The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Food Matters More Than You Think: From Plate to Planet with Mark Bittman

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Food impacts everything, which is why changing the way we eat and working towards a new food system can be so powerful and far-reaching. Cooking at home used to be the norm but it’s become the exception. Food marketing has convinced us our kitchens are holding us hostage and that true freedom is convenience, found in packaged and fast foods. In fact, 50% of meals are now eaten away from home.  That’s why cooking at home is a revolutionary act. When we prepare our own meals, we can control what’s really going into our bodies, and we also get to buy ingredients that meet our standards and values, like humane treatment of farmworkers and animals. Today’s guest on The Doctor’s Farmacy is one of my personal mentors and idols as a leader in the food movement. Mark Bittman is the author of more than 20 acclaimed books, including the How to Cook Everything series. He was a food columnist, opinion columnist, and the lead magazine food writer at the New York Times, where he started writing in 1984 and still writes occasionally. Mark is currently a member of the faculty of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and is writing a new cookbook called Dinner for Everyone to share how simple and delicious it can be to cook at home, no matter what your dietary preferences are. This episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy  is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market  has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. I never let myself get into a food emergency. Instead, I always carry enough food with me when I’m on the go, for at least a full day. I order real, whole foods online from Thrive Market. Right now, Thrive is offering all Doctor’s Farmacy listeners a great deal: you will receive an extra 25% off your first purchase plus a free 30 day membership to Thrive. There’s no minimum amount to buy and no code at checkout. All you have to do is head over to http://thrivemarket.com/farmacy

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Every year that passes that we are not teaching four-year-olds how to eat well means that 20 years from now we're going to have 24-year-olds and 40 years from now we're going to have 44-year-olds who are struggling with their diets. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Now before we get started with this week's episode, I want to tell you about a company called Thrive Market. This made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my crazy travel schedule.

In fact, I believe in them so much that I was one of their first investors over five years ago. So here's a little background. I split my time between three different locations, Cleveland, the Berkshires, and New York. And I'm constantly traveling. Anyone else who travels a lot knows that airport food and rest stop food is horrible. It's junk. It's pretty scary out there, actually. I recently drove through Ohio and it was a food wasteland. It's

easy to make healthy choices at home, for sure. But when you're hungry and you're on the road, it's pretty easy to get in a food emergency. Those french fries and cinnamon buns, well, they just seem to call your name. I never let myself get in a food emergency. I bring enough food with me for at least a whole day, sometimes more than a day. Whole foods, real foods that I order online from Thrive Market. They sell all my favorite snacks, condiments, cleaning products, self-care products, pretty much all the stuff in my kitchen or the rest of my house at discounted prices. Now, they don't sell fresh fruits and veggies, but pretty much everything else, including regenerative beef and sustainably harvest fish. I just order a box full of all my favorite stuff,

have it delivered to my house or in fact wherever I am, and then I stock my pantry and my backpack with all my favorite stuff and I carry it with me. And all of it's clean, whole food. And it's between 25 and 50% off the retail price that you get at a place like Whole Foods. They also carry one of my favorite snacks of all time, Hugh Kitchen dark chocolate. Now, this is probably the best chocolate in the world. They have all the flavors that you need and that I love. And if you haven't tried this chocolate, it's pretty amazing. They use only the most high quality organic ingredients. They use coconut sugar, which doesn't spike your blood sugar. And they carry so many different flavors like hazelnut butter, dark chocolate, almond butter, chocolate covered almonds or cashews. My wife's favorite are the gooseberries covered in chocolate. They are addictive, so be careful. Hugh Kitchen Chocolate

is hands down my favorite, and Thrive Market offers all their products up to 30% off. So not only does Thrive offer great deals and carry all my favorite brands, but they also give back. For every membership purchased, they give a membership to a family who's in need. And right now, Thrive is offering all of our Doctors Pharmacy listeners a fabulous deal. You're going to receive an extra 25% off your first purchase, plus a free 30-day membership to Thrive. There's no minimum amount to buy. There's no code at the checkout. All you have to do is head over to thrivemarket.com forward slash pharmacy. That's thrivemarket.com forward slash pharmacy. That's with an F,

F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. I'm really proud to have them as a sponsor and to be an investor in their company. All right, let's get back to the episode. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation is with one of my idols and mentors even though he doesn't know it Mark Bittman who I've been following for decades and has been one of the leading voices not just

in reinvigorating cooking and he's written amazing books on this 20 different books including how to cook everything and food matters a guide to conscious, and VB6, and many, many other books. But he's also been a leader in the food movement, which is really focusing on the idea that the food system itself is driving many of our social problems. And I had the chance to watch his extraordinary TED Talk, which I encourage you all to watch. Now 10 years old. 2007, maybe. It's 12 years old. And one of the compelling images I remember was you showed Mushroom Cloud, which was emblematic of how we grow meat in this country, that it is the nuclear bomb of today in terms of climate, environment, global destruction. And we're

going to get into that. He has written extensively in the New York Times. I was devastated when his New York Times column stopped because I read it every week, and it was just a wonderful compendium of various ideas around food that really went far beyond just cooking. He has had some extraordinary television shows shows emmy award-winning uh show called years of living dangerously about climate change he's written for so many publications he's now teaching at columbia and on food policy social justice and many other things he's started a new magazine on medium uh we don't know the title yet do we we don't know the name but it's there it's yeah i'd say it's great uh aspects of food that aren't being talked about it's not your usual cooking

column it's actually about the issues that matter that relate to food he's going to be having a podcast newsletter and i can't wait for all of it um he's um just getting started and it seems like in his work around food and one of the the questions I have for you, Mark, and welcome to the doctor's pharmacy, is you got into this field through the doorway of cooking. I did. And then somehow you took a different direction where it took you into thinking about food in a global way

and the food system, the way and the food system, the consequence of the food system. How did that happen? Because a lot of chefs are out there and they're just cooking and talking about food and cooking, but you're talking about food as a solution to all the world's problems. Right. Well, I think I was never a chef. I was a cook by accident and a writer by trade. And when I started writing, I was writing cook by accident and a writer by trade and when I started writing I was writing about community organizing and local issues and things like that and bought the Boston area when I started to write for whatever reason no one was interested in anything I was writing about until I started writing about food

so I started writing about food which was I started writing about food, which was fine with me. I loved cooking. I love cooking. But I did have this kind of dilemma or challenge, which was that I wondered whether writing about cooking was really the most important thing I could be doing. And gradually I came to, and we're talking about a career that at this point is 40 years long. So, I started writing about food in 1980. So, literally almost 40 years of writing about food.

