The History Of Our Food System: What’s Wrong And How To Fix It with Mark Bittman

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

People sometimes say to me, what can I do to work towards a better food system? And I'm like, there's almost, no matter.

What your passion is, there's a role.

For you to build a better food system.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman. Supplements are one of those things that I'm always being asked about. Is it worth spending money on them? Do we need them if we really eat well? And can your body even absorb them? And the answer, to most of these questions is, it depends. There are definitely certain supplements I'd never recommend taking because they aren't made in a way that your body can take advantage of and you just won't be able to use them. And there are definitely some supplements we can benefit from because our food supply, even if we're eating whole organic foods, just doesn't provide enough of certain nutrients.

That we need for optimal health.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, that's Pharmacy with F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. Do you care about food and our food system and the declining state of agriculture and our health and the economy and climate. Well, this conversation you better listen to because it's one of the most important conversations we need to have now in 2020. And it's with one of my intellectual heroes, an incredible guy, Mark Bittman, who's the author of 30 books, which way beats me. I'm only at 17, including How to Cook Everything. The New York Times bestseller, number one New York Times bestseller, VB-6 Eat Vegan Before Six to Lose Weight and Restore youe Health for Good. He wrote columns in the New York Times for years. I read every single one. And he was also in television hosting four series, including the Emmy Award-winning Years of Living Dangerously. He lives in New York. He's on the faculty of Columbia University, the editor-in-chief of Bitten and his most recent which we're going to talk about today is Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food from Sustainable to Suicidal. So welcome, Mark.

Great to be here, Mark.

So you're one of these sort of unicorns out there who's a chef, who's a journalist, who's a policy wonk, who's interested in all aspects of food, end to end, from farm to fork. farmed a fork and has a systems view and perspective that is pretty unique. And there's a couple of people out there who are thinking like you, but very few people connect the dots and put the whole story together. I saw one of your original TED Talks, which equated eating cows to the atomic bomb. And I use that a slide lot in my talks.

That's a nice slide.

Yeah, it was made the point. and I think you really have written one of the most important books that I've ever read because it helps us understand why we're in the predicament we are, where food is something that we think of as joyful and delicious and sustaining and nourishing, but our current food system and the food it produces is massively destructive. And you make a case for how we have to address this in animal, vegetable, and junk. Before we get into the interview, I'd just like to read a quote from the book because it's really quite powerful. And I think it sort of speaks to the breadth of thinking and the systems view that you have, which you said the following: To meet the human and environmental crises head on, we must ask ourselves what would a just food system look like? And I believe we can answer that question, and I try to, although getting to that place won't be easy, it's crucial. because nothing is more important than food. You can't talk about reforming a toxic diet without talking about reforming the land and the labor laws that determine that diet. You can't talk about agriculture without talking about the environment and clean sources of energy, about the water supply. You can't talk about animal welfare without talking about the welfare of food workers. And you can't talk about food workers without talking about income inequality, racism, and immigration. In fact, you can't have a serious conversation about food without talking about human rights and climate change and justice. Food not only affects everything, it represents everything. And you use in the beginning of your book one of my favorite quotes from John Muir, who was a naturalist back in the 1800s. And he said, when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else. in the universe. And I think this is the truth about food more than almost anything else. And yet everything we do about food is in silos and is reductionistic. And that's why we're in the predicament we're in. So, Mark, you've written so much about all these issues. Why did you decide it was important to write this book? Because it's quite a different kind of book than your usual books.

You know, I'd really rather listen to you than talk, because you're so You're so articulate and you're so get it.

Well, I just quoted you. I didn't say anything. That was your words. I just read your words. That wasn't me.

You picked the right quote.

You picked the right quote.

Although I'll give you another quote. And the John Muir thing is right also. Two things. I mean, I'll answer your question also. But the John Muir thing, you know, that's, What he said, I don't think the word ecology had been, maybe it existed, but it certainly wasn't popularized in John Muir's time, but everything is about ecology, which is a way of describing the natural world as the oneness of things. And food is certainly a big part.

Of the ecology of things, and ecology determines food and vice versa. So that's one thing. Another thing is, one goal in writing this book is to get people to ask themselves this question. And the question is, what would a.

Good food system look like? And then when I say to people.

What would a good food system look like? The answer usually comes back something like, well, one that feeds as many people well as it can without harming the land any more than it has to.

That kind of thing. What we have is a food system that basically is geared toward profiting the few at the expense of the many. That's the fundamental problem. And that's why I wrote Animal Vegetable Junk is to say, in a way, to explain how we got to this place. Because it was a long and complicated road. It could have gone in different directions many times. And then to talk about where we're at and how we're going to get out of here. to use a word that's overused all the time, which is what happens in this country, it isn't sustainable. It can't endure. The way we're doing food now doesn't work. So there are people who say, you,'re fantasizing that we can do it better, just as there are people who say, you,'re fantasizing that we can do society better. But the fantasy is to think that things can go on the way they are because they can't. Too many people are dying, too much earth is destroyed, and too many things are being poisoned. So we need to make change. The question is how, when, where, and so on.

Well, the beautiful thing about your book, and I feel a little bit guilty of this, which is really having more of a short-term history view of what happened. In other words, oh, well, it was just since the turn of the last century when we started to modernize agriculture. But you go through this incredible arc of history from pre-hominid people and how we started eating differently and hunching and gathering.

