Mark Bittman’s warning: the true costs of our cheap food and the American diet
Written by Oliver Milman in New York
From Mesopotamian irrigation to McDonalds, the bestselling food writer tells Oliver Milman that his new history of food is his most important work
The global, industrialized food system faces increasing scrutiny for its environmental impact, given its voracious appetite for land is linked to mass deforestation, water pollution and a sizable chunk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The implied trade-off has been that advances in agriculture have greatly reduced hunger and driven societies out of poverty due to improved productivity and efficiencies. But Mark Bittman, the American food author and journalist, argues in his new book Animal, Vegetable, Junk that these supposed benefits are largely illusionary.
Growing food, or growing crops in order to sell them and make money became more important than growing crops to feed people
Cheap food has had a terrible impact on public health. As every country switches from a traditional diet to a more American diet, their rates of chronic disease go up. And yet we cannot get government to consider this a crisis
Related: One in four faced food insecurity in America’s year of hunger, investigation shows
Animal, Vegetable, Junk by Mark Bittman is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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