Mark Bittman has been writing about food since 1980, and has been a leading voice in global food culture and policy for more than a generation. He has written thirty books, including the now standard How to Cook Everything (and its many spin-offs), Food Matters, VB6 (the first popular book about part-time veganism, and an instant #1 NYT bestseller), and, in 2021, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food from Sustainable to Suicidal, which The New York Times called “epic and engrossing.”
Bittman spent three decades at the Times, where he created “The Minimalist” – a weekly column that ran for thirteen years without interruption – and had a five-year stint as the Sunday Magazine’s lead food writer. He simultaneously became the country’s first weekly opinion writer at a major publication (The Times) to concentrate on food. His influence on mainstream attitudes about food and agriculture during that period is immeasurable, and he is still consulted frequently by politicians, policy-makers, academics, NGO and non-profit leaders, and others concerned about the present and future of food. He continues to produce books in the How to Cook Everything series, the general cooking bible for a quarter-century, and has hosted or been featured in four television series, including the Emmy-winning Showtime series about climate change “Years of Living Dangerously” and “Spain … On the Road Again,” with Gwyneth Paltrow. He has won countless awards for journalism, books, and television and has appeared in at least a half-dozen documentaries. Bittman was a regular on the Today show from 2005 to 2010 (and still appears occasionally) and has been a guest on hundreds of television and radio programs. His 2007 Ted Talk, “What’s wrong with what we eat?” has been viewed five million times, and he was among the opening speakers at the 2022