I can't blame them though.

No, no, but it was fascinating. And then we had the advent of agriculture, which in the book you describe as potentially one of the worst things that's ever happened to humanity because it led to the beginning of all the injustices we see. and slavery and land destruction and colonialism and patriarchy. And I mean, you just gotta lay it all out. And I think that one of the things that struck me about the book is that we didn't get here by accident. That there were a number of different things that happened historically that led us to this point. That we went through this hunter-gatherer phase, the agricultural revolution, which in the span of human existence on the planet is just like a few seconds, maybe five minutes of our existence, you said. And yet, it's one of the most massively destructive things we've done. And yet, there is redemption in actually how to fix it. There's a way out, which is what's so beautiful about Buck. It's not just, oh, sh*t, here we got here and, you know, we've got a junk world of food and junk agriculture and we're really creating a junk society. And we've seen the effects of this. but there's a way out, and you describe that in the book too. So talk to us, take us through that sort of narrative just briefly around animal, which is the hunter-gatherer, the vegetable, which is farming, and the junk, which is the industrialization of the food system. And take us through that arc in a way that we can kind of understand that trajectory and how we got to where we are, and then let's talk about how we get out.

Right. I mean, I'll try to do that.

It's three or four major turning points. It's a lot to talk about, but.

I think By the way, this book is so meticulously researched and so beautifully written. I mean, it's one of the most breathtaking books I've read on the subject. I wish I'd written it. And I encourage everybody to get a copy. It's called Animal, Vegetable, Junk by Mark Bittman.

There.

There you go. You can see a copy of it. Beautiful cover.

There's an interesting thing that I've been thinking about since I finished the book. And that is that we see how things happened only retroactively, only in hindsight. We don't really see how things are happening while they're happening. That's why history is interesting. Even contemporary history, what happened two weeks.

Ago, you can be more reflective about than you can when it was happening.

But when something was happening 10,000 or 500 or 200 or 20 years ago, you can say, oh, look at these decisions that were made that really changed the course of history. What if we had done it a different way? I mean, that's the stuff of science fiction movies mostly. Or we can actually make decisions now that change history, but now we have the knowledge to make these decisions consciously and with intent. We know the consequences. We know the consequences of putting 100 million cars on the road, for example. We know the consequences of eating a diet that in which the majority of calories come from ultra processed foods, we know what happens when you do these things. Now we didn't know what happened when we started doing them, but now we know. So we can make conscious changes and we can make smart conscious changes. It's obviously not that easy. It's easier for many people in their personal lives to do it, but it can be done. I'm convinced that humans are going to do this at some point. to make decisions, intelligent decisions with the future in mind. We haven't really started to do it yet.

Anyway, you're an archaeologist.

Well, I may not live to see it, but it doesn't mean I don't believe it can happen. The arc of history is that there were hunter-gatherers. It didn't take a genius to notice.

That if you put a seed in the ground, a plant, a similar plant would grow.

And it didn't take a genius to.

Know that animals had babies and those babies could be, the growth of those.

Babies could be encouraged. But what happened at the beginning of agriculture was that people started to plant seeds intentionally and to protect those crops and people started to breed animals, domesticate.

Animals, and to protect those animals. So foragers couldn't think forage if you were planting crops. They couldn't forage those crops. And hunters couldn't hunt the animals that you were domesticating. But that was the beginning of rule making, the beginning of law making. That was the beginning of the structure of society. So nothing wrong with that. There is an argument to be made that agriculture was a big mistake. Hunter-gatherers, there's archaeological evidence that hunter-gatherers lived.

Longer than Romans, for example, and were taller than Romans and healthier in general than Romans.

But there's no going back.

There was no going back.

Yeah, I mean, you said basically the hunter-gatherers were five foot nine males average. And by the time we started growing our own food, it was five foot three. And I know that's true. I know that's got to be true because I'm so tall that I go into these old houses that were built 300 years ago and I hit my head on all the door frames.

Right.

And my feet don't fit on the steps.

Yeah, the steps are tough.

But when you.

Let'S see, where do.

I wanna go here? When hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists, populations grew because there was more food. And also hunter-gatherers didn't want lots of children, but farmers generally did want lots of children. for obvious reasons, they wanted more labor. And so populations grew, which made for more agriculture, more agriculture was able to feed larger populations, and so on. There was no going back. So you fast forward to about 500 years ago, and there's a basic rule of agriculture, which is that if you're depend, and you know this, if you're dependent on vegetables for the primary plants primarily in your diet, you don't need as much land to grow those vegetables as you do if you have a diet that's high in animal products because there's no intermediary, right? You're eating the food you're growing, whereas with animals, you're concentrating that food into animal flesh. So this explains, very simply, this explains the historically higher populations of Asia compared to Europe, which is that vegetarianism or near vegetarianism was more traditional in Asia and omnivorous or carnivorous was more popular in Europe for reasons that aren't really worth going into. But the upshot of it was that Europeans were running out of land.

And the fact that Europeans were running out of land forced them to go explore and the rest of the world. The Chinese had already sailed to Africa, which is a much longer voyage than from Europe to North America. They had the technology to go wherever they wanted to in the world, but they didn't need to because they had enough land for their needs. Europeans needed land, and so they came to North America. And now you have the sordid history of the killing of the indigenous people, the taking over, the conquering of North and South America for that matter, and the establishment of agriculture on what's arguably the richest continent in the world, the best watered, good sun, good soil, and so on.