And I think by 1990, 1995, maybe 2000, I had come to terms with it because I thought, you know what, cooking is so valuable and so important. And, you know, in those 20 years, say, the world around food had really changed. Local food had kind of gone away and was starting to come back. But I mean, I lived in Massachusetts and Connecticut then. And when I started to write about food, there were local farms. There were people doing dairy and meat and vegetables within 20, 30 miles of Boston and New Haven, both of which I lived in, and doing it real. It was not a hobby. It was not small. People were farming. By 2000, that wasn't happening anymore. And I thought, you know, to preserve these traditions, to talk about food, to talk about food and nutrition, because it was also becoming clear at that time that cooking was really a much better way to eat than takeout, fast food, da-da-da-da-da. And I thought, you know, if I can encourage, I used to say, if I can get everybody in the

United States to cook rice and beans once a week, I will have had a successful career. I still think that. But that was kind of, there was a little bit of corner turning there. And by 2000 or so, I thought, you know, Eric Schlosser had just written Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan was starting to write some food oriented things. And I thought, you know, people are beginning to write more seriously about food. It's not just cooking. It's not certainly not just restaurants. It's not even just nutrition, you know, which had gone through a kind of bad period. I'm sure we can talk about because there was there has been a lot of confusing

information which i think is there's less of that now i think we understand things better but there was a period where writing about nutrition was like a minefield um but anyway people were starting to write about the link between the links between good food cooking cooking, good agriculture, food access, what we grew, how we grew it, et cetera, et cetera. And as I said, around 2000, I started to think, I could do that too. And by 2005 or so, I wrote a piece for the Times which was brilliant headline, which I didn't write,

called Taming the Meat Guzzler. And it was a piece about the links between high production and high consumption of factory-raised meat and rates of cancer and other chronic diseases and global warming. And no one had written that story. So I was kind of the first to write that piece. And I was lucky enough to have written it on a great platform, the Times platform. And it was a super popular piece. And from there, I didn't stop writing about cooking. I still do.

And I love writing about cooking. And I think it's important, but I started to shift and add more and more writing about policy and about food in general. And so now I kind of slip my time between those two things. Yeah, and they're not disconnected, right? No, they're totally connected. I mean, cooking real food at home, in a way,

is a revolutionary act that can solve a lot of our problems if people do it. Right. It's true. But, you know, when you get into these conversations, it's not a but. It's true. Nevertheless, when you get into these conversations, you quickly realize that not everybody is going to cook at home. It just ain't going to happen. Some people can't and some people won't. 50% of meals are now eaten outside the home. It just ain't going to happen. Some people can't and some people won't. 50% of meals are now eaten outside the home. Right. And so it's a partial solution at best, or it's a solution for those who can do it and can do it well, but it's not a panacea. And I only say that because there was a time when I thought, okay, my job is to get everybody to cook all the time and then

all the world's problems will be solved. It's not that simple. But it would help. It would really help. It would help. And it would improve people's health. It would help promote the right kinds of agriculture. It would reduce our healthcare costs.

It would help people pick the right food. It would end global warming. I don't know if it would end global warming, but it would put a dent in it. I think you're right. It's a revolutionary act. Yeah. right food it would end global warming i would end global warm but it put a dent in it i think you're right it's a revolutionary act yeah um but cooking with good ingredients is a revolutionary act but making sure that you consume good ingredients however they are prepared it's also a revolution yeah now you you actually sort of came at this in an interesting way through one

of your books called vb6 which is vegan vegan before six, which is an interesting concept. Right. And I love it. I sort of coined the term pegan, which was actually kind of related to that, which is paleo vegan as a joke on the extremes of diet. And you sort of came at it through, hey, we should have eating mostly plants. And I think I agree with you 100%. I mean, no matter matter really putting labels on diets

is stupid people like labels i get it but you know it's like yeah eat plants don't eat a lot of junk food don't eat a lot of animal products call it whatever you want right yeah and and that has been i think a key part of message and i want want to sort of jump into what you sort of come into in the later part of your career, which is this whole food movement. And you are one of the leaders and icons in it. And you wrote an article, I think it was in the New York Times Magazine first, it was a letter basically to the future president in 2015, which unfortunately wasn't taken as advice.

Right. But it was very powerful. and you link together so many disparate things that people just don't connect the dots on and i just want to share a little bit of what you wrote with michael pollan and others that was i think for me one of the best summaries in a couple of paragraphs of this problem then i want to say i'm so glad you're reading it because you said to me what did you do i had to make it up so you all wrote that you know you know basically the the um the striking thing is is we have no food policy in this country even though the food system and all the consequences of it are driving most of

the crises that are happening today's world. Environmental degradation, climate change, economic inequality, you know, the burden on the federal budget. There's no plan or principles that we actually agree on for managing our food system. And you wrote that the current and future well-being of the nation can be significantly improved by creating a national food policy. Such a policy, you said, if properly conceived and implemented, will result in a healthier population, a reduction in hunger, mitigation of an adaption to climate change, decreases in energy consumption, like because one-fifth of our fossil fuels is used for agriculture, improved environmental conservation, rural and inner-city economic development. We'll talk about that. A reduction in socioeconomic inequalities. This is really a social justice issue. And you're teaching, of course, in Columbia on that. A safer and more

secure food system and savings to the federal budget, especially in spending on health care. And you said the previous administrations have failed to appreciate the linkages between farming, diet, public health, and the environment with the result that the food system has never been effectively overseen, administered, or regulated. In fact, nobody's really paying attention to all these linkages. This in turn has resulted in severe market failures that we call by other names that are seemingly separate issues, right? So the obesity crisis, runaway hunger, epidemics of chronic disease, the ethanol bubble, surface water contamination, hypoxia, you know, killing dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico where we lose 212,000 metric tons of fish because of the runoff from nitrogen from the farming we do.

That wasn't in your article. I just added that. Soil degradation. And soil is critical for storing carbon. Food and safety scares and recalls. Rural economic decline. inner city food deserts, labor exploitation, rising economic inequality, and the federal fiscal crisis. By attending to the food system, it's possible to connect all these dots and begin to address

them in a coordinated, effective way. This is a big idea. And it's an idea that's been around for a while, but nobody's paying attention to it. How do we get people to pay attention to this? I want to say two things here. One is that everything that we just said, you could pretty much say about the climate change issue also. Yeah.

And Naomi Klein, who's an idol of mine, I'm sure you know, wrote this book called This Changes Everything, which was about if we were to address climate change seriously, and Bill McKibb has been saying this for years, if we were to address climate change seriously and bill mckibb has been saying this for years if we were to seriously address climate change we would have to address all of those issues too and food including food and food is the same kind of thin end of the wedge if you were to address food seriously you'd have to address everything from climate change to income inequality to soil quality you name it to cooking for that matter so that's one thing i want to say the other thing i want to say is this

in the history of this country and in the last 100 150 years this country has determined a lot of what happens in the world like it or not that you, you might hate America, but you can't deny its power. So certainly since World War II, but arguably even since the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th century, a lot of what happens here determines what happens elsewhere. And we in this country have never once said, what do we want food to be? What do we want food to be what do we want it to do if there were a food system what might it look like what would its primary goals be we've never stated that and if i say to you i'm and i'm not going to put you on the spot because it's a rhetorical question but if i say to you or almost anyone else if you were czar of food if if there were a food system, like what would your priorities be? And I think most people would say something like, well, let's try to feed everybody as well

as we can and do as little damage to the earth as possible. Something like that. You know, you get into animal welfare, you can get into the details of what feeding everybody well means and get into the details of soil maintenance and all of that. But it would pretty much be let's benefit, you know, greatest good for greatest number kind of thing. That's not what we have. I mean, A, we don't have a system. But B, what we have, what we call a system, what we call a food system, is a bunch of rich people just trying to get richer. I mean, that's the bottom line.

You mean big ag and big food? Yeah, big ag and big food. The goal of the food system, the goal of the people who determine what we eat is to make money. And they make money by selling chemicals, by selling fertilizer, by selling seeds, by selling equipment, by selling hyper-processed food that makes us sick, and so on. That's where the food system is. So the difference between A and B, greatest good for greatest number, and a bunch of people trying to get rich selling a bunch of stuff we don't really need, that's a huge difference. So how do we get there? That's really the question. And it's not a shortcut. I'm not going to sit here and say, here's what we do in order to do that. It's a big question, but first we have to ask the question.

I mean, you were part of a conference called The True Cost of Food, which I am so jealous that I didn't get to go to. Because it was in London, but yeah. No, wasn't there one in California? Oh, yeah. There was one in California, too. Also good. Yes.

It was really stunning. And it brought all these issues together from different experts across the world. And this concept is something that would be useful, which is what is the real cost of what we're eating? What is the real cost of a feedlot hamburger or a can of soda to the environment to humans to social justice to the economy to our kids who have to eat this food that have developmental issues and cognitive impairment i mean those measurements those metrics have to be solidified you know what matters um has to be. And if we measure it, it changes what we do. Right. But a can of soda, let's say a can of soda costs a dollar. I don't know if it matters

that the true cost is $2 or $4. It's somewhere in that range. And it depends. Are you counting healthcare costs? Are you counting- Everything. I know. Are you counting the cost of mining the aluminum, et cetera? Cost of the dead fish in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean, but, you know, there are things that are immeasurable because the industrial farming and the production of junk food and so and so forth decreases biodiversity. We don't even know what decreasing biodiversity costs. There's no way to put a price tag on that. You know, you're into sort of esoteric ways of improving health. Yeah.

There could be some, you know, there could be some micro, there unlikely is some, or there likely is some microbes, some bacteria, some this or that out there that could be a cure for cancer. I mean, it's silly and elementary to say that, but there's millions of species we haven't even identified, but we're killing them anyway. Like the biodiversity of the soil. I mean, our friend Daphne Miller is a doctor. She focuses on the health of the soil as a way of creating health of humans, which is something that people aren't even thinking about. And that is right.

And I think we can't measure everything. What is it who said everything that matters can't be measured, everything that can be measured doesn't necessarily matter. Interesting. Who was it who said that? I forget. That's good. I don't know, was it Einstein or something like that?

And I think that we have to start looking at these things. And the impediments are huge. So what do you think are the greatest impediments and how do we overcome that because you know these issues have been laid out so clearly by so many people including you and michael pollan and others in the food movement and yet they fall on deaf ears and we don't hear this in the political discourse we don't hear in the media we just except for you elements. But it's it's a tough issue. You know, it's funny. We don't we haven't made much progress on climate change.

We haven't made much progress on income inequality. We haven't made much progress on addressing what the role of people is in the labor force in the future. The big issues don't get tackled very well and i think we understand or we get that they're hard to tackle and we get that a lot of politicians are corrupt and we get that some of them are just stupid um but food not mentioning any names it's not gonna do us us any good. But food is different because food's so core. And it's both so obvious that it needs to be fixed. And yet, because food is cheap, because so many of those external costs that you were just talking about aren't paid directly by us, the consumer, or the industry that produces them then food of fear appears to be cheap so politicians would just say look everybody in the united states more or less is eating okay

i mean some people need food stamps i don't want to belittle that but this is not you know the poorest people in the united states relative to the rest of the world are doing pretty well food wise in terms of getting the right number of calories or enough calories. But not the right calories. No, we can get into that. But the thing is, it's not an issue. There's not a huge issue of hunger or lack of calories in this country. And so I think politicians would just as soon leave well enough alone, not to mention the

fact that the food industry's lobbying budget is as big as the defense industry's lobbying budget. So there's a lot of pressure to just say, let us do our thing. We know that we're not feeding people ideally, but at least we're kind of feeding people. And I think there's a lot of that kind of like, well, we can address other things. I also think it's really, really hard to address food.

I mean, from a policy perspective. And yet, where can we start? What's obvious? So on. The fact that we're relying on industry to get antibiotics out of the food supply, despite increasing numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Let's just stop there for a minute because that is such a big issue. There's 29 million pounds of antibiotics made,

24 for preventing infection in overcrowded animals. Right. Super bugs kill 30,000 people a year and millions around the world. And rising. And rising. By 10%, 20%. I read an estimate that globally the cost of all that is about $2.1 trillion. And the FDA, and this is the corruption of the government, the FDA said, pretty please, will you not do this?

Because we don't think it's a good idea. And so there are voluntary guidelines, which nobody follows. They might be following them, but there's no oversight. You wouldn't know. There's all these companies that have pledged to take antibiotics out of their food supply. NRDC, the National Resources Defense Council, says they're actually doing it to a large extent. I believe NRDC. I'm not sure I believe that this is really happening. It sure would have happened faster if the Obama administration had come in in 2008 and said, here's an issue.

We want to resolve this by 2012 or 2015. It would have been resolved by now. That hasn't happened. It hasn't, you know, in the 70s. We're talking 40 years ago. In the late 60s, early 70s, actually talking close to 50 years ago, people were saying, we have to stop marketing junk food to children. This is really bad.

We are teaching young children that soda is a cool thing to drink, even before they can talk, even before they're even marginally able to understand what's coming at them. We're teaching them soda, sweetened juice, sweetened breakfast cereal, cookies, these are the things that make life worth living. Right. 50 years ago, there was noise being made about that. The Federal Trade Commission, which was on the verge of doing something about it, was effectively silenced.

Congress was effectively bought off. No one even raises the issue anymore. You can't even get the national government to talk about this stuff. So now you're relying on things like soda taxes, which are better than nothing, but not much. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, Barry Popkin,

who I know you know very well, he said to me that in Chile, where they implemented a sweeping policy change around food, including a soda tax of 18%. Right. And including. Great labeling. Including eliminating marketing to kids. Right.

Through any media and also on the cereal boxes. So Tony the Tiger is dead. Right. He said, shockingly, when they analyzed the impact of these policies, that the marketing restrictions were four times as effective as the soda taxes. Yeah, I would imagine that. And in this country, I read, I think Mayor Nessel wrote an article, I think in the New England Journal years ago about food marketing to kids and said, I think we're one of the

only countries other than Syria that doesn't restrict food marketing to kids in some way. I don't know if that's true. Well, maybe in some way. And we do restrict it in some way. I don't know if that's true. Well, maybe in some way. And we do restrict it in some way. But again, to a large part, it's voluntary. Like the industry had said, well, don't worry about it. We won't market junk to kids, which was a total lie. They took one sliver of their marketing budget and moved it somewhere else

so they can say, oh, here's this. You know, Saturday mornings, we don't sell junk on children's programming. That's kind of it. The real tragedy here is that, I mean, suppose we have this conversation, a great conversation filled with interesting things, two intelligent guys. Maybe we change a couple of people's minds or a few people have insights. Fabulous. Meanwhile, the budget for the fast food, junk food industries is in the billions of dollars. And they're targeting young kids who can't really say, oh, what a bunch of garbage that is.

But say, oh, wow, I can paddle my canoe down a river made of milk and capture Froot Loops in this kind of game that and aren't fruit loops fun or isn't coke enjoyable every year that passes that we are not teaching four-year-olds how to eat well means that 20 years from now we're going to have 24 year olds and 40 years from now we're going to have 44 year olds who are struggling with their diets who are coming to see you and other doctors and saying, gee, I'm overweight. I can't control. Why is that? Well, the reason is not that you're a bad person. The reason is that you were trained as a young person to eat badly and that you're surrounded by not the most ideal food that you should be eating. In fact, you're surrounded by the opposite of the ideal.

