Mark Bittman > Quotes

“1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.”
― Mark Bittman, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good

“[C]onvenience is one of the two dirty words of American cooking, reflecting the part of our national character that is easily bored; the other is 'gourmet.' Convenience foods demonstrate our supposed disdain for the routine and the mundane: 'I don't have time to cook.' The gourmet phase, which peaked in the eighties, when food was seen as art, showed our ability to obsess about aspects of daily life that most other cultures take for granted. You might only cook once a week, but wow, what a meal.”
― Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food

“America’s food system is broken.”
― Mark Bittman, A Bone to Pick: The good and bad news about food, with wisdom and advice on diets, food safety, GMOs, farming, and more

“To quote the philosopher Max Roser: “Three things are true at the same time. The world is much better; the world is awful; and the world can be much better.” There is plenty of good work to do.”
― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

“In any case, the principles are simple: deny nothing; enjoy everything, but eat plants first and most. There's no gimmick, no dogma, no guilt, and no food police.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it’s only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.”
― Mark Bittman, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good

“Ecologists recognized that resources are finite, and that nature is in charge. That's basic science. Capitalists believe that nature exists to be exploited by humans, a tenet perfectly in tune with Western religion.”
― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

“And it should not come as no shock that Big Food, along with the pharmaceutical industry and its scientists for hire, has promoted confusion in the media and in the mind of the American consumer to contribute to our culture of overconsumption.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“Teach a cook a recipe and he’ll cook for a night; teach a cook a technique and she’ll improvise for a lifetime.”
― Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food

“(As Michael Pollan says, "a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food")”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“DRIED HERBS  Oregano, thyme, sage, rosemary, and tarragon are decent substitutes for fresh. (Dried parsley, basil, and mint are worthless.) They keep for about 6 months.”
― Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything: The Basics: All You Need to Make Great Food--With 1,000 Photos: A Beginner Cookbook

“(The word “canola” is a bastardization of “Canada oil,” made from a variety of rapeseed developed in Canada specifically designed to produce oil from these low–erucic acid varieties.)”
― Mark Bittman, How to Eat: All Your Food and Diet Questions Answered: A Food Science Nutrition Weight Loss Book

“Eat all the plants you can manage. Literally. Gorge on them. Salads, cooked vegetables, raw vegetables, whole fruits- cooked or raw or even, in moderation, dried. There are hardly any limits here (though you don't want a diet based entirely on starchy vegetables like potatoes).”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“Domesticated animals were often too valuable to be eaten. Indeed, the amount of meat consumed per person may well have gone down with the advent of farming as wild animals became scarce, at least near villages. (In fact, it’s safe to say that meat consumption has fluctuated greatly throughout history and throughout the world, and that, with very few exceptions, until recently it was mostly eaten occasionally.)”
― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

“Listen to your body: Are you losing weight, feeling fine, getting results that makee you and your doctor happy? Keep it up. Are you not getting the results you want? Cut back on treats, and eat more plants.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“When it comes to fats, embrace olive oil. That's where you start. You can use butter when its flavor or luxury is really going to matter to you. Use peanut oil or grape seed oil for stir-frying (or any frying), use dark sesame or nut oil for extra flavor, and you really don't much else. --Don't worry too much about quantity. Don't start drinking oil, or eating fried food daily; but using oil for dressing or cooking is not a big deal, provided you are not eating many refined carbohydrates or animal products.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“You shouldn't eat "unlimited" amounts of grains, as you would other plants, but eating grains several times a day is fine. --
In any case, eat far fewer carbohydrates; they are all treats, not off limits but to be eaten only occasionally (and with gusto).”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“For most of us, the idea is to get the number of calories it takes to maintain weight (or fewer, if we're trying to lose), along with a good balance of nutrients. And this is easy: As long as your diet isn't based on junk food, almost any diet that supplies you with enough calories will also supply you with adequate nutrition.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“What determines how much cholesterol your liver makes? Not the cholesterol you eat but the kind of fat you eat. Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats tend to raise the good type of cholesterol while lowering the bad. Saturated fat, found most in animals, tends to be more or less neutral-not so bad, in small quantities at least-raising both types of cholesterol equally.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“In what's usually referred to as "the Columbian Exchange" -one of history's great misnomers, given the genocide that followed - Europe took so much of value from the Indigenous people of what became known as North and South America that it was able to rule most of the world until the mid-twentieth century.”
― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

“It would take Western science centuries to develop a truly rational branch of thinking, one that recognizes that everything is connected—the body, the natural and spiritual worlds, the wondrous and the inexplicable and the irrational.”
― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

“The legendary wheat-field triumphs came from financial incentives, irrigation, and the return of the rains, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long-term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change, [and] the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.”
― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

“First you follow recipes to the letter; then you begin to synthesize some of those recipes, comparing one with another and drawing on what you see as the best of them; then you develop a repertoire of recipes you’ve made your own. Finally you throw away the books, start shopping, open the refrigerator, and cook. You cook like a grandmother, or like anyone with experience.”
― Mark Bittman, Cooking Solves Everything: How Time in the Kitchen Can Save Your Health, Your Budget, and Even the Planet

“The evidence overwhelmingly supports a more traditional diet-what I'm calling sane eating-in place of the modern American diet.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“The third most abundant substance in breast milk is an oligosaccharide. Babies don’t digest it directly. Rather, it nourishes a bacterium called Bifidobacterium infantis, transmitted through vaginal birth and wiped out by antibiotics, and now thought to be missing in most American babies. B. infantis is essential in programming our metabolic operations. Those who maintain a healthy population of the bacterium are less likely to become overweight, experience allergies, or have Type 1 diabetes. But the majority don’t, which leaves them prone to numerous autoimmune diseases, colon and rectal cancers, allergies, asthmas, Type 1 diabetes, and eczema. All of these conditions have increased as breastfeeding has declined.”
― Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

“(We have a rule of thumb: The longer the shelf life of a food, the shorter the shelf life of the person eating the food! There are exceptions, of course—beans and whole grains keep forever—but it’s worth bearing in mind.)”
― Mark Bittman, How to Eat: All Your Food and Diet Questions Answered: A Food Science Nutrition Weight Loss Book

“Base your preferred diet on any traditional eating style you like; the point is that once you get into the habit of eating sanely, it becomes second nature.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“Cooking is like exercise or spending time in nature or good conversation: The more you do it, the more you like it, the better you get at it, and the more you recognize that its rewards are far greater than its efforts and that even its efforts are rewards.”
― Mark Bittman, Cooking Solves Everything: How Time in the Kitchen Can Save Your Health, Your Budget, and Even the Planet

“So the idea is to eat food that fills you up(and provides you with nutrients) without giving you more calories than you need. One way to make sure of that is to eat food with low caloric density, and this is less complicated than it sounds-believe me.”
― Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes