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.”
Bittman is now seeking to reimagine the American dining scene. Armed with a churning mind and a charmingly low-fi PDF deck, he is pitching investors the restaurant chain of his wildest dreams. Community Kitchen, as it is called, does not involve a specific menu, an exact location, or even a gimmick. It’s running on an earnest, somewhat fuzzy, yet indisputably radical belief: that restaurants can be virtuous from every conceivable angle.
Community Kitchen is the concretized distillation of all of Bittman’s preoccupations. He hopes it will do everything up and down the food chain in a way that is, to him, unobjectionable. What if, rather than play to profit motives, a restaurant could hew to a new set of priorities? Namely, that the ingredients are sourced from regenerative farms, that workers are paid fairly, that the food is nutritious, and meals are affordable to all via sliding-scale prices.
Bittman’s restaurant of restaurants is a heady proposition. While the characters on the new season of The Bear are losing sleep battling mold outbreaks and crisscrossing the world in search of culinary inspiration, Bittman is stationed in his home office, in Cold Spring, New York, where he lives with his partner, the food activist Kathleen Finlay. He still cooks dinner more often than not, he says, but his days are spent rolling fundraising video calls with prospective investors.
It’s a decided pivot for a man who once called cooking at home the “most radical thing” people could do to improve their diets. But showing people how to cook for themselves only has so much impact if people aren’t preparing their own dinners. “Fifty per cent of meals are eaten outside the home, right?” he said. “So restaurants are there whether you want them to be or not, and most restaurants offer food that’s generally unhealthy.”
“Most people will know that Mark makes delicious food. Fewer people will know that he is also deeply concerned about the problems of capitalism in the food system, and even fewer people still will know that he is a community organizer who is very committed to ending those problems,” said Raj Patel, a research professor at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A food activist and fellow author, Patel has been friendly with Bittman for over a decade, and has been a key sounding board for his new venture.
Bittman’s project is less concerned with establishing a dining destination or two than setting in motion a wholesale paradigm shift. “This is not about building a restaurant empire,” he said over a video call, his demeanor alternately professorial and avuncular. “I want to be really disruptive, really revolutionary, really radical. 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.”
There’s little doubt the US needs a food overhaul. Roughly a quarter of Americans are food insecure. More than half of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. And the food we’re loading up on is killing us: diet-related deaths outrank those that come from smoking.
Of all the notions feeding Community Kitchen, the most eyebrow-raising might be the assumption that the outposts will lose money. Bittman is not the first to float the idea of a non-profit restaurant. A pay-what-you-can concern in Fort Worth, Texas, is set to open a second outpost in Arlington, Texas. Brooklyn’s Emma’s Torch, which trains and employs refugees, asylum seekers and survivors of human trafficking, has just expanded to Citi Field. For a time, Anthony Weiner, the ex-congressman whose political career came to a crashing halt when it emerged that he was sending sexually explicit emails to a teenage girl, was developing a non-profit restaurant in the Rockaways.
Bittman said that bringing a non-profit restaurant to market is not that outlandish. After all, we live in a society founded on subsidies, where everything from American universities and agriculture are underwritten by the government. “We subsidize farming, but not eating,” Bittman said. “The United States subsidizes the production of bad food. We subsidize the production of food that’s extractive and destructive and unhealthy and makes people sick, and is bad for the environment and so on and so on. We could be subsidizing food that’s nutritious and supports environmental health and supports farmers. That’s a change that has to be made.”
“If you want to do right by people in planning a new idea for the food system, you’re going to lose money,” said Patel. “And once you embrace that, the interesting question becomes, where do you best lose money?”
Once Bittman can line up investors and build his restaurants, his hope is politicians are inspired to fold support for similar enterprises into their agendas and budgets. “The healthcare bill in the United States is $4tn. The defense bill is $1tn,” he said, pointing out that investing in healthier eating habits would lower the costs of healthcare. “I’m interested in building a model, in saying: this is how it could look and work.”
As for how, exactly, the restaurants will look and work, and who, exactly, the chefs will be, and what, you know, specific side dishes will be on offer and what brand of hand soap will get top bathroom billing, those are all details to be sorted out later. The rendering of a dining room on Bittman’s power presentation calls to mind the initial renderings that Mark Zuckerberg shared when he was proposing his Meta virtual reality-verse. It’s hard to think too granularly when you’re changing the way we operate on such a large scale.
Bittman said his menus will be designed when the locations are locked in place. He has his eye on a range of zip codes north of midtown Manhattan, ranging from Inwood, in north Manhattan, to Westchester, all chosen for easy access to foods from the farms of New York’s Hudson Valley, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. The menus might be individualized and site-specific. “If it’s in a Latinx neighborhood, you concentrate a majority of the menu on that kind of food; if it’s a south Asian neighborhood, you make the majority of the menu reflective of that,” said Bittman.
He’s confident the food will be field-trip worthy, enough of a draw for residents of tonier neighborhoods to make the trek (and cover the highest end of the sliding-scale prices). “You create a community in which wealthy people eat in the same restaurant as people with less money,” Bittman said. “You don’t see that very often.”
Given his station as a leading food-policy star and sought-after talking head, it’s understandable that Bittman’s project is brimming with pie-in-the-sky thinking. The question at hand now is: does his vision stand a chance of on-the-ground success?
“It’s hard to do everything well,” said Jennifer Blesh, associate professor of sustainable food systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. “I think [Bittman’s project] might be a little bit academic, but it could be this really important model of innovation that demonstrates how we could shift resources to more diverse and equitable food systems.”
There could be an opportunity to influence the national conversation, she added, and warm people up to the idea of government-supported dining. Blesh cited the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Zero Hunger program that led to the creation of low-cost Popular restaurants. Launched in the early 1990s, the group of local- and state-subsidized restaurants modeled after the Popular restaurant in Belo Horizonte provided affordable, nutritious lunches to low-income workers.
Charisma S Acey, the faculty director at the Berkeley Food Institute, said that if Bittman is shooting for the moon, then it’s worth building out a fifth pillar that addresses the racial and gender dynamics that blight the US food world. “There’s often a disconnect between the good food movement and the struggles that low-income people and people of color face,” she said. “If you’re really trying to create a non-profit restaurant that addresses everything, you have to ask: are we addressing the root cause, and not just trying to soften the blow of a terribly unjust global food system?” Bittman said he agrees wholeheartedly with her point. “The thinking behind Community Kitchen is to work across the whole system simultaneously,” he said via email. “This systemic approach does not partition race and gender inequity as if they were separate struggles, but works to dismantle all exploitation across all components of the system.”
Bittman seems eminently comfortable in his new role of fundraiser, perhaps fueled by conviction of his idea, or the self-confidence that comes from being a celebrated thought leader who gives TED talks and guest lectures on cruise ships (he and Finley had just returned from a week boating around Alaska when he spoke with the Guardian). “You’d give me $2m if you had $300m,” he said to a reporter in what sounded like half-jest as he ran through his pitch deck. “So I have to find the people who have that.”
Once he has raised the $2m he estimates he needs to launch the first Community Kitchen outpost, he will work to raise another $25m to build five locations over the next five years. And then? “I hope that somebody else picks it up and runs with it. I want to get it started and I don’t want to run it forever.”
It’s a lot of big asks, and a big task he’s laid out for himself. “Sometimes we get it wrong. And with industrial food, we’ve definitely gotten it wrong,” Bittman said. “Let’s show everybody how to do it right.”