And every place you go, David Kessler's always talked about this, this sort of, I mean, the silly scientific term is obesogenic environment. But basically what it means is that we are in a permanent carnival of junk food. Food swamp. Right. And food swamp is much better than food desert yeah everywhere you go there's cotton candy and marshmallows and cinnabon and double cheeseburgers and uh and it's all screaming eat me and when you're a little kid you were being told

this is the cool stuff yeah not like stir fry with broccoli and tofu but this it's tough and you know the average kid sees between six and ten thousand ads for junk food in a year a year a year and if you spoke to your kid three times a day at every meal about healthy eating you could not compete right that would be one thing and then i think even today it's worse because that was based on traditional media now we have social media which is all subversive invisible embedded and much harder stuff stealth marketing that's a good it's true if you spoke to your kid three times a day you'd talk to them a thousand times right and then my daughter hate you by the way the kid would hate you so that's true and my daughter is fascinating she it reminded me of a story when i was um you

know reading about this you know kids who are two years old can recognize labeled brand name products before they basically can even walk or talk you have to be eight before you can distinguish fact from fiction i remember my daughter was up at eight or nine she says daddy how come all those commercials on television in real life it doesn't actually kind of match up with what you see and i'm like wow that's very insightful she kind of had this awake awakening and like all that crap she sees in the media isn't actually what it really is and and uh you know our friend kelly brownell was also uh sort of pioneering some of this research around food marketing and said the worst foods have the most marketing so the ones that have the most uh harm and the least nutritional value are the ones

that are most promoted right well unadulterated foods are not very profitable like broccoli's not that problem yeah who's where do you see those super bowl ads for broccoli or cashews you know like you don't um all right so let's talk about the the the way we can help shift this and if you were advisor to the president and you were sitting in the white house and maybe uh this next election cycle and you could help shape that national food policy where would you focus i mean i would the two things we've talked about i would do the antibiotic thing like that i wouldn't even you know just yeah it has to be an edict and by the way that would transform animal agriculture overnight i think it it might although they've taken antibiotics out of industrial agriculture in denmark and the netherlands and they're still producing a lot

of factory farm meat so you can do it without antibiotics. It's not a panacea, but it sure starts to solve one public health problem, which is that our antibiotics are not as effective as they were. And so that's an easy thing. There's great public relations victories, a lot you could talk about. You could use it in tandem with making factory farmed meat better. You're not going to make it go away by this, but there are degrees of. So I would just, that would be like, okay, you want to know what I want to do? It's not the biggest problem. It's not the biggest solution, but it's the easiest thing.

It's like such low-hanging fruit. And really, we all, those of us who wrote this call for a national food policy, honestly thought that it would be one of the first things the Obama administration would do. And that's 10 years that it hasn't happened, that it could have happened. So that's unfortunate. The second thing I do is start working on the marketing of junk to kids. I mean, we just talked about that also. But I would just say, what's feasible? What can we do here? Can we make it so that minors can't buy soda without their parents' permission?

It's a radical notion, but they can't buy cigarettes. And soda is arguably as harmful as cigarettes. We had no problem with that. It's certainly as harmful as beer. Well, I mean, it's now clear that diet and particularly sugar-sweetened beverages kill more people than smoking, war, and terrorism combined. Right. And transportation.

Well, you know, experts are now saying that the leading cause of death worldwide can be traced to diet. So we know that a billion people don't have enough to eat. That's an income issue, and that's a justice issue, and that's an issue that needs to be dealt with in one way. On the other hand, we know that another billion or more people are getting the wrong calories. Two billion are overweight. Okay.

Are getting the wrong calories and are billion are overweight. Okay. Are getting the wrong calories and are getting chronic diseases from their diet. You know, it could happen. I mean, it could happen to non-overweight people too. So how do we address that? Yeah. And, you know, until we change our economic system, we're not going to be directly regulating

what food manufacturers can produce but maybe we can directly regulate what they can sell and how they sell yeah that's now that would be a so what about this sort of dichotomy between the message that meat is bad in the sense of harming the planet harming people causing climate change and feedlot factories. And the emphasis you also place on regenerative agriculture, which necessitates animals being part of the cycle of regenerating soil, holding water, drawing down carbon, reducing climate change. Because I think it's a debate that is dichotomized, but falsely so.

If meat is bad, it doesn't mean all meat is bad, right? And how do you explain that to people? I think you start with the fact that the way we produce meat is mostly bad. Bad is obviously a simple term, but it works, I guess. And you start with the fact that we mostly eat too much of this meat that's produced badly. So if we ate less meat and produced it better and saw our animal friends as a way of keeping soil healthy, as a way of promoting regenerative agriculture and so on, it becomes more of that kind of closed system where everybody has a role. And it's not just we're raising animals

as if they were little machines and we're killing them as if they had no life worth thinking about and we're just eating them as fast as we can and by the way we're doing it at a rate that the rest of the world can't but tough luck because we're americans or whatever you're whatever you're saying. You know, the latest thing five years ago or so, Lancet said Lancet said that people in the West should be reducing their meat consumption by 90 percent. I don't think they're actually the latest stuff, I think, is a little less onerous. But even if it's 50 percent, that's a lot for a lot of people. I think it's just clear to say we need fewer animals in industrial production. We need more animals on pasture. And we as humans need to be eating fewer of them and paying more attention to which ones we're

eating when and how. I mean, that's a broad overall statement to come out and say, look, we all have to be vegan or we have to reduce our meat consumption by 90% like this. People are just going to shut their ears, I think. Well, what's fascinating, though, is if you look at the problem, the price of feedlot meat is pretty low. It's unbelievably cheap until you get to that true cost stuff. That true costing. So you add in the cost of the fossil fuels to grow. You add in the cost of soil destruction from the corn and soil. I mean, one pound of soil is lost for every pound of corn grown.

We have the greenhouse gases. 100 liters of water per pound of meat. Right. That kind of thing. Greenhouse gas stuff. On and on and on. Public health costs. I don't think you mentioned that. Exactly. Trillions of dollars a year. Yeah, stuff on and on and on. Public health costs, I don't think you mentioned that.

Trillions of dollars a year. Absolutely. So there's a huge cost. So maybe a pound of meat should be $1,000 if it's a feedlot meat or whatever it is. Whatever it is. It's not $4 or $6. And then on the other hand, your grass-fed ribeye is $70 for a steak. You know, that's ridiculous. But what if the true cost of that was incorporated in terms of

the benefits to the soil and the water retention of the soil and the reduction in climate change and the health benefits of more omega-3 fats in the diet from the food? I mean, so we have to equalize that. And we put all these price supports for feedlot meat through subsidies that gross corn and soy. We destroy rainforests and destroy soil. None of that's incorporating the cost. And on the regenerative side, it's very hard for people to start that because it costs a lot of money up front. It's hard to transition.

