

He's not a food guy, is he? He's not a food guy. In the clips, it looked like he didn't even enjoy it. But it's a hard argument to make that I came up with breaking bread. Yeah, like that. Right. It's a hard argument to make

that I came up with anything. But yes, I did write the no-need bread story as just reviewing that with someone because I was trying to figure out, I mean, I'll tell you the briefest possible version of the story. Jim Leahy, who runs Sullivan Street Bakery, called me up and said, I have this new way of making bread. It's unbelievable.

I'm like, I'm good. He's like, no, you're not. This is amazing. So I said, okay, we'll go over. And somehow it wound up that a video crew went with us. So I went to write this piece for the Times. I was writing for that a column in the Times at the time. And someone said, bring a video crew.

And this was really before everything was on video. It was 2007, 2008. Someone's idea. Probably not mine, but no one else says it's theirs either. So someone's idea was bring a video crew. We brought a video crew. Jim's no-need bread is great. The story just took off.

The video was like the first New York Times viral video. The story was number one on the most emailed list, like forever. Yeah. And it wasn't, I mean, to me, yeah, it was a big deal, but it was funny being so well-known for someone else's thing. But again, that's kind of how cooking is. It's not like you invent stuff. You put it together in a different way

than people did before. Right, exactly. I know. Whenever you look at, there is good writing. I think my love for your work is that it's good writing around this subject. Right. Thank you.

If there's really good writing, then it really draws you in. But we're talking pancakes. People are like, we love your pancakes. I'm like, they're not really my pancakes. They're like pancakes, you know. I just wrote down the recipe. It's the regular recipe.

Yeah. It's just making little tweaks here and there. I know. My wife is playing around with chocolate chip cookies right now. Just trying to get it down. And it's amazing. There is no down. There's a thousand ways of doing it.

A thousand ways. Yeah. It's really pretty wild. So that really took, but that really did, I mean, hit the culture. And what has happened to bread, since that time in these smart these artisan shops and people having appreciation for the wheat

and all of it it all got kicked off from that really well okay we can say that I don't want to take too much credit we can say that it was a signal moment and maybe it was but COVID was important also because people were locked in their houses

and they were like what am I going to do and they're like maybe I'll make some sourdough bread I think what's happening now and obviously we're basing a business on this hope and assumption, what's happening now is people are understanding bread is not the enemy, bad bread is the enemy. Exactly. And there is a whole lot of bad bread out there.

Ton. And so starting a business that's making good bread and making it available to people, our hope is that we're going to catch a wave on that. And it's time because if you look at no need bread and then no need bread was not sourdough, Sourdough is a naturally fermented bread. No need bread used commercial granular yeast. It was great for its time. We moved past that sourdough.

Natural fermentation is a better way to make bread. It's better for your gut. It's better for people with allergies. It works better. It tastes better. All of that. And then the next level is really whole grain. And you can't make whole grain.

You can't make good whole grain bread unless you, you use sourdough, unless you ferment it naturally. And that's how bread was made all the time until like 1875. I mean, 10,000 years, and then we screwed it up instantly, and it's been pretty bad since then. Yeah. And I think it's going to turn around the way, you know, wine turned around, then coffee turned around, then all this other stuff has turned around.

Bread's going to turn around. Yeah. Yeah, and it actually got worse. It got a lot worse for a long time. And to the point where people were saying, like you said, bread was the enemy. And I would always go out there and preach, why have human beings been eating bread this whole time? And now when it's my time to have some toast. I can't get a good piece of bread.

It's the enemy and it's going to kill me. I mean, what's funny is that when we, I don't know about you when I was growing up, you know, I thought bread was perfectly fine. It was like, oh yeah, that's what bread is. It wasn't a bad product, honestly. Well, it's pretty bad. And then my grandfather would come over and he'd take a roll or a bagel or whatever and he'd take all the white stuff out

and throw it away. And he'd be like, I'm only interested in the crust. It's the only good part. And of course he was right. And we all discovered that as the years went by. And now we're discovering, you know, bread can be delicious. It can be healthy. It can be a very plant-forward food

that you should be integrating into your diet. And it is. It really is. Yeah. Once I started making it, I couldn't believe because I would shop for my family all the time and thinking I was getting them nice bread because of the, you know, the wooden logo, you know, and it looked like it was carved and country and then 50 ingredients. Right.

And then when I started baking bread, it was like, oh, this is, it's like when you travel and you eat a real piece of fruit someplace, you know, if you go to the islands or something, you're like, oh, my, this is. You don't want to eat it anymore. Yeah. This is not what's in my supermarket. It was the same kind of thing of just eating this real bread. And there was just no going back. It was just...

But the thing, you know, as I've been doing it, and it's just kind of grown, and people started knowing me for bread, and this podcast, I just... I can't... I don't really truly understand how it's taken over my life. There's something mystical to it, the power of that. But on a business sense, people are always like,

would you sell your bread? And I'm like, it's... You can't, it's bread. I'm not selling bread. You know, it's hard to do that, but you've kind of cracked it. I think we've cracked it. You'll see. It's really good bread.

It's majority whole grain. I thought, I brought you three. I brought you a cornbread, which people go insane for. Cornbread? It's like wheat flour, corn flour. Really? Not cornmeal, but corn flour. Baguettes that are 50% wheat and 50% white.

