How are so many of our most important issues tied to what we eat? James Beard Award-winning food writer Mark Bittman talks with Billy Shore about the relationship between food and critical issues like climate change, public health and social justice. “You can’t fix any justice issues, environmental issues, nutritional issues without fixing food. Food is at the center of just about everything,” claims Bittman. “It’s not going to happen from the top down. The push has to come from lots and lots of ordinary people. That push needs to be focused on food, but it also needs to focus on racial justice and gender equality and so on down the line,” he says.
Bittman discusses his latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, which delves into the history of agriculture and food production. “Humans have made a number of decisions over the past 10,000 years about how to do agriculture,” he says. “When you get to the middle of the 20th century, you have a system in which corn and rice and wheat and soy are the primary crops being grown in the United States… That’s had a tremendous negative impact on things like climate change and our public health,” explains Bittman.
Join us for an important conversation with one of America’s foremost food writers about why fixing our broken food system can help solve many other critical problems we face.
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