The Freewheelin’ Mark Bittman

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The road through Glynwood Farm, outside the small town of Cold Spring, New York, rambles upward between fields, ponds, and the odd cluster of livestock, and at a high point sits a little old farmhouse. Glynwood is a nonprofit that feeds its neighbors through meat and produce sales, trains Hudson Valley farmers in topics like holistic grazing and “practical fence building,” and hosts community events that promote sustainable food production. The house at the top of the hill is made available to the organization’s president.

Right now that person is Kathleen Finlay, and so another resident of the house is Finlay’s partner, Mark Bittman—former New York Times food columnist, prolific recipe writer, and author of the How to Cook Everything series of cookbooks, which it is not too soon to call canonical. One sunny day last fall, Finlay was out of town and Bittman was preparing lunch for a few guests—two engineers helping him record a new podcast, called Get Bitt; his assistant Emily Stephenson; and his daughter, Kate, who’d come up from the city with her new baby.

From time to time Bittman checked the oven to monitor the progress of what might be his most famous recipe: no-knead bread, which he learned from the baker Jim Lahey and which he was baking for a podcast segment. For the main course he prepared cocido, a Spanish chickpea stew flavored with a ham hock from Glynwood, served with rice dressed with arugula pesto. And for an experiment, he planned to sear two pieces of pork liver, also from Glynwood, using a fancy induction burner sent to him by the manufacturer to try out. “I’m going to get sage from the garden,” Bittman said. “We’ll marinate the liver in sage and garlic and oil, and we’re going to cook it on this thing like—I hate to say ‘Bam!’—really fast.” He ranged around the kitchen, fussing with the food on the stove and carrying the baby to the window to get a look at two chickens pecking around underneath the sill. “Their names I take no responsibility for, but they’re Dolores and Mulva,” Bittman said. His other daughter named them after the famous Seinfeld episode.

Bittman on Glynwood Farm. Since leaving the New York Times a few years ago, he has dabbled in podcasts, start-ups, and policy.

Photo by JP Bevins

Two episodes of Get Bitt have since been released—it’s on a relaxed schedule. At the time of the taping, so was Bittman. In recent years he had left his job at the Times, dabbled in West Coast start-up culture while working at a vegan meal-kit delivery service, and taken the odd assignment here and there that had appealed to his interest in food politics: a fellowship at the Union of Concerned Scientists, for instance, where Bittman collaborated with his friend Ricardo Salvador, who oversees UCS’s food and environment program, to think about what it would take to reform the American food system. Mostly he was freelancing, off deadline.

The podcast recording that day happened on the sofa, where Bittman sat wearing blue running shorts and a NEW YORK sweatshirt, complaining theatrically but clearly enjoying the hubbub. “This is how you talk on the phone,” he said at one point before an interview, reclining and crossing his legs, after one of the podcast guys suggested he sit up and talk into the microphone. Then he mimicked a back-and-forth: “‘What did you have for breakfast this morning, Mr. Bittman?’ ‘Steel-cut oats. No wonder I’m so fucking hungry.’” The podcast, he said when he recorded the introduction, was “an opportunity to say what I want or talk to whoever I want. We’re going to do every aspect of food that is of interest to me, which is a pretty broad range, and then we’re going to leave food behind entirely from time to time.” The eclecticism was reflected in that day’s interview docket, which included Tunde Wey, a Nigerian-born, New Orleans-based chef who writes smartly on the topic of food and racism, and a skateboarder named Spencer Hamilton, whose Instagram handle is @MonsantoKills and who has a tattoo that says “Kale Yo’self,” accompanied by a drawing of a leaf of kale smoking a joint.

Lunch was served on the house’s pretty screen porch, where Bittman cranked up the induction burner, which he had set on a little stool. As it seared, the liver attracted the chickens, who clustered around the screen door and bobbed their heads curiously. The liver was rich and Bittman had some trouble cooking it—the fat center remained raw while the thinner edges became overdone. Everybody had a few bites, but there remained another whole uncooked organ. “I’ll put it back in the freezer,” he said. “I know people don’t approve of that behavior but I do it all the time. It’s not like we’re such connoisseurs of pork liver that we’re going to be like, ‘Oh, shit—was this liver frozen twice?’”

Bittman’s recipes are building blocks—he wants readers to learn the basics and is eager for them then to feel empowered to create or to improvise. The approach has earned him a following among America’s home cooks, of whom Bittman is one of the most preeminent—he has no restaurant training and learned by cooking for his family. In addition to the How to Cook Everything series, for years Bittman also wrote the Minimalist column for the New York Times, which emphasized simple, accessible preparations. Eventually he moved to the Times Magazine and to the paper’s op-ed page, where he wrote a regular column on food policy and politics. The move toward politics followed the success of his 2008 book Food Matters, but in a sense it—and much of the writing he’s done since—was a return to form. Bittman’s interest in politics precedes his interest in food.