I mean, 50% whole wheat and 50% white. And then that whole wheat that I had to eat some of this morning, which is why you're getting three quarters of a loaf. You took a slice. That's amazing. That's whole wheat. And that's really, really good. That's so funny.

I've done this on my podcast. Of course. I mean, come on. It's the only bread I have in the house. I'm having some toast. I need some toast. This is really quality stuff. We were like, we're going to have some toast this morning.

And I was like, I was kind of bring that to Tom. Yeah, let's actually. Totally acceptable in my book. So what's the process? How are you getting this bread to people? Our baker is freezing it, and it's getting shipped frozen. And the thing about bread that people don't know, and this is especially true of whole grain bread. It's very tolerant of freezing.

It reheats beautifully. This has all been frozen. I reheated it this morning. This is all reheated? Yeah. But if I was going to. It'll be good now, but if you put it in the oven for 10 more minutes, it would be even better. So, I mean, that's the – I love that you're eating on the air.

You've got to go away from the mic. The good thing about bread is it's not too chewy. It's quiet. It doesn't drive people completely insane. It's not sloppy. Just cornbread's good. Yeah, that's – my daughter's – my daughter Kate's favorite is that. She's in this business with us.

In crust, we trust. I love that. Cute. Anyway, we're freezing it. We're shipping it in boxes to people's doors, and the best thing to do is thought and then heat it up, but you can reheat it straight from frozen. You can freeze it and thaw it and freeze.

I mean, you must do, you know this from being a home baker. You can freeze it and thaw and freeze it and freeze it. It doesn't care. It's like incredible. And whole grain bread will also, doesn't get stale as fast as white bread. It doesn't get moldy the way white bread does. You can sit it on the counter for days.

It's fine. So we think the logistics are just going to get easier and easier. I mean, a lot of this is, you know, the shipping stuff frozen technology really matured during COVID. Like when you could start getting, when you could start ordering ice cream online, that's, that's, when that first happened, the thing was Jenny's, that first happened. I was like, what is that going on here? What are these people doing? They're shipping me ice cream, and they were. You know, it was expensive, but there it was.

So that was sort of a game changer. What we're looking toward doing now is really knowing where the wheat comes from, knowing who the farmer is, knowing where the wheat comes from, knowing what the wheat is, what variety it is, knowing the mill. We know the baker already, knowing the shipping process. Like really doing, I said this. before, but really doing for bread, what's been done for, really, coffee is probably the best example, wine, beer, all these things where you went from, it's a commodity, it's kind of

we need it, but it's not very good to like, we know how this is being made and we are making it right, you know, and that's, we're on that road, but it's only going to get better. Stuff's only going to get better. You just launched it? Yeah, we launched like, I guess, in April, so two, three weeks ago. Two, three weeks ago? Yeah, we just launched it. Wow.

We had a little Mother's Day promotion. We sold the little. We're not, you know, we're trying to figure things out. Yeah, trying to get it out there. You know, it's, you can't wait for everything, all your ducks to be in a row. We can ship it. It's really good. Yeah.

People are buying it and liking it. There's some things to work out, and it's really going well. It's brilliant. I mean, just to be able to have like this quality bread in your freezer waiting for you and that you can, because as a home baker, it's a three-day process. Well, here's the thing, Tom. You stop being a home baker when you start buying this bread. That's the problem. I know, I know. Like, I haven't baked bread in weeks. Oh, really? Because like, why? I have that. I know. And also, here's the other thing.

Just I'll say this and now, well, anyway, when I baked with you. this guy who's baking this for us. I gave him the recipes. I brought the starter and I brought the flour and I said, here, use this. And he made my bread, quote unquote, my bread twice as good as I was making it.

So then I was like, okay, well, I'm out. I'm like, that's not what I do anymore. Why do you think he, why do you think he was able to do that? I mean, some of this is physical. He can read where the dough is at. He's like, a little more salt, a little more water, whatever. He can see those. things. We can all measure

to the precise gram, but you still need, like, one day this flower is going to absorb more water than another. One day, it's going to behave differently. One day, my starter is going to be livelier. And he's not doing it by road. He can see this stuff. And even though

he's producing hundreds, thousands, maybe, of loaves of bread at a time, he can see the batch. He can see what's going on there. And when he did it on a small scale for with me, I was like, man, this guy's on a whole other level. Of course he is.

I mean, professional. He's a professional. I'm a home schlep. I know, but when you're walking around home schleppy, you think you're pretty dialed in. You've been doing it a long time, right? People are complimented. People love it. That's why you're going to venture into spreading it.

You know, it's like with anything else when you, you know, you can make a really good, I don't know, spaghetti, matrechana, you know. And then you go to somebody who's been making it every day for 30 years. eight times a day, 20 times a day. It's like, there's just these things that people learn to see, you know? Yeah. I mean, there is that process like when you first made your first loaf of bread and then you first start doing it.

And you just remember how sticky it was all of your hands. You couldn't handle it. And just from repetition, it all gets cleaned up and you're able to handle that same hydrated bread with no stickiness. Yeah.

