“Until we start to deal with agriculture and food, we’re going to continue having public health and environmental crises,” says food journalist Mark Bittman. “We haven’t turned the corner on this issue yet, but there’s an opportunity for us to turn the corner.”

Today, Mark Bittman joins us to talk about our relationship to food through the lens of his new book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal.

Mark Bittman is the author of thirty books, including the How to Cook Everything series. He was a food journalist and columnist, opinion columnist, and the lead magazine food writer at the New York Times, where he started writing in 1984 and stayed for thirty years.

Bittman is currently Special Advisor on Food Policy at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where he teaches and hosts a lecture series called Food, Public Health, and Social Justice. He is also the editor-in-chief of Heated. His latest book is Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).