And a lot of rangelands are not being used in this way, but could be restored. I mean, I always sort of talk about how we had 60 million bison in this country before we killed them all off to starve off the Native Americans. And now we have about 80 million cows. We didn't have climate change back then. We didn't have soil destruction. They were actually building tens of feet of topsoil. So how do we sort of rethink that and include that in the equation?

So I think to me, that that actually help account for the true cost of food and reduce the supports for that in feedlot meat and then having subsidies and support for regenerative ag seems to be like a great solution right and you put that in conjunction with putting farmers back on the land who want to do the kind of farming that will support the environment that will produce meat that's raised without torture and and so on and you have a you're beginning to have a kind of comprehensive plan for how to address food i think a big thing is i mean you asked what i would do if i were food czar or whatever. Another big thing that addresses that package that you just raised is how do we make land affordable

for people who are going to farm it in a way that will sustain that land as opposed to scraping off the top layer of topsoil, having the wind blow it away. And that's what happened to the prairie. A lot of it is just gone that was the dust bowl we killed the bison and we got the dust bowl well we killed the bison we killed the bison and killed the original people or moved them in order to be able to scrape that the the prairie down to the topsoil in order to plant the topsoil in wheat. And then much of that topsoil blew away during the Dust Bowl.

Right. And then there was an attempt to kind of reestablish that environment, which, you know, hasn't worked that well. And it's certainly not a sustainable system now either. I mean, it's only what, 75, I guess 90 years after the Dust Bowl, that land isn't repaired and that land is not being used in a sustainable way. Yeah, it's really all interconnected. And that was what was so great about that article to create a 21st century national food policy, because it connected all these disparate dots and it pointed out a lot of points of light of

people actually doing the right things that need more support and help right and and the truth is we have the potential to change what's going on with simple government policies like the good food purchasing program for example in la is where the local government says we're only going to buy food for our institutional things that we serve as a government that's sustainable, that's high in nutrition, that meets all these metrics, and it's measured and it's reproducible. So those kinds of initiatives could be huge if we sort of put a little compost on them. Not gasoline. That is spreading the good for food purchasing policy.

And the great thing about it, and this is because of the terrific people behind it, but the great thing about it is that it even talks about the parts of the food system that aren't. Again, we're talking about hidden costs for a bit or we're talking about factors that aren't normally associated with it but good food purchasing policy says well we want this food to be grown by people who are treated well but by people who have fair labor practices yeah um so that we want to make sure that workers who are bringing us our food are treated well that's a novel concept yes to say um i mean you probably know that something like eight of the ten worst paying jobs in the united states are in the food system yeah farmers who are bringing us our food farm workers food workers retail workers people who bring us food often are on food stamps they can't afford to buy food in the same way that many of us do. So they're being underpaid.

They're being paid minimum wage. There's wage theft in a lot of those kinds of jobs. They're being paid less than a minimum wage. They're tipped workers, which is a problem. And good food purchasing policy is a way that cities can say, well, we don't want workers who are in the food chain who are supplying us our food, our city's food, to be mistreated. We want them to be making at least a fair living wage.

And that's a food issue. You can't say that's not a food issue. It's a food issue and it's a big issue. And the other part of it that people don't think about is that farming is the most dangerous occupation in America and people who are farm workers die at seven times the rate as non-farm workers and it's because of the pesticides and the chemicals and the farm injuries and and these are often poor

underserved workers who have no health care and guess what we pay for that i mean so all these costs are sort of embedded in the system that aren't reflected in the price of food and we we actually don't even talk about them so mark you've uh been advocating in this way for food for a long time but you also have another life which is as a chef and as a cookbook writer and and i used to watch all your little things on when i was flying on tv they had these little mark bitman cooking jet blue on jet blue yeah it was great i was like how simple you make cooking and how easy it is and i went on jet blue once in those days and i saw my face on like 60 screens yeah and the

rose i can't take this yeah it was like a new york times cooking thing but it's all online right these little cooking videos well yeah there's also the the ones the minimalist videos which ran on the time side are still on the time side. Yeah, so cooking doesn't have to be super complicated. And then your new book is Dinner for Everyone. So whether you're vegan or whether you're vegetarian or whether you're an omnivore or whatever you are, if you love food, and most of us do love food, this book is a pretty great way for people to enter into thinking about making food at home which is something people don't do right well and anyway something most people don't do but you know there is dinner for everyone is a kind of three-pronged book and um

because we asked ourselves well what do people really want at this point well everyone wants to cook quickly. So we have that. Everybody's looking for better plant-based meals. We have that. And people like to cook for each other. So we have that. So the idea is that we take a concept like stroganoff or scampi or pizza or pasta bolognese or eggplant Parmesan or stir fry.

I mean, there's a hundred different sort of iconic concepts and each one we do a fast recipe, like under half an hour, really fast, a vegan recipe. So we take that concept, even if it's a meat based concept,

then we do a vegan version of it. And we don't use fake meat or anything like that. We just take the soul of the recipe and steal it how do you do pasta bolognese though like how do you actually i mean i can't remember the details of how we do it but there are grains that if you put in a tomato sauce you swear there's ground meat in yeah bul Yeah. Bulgur's really good. Farro is really good. You just think, what are those? There's these little chewy bits, and it's like, wow. It'd be hamburger.

And then the third one is cooking for company. So it's more complicated, project-based meals that might take a little while. So I like it. It's a really good book. You note that it has the word every in it because my books tend to have they're either how to cook everything this is dinner for everyone but so that we like big scale but this is really a way to kind of attack dinner from three different directions all of which are i think ways that people want to cook yeah i mean i think of you as the replacement

for the joy of cooking i mean that book has been an iconic book but your book's want to cook. Yeah, I mean, I think of you as the replacement for the joy of cooking. I mean, that book has been an iconic book, but your books, How to Cook Everything, are sort of the modern version of the joy of cooking in a way. And I just think if anybody really is interested in cooking, your books to me are the go-to books on how to make pretty much everything. Well, thank you. Whether it's vegetarian, vegan, healthy. And it's also mostly healthy and delicious.

And there's like a little indulgence in there, which is awesome. There's nothing wrong with that. And I think it's important that people understand what you're saying, which is that it doesn't have to be a hassle to cook. It can be quick. It can be easy. And it doesn't have to be super expensive. And I think these are the myths that the food industry tells us. Leave the cooking to us. You deserve a break today. Get out of the kitchen.

And we've disenfranchised Americans from the kitchen intentionally as a culture. And now you're saying, let's get back in the kitchen and eat real food. And it's part of the solution to this food crisis we're talking about. Right. It is. You know, it's funny when I started writing about food, as I said, I started in the 80s, but I started cooking in the 70s. You know, that that is a long, long time ago now. And that that notion that you deserve a break today and that food should be convenient and that your time is too good to be spent in the kitchen. That was a notion of my childhood. I grew up in the 50s. And I mean, really, that stuff started convenience food and processed food really started in the 20s or even a little earlier. But in the 50s after the war, that's when women were in a way being chased out of the

kitchen. And I'm certainly not saying that cooking is women's responsibility responsibility but that's who was doing it in those days and they're being told you're too good to be spending your time is too valuable we have an easier way to do it and my reaction to that as a very young man at the time was well i'm interested in this i'm gonna going to do it. I really like it. And I did. And as we talked about before, it became part of my career. But now it's 40 years later, 50 years later. And that notion that no one really wants to spend time in the kitchen has 40, 50 more years of advertising and marketing behind it. So it's really a hard habit to break.

And so many people say to me, you know, I don't even want to cook. And I don't know how to cook. But I don't even care. So people that work is really cut out for us. Cookbooks do help address that. But we also have to, you you know push hard the notion that cooking is good for you cooking can be less expensive cooking is really it gives you control over what you're eating it's a really important thing and

you know as I said before I still think this if you can convince people to cook rice and beans once a week you're doing a great job doing a really great thing because you know a nutritious nutritious serving of rice and beans and maybe with a green is like 50 or 75 cents per person and it doesn't cost anything so um and that's like that's the staff of life right there you know that's everything you need to live on and you know cheeseburgers and fries don't cut it compared to that no and you know it's really true that we really raised generations of Americans who don't know

how to cook I think Michael Ponson people watch more cooking on TV than they do cook at home and I think the skill sets are lost how to chop a vegetable how to peel garlic I mean just simple things that have been passed down from generation to generation are lost. And so people actually are intimidated by it and they're afraid of it. We just had a wonderful event in Cleveland called the Functional Food Festival where we had a cooking demo. We had doctors come from Cleveland Clinic who are into food and cooking

and did cooking demos and cooking classes and actually participatory groups with like about 200 people it was amazing wow and we and people just are hungry for this right no pun intended or maybe maybe yeah so uh you got to check out mark's books they're really great if you're interested in cooking at all if you want to get started there's so many different books he's got out there but they're all amazing and dinner for everyone is is just i look through the pictures are great it's delicious it's a very pretty book great book yeah um okay so let's talk about your new projects because you're you're not out of the game yet you're still in the game after 40 years you're creating new things you're doing new fun things you've got your newsletter which is a lot about food and recipes at markbitman.com which i encourage

everybody sign up for i just did and uh, you've got this new project with Medium, which is a big platform for all sorts of different insights, articles, topics. And you're writing about things that are related to food, but not necessarily about recipes. For example, how does food connect to agriculture and politics and history and labor and culture and identity and family and love these are really unusual topics that aren't really getting voice anywhere so what inspired you to create this project with medium and what um what what do you hope for it you know it's the stuff we've been talking about for the last whatever um and i think we will do some cooking on the medium site which doesn't have a name yet

although i think it's going to be called either bit or heated you heard it here first okay um but it might not be called bit or heated because we haven't decided yet but it's being those are the two names that are being vetted at the moment um We had some naming issues, but what we don't have is issues with our approach, which was I have wanted for a long time to do pretty much exactly what we're talking about here, which is Thai cooking, the joy of food, the love of food, farming, the responsibility for land, the love of growing things uh labor and nutrition climate change of course everything that circles around food and most of which needs to be better in one place and we have sites that um that address different parts of this and do it very

very well but we don't have a site that addresses all of it and does it well. And that's what I'd like heated or bid or medium or bitman or whatever we wind up calling it to be. A place where you would come not only for recipes, and as you said, my newsletter will feed somewhat into that and will generate recipes, things that are simple to cook a few times a week. But people will come to for recipes. Really, I see the recipes almost as bait. Like, come because you know me for recipes and you know they're going to be good and quick and healthy and blah, blah, blah.

But meanwhile, while you're here, read this story about food and race or agriculture and labor or restaurants and minimum wage or whatever the topic happens to be. So the beautiful thing about this site is in this column you're going to be creating, essentially it's a gathering place for other thinkers and writers and authors and activists in food to have a voice well that's what we hope and we hope people will come to us and also i maybe you'll take an article from me i will for sure i will now that you've said it you're a target but i also would like

to get people who don't ordinarily write about food writing about food so it's not only people who write about food writing about different aspects So it's not only people who write about food writing about different aspects of food. We definitely want to do that. But it's also people who write but don't write about food saying, okay, well, I actually have something to say about food. Because everybody does. Everybody thinks they're an expert on food, which is great.