It's just purely time. Well, my first love of bread was white bread from joy of cooking with butter and milk in it, and it was a mess. And really it was Jim, it was when we did the no-need bread that I learned that more water, more water, more water, and it makes it less sticky because you've got it sort of slippery, and it does make it easier to handle. It also makes the bread better. It turns out bread is like a gas bag of flour held in suspension with water, and that's what. it is and it's incredible that it's so good it's insane i mean that's a reason why it's been talked about for all of human history uh do you ever read that was it the bread and what's the giant bread bible bread enthusiast or bread oh no there's something kitchen you know what

i mean it's like volumes it's in it's like no i have not read volumes man you the science behind it You know, these MIT guys, and they start getting into food, and they start going after, like, the, I look at that. It's almost like, I'm a baseball fan. I love baseball. Yeah. I don't know everything about baseball. No, when you want, I mean, you're also a journalist,

and what journalists do is they call people who know what they're talking about and say, help me figure this. I called someone the other day, and I'm like, we are, all these people are saying, oh, I'm gluten intolerant. I'm using air quotes because, It's not the same as celiac, right? People say, I'm self-diagnosed gluten. And I can eat your bread, and it's fine.

So I'm like, well, that's like, you know, how people say, oh, I went to Europe and I could eat the bread there. So I called someone who knows why that is. And it's complicated, but it's real. Like people who react badly to bad bread don't react badly to good bread. And I'm not saying it's only our bread. It's like naturally fermented. whole grain bread does not react the same way in the gut as, you know, Wonderbread or white baguette or whatever.

But, yeah, I don't know why that is. Now I could explain it a little bit, but... It's unknowable. It's amazing. Like, there's no really mastery. There's no mastery. You just have to... The amount of information in the world is so crazy.

Especially if you want to spend time learning about baseball or music or whatever. Yeah, right. If you have one other... whatever thing that you're interested in. This is who you baseball fan of? Well, the Yankees, I was a Giants fan, but they moved to San Francisco when I was nine. So I was sort of teamless for...

Yeah. Until I moved back to New York, I was living in Massachusetts. I couldn't root for the Red Sox. I didn't have anybody. And then I wound up a Yankee fan, which is sort of default for New Yorkers. Yeah.

Yeah, me too. My grandfather was Yankees, so luckily, I'm stuck with them. Thank God. Yeah, but aren't you living in L.A.? You could be rooting for the winners now. Oh, man, I know. I was at that game when the last year before

when it was the Yankees against the Dodgers and Freddie hit that Grand Slam home run off Nestor Cortez, and I was there as a Yankee fan. But the joy from that state, when he hit that, the explosion of joy in that stadium, even though it was against everything that I was rooting for, you couldn't help it. It was just so fantastic.

I've been games like that. Right. Twins. I can't remember whatever. Angels Twins game when the, I don't know, twins are up 8-0 and the Angels came back late in the game and won a playoff game in 2000, 2001. I don't know. I'm not good at this.

I'm really, I am better at talking about bread than about it. Like, I have no memory for dates. I'm the same. I'm the same. When people are just, rattled off like the play, the 98, that I forget it. Well, there's idiots ofants out there, like Bill Simmons,

who can just remember everything. Unless he has a really good producer, has got notes in front of them all the time, I don't know. You've written how many books? 20-something. 20-something books. And I saw a comment on, as I was complimenting your writing,

that you were starting, It was an interview about the nonprofit, and you were saying that you wanted to take a step back from writing for a while. Tell me about that, because you've been writing for a very long time. I'm writing, but I'm not doing journalism. And in 2015, when I left my Times columns,

and I'd had three, I left those behind. You had three? Well, I was the minimalist for 12 years, 13 years, and then I was the Times. magazine food writer columnist for four or five years and add the opinion column at the same time so add three wow not all at once but I had two at once when I left I had this withdrawal period and I mean it's funny because I had daily weekly deadlines and sometimes three and four deadlines a week for my whole career yeah and then suddenly no one cared whether I wrote or not and that took some getting

used to and I went through a period of writing because I wanted to because I felt like it was a self-worth thing. Yeah. And that finally wore off and I felt like journalism. I mean more power

to them but it's not for me anymore. Yeah. But I'm still doing cookbooks. I'm working on a memoir and I think I have one other serious book left in me and I'm not really sure what it is. But I I wrote this book that's a history of food and agriculture, mostly in the United States, called Animal Vegetable Junk.

And it came out in the middle of COVID. So, of course, like everything else, it sank like a... What's the expression? Sank without a trace? Yeah. But I really enjoyed working on that. And I think it's... I think it's well-written.

It's good. I'm happy about it. I'm satisfied with it. And I'd like to do something else like that. I mean, not... What about it was... Are you proud of? I mean, I did a lot of research, and I think put it together in a way that is in my, what I hope, as usual style, very straightforward, candid, muscular, it sometimes said, which means you don't use a lot of flowery adjectives, adverbs, metaphors.

I don't do that stuff closely. I tend to write like I talk, which is semi-articulately because of better on the page. because you can fix stuff. Yeah. I hope. Yeah. But. Was it the subject or was it the subject?

I mean, it's fascinating. The history of agriculture. Humans and food is fascinating. And, you know, I sort of blitz through the first, I don't know, well, 200,000 years. Well, they do the first 200,000 years in seconds. But then the history of agriculture from 10,000 years ago. until the agricultural, the real agricultural revolution. I cover that.