What ultimately happened, I'm trying to, at.

The same time you were seeing the spread of luxury items like tea and coffee, coffee and sugar, which needed more labor. And you then began to see it's so hard to sort of shortcut all of this. As you can tell, I don't have a slavery elevator pitch, but you saw then the beginning of slavery. So slavery moved from east to west pretty much with the development of sugar.

And when sugar reached the new world, that's pretty much when slavery reached the new world.

But fast forward again to the 19th century.

When two things happened.

One, land was given away, land was stolen from the indigenous people and given.

Mostly to white European males, which really explains today's wealth inequality. Because the foundation of wealth to a large extent is land and land in the United States at least has long been concentrated in the hands of white males because that's who the government gave it to in the late 19th century. That's one aspect of the story. Another aspect of the story is the industrialization of food, the farm as factory, the Taylorism of farming, the increasing efficiency of farming, the desire to say, instead of growing crops for ourselves and our neighbors and our village and our region, we're going to grow crops to sell, and we're going to use that money to buy whatever food we want from people who are growing different things. But from now on, everybody's going to be selling most of what they grow, and people are going to need to be in the cash economy in order to buy food. And so what happened was that farming became commodity farming. We started growing first wheat, but later corn and even later soybeans. and those products were increasingly processed into foods that were easier to ship, had better shelf lives, and so on at great cost, as you know as well as anybody, at great cost to everybody's nutrition. So here we are today. Most farming is monoculture, which means growing one crop at a time. That means chemical fertilizer, that means loads of pesticides, and that means foods that are destined to be hyper-processed foods, which as you know are not only bad for the environment, bad for farmers, but bad for our health. End of story, not quite.

Yeah, so this is very interesting. So none of this really happened with bad intentions. We sort of fumbled along as human beings emerging out of the hunter-gatherer period, started developing agriculture, and it wasn't all uniform. there were some agricultural systems like in Mesoamerica where they created a really sustainable model of the three sisters, which is the corn, beans, and squash, where the corn provides the place for the pole beans to grow and the soy. I mean, the beans actually fix nitrogen in the soil and you get this wonderful regenerative agricultural system. But in other areas, it was really raping the land. It was depleting the land until it turned to desert and then moving the next spot. Right now we have nowhere to move. There's no more land. There's no more land in the world.

That can be farmed as being farms. Yeah, there's no more land.

And it's, well, I've got a nice lawn in front of me. I could probably plant a garden, but I don't know if that's true, Mark, because during World War II, we had the victory gardens and 40% of our food was grown in people's backyards.

So I think there's more land than we think. Well, you know what?

That's a good point. That's a good point.

Yeah.

So I think that, you know, nobody really had bad intentions, but we've done a lot of destructive things. And you've talked about many books you've read during there, the Montgomery's book about soil and the destruction of soil over the millennia. You talked about, you know, the Sapiens. And when I read Sapiens, I was like, oh my God, I thought I had this idyllic view of past humans who lived in harmony with nature and didn't destroy their environments. And we've been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. But now our tools of destruction are are much greater. And we've entered an era we call the Anthropocene, which is where human behavior is damaging or altering the natural environment, including climate. And a lot of this has to do with agriculture. And I think people don't understand it's all about the USDA. That's sort of like a branch of government that, you know, it's all right, it's kind of boring, the farm bill, who cares? Like, you know, farming, grow food. But it turns out it's probably the most consequential piece of legislation that determine so much about our health, the food because of the food we grow or don't grow, the environment because of the methods of growing drive climate change, because of the farm worker and the food workers who are undergoing tremendous strain under the poor wages and all kinds of human rights violations. So the whole system is sort of intersected and we now find ourselves by either, you know, this ignorance, maybe a few bad intentions, but mostly kind of well-intentioned efforts to, you know, feed the world, except it's kind of done the opposite. It's created a massive obesity, massive chronic disease, massive environmental impact, economic impact, national security threats, and, you know, we can't mount an army because they're all too overweight to fight. And even kids' performance in school, academic performance and cognitive function, violence, behavior, all these things are driven by the poor quality food we're eating. And as a doctor, you know, treating patients, using food as medicine, it's so obvious to me these effects on our cognitive function and our biological function. And then we sort of, when you start to pull that thread, like John Muir said, you keep going back up and up and upstream, which is where you got to, which is we have to look at everything from seed to farm to food production, distribution, marketing, and consumption. And it's a massive task that requires a real rethinking of our entire food system. And you've thought more about this and more deeply about this and longer about this than most humans on the planet and have talked to more people and experts than most people. So how do you take all this that you're holding, which has got to be quite an emotional, intellectual, spiritual burden to kind of see the problem, see the solution and see nobody talking about it. I mean, you know, we have this new administration come in, like this isn't on the agenda, right? If you look at Biden's four policy objectives, right? The economy, climate, COVID, racism, they're all connected by food. They are. And yet nobody is saying a word about using that to actually solve the problem. So, Mark, you know it.

He doesn't know it. That's the problem.

You know it. He doesn't know it.