Bittman grew up in Manhattan, the grandchild of European Jewish immigrants, and went to Clark University in Massachusetts, largely as a way to get a student deferment from the Vietnam War. Following his sophomore year, in 1968, he and a friend stayed around for a summer and worked the graveyard shift at a plastics factory. “We were smoking dope, cooking cheeseburgers and fried eggs at nine in the morning for dinner, going to bed at ten, waking up at five in the afternoon, hanging around, going to the diner for dinner and then going to work at midnight,” Bittman recalled. A couple months of this convinced the pair they were wasting their time. The friend split for San Francisco and Bittman returned to Manhattan, where he enrolled at New York University.

He moved in with a couple of friends who were “political,” “feminists,” and “good cooks,” and those worlds started to expand for him. Bittman and his friends ate cheap international food and went to protests: antiwar protests, women’s rights protests, protests of the Kent State shootings. “Politics sort of became everything,” he said. He and his friends “got together and we said, ‘We have to make people understand that all the struggles are the same. The antiwar struggle is the same as the racism struggle, it’s the same as the workers’ struggle, it’s the same as the women’s struggle, da da da da da. It’s all about capitalism.’

“Needless to say I failed in doing that,” he concluded. “But that was the idea.”

He went back to Clark to finish his degree (psychology) and afterward moved to Boston, where he edited the newspaper for the Somerville Tenants Union, which advocated for welfare rights and rent control. At the time, Somerville, outside Boston, was “99.5 percent white,” Bittman recalled, but a population from Haiti was starting to move in. Residents welcomed them with rocks through their windows. “We had this little cadre of our antiracism brigade, and we literally went to all the Haitians in town and said, ‘We are here to help you, and if you get in trouble, call us.’ We’d get phone calls in the middle of the night. Like three or five of us would go running out and try to help. Usually by the time we got there, nothing was going on.”

After his first wife, Karen Baar, gave birth to Kate, the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Bittman took a job as a traveling salesman of photographic equipment. He cooked dinner for his family often and knew that he liked to write, and eventually got in touch with the editor of the New Haven Advocate about doing some restaurant reviewing. He moved on to be the dining critic at Connecticut magazine and later the food editor at the New Haven Register.

I had a conversation last week: ‘My kids love your pancakes.’ They’re not really my pancakes. But okay! Glad I was able to help!

In 1987 Bittman became the editor of Cook’s magazine, the forerunner of Cook’s Illustrated. Jack Bishop, who worked with Bittman at both iterations and is now the chief creative officer at CI parent company America’s Test Kitchen, said that Bittman was particularly suited to the ways in which Cook’s tried to appeal to its audiences: “He’s a self-taught home cook and really understands how to write a recipe that actually matches the skills and commitment level that the typical home cook wants to put into a recipe.” In turn, the CI ethos—the famously austere magazine focuses singularly on perfecting recipes and recommending practical gear and ingredients—served Bittman well when, in the mid-’90s, he was tapped to write a sort of modern-day version of The Joy of Cooking. The immediate success of Bittman’s How to Cook Everything—a doorstop volume published in 1998—begat a franchise, with sequels like How to Cook Everything Fast, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (the tenth anniversary edition of which will come out in the fall), and most recently How to Bake Everything. (As a co-author of two cookbooks with the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Bittman also served as an able translator between haute cuisine and the home kitchen.)

Through these books and his Minimalist column in the Times, Bittman gained a reputation as a user-friendly writer whose commitments ran as strongly toward teaching people how to cook—as much as giving them fun or interesting recipes. Bittman is ardent in his belief that cooking is a social good, and some of his most popular dishes are his most basic. He told me that the biggest hit from How to Cook Everything is pancakes, a recipe that breaks no new ground as far as breakfast is concerned. “I had a conversation with someone last week: ‘My kids love your pancakes. I make them all the time,’” Bittman said. “They’re not really my pancakes. But okay! Glad I was able to help!”

At the same time as his star was rising as a cookbook author, Bittman started thinking about how to fuse his career with his longtime political interests. “It almost felt like, my work isn’t as important as it should be,” he said. “And then I kept thinking, well, I’m giving people tools that help them have more control over their lives, to eat better food and save money.” Still, he said, “as the years went by, into the ’90s, into the 2000s, it became clear that there were much more interesting things to say that I hadn’t been saying.”