And then the last couple hundred years, it's really been, you know, we ate locally, according to our what was available, according to our genetics and so on. We as a species did that for, you know, it's arbitrary, but let's say 9,800 years. And then the last 200 years, we completely screwed it all up. So how do we get to a place where we're eating what

bodies need and we're treating land the way land should be treated and we're not this like you could trace so many of the world's problems back to the way we handle food and our relationship with food and and most of that started becoming perverted with colonialism in the 15th 16th century and then accelerated with the industrial revolution globally or nationally no globally but then from 1900 or so on, the United States led the way in screwing up food. Yeah. We were the world leaders in screwing up food.

We're number one. And we haven't screwed it up for everyone yet. And sometimes I think, well, there are other countries that look at the U.S. and are like, we don't want to go down that route. But, you know, American agriculture is run by very powerful companies who would love to spread their products and their way of doing things around the world.

And it's kind of an economic colonialism that is unfortunate, let's say. Yeah, yeah. It's really, my sister runs a nonprofit in New Jersey called City Green, and they have local farms in Clifton, New Jersey. It used to be farmland. Route 46. Yeah, right, right there, right there,

Grove Street in 46. And she's revised. these farms and provides food to Passaic and Patterson and Learning Gardens, all this beautiful stuff. But it is just being around her, as she's been doing this for 15 years, it's just you realize like what it was like you're saying and what it's become, what this food process has become. The idea that there were multiple farms like hers around that area and that everybody was feeding off of that. And now it's this unique

nonprofit. It's almost like a museum piece. Right. Right. And they're in there and they're making this stuff with the same soil and bring these crops and it's beautiful and tastes amazing. But then if you were to go to the supermarket and get your food for that day, who knows

where that came from. Yeah. It came from California unless it came from Mexico, unless it came from Peru or whatever, China. God. I mean, There are still, my partner also runs a food nonprofit that encourages people like your sister, works with people like your sister to help them do their work. And so, and we travel a lot.

And when we travel, we look at food stuff. And there's still, even like Rome is still, you drive five miles from Rome and there's real farms. Right. And there's still this, you know, I don't want to romanticize it too much. but there are many cities around the world that are still ringed by farms and where at least some of their food is coming from within 50 miles away.

Yeah. It doesn't happen in the state. I mean, it's starting to happen in the States, but we went so far away from that. Can it come back? Like you say, it's starting, and you do kind of feel that and people are making those efforts in restaurants,

and this is... Sure. I would say the biggest obstacle now is fairness of land acquisition, equity of land acquisition, and so many farmers have been driven. driven off their land, and especially farmers of color, black farmers in particular,

well, black and indigenous farmers in particular, but immigrant farmers as well, have been driven off the land or find it impossible to farm, and there are people who would farm if they could get land. So, you know, it's a dirty word or a dirty phrase to say at the bottom of this, we need land reform. But if you're looking 20, 30, 50 years into the future, if you want to see the future in a positive light, it's going to include land reform.

It's going to include pudding or helping people who want to farm get the land they need in order to farm. Because you can't buy an acre of land in New Jersey and start farming on it. It's just, you know, it's impossible. Just because the cost is so prohibitive. Yeah. So many answers around food are,

how do you prioritize food? And so the first argument is why would you prioritize food? And you'd prioritize food if you want healthy environment and a healthy body and, and sort of public health and longevity and all these other things. So if you agree, well, food is important, then how's the investment, what's the investment in food look like? And my argument, and this is, you mentioned Community Kitchen, not by name, but our nonprofit community kitchen

but many people's argument is we have a department of education no one asks it to make money we have a department of transportation and no one asks the military there's all this stuff that we invest in for our common good and we don't invest in food for our common good

and once we do that we can start to quote unquote fix things and in order to do that you have to rest it away from these gigantic food corporations who just seemed I mean to the level their dominance to the level of

we own these seeds it's just Right, we own the seeds, we own the manufacture, we own the land. I mean it's... Yeah. Yeah.

Is there a way to come back from that or is it? There is, but it's the same, it's almost the same as everything else. I mean, yeah, I don't know how political you want to get, but, you know, most of my friends and I wake up every morning and say, well, what terrible thing happened yesterday? And, you know, the answer to this is the recovery of power by the majority of people in this country,

and then we can start to make changes that move us in the right direction. I will say, you know, if you look at the last 50 or 100 years, a lot of really good things have happened. and the pendulum swings back and forth. I do believe the arc has been towards progress in the last 75 years anyway. That doesn't mean you're not going to have setbacks because people who benefit from the status quo, people who don't want to see change,

don't want to see true equality and fairness for women and people of color and blah, blah, blah. People who don't want to see that are fighting back, and that's the Trump administration, and that's what we're seeing right now. certainly, as far as I can tell, the only good thing about the Trump administration is that it demonstrates that radical change is possible. So if radical change is possible in the wrong direction, then radical change must be possible in the right direction. It could be done pretty quickly.

Yeah. I know. Oh, the headlines. As soon as you said it, the headline from the time yesterday was ending protection for public lands. I couldn't even read it. I was just like, oh. There was something this morning.

I was just like, no, say it isn't so. I know. I was reading some international journalism and it's like, which is important, I think important to do, to read what other people

are saying about the U.S. And they're like, well, now that the U.S. isn't doing this, now that the U.S. has opted out of that, now that the U.S. isn't protecting the other thing,

everybody around the world knows that we're completely screwing up. I mean, it's not a secret. It's obvious. everyone somehow except for us. Right. Well, yeah.