So if we can find some writers who normally don't write about food but would like to, i think that'll be really fun for us also it is sort of the intersection of so many different areas of life that are related that you know creates this gathering place yeah can we get paul hawkin to write something for us absolutely but also can we get i don't know we get people who who can we get deborah eisenberg who's a novelist i really like to write about food she never writes about food I don't know. We get people who, can we get Deborah Eisenberg, who's a novelist I really like, to write about food. She never writes about food, but can we get her?

That kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, one of the articles you wrote about was about an African-American farmer and the issues of race and land and farming and the disenfranchisement of the African-Americans who actually were big farmers and grew most of the food in America as slaves. I mean, these are topics that are fascinating that you don't get the light of day.

Right. And they matter. Right. Well, I mean, people, when they think about food, they tend to think about cooking or restaurants or eating out or fast food or whatever. There's not enough talk about agriculture agriculture is the beginning and end of it all so um if you don't care about how your food is raised and where you come from then you can't say that you care about food at all i mean because that's the bottom line

there is where did this come from how was it raised who raised it where was it raised how it was used and so on it's true i mean once you know it you can't unknow it i mean now when i go out to dinner and i'm like do i order the meat which is probably feedlot beef right and what are the consequences that and i feel tremendous awareness and guilt basically you shouldn't and i don't and i don't or i'll be really conscious and go where do they have grass-fed meat i mean i can afford it most people can't but if we start to begin to shift how people understand what they're doing now people don't want to buy water in plastic bottles where everything you know i just uh right and i think we all sort of take that as a given,

but now people are having awareness of things that are really shifting their behavior. And I think it may seem disempowering, some of the things we're talking about, because it's so overwhelming, it's so big, there's so many market forces and big food companies and ag companies driving the agenda. But the truth is they do respond to consumer behavior and consumer action in a way that I think is underappreciated. I think that there's something, you're right, but I think there's actually something bigger than that too, which is that you change, if you change your own behavior, you could say, well, I'm having a, you know, one billionth of a percent of an impact. And that may well be true, but you're also talking to people about how you're changing behavior and changing your behavior or thinking even if you're not changing your behavior, you say, you know, maybe there's something to this single serving, single use issue, you know, plastic water bottles, plastic silverware, throw away napkins, blah, blah, blah.

I'm not going to change anything about the way I do this stuff, but maybe it's an interesting conversation. And maybe you have that conversation with someone else. And this conversation multiplies exponentially. And before long, maybe it's an issue. I mean, you have cities. It's not the biggest issue in the world, but you have cities saying we're not using plastic shopping bags anymore. Right. New York now just isn't going to do that.

Okay. This is not the world's biggest issue, but it is an issue, and it's a consciousness-raising issue. Why are we not using single-use shopping bags? Well, that's an interesting question. What does that reflect on? What does it mean for other single-use stuff? What does it mean in general?

Where did those plastic bags come from in the first place? Oh, wow. It turns out that's a fossil fuel issue, so on yeah it's true i mean i actually met this woman who started a new straw company because of the plastic straws and the amount of pollution they cause and what's fascinating to me is that the big food companies like fast food companies mcdonald's and others are hungry to incorporate these products into their businesses because they realize where things are going and so someone come up with a simple idea to change something and all of a sudden it changes the behavior of these big corporations and that changes everything right

well that single-use stuff is that is all down to the fast food industry they are like who the hell needed a straw in the first place right not even sure what they're for but you know what they're for is you have a big cup that you're going to throw away yeah covered by a lid which by the way we don't have a lid on this and because you have a big cup covered by a lid you need a straw to poke through the lid so now you've got three things that you're going to throw away in order to consume something that is worthless in the first place. Yeah. Well, yeah. Why would you consume a big gulp? Just like 42 teaspoons of sugar. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation.

You're a real light in the food movement. Yeah. Well, I think you underestimate your impact. And it's it's you know, I hear presidential candidates wanting to call you to help them write their speeches. So you're doing something right. You heard one would-be presidential candidate call me. I think there's going to be more because I'm going to be sending them your way. And I think this is the moment.

This is the moment, hopefully, in this election cycle where we can actually start to bring these issues up. You know what? If we at least, in the last election cycle, Ricardo Salvador, who is one of the people who wrote the call for the national food policy, and I and a couple other people, a number of other people, really worked hard to try to get candidates to recognize food as an issue worth talking about. We even went to Iowa in the dead of winter and talked about it. And we got nowhere. We got absolutely nowhere. And we got absolutely nowhere with the obama administration too i'm not pleased about that i'm proud of the work that we tried to do

and we did the work but but maybe we're seeing it now and maybe we'll see something this election cycle would be great we will but we have to take a long view i mean the abolitionists in the early 1800s they had to wait 50 years, you know. Right. You know, the movement around women's rights. We had the suffrage movement. But then, you know, it took another, you know, 70 years to get to women. Oh, those are really good points. Sometimes things happen quickly.

Like gay marriage happened very quickly. Legalization of marijuana, not a huge issue, but it's happening pretty quickly. This is like, food is like so big. It is. And to turn it around, turns everything around, makes the world a better place. I mean, how great is that? It's great. That's a great message.

Thank you, Mark, for joining us in The Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks for having me. And if you love this conversation, please feel free to share it with your friends and family and social media. We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment. Tell us what you think. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

And make sure you go to markbitman.com. Sign up for his newsletter. Google Medium and Mark Bittman. And you will follow him on Medium for his new amazing column and section, which I don't know what it's called. But you will by then. And I really enjoyed this conversation, which I think really matters. So we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks, Mark. Hi, everyone. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. So two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening

to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets. I use a few of those. And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics. I'll only email you once a week, I promise, and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com forward slash PICS, that's P-I-C-K-S to sign up free today.

Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare

practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.