In 2008 Bittman published Food Matters. Part cookbook, part manifesto, the book became one of a few good-selling food-politics salvos launched in the aughts, which together constituted a sort of emerging intellectual movement making connections between public health, industrial agriculture, and processed foods. Food Matters came on the heels of Eric Schlosser’s 2001 Fast Food Nation, Marion Nestle’s 2002 Food Politics, and Michael Pollan’s 2006 The Omnivore’s Dilemma, synthesizing various of their arguments—meat is bad for you and the environment; junk food is a threat to public health; modern agriculture is unsustainable—while also providing recipes.

In 2011 he took his concerns to the Times op-ed page, where he launched a weekly food-politics column. To food-movement people, Bittman’s high profile was a kind of validation of the work they’d been doing. The Times column “was about as mainstream as you can get,” said Nestle, the founder of the food studies program at New York University, “in giving credence to the idea that issues that have to do with food politics are important, and worth attention from America’s intellectual class.” He used the space to talk about many aspects of American food production—including, notably, workers’ rights, which have increasingly come to be seen as inextricable from the fight for a fairer food system. Bittman stopped writing the column in 2015, after he felt like he’d said what he had to say. In his valedictory piece, he mentioned the Fight for $15, the fast-food workers’ minimum-wage campaign he’d championed in the Times: “That it’s spread to the wider workforce is not only a victory but evidence that food struggles are representative and important,” he wrote.

That day at Glynwood, Bittman stopped by the farm office to pick up a couple of heavy boxes of How to Bake Everything. Back at the house, Kate Bittman, who shares her father’s sarcastic sense of humor, mock-complained that she wasn’t mentioned in the acknowledgments. “I’m sick of acknowledgments,” Bittman said. Kate faked sympathy—“Oh, did you write too many books?”—and Marc Brush, one of the podcasters, said he had a joke but declined to say it. Kate egged him on. “He didn’t write it, right?” Brush said, to laughter from the group. A lot of the legwork on the How to Cook Everything franchise is performed by a small team of Bittman employees, including a couple of past editors who now work on his cookbooks and write under their own names for Bittman’s website.

I needed to find something to pry me out of the Times.

“Nice,” Bittman said, grimacing. “One of my biggest supporters has turned on me.”

You could see the How to Cook Everything enterprise as separate from Bittman’s political interests, but you could also say that, for all his concern with systems, maybe the heart of Bittman’s political program is his conviction that people should be cooking more—that the simple act of home cooking is also an act of resistance against the industrial food system, and one that leads to greater personal autonomy, better health, and a healthier environment. That’s what Food Matters is about: “I’ve come to the conclusion that the food policy that matters most is yours,” he wrote in the preface. It’s not an uncontroversial opinion, but there are counterarguments: that the time to cook is itself a form of economic privilege; that the burdens of cooking often fall on women; that there’s a reason working people turn to McDonald’s when it’s time for dinner, and it’s not that they don’t care about their kids’ health; that fresh produce can be costly.

Bittman brings these issues up often in conversation, and wrote about them in his Times column. “In some ways the argument that food should be better, people should be eating better food, is an elitist argument,” he told me, “unless you start discussing what society ought to look like. If you’re in favor of less destructive agriculture, fewer animal products, all of that, food needs to be more expensive. If you’re saying that food needs to be more expensive, you can’t say that and then leave two-thirds of the country behind. So then it becomes not a food issue. It’s a justice issue.”

Since leaving the Times Bittman has experimented with different ways to fuse his interests in food and justice. Following his gig at the newspaper—he came to find the food angle constraining, when he would have been as happy, he said, writing about gun control or income inequality—Bittman decamped for California, where he joined a vegan meal-kit delivery service called Purple Carrot. But that was “just the right excuse to leave,” he told me. “It really had very little to do with Purple Carrot in the long run—it really had to do with, I needed to find something to pry me out of the Times.” He stayed out West for six months before deciding the work wasn’t for him.

The other day Bittman was back in California, spending time at a writers’ retreat at Point Reyes—Mesa Refuge, which invited him under a fellowship that supports journalists "who offer thoughtful coverage of con­nections between humans and nature." He gets up early, he said: "I work from 4:30 until I feel like I'm going to throw up, which is 9 or 10. And then I go for a run." He's working on some projects he's not ready to talk about publicly yet and some (mostly future How to Cook Everything volumes and a new gig at Grub Street) he will, and gearing up to teach this fall at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. He'd spent the winter holed up at Glynwood: "I needed some time and space," he said. "I think I got that." Bittman spent a lot of his time there getting reacquainted, he mentioned, with how much he likes to cook.