Or a lot of people recognize it but feel like we just have to, can't do it yet. Can you imagine the day that you wake up and that name isn't in the paper at all? Well, hopefully this November will take us somewhere. I'll tell you that I assume you can edit out anything you want to. I have this cartoon sitting on my desk where this fortune teller is sitting with Donald Trump and she goes, the day you die will be a national holiday. And he goes, well, that's really cool. What national holiday?

And she says, any day you die will be a national holiday. Also, if you're not a member of the Patreon yet, you really should join. It's a great way to support the podcast. And we get extra bonus material. A lot of it's silly, a lot of it's fun. And we were really starting to grow that. We're interacting with the fans a lot more. So if you get a chance, go over to patreon.com.

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You didn't plan on this. No. You didn't, you weren't, right? You kind of, you were a writer of different sort. I still can't plan on anything. I wanted to write. I became, I was doing community organizing when I was in my 20s, and someone said, you want to work on our newspaper.

We had a little organization in Boston doing community organizing, and someone said, do you want to work on the newspaper? And I said, yeah, and she basically said, okay, because I'm quitting, and then I was running this little newspaper. And so I got to write. I also learned that to edit and type and do photos and all of that. And then when it became time to try to, quote, unquote, become a writer, I didn't really have a topic, but I was cooking a lot and I tried writing about food and it worked. Right.

But it certainly was not a plan. And there was no plan. What do you think that alignment was? Well, I guess I have to preface this by saying modesty aside, but I'll try to retain a little modesty. You said that my writing was good. I think that in 1980, when I started writing about food, people who could really write did not choose to write about food. They were all writing about something else.

So the fact that I could put together a sentence and a paragraph around the recipe made me unusual. Right. And now, you know, there are great writers writing about food all over the place. But I think then, and you see it in how to cook everything, how to cook everything, a thousand pages long, a thousand recipes, a thousand variations, whatever it is, is really a well-written book, and I'm pleased with that. And so I could do that. From the get-go I could write pretty well about food, and I think that was important.

And did it stir a passion for food at the same time you were doing it? Were you calling on something that was kind of in there? No, I think. I don't think I am working on this memoir, so I'm exploring these questions. There's no answers. Did I, why do I like fish? Oh, I went on a school trip to Fulton Fish Market when I was 10.

Why do I like, you know, and it's like, no, these aren't good reasons. There's reasons are tricky. They're like granular and compounded. So I was writing about food. I really liked cooking. Then I needed to find more material to write about, so I cooked more and better and differently, talked to people about it,

went and cooked with other people, sold more stories to more important publications, had more freedom to write about the stuff I wanted to write about, had more freedom to go like, oh, I want to learn about Korean food. I'll go cook with some Korean people who are interested in cooking with me, write about that. Oh, I want to learn about Italian food.

I'm going to go to Italy. just compounded, compounded, compounded. And then, you know, was... It's cool. I mean, that discovery is... That you were discovering it simultaneously while you were creating. That's cooler than when I was 10 I went to the market. Yeah.

It is. But it's the real story. I mean, also, I was lucky enough to become interested in and have positive reinforcement around food as opposed to, I don't know, concrete, which I'm sure you could make an interesting career out of studying concrete, but I probably couldn't have. Yeah, but I mean, as a journalist too, you could have ended up covering really heavy stuff, you know, like, you know, the ugly stuff.

Or boring. Yeah, right. Even worse. I mean, I did, and of course these things are of interest of people who are involved in them, but I did spend a year covering a local zoning board and a board of a board of appeals and the local education system. And, you know, of course, those things are important and interesting. But if you wind up doing that for your whole life, I'm not sure you're happy as a journalist.

Yeah, I bet that guy knows a lot more about baseball than we do. Right. Yeah, it's, it is an interesting thing. Do you find that when you're looking at like the memoir and you're kind of exploring that and your other book that you mentioned, those are more solitary pursuits. You're kind of, is it, is journalists, I guess my question is writing as a journalist,

is it less solitary than when you're writing? I mean, I think when I cooked, when I cooked all the time and wrote about food all the time, wrote about cooking all the time, I was out in the world a little more. I am spending more time alone, I think, in part, that's about the memoir. But look, I'm not a journalist anymore.

I'm doing a bread business. I'm running a nonprofit or I'm involved in running a nonprofit. I'm writing a memoir, thinking about other things. I don't go out and cook with other people as much as I used to. Right. And I go to way, way fewer restaurants than I used to. That was my next question. Well, I am not a fan.

Restaurants, colon, I am not a fan. Really? Why? Well. The trend or the... I mean, I'll back off of that a little bit. I'm less of a fan than I was. You know, we did Community Kitchen

because we wanted to show what a restaurant might look like if it looked like it was doing everything right. And there are people who are trying to do that. But the way things are set up in the United States, States, you can't make money in a restaurant and do things fairly at the same time. You can't source well, pay your workers well, cook great food, and make the food affordable all the same time. It's not, and make a profit. It's not possible. Really? So we set up this nonprofit to say, look, if you're willing to lose money, you can do all of those things. Right. Source great food,

cook great food, treat workers well, make the food available to everybody. You can do it. You just need money. It goes back to the why there should be a subsidized department of food. Right. The way there's a department of education. Yeah. So I feel sort of antithical to the way I want things to be, but they're also more expensive.