I know. We're trying to get to them and we're trying to have conversations, but it's how do you, from your perspective, see that we can start to undo some of the harms and reimagine the food system? Where do we start? How do we start to move through it in a way that gets to solve some of these big issues that you outline in your book, Animal vegetable junk, which everybody should immediately go to Amazon, go to their bookstore, if it's still open, and get a copy because it is really an important book that it defines. It's sort of, I would say it's almost like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It defines this moment in time of what had happened, what's going on, and the impact. And if we don't deal with it, it's catastrophic.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. My main goal with diet is to use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Our soils have become depleted and our digestive tracts just aren't working so great. They're compromised by stress and toxins, and they just can't absorb nutrients as efficiently as they should. And that's why I always use, and I recommend to my patients, a multivitamin mineral as nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all our day-to-day body functions. all the things that we need that our food might be missing. But there are so many products out there I wouldn't go near because they contain artificial fillers or inactive ingredients, and you have to be pretty picky. The one I trust and take myself is Athletic Greens. They use high quality, highly absorbable forms of vitamins and nutrients from real whole foods. Athletic Greens comes in a powder that tastes great and mixes easily with water or smoothies. and specifically supports my gut health, immunity, energy, and recovery. And it's not just vitamins and minerals. It has phytonutrient-rich superfoods, and adaptogens, and pre and probiotics, and even digestive enzymes. I love that they add the digestive support in their powder, since so much of our immune strength and overall wellness starts in the gut. It's really one supplement that covers so many bases, and you'd be hard-pressed to find something else in this comprehensive form in any single other product. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine, and I love having it with me whenever I travel. I also love that it's diet friendly, whether you're vegan, paleo, keto, dairy free, or gluten free. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my audience a full year supply of their vitamin D3 K2 liquid formula free with your first purchase. Now, these two nutrients are also so vital for a strong immune system and strong bones, and many of us are not getting enough of them. I use the Athletic Greens powder and their D3 K2 formula to make sure I get extra nutrients that complement my diet. They're also going to give you five free travel packs as well. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hymen to get your free year supply of vitamin D3 and K2 and five free travel packs with your first purchase. You'll get it delivered straight to your door and I promise you'll feel the difference Athletic Greens can make in your daily wellness routine. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/hymen. Now let's get back to this week's.

Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. So the price of inaction, you say this very clear in the book, is really catastrophic to humanity and is catastrophic to the planet. The planet will be fine once we go, but in the meantime, it's going to be a pretty messy place to live. I mean.

Change has to be incremental. It would be really helpful if the Biden administration recognized the importance of food, which is why you and I were both pushing for a progressive secretary of agriculture. And we don't have that, but anything is an upgrade from the last secretary of agriculture. at least I think that, you know, Vilsack has already shown an indication that he's willing to listen. So maybe he'll be better than he was last time around. I think that that change has to.

Be that change has to be not necessarily slow but incremental, and that you.

Have to make change that you can.

Evaluate so that you know how it's working. And if it works well, you keep.

Going in that direction.

And if it doesn't work well, you evaluate and make some new change. So I think soda taxes are a.

Really terrific idea.

Which are an idea that's in the process of being shown.

To be a good idea.

And we didn't know that five years ago, but five years ago or six, Berkeley passed the country's first soda tax and then some other Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Oakland. But what we've seen is that if.

You tax soda, as we tax tobacco, you discourage its consumption. If you decrease the consumption of soda, you decrease the consumption of useless calories or harmful calories.

If you decrease the consumption of harmful.

Calories, you decrease chronic disease. These are all good things, right?

So that's just one example of the.

Kind of thing you could do and.

Say, well, this is so let's do more of it. Similarly, encouraging the use of encouraging shopping at farmers markets, encouraging enrollment in CSAs, community supported agriculture.

As people do that, they're naturally buying.

And being forced to prepare more fruits and vegetables. Their diets are changing. Similarly, you improve school lunches, you improve food and institutions in general. You set out guidelines for those institutions and you say more whole grains, less hyper-processed food, fewer added sugars and so on down the line. And when you change those guidelines, you see, oh look, we're creating a healthier diet in a controlled population and we're seeing that there are positive effects of that healthier diet in that controlled population. I mean, there are dozens of ideas like this.

And, you know, it can even be, I mean, people sometimes say to me.

What can I do to work towards.

A better food system?

And I'm like, there's almost, no matter.

What your passion is, there's a role.

For you to make a bit, build a better food system. If you're a person who believes in fighting for immigrant rights, countering racism, fighting for labor rights, then you can look at the fact that five out of 10 of the worst paying jobs in the United States are in the food system. And most of those jobs are held by women, immigrants, and people of color. And most of those jobs are underpaid. So struggle for better payment in those in that arena. That's building a better food system, too.

Try to get land into the hands.

Of people who want to farm it.

And farm it well.

That's building a better All of these things.

Yeah.

And build better government, because we need, I mean, even as you said, it's not really on Biden's agenda, but on the other hand, if he does what he says he's going to do, he will improve agriculture and improve food, even if it's unintentional.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, in your book, you talk about this is sort of this, this, you know, extraordinary moment where we're in now, where COVID has led to the funneling of literally trillions of dollars.

Literally trillions.

Like one $2 trillion package after the other. I don't know, we're up to $6 trillion now. I don't know how many trillions. And you speak about FDR's New Deal, where he was able to implement a sweeping set of changes that brought us out of the Depression by putting people to work, by building roads, by building bridges, by making national parks, by employing people through public works programs and improving infrastructure at a time when it was all very needed, bringing electricity to homes. Right now, for me, the problem is that I feel like I'm in a glass booth where I'm and no one can hear me and no one recognizes the problem. In the Depression, everybody knew there was a depression. We, most of us kind of agree that climate change is an issue, that racism is an issue, that income inequality is an issue. I think we haven't even named this problem as a society and said, food is central to solving this issue. And I just, it's so frustrating to me because you and I see it. people like our friends, Darsh Mazafar and Harvard see it, but there's not that many people who are systems thinkers and think in ecological terms about these issues. And so, you know, one of the things you proposed in your book, which I kind of really loved, which is the idea of taking this as a national crisis, as a national emergency, just like we did COVID, because it really is. And even though these issues are siloed and seem separate, they're really connected and they can be solved at the root cause, which would then create all these downstream benefits. So, I think if we had some kind of food new deal, or the Green New Deal is, I guess, part of that, all that's controversial, it really speaks to the fact, we could have taken with that money from COVID we could literally train 10 million new farmers, you said, we could actually help to transform agriculture and support regenerative agriculture. and change food production, which as you say, changes food consumption, right? We're only eating the stuff that's grown. We grew different stuff, we'd eat different stuff.

That's all you can do.

Right. So can you talk a little bit about this idea and how we might, like if you were advising the president, how would you convince him to start to understand one that this is an interconnected issue, an essential issue that's being ignored. And two, what would be the key ideas that you would want them to implement that are the biggest levers, would get the leverage to make the biggest changes?

I mean, I don't pretend to have all the answers, obviously. So, it's interesting. Well, you have more than most.

We have more than most.

You know, Greta Thunberg, says that we really only deal with crises and emergencies. And we don't really consider the climate crisis a crisis, and we don't really consider the food crisis a crisis. We do consider COVID a crisis, and yet, as you know, so let's say 300,000 Americans died from complications of COVID in 2020. in 2020. Put aside the fact that some large percentage of those people died because they had complications that were the result of their diet. That was already a food problem.

Yes.

But put that aside for the moment and consider that 1.5 to 2 million people every year in the United States die of diet-related chronic chronic disease. So why is COVID a crisis, which is going to be in the next year or two solved or more or less solved by a vaccine, when diet, which we're making no attempts to address.

Almost no attempts to address, kills five.

Times as many people per year and is largely ignored?

Yeah.

I feel the same way you do. It's a little bit like like shouting in the wilderness.

It's all we can do, you know.

And between the two of us, we.

Have a fairly big audience and some people are listening.

I don't know exactly how to turn this battleship around.

That's why I said before, I think you make these small changes and you.

See that things are moving in the right direction rather than saying, we're overturning the food system tomorrow, because that's, you.

It's not gonna happen. Yeah.

Well, you do point out in the book that, you know, these big companies that are part of the problem are starting to realize they need to be part of the solution. And that they're- Do I?

Because I don't really feel that optimistic, but okay.

Well, I mean, you talk about how maybe, you know, they're buying up organic brands and they're, I mean, General Mills and Danone and other companies are supporting regenerative agriculture. I think their Nestle's is sort of looking how to become a health company. So while they still have a legacy of products that are killing all of us, they're also starting to rethink what they need to be doing for the future.

I mean, I think that's greenwashing, but okay.

It might be, but I don't know. I think I've talked to leaders in Walmart and they're very focused on how do we create a healthier population? How do we shift our products? How do we start to create a more equitable food system. I mean, they are the biggest organic grocers in America right now, probably the world.

Right, but if you go on their.

Website and you start shopping, all of the suggestions that they make that you.

Would be adding to your cart are junk food. So maybe the next time they tell.

You that, you can make that if they want to know one thing they can do better, that would be to encourage the consumption of that organic food that they're the largest suppliers of instead of instead of encouraging the consumption of.

Hershey's kisses, which is, you know, where they're at.

You know, I agree. And I think that, you know, one of the challenges is that there's a lot of, let's call it fake news about the food system.

A lot of a better term.

Like we need to have this industrial agricultural system to feed the growing population, which will be 10 billion in another decade or two.

And then- that is a lot.

Yes. Yes. And this is the Green Revolution, which was designed to sort of bring agriculture to developing countries and give them our seeds and our chemicals and increase production and reduce starvation and famine. I think there was some good intentions and there was some good done by, you know, Norman Borlaug and dwarf wheat. And, I mean, there were- it wasn't a complete disaster. But it turned out that it actually subverted a lot of these countries' indigenous systems. And you point out that 75% of the food grown in the world is actually grown by these small indigenous peasant farmers, which use techniques that are often sustainable or regenerative, and that the 25% of food that's being produced by the big ag firms are the ones that's killing all the rest of us. So the idea that we can actually come up with a different agricultural system, because it has to start there, that's based on regeneration and use the word sustainable, I think we have to go beyond sustainable because we don't want to sustain what we have. We want to have a much better system.

That's a good point.

Yeah, and I think that this whole buzzword of regenerative agriculture talks about how do we regenerate agriculture? regenerate soils, water systems, ecosystems, pollinators, even human health, right? Regenerate human health. So the question is how do we start to sort of break down that myth and how do we start to incentivize agricultural production in a way that is going to drive the right changes? Because we now have a new administration and there's a chance that we might get a voice or be heard in this conversation a little bit more now. And if you were sitting there with President Biden and Secretary Vilsack and you were on the hot seat, what would you tell them to do around agriculture?

I mean, internationally, I would say we should be minding our own business and letting, if we want to intervene or help other people, we should be helping them farm the way they know how to farm, or we should at least not be attacking their way of farming, which is what the Green Revolution was about. But I would say let's support what you're calling regenerative agriculture, I call agroecology, but in any case, let's support the development of good agriculture. Let's get land into the hands of people especially people of color and women who were shut out from the land distribution of the 19th century. Let's get land into the hands of people who want to farm right and let's start farming right, producing a variety of crops that are good for people to eat and distribute them locally at prices that people can afford. That's the Green Revolution. That's the real Green Revolution.

But the thing is, Mark, the argument.

Is that, well, that's on well and.

Good and that's nice, but, you know, that's sort of a marginal part of agriculture. It's not really gonna solve our global hunger problems. It's not really gonna be able to scale to a growing population.

Hang on, hang on. There's no global hunger problem. There's a global income problem. No one with money is hungry. The only people who are hungry are people who can't afford to eat. The UN says there are enough calories right now to feed not only the seven billion people alive, but those mythical 10 billion people that are supposed to.

Be here in 20 or 30 years. So it's really not an issue of growing enough food. It's an issue of A, people being able to afford good food, and B, growing food that's good for people to eat.

Because a lot of the food that.

We'Re growing now, as you know, is not good for people to eat. So there's those two changes, make good food, produce good food, and make it available to everybody. That solves the problem. It's a huge undertaking. That's why I'm saying start small. But if you're asking what the big question is and what the big solution.

Is, It's not exporting industrial agriculture to.

The rest of the world. It's letting the rest of the world teach us how to grow food in a way that will endure, that will be regenerative.

And you think this has got to come from the bottom up, or you think this is also got to really come from top down because we can join all the farmers markets and CSAs and all the compost our vegetables, and do all these wonderful things that are good for us and help the planet. But unless we have large-scale policy changes, how can we achieve that goal?

Well, we can't, and it has to be both. And it's great if individuals can and do change their lives.

And there's no reason to argue against.

That, but obviously not everybody can or will do that. You know, it's just, there's this statistic which basically says 60% of the calories available in the United States today are in the form of ultra-processed food.

That means that someone's got to eat that stuff. That's what's out there to eat. You can only eat what there is. You can't eat food that doesn't exist. So there's not enough real food to go around. Someone's got to eat the ultra processed stuff.

So we have to change agriculture.

And as individuals, as you say, we can compost all we want, we can eat all the plant-based diets we want, blah, blah, blah. We can't change agriculture without government support for changing agriculture. So it has to be bottom up and top down. We do, as I think we've seen in recent weeks, we do live in.

A kind of democracy where we have some control over our leadership.

We need leadership that understands what food issues are and leadership that wants to build healthy agriculture, healthy land ownership, healthy diets.

Yeah, I think this is so key. And we always have new administrations are always hopeful. But it seems to me that there are forces at play that are subverting the truth, subverting the right information. We both know Sam Cass and one of the most striking things he said to me, he was a White House advisor on food, he was a chef in the Obama administration. He said every day the food industry lobbyists would show up and they would present these beautiful regulations all written out. They have beautiful bills and legislation. They'd have their big binders of all their research and data to back up everything. and they literally present the lawmakers with exactly what to do, who basically, to their defense, really have no expertise in this area and no real understanding of the depths of the science. And they all, this sounds good. You guys sound smart. This is good. He said there was not one person who came from the kind of, let's say, other side to present another story of what we should be doing with equal sort of strength. And I think That really disturbed me because we're just hearing this one-sided, lopsided view. And I sat on a last summer on a boat with a senator, a Democratic senator, who's fairly open and progressive. And I kind of laid all that out, these intersections that you map out in your book, animal, vegetable, and junk, which everybody should get. And he just, his jaw was hanging down. He was kind of dumbfounded by it. and was shocked and didn't really even know that these issues were connected. And I think we have a lot of education to do in Washington if we're going to sort of move the needle. And I think, you know, there are examples of this. There are examples around other movements, whether it's, you know, civil rights, gay rights, whether it's, you know, just all the things that we've seen to sort of have really legs that have been pushed forward through to really deliberate education, both of consumers and policymakers. So it seems like we have a lot of work to do, but it seems to me an existential threat. I mean, like you quote David Foster Wallace in your book, you know, he's talking about climate change, says, it's worse, it's far worse than we think, you know? And I think it's sort of this way I feel, and you and I both feel that way, and I feel like we're kind of wandering around the wilderness and nobody's really and I'm not sure if we're gonna get it in time. That's what worries me.

Well, we'll probably be dead, so it shouldn't worry you that much.

Hey, wait, I don't know about you, Mark. I'm gonna be living to 120, maybe I'm going for 125.

Yeah, but that's probably too soon anyway.

Look, things are so interconnected that if.

Someone says, how do I fix the food system? How do I help fix the food system?

I would say go work for local progressive candidates.

Who understand the relationship between food and farming and eating and health and don't.

Even think about food policy.

Just let's get the right people in office and then the lobbyists may have less power or we may be able to abolish the electoral college. I mean, there's so many issues that are interrelated on this because really the bottom line is how do you make significant lasting good change. And it's not just around food. It's about every issue you can think of.

Yeah, it seems like we need to be better organized. We just need a compelling narrative and we need a compelling story that allows us to sort of drive this narrative through the population. And it's something I've been chewing on and struggling with for a long time. I know you have, and I think hopefully we're getting there by these conversations, by books like Yours, Animal, Vegetable, Junk and by my book Food Fix that I released last year as well. So I just, you know, I think we're in this pivotal moment. One of the things I want to sort of touch on that you touched in the book, which I think people aren't really focused on and even, you know, in the media, in politics, you don't really hear about it. There's a massive conversation about climate change. You know, Biden wants to put forth the $2 trillion climate initiative. There's a real thrust with John Kerry being a cabinet level position on climate. And yet absent from the conversation seems to be any conversation about how agriculture and our agricultural system and food system is either equal to or greater contributor overall end to end to climate change. And that ultimately we can't solve climate change unless we solve our food and agriculture issues as well. It's not just about fossil fuels and solar and wind and all that's important, but it's just, it's like, wait a minute over here, like the elephant in the room. Can you talk about that connection and why is that so? And how do we need to start thinking differently about it?

Well, I think anyone who takes climate.

Change seriously has to look at agriculture. And hopefully when people start doing that, they will. There were provisions in the Green Revolution, sorry, the Green New Deal, proposal originally that did take agriculture into account. And I'm hopeful that by taking climate more seriously, the administration will understand that agriculture is a big contributor to climate change and needs to be addressed. It's again, it's up to us to remind them if they don't see it.

How do you sort through the data on the promise of regenerative agriculture to build soil, draw down carbon, and have all the secondary benefits of water conservation, reduction in chemical use, and increase in biodiversity and pollinator species and so forth, and production of more and better food where farmers have better lives and make more money. I mean, how do you think about that conversation? 'Cause regenerative agriculture sort of by definition is about building soil. And the science of agroecology points to the fact that you need animals integrated into ecosystems to build that soil. Just as we built 50 feet of topsoil in the Midwest through the bison and the 170 million ruminants that were grazing in mobs and chewing and spitting, which made the grass grow, pooping and peeing and fertilizing it and then moving on. How do you sort of address that conversation? Because the conversation is eat less meat, it's like feedlot meat or no meat. And I think there's a interesting sort of conversation to be had there and what your perspective is, I'd love to hear.

I mean, like you, I don't believe that argument that it's feedlot meat or no meat. There is such a thing as regenerative animal production. I think there's a role for animals in agriculture, but long term, I'm not as sure. But we're in a transitional period that hasn't really even started yet. I mean, we're just at the beginning of a period where we're trying to figure out and we're trying to act on building an agricultural system, a food system that actually works. So we're not going to end animal production anytime soon, perhaps we can end CAFOs in the next five or 10 years and start to raise animals in kinder and more sustainable, more regenerative ways. Certainly animals have a contribution to make when it comes to soil building. I do believe there are probably ways to build soil without animal production. But given that people still want to eat meat, many people still want to eat meat, but those same people for the most part want to see animals treated better and and want to see the raising of animals not poison the environment, I'd suggest that we start by restricting CAFOs and ultimately eliminate. When I say, if anyone doesn't know, let's say factory farming of animals. CAFOs means confined animal feeding, consolidated animal feeding operations. Let's regulate those as they should be regulated, reduce the amount of poison that they're producing, reduce the cruelty to animals that they're responsible for and start to raise animals in a way that's kinder and gentler for a more appropriate term, but still contributes to agriculture and still allows people to eat some meat.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think what people also don't realize is that 40% of agricultural lands are unsuitable for grown crops or human consumption. And we don't have four stomachs and we can chew for 12 hours a day. And what turns out what these animals do is they upcycle inedible food stuffs into highly nutrient dense food that otherwise we wouldn't have because we actually have land that you can't actually grow the crops on. So I think there's a bigger conversation about how to do it, how it scales. I think we are unfortunately not having these more nuanced conversations, it's all sort of extremism. And I think that's really unfortunate, 'cause I think that the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. And I think, you know, we really have an opportunity to do something quite different.

You know, I think that's why I'm preaching a little bit preaching incrementalism.

Let's make with the changes that we can make and let's, I mean, if.

We even enforced existing laws on CAFOs, they'd be reduced. The FDA doesn't even know how many CAFOs there are in this country. It doesn't know where they are. It doesn't know how many animals are being raised in confinement. These things are poisoning the land around them, they're poisoning the water and the air around them. They're poisoning the communities they're in, which of course are disproportionately of people of low income and usually people of color. It's a sort of form of environmental racism that needs to be be regulated and needs to be changed. That's not in the grand scheme of things. That's not saying we're not eating meat anymore. That's just saying let's try to produce meat in a responsible manner.

Yeah, you also talk about technology and food and food and ag tech are one of the biggest growing sectors of investment.

Right.

And some of the all stars in that crew are the fake meats. Beyond Burger, Impossible Burger, and they have a tremendous amount of buzz. They've got high profile investors like Bill Gates and Richard Branson. This whole idea that we can save the world by getting rid of animals and eating fake meats is sort of caught on. And yet there's some fundamental issues with that. And you talk about the industrialization of food, and particularly the industrialization of fake meat. as being a ultra processed technological solution that really subverts the bigger idea, which is that we need to go back to basic principles of agroecology in order to grow food. Because you can grow all this fake meat ingredients, whether it's pea protein or soy protein, but you can grow it in large monocrop cultures using glyphosate and pesticides and depleting water resources and, I mean, like, and it's like, wait a minute, that's not exactly what we should be doing. So what's your perspective on this whole sort of technology approach to solving this.

And.

The fake meat craze?

I mean, we can only go on what we've seen.

And what we've seen is that as.

Food becomes more processed, people become sicker, the land isn't as productive, it's treated worse, it's degrading. We're poisoning soil, we're poisoning air. This is a result of ultra processed food. This is not a result of growing lima beans, broccoli, rice, even wheat, which is hard on the soil. This is a result of that kind, you mentioned at the beginning of reductionist thinking, of thinking that food is about nutrients. Food is actually not about nutrients. There are nutrients in food, but food is not nutrients. Food is food. and you have to grow food and eat food to get the benefits of food, they can't be reduced to their individual components and doled out like vitamin by vitamin, nutrient by nutrient. I mean, you know the whole, I do this and I go through this in the book, but the whole thing about when industrial processing began and when wheat was first stripped of bran and germ on a on an industrial level and white flour became the commodity. And then later white bread replaced real bread, brown bread. People started to get sick because they weren't getting enough nutrients. And we're still getting sick from eating stripped down foods more in the form of cancers and insulin resistance, as you know, because we're not getting the full benefit of whole grains of real vegetables and so on and so forth. The answer is not to make pea protein, make soy protein, et cetera, et cetera, and call that meat. The answer is to eat those vegetables.

That's right. I think we are in a crazy time of technology solving everything and it really might not. And the these ultra processed foods, whether it's the K rations that the male's ready to eat that the military eat, or whether it's these baked meat burgers are not necessarily solving the problems that we want around whole food nutrition. And you mentioned sort of the vitamin deficiency indirectly. The vitamin deficiencies were discovered because we polished rice and polished wheat and he got all his white. And so you had all these people with pellagra and berry berry and xerophthalmia and all these horrible diseases that were remedied by simply taking vitamins. And Robert Heaney is a professor, I think he's recently died, but he studied vitamin D a lot and he wrote an interesting article called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. So if you don't have niacin or riboflavin or any of these, you'll get these short, these short quick vitamin deficiencies like scurvy or pellagra. But if you eat these ultra processed foods which have lack of phytochemicals, lack of fiber, lack of vitamins and minerals, and all the antioxidants and food as medicine components, you get what we call long latency deficiency diseases. So, for example, if a diet is low in the short run in vitamin D, and you know, any vitamin D, because you're not eating herring and mushrooms all the time, then you'll get rickets. But if you don't eat vitamin D, and maybe you have enough to prevent rickets, over the long term, you will get osteoporosis or heart disease. Same thing with folate. If you have short-term folate deficiency, you'll get anemia. But if you have long-term folate deficiency, you might get cancer, heart disease, or dementia.

So I think this is a concept.

That'S super important, these long latency diseases. It's interesting stuff. I'd like to read about that. Yeah, Robert Haining, I can send you his paper. We'll have it in the show notes. But it's a brilliant analysis. You would really love it. And actually, I wrote an article years ago where I sort of talked a lot about this. I'll send you it's called the Paradigm Shift about changing our notions of disease. I wrote it like 15 years ago, but I think it's still pretty relevant because paradigms take forever to change. I think we're still not there. Well, Mark, you are just one of my heroes, honestly, truly, you know, Actually, the funny story is that my first book, Ultravention, Mark's daughter Kate was the publicist, and I haven't seen her in God 20 years.

She says hello by the way.

She talks about you.

She loves setting up these interviews because she has an excuse to talk about you.

I know, it's great. And you know, you really inspired a lot of my thinking, reading your articles in the New York Times over the years, your incredible books, and you know, for people who are interested in Mark, it's not just taking these high level philosophical views in the arc of history and politics, but you can go to Mark's website, markbittman.com, you can look at all the books he's written, how to cook everything and pretty much how to cook this, how to cook that, and they're just delicious amazing recipes. He's an incredible chef who's had lots of online videos and so forth of cooking. I used to see his New York Times things when I flew on airplanes, which I loved. and I think Mark is a wonderful resource who's seen who teaches you how to make delicious food and eat real food and also highlights some of these important issues in our society and has just written some brilliant articles in newspapers and magazines about how we need to think about food policy differently in letters to the president. So you got to check out his work if you haven't. And make sure you get animal vegetable junk. It's an incredible book. It's a history of food from sustainable to suicidal. And, I think we're not that far away from suicide right now. So, Mark, thank you so much being on the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast today. I really keep up what you're doing. I'm always surprised how I keep learning from you over and over. So, thank you so much for all the work you do. And, for those listening, if you love this podcast, share it with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. We'd love we'd love to hear from you and your thoughts about how we can have a better food system and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts.

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