‘I want to be disruptive’: Mark Bittman sees profit-less restaurants as a win

Mark Bittman: ‘I want to show that there’s a whole other way we can do all the things that are related to food and address everything that’s wrong with the current food system.’ Illustration: Yuanyuan Zhou/The Guardian

At 73, with close-cropped silver hair and a propensity to toss off a nebbishy shrug, Mark Bittman isn’t ready to settle into retirement. After more than a decade of writing a wildly popular New York Times recipe column, The Minimalist, as well as more than a dozen cookbooks, countless opinion pieces that tapped into his despair over our broken food system and his passion for food policy, and most recently, the 2021 book Animal, Vegetable, Junk, a sweeping account of the history of food, he finds himself yearning for something more.

“You write the same thing over again and nothing changes,” Bittman said. “I kind of thought, you know, I’m not as enthusiastic about this kind of journalism as I was. I’d like to do something more concrete.”