They're more annoying. They're more precious. There's fewer mom and pops that are really, really fun than they're used to be. Yeah, I know that's really missing. You know, there's the chain stuff. I mean, when you talk about, you know, when we talk about restaurants, we think about, there's this cool chef who blah, blah, blah. But, you know, I don't know what the number is,

but it's got to be 80 or 90% of restaurants. Yeah. Or chain restaurants. Right. They're Applebee's and McDonald's and all of that stuff. And, you know, you know what you're getting there. Yeah. We don't even have to badmouth it, but they're not sourcing well.

They're not treating workers well. They're not cooking great food. It's often inexpensive. Although even that, it's not as cheap as it used to be. In the mom and pops or just the one-offs, what is the thing that you, that get sacrificed first? I mean, they have to find rent that they can afford, but what gets sacrificed is their bodies because they're, you know, they're exploiting themselves in a way. And their relatives and whoever, you know, I mean, look, it's one thing to, it's one thing to mistreat workers who are coming, hoping for, a decent job, it's another thing

to mistreat your nephew or your mother or whatever, which is like what people are doing a mom and pop restaurants, they're exploiting themselves. It's hard work. It's really hard work. It's really hard work. We were just we were

just sort of in our neighborhood admiring these people who were like in Midtown Manhattan running mom and pop restaurants like, how are you people doing this? It's ours, you know, it's like 10 in the morning until 12 at night. God.

The crowds and then the lack of certainty, the whole thing's really. It's really, it's not a, it's hard. It's really hard. When I started looking into when I started, you know, baking and touring around and I would visit bakers and stuff, and I kind of went into it like,

yeah, maybe one day I'll do that. A bake shop sounds so cute. And you see these people just being in there, two in the morning and just, you know, I would always naively walk in and see a case filled with pastries and think, oh, isn't this nice that these are here? No, how did they get here? Somebody was in here in the dark, ignoring their family, making these. I think it's one thing if it's you.

It's like I'm opening a bakery. I'm going to. Right. I don't know. It's another thing. When it's a business and where are we cutting corners? Well, we're either not buying the ingredients we'd like to buy or we're not paying our people well enough. Yeah.

Or if you're lucky, maybe you have a cheap rent and that sort of helps you get started. Yeah. You know, again, it's what we're talking about with home cooking. There's so many iterations that a generalization is very dangerous. Yeah. This is cool, though. This is called bitman bread? Bitmans, yeah.

Bitmans. To be able to do this and provide and give people this great stuff without having to be there at two in the morning and see people face to face. It is pretty great. We had this great down at the Jersey Shore where we spent time with family. There was this great seafood place. It was a takeout place jammed. I mean, just flying, you know, it was great.

Fry clams kind of thing. Yeah, clams and you can go grill jambalaya or you could have like just the, you know, the fried stuff. It was just a staple. and they're closing down after like 25 years. And the farewell on the website said something to the effect of, we're closing down. It was a wonderful experience.

We loved feeding you and interacting with all of the people in the community. Well, most of you. That's great. And, you know, that part of it of having to deal with people's demands is so, that's got to crush you. If you're a public-facing person and you like that, more power to you. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. But people have gotten so specific about their wants and their, right? All it takes. Just being online behind someone at a Starbucks or whatever, and there's 25 people behind them and let me tell you how I want it. That's been encouraged, I guess. Is there a favorite? How to Cook Book of yours?

How to cook everything? Well, it's got to be the original. Yeah. My heart and soul was into that. How long to take to make to do that one? You know, when I was working, I was working by myself on that for the first two years. And so two years of cooking, researching, writing, that was very solitary. Very, very solitary.

Oh, really? And then. You didn't have. people around you that you were doing all that with? Really? Not a Xerox machine. I had a computer, I had a telephone. But then I...

It's a very long story, which is told in a number of places if anyone cares. But then I turned the manuscript in and there was a new editor and she said, what do I need to know? And I said, well, you need to know we have this gigantic manuscript that I think

could make a pretty good general cookbook. and no one had written a general cookbook in a while. But it's a mess. I mean, I can't, I'm, like, lost here. I was overwhelmed by the stuff that I had generated. And she was great. No harm in thanking her. Even now with Jennifer Griffin, she was fantastic.

And it was the days when publishers were supportive. We hired another editor, Jack Bishop, who was a friend of mine, and the three of us worked for six months sort of going over this thing, page, both coincidentally 25 chapters. So we took a chapter a week for six months and just went over every single thing. And that's when we came up with the idea for sidebars and for lists and for more variations and for all the things that makes how to cook everything, the sort of amazing book that it is.

And after that, I, after that I've had a collaborator, Carrie Conan, who was the done a great deal of the work. But the template, you know, was set in the mid-90s early. Yeah, the mid-90s. And so that's 30 years now and everything has sort of, it's pretty amazing because I got the column in the Times and I thought, well, this is nothing could be better than this. And I started writing, and then everything came out and, like, won every award and sold a zillion copies.

And that turns out that's what I'm going to wind up. That's going to be the first line of my obviability. Right. Is that a good everything, which is fine. It's certainly nothing wrong with that. What was it like working for the Times? Was it? I mean, I was a kind of pimple on the elephant's butt.

I mean, I wasn't like an integral part of the paper. I got to do what I wanted to do. The column was really popular. Everybody was happy about it. Yeah. And it was all, wasn't all me. Obviously, there are editors involved. and later on photographers and videographers and everything.

But that was also a little less solitary, but it was me coming up with a recipe every week. And I remained, I did it for 13 years, and I never missed the deadline. Wow. That's kind of cool. That is cool. And I had great editors and great collaborators,

and because it was the times I had access to, like people took my phone calls. Right, yeah. And then when I left that column and did the opinion column, that was also, you know, I thought, okay, now I'm going to really change food because I have this platform and I'm going to write about what I want to write about. People are going to pay attention. And that turned out not to be exactly the case, but it was really interesting.

Interesting how? Well, I did get to tackle some of the things that we've talked about here today. I got to tackle the real issues in food and to write about them. And this was only, well, now it's more than 10 years since I stopped. when I started 2008, 2008, started writing seriously about food for the Times. Very, very few people were doing that on a national platform. And certainly no one was doing it for the Times with any regularity. And it really was, I didn't invent those issues.

I didn't invent the positions that I took on those issues. I mean, sometimes they were mine. But more often I was acting kind of as, voice for people who were struggling to improve the food system. And I got to do that. And that was really cool. It is cool. It seems like your story, you kind of had that community kind of, I don't want to say,

I don't know what your hair was like back then, but a little bit more of a hippie attitude. And that you were able to, like, get that platform and still talk about things that were meaningful. All of that's true. Yeah. My hair was short, but it was long 50 years ago. Yeah, yeah. That had to feel pretty great. Yeah, it did feel pretty great.

It was also frustrating because not everybody reads your column and they say, when are you going to write about bread? And you say, well, I wrote about bread last week. Or they're like, we agree, antibiotics should be out of the food supply and nothing would happen. Sure. Or we agree, people should have access to land and nothing would happen. But you're beating the drum and then other people start beating it.

Now other people are doing that. I don't have to do it. I think it's really sad that the Times does not have a person writing about this regularly. Yeah, I was just going to ask. I don't think there is, right? No, there wasn't before and there wasn't after. And I think it's a mistake. Yeah, that's interesting.

No one asks me what I think. You're asking me what I think. I care. So did you have an office? Did you go in every day? I did. I actually was, um, let's see. I started writing the minimalist of 97 and we were still in the old building, which is on

the 3rd Street, which was kind of slum is probably the wrong word. Well, compared to the new one. It was a mess. And then they built the new one, and I did get an office over there. And when I got the opinion column, I got an even better office. And I loved it. It was really a community. It was before, there was a, before COVID, obviously.

So it was before people started working at home in great numbers. And the people were fantastic, and it was great. I did go in. I was living in the city. I went in every day or almost every day. And I loved it. It had to be great. And then I left, and then there's COVID, and it's not like that there anymore.

I mean, I don't know it firsthand, but I know most people don't go in, so it can't have that sense of community. Most people don't, even now. Jeez. And I think that's a loss there. I think that is a loss for us as a community also as a country, I think, not talking about the times, but I think, you know, to the extent that we're atomized and isolated and we're not in community. I think we don't know each other. It's a problem. It is a real problem.

It seems like some are starting to require the people come back and they're starting to see that we have kind of lost something. It seems like these corporations across industries are starting to ask people to show up. Right. I think from a profit perspective, it's a mistake to have people not be in the same room, but from a community perspective, it's a mistake. It's unfortunate that we're not in community with each other. Yeah.

There's two different worlds here. The business world is making a mistake by not having people work together. But we as humans are making a mistake by not hanging out. Yeah, I know. It's a, I feel like the younger, like my daughter's just out of school. And it seems like they kind of recognize that. They see as a, this is our time to hang out. And not, you know.

I think that's right, too. My kids are like that, too. They really have friends and they really try to see people. And they try to meet people they don't know also. They try to live in their neighborhoods. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

And they go out to events and they do all the stuff that I say no to. Because I've run out of steam. But that had to be a great time. I mean, man, I mean, in New York at the times, having stuff coming out. Yeah. It was really cool. That had to be cool. Yeah.

I went over and visited. I brought my daughter to see Sam Sifton. He took us through. I forget what we were doing. He had put me in the times as making a bread. It was actually a really important moment because I had been making bread for six weeks. And somehow he heard that I had a sourdose starter

and they did a story on bread again. And we became friendly after that. And he brought my daughter through. And just to be like a college student kind of who has a writing interest and just to walk through that building and see all these young people and older people just mixing. Yeah. It was inspiring to both of us.

Yeah. Yeah, it was really pretty great. To be cut loose of the journalist's deadline, that had to be a relief but also disorienting, I would think. Yeah, as I said, it feels like a little bit of an addiction. I mean, when I was really young, when I was in my 30s, there was a period I had three or four deadlines a week. God, that's a lot. And then by the time I left, the Times, I was down to two, but they were high-pressure deadlines. I mean, you don't want to...

You can't miss that. You know, you don't want to screw up writing for the Times. And mostly I was lucky or smart enough not to. But it's funny because food was always, it's not so much anymore, but food always happened. Food sections always happened on Wednesday's traditional. which came from the fact that women's pages happened on Wednesdays in the old newspapers. Right. So Tuesday was just always this day of very high anxiety for me.

Yeah. And Wednesday was his day of great exaltation and relief, right? And then Thursday was kind of a day off. And then Friday I'd start to get a little antsy. And the weekend, what am I doing? And Monday and Tuesday were like, ugh. And that just never stopped. And I think when it did stop, there was just this withdrawal.

period from this cycle that I knew. I didn't particularly love the cycle, but it was my cycle. Yeah. And I think anyone who's had a column for any period of time will say the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, just that thing. I didn't, I was never a journalist, but I did a, but you're a journalist now. Yeah, but I did a, for the writing aspect of it, I, for Prairie Home Companion, which became live from here, I would do this five-minute monologue every week. And it's similar, that thing. of yeah you know it's done i was great and we hit it and you have you have relief for like like you said like 24 hours and then it's oh shit here we go frank rich frank rich said when i've got the opinion column frank rich said to me yeah it's really great only it's like being tied up under a windmill the blade comes down and you duck it and then you look up and it's like oh no i never forgot

So you've been on this journey of kind of, in a way, just writing about it culturally and cooking and food and this kind of thing and exploring. And then you start to get into the weeds of what is all of this and the positives and negatives and a lot of negatives of how do we write the ship. Right. Where's your head now? Are you hopeful? Are you Well, I'm Yes, I'm hopeful

There's days that I despair But there's days that I I'm hopeful I do think If you I do think food is a particularly Strong example Of things going wrong

And not going right again But I think the big picture is That things have Many things have gone right and if you're looking at women's rights or you're a gay person or you're a person of color and you look at your life compared to what your life would have looked like 50 or 75 years ago, I think those trends have been in the right direction. It's not an easy life for a lot of people, but, you know, public health has made advances,

longevity, et cetera, et cetera. The world is probably a safer and better. place than it was for most people, especially given that we're now supporting, what is it, eight billion people or whatever the number is. So when I was a kid, it was three billion. It's a lot more people. It's a lot more people. You know, I think if you look at food, there's a reason to be hopeful, but there's really reason to think, God, this is bad.

I think about that every day. When it's lunchtime, and I think about, there are eight billion people looking for something to eat right now. How do you do that work? How does that work? Yeah. Well, I do think people are more conscious of the fact that food needs to recover from this place that it's been forced into, this really bad situation. And I think more and more people recognize that, more and more people who are working on that, your sister, the people my partner works with, the people I work with.

People are saying, look, we can't right now, it's very hard to change policy right now. because of the federal situation. But we can set up models for how things ought to look when they look better. And people are doing that. So there is reason to be hopeful. It's just not fast moving. And I think, you know, we're not gonna unpack

the mysteries of the universe here. But, you know, if we're lucky, we have 50, 60 years as adults who have functioning mentalities, and things change slowly. Yeah. So our perception of things is very, very, very, it's fragmented and it's limited and it's hard and change happens over decades and centuries and millennia and it's just hard to see what the big picture is and hard to know

what things are going to look like even 10 years from now, let alone 50 or 100. Yeah, it is interesting. It's fascinating. Because it's frustrating. Because you want to know. Yeah. But it's also interesting, like you said earlier, it's like things can change really. quickly. You can have something like

change tomorrow. Right. But then those big arcs. I mean, if you knew three years ago what was going to be happening, A, you might have moved out of the country. You could have made a lot of money and see you'd be a genius because no one foresaw all of the changes that have been made in this country just in two years.

A year and a half. year and a half. Insane. I can't wait to be bored again. Right? Yeah. When it wasn't like the dominant thing on your brain. Unless the dominant thing is things moving in the right direction, which could happen

even in my lifetime. It could still happen. So I do have hope of that. That's good. That's good. Well, I like hearing that from people who really think and are thoughtful and expressive and creative. And I'm always hoping that.

I'm hoping for hope. Yeah. So it's nice to hear that. I look forward to your memoir. That'll be cool. I look forward to it also. Yeah. How much further you have to go?

I mean, I think I could have a draft by the end of them. You want to say month, but you're stopping. Okay, end of June. I think I could have a solid draft by the end of June. No, I want to be finished with it by fall. Yeah. I think it's in really good shape right now. I'm working on it for years, so.

That's great. But it's at a finishing point now. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. That's fantastic. I want to read the other book, too. I'll send you a copy. Yeah, I would love that.

And congrats on the bread thing. This is a, this is to crack this, to get people, to get this kind of bread in people's homes is, that's an achievement. That's another way of kind of cracking, like, how are you doing this? You know, someone that bakes really good bread to see good bread that you're going to get in the hands of people is. You'll like that bread. You may stop baking. That's the bad news. But, you know, if you love it, you'll keep doing it.

And I love baking. But once this stuff was in the freezer, I'm like, oh, I'm not going to go to. I'm going to take this out of the freezer. I'm not going to start stirring this, having my wife feed the starter when I'm on the road. Exactly. My starter, I'm sad to say, is pretty much dead. Oh, no, really? Well, it lives elsewhere.

But, yeah, I've given enough of it away so that if I want to start it again, I just have to ask some people to bring me a little bit. Yeah. It's like kids who left the home. I'm really not baked bread in weeks or months. Really? Yeah. Oh, man.

I don't like to hear that. Well, you've had a bunch of years. Taste it. You'll see. It's really good. No, the corn one's really legit. Well, thank you for this. This was really... Total fun.

Thank you, Tom. Yeah, and much success and come back with your next endeavor. We'll do. All right. Thank you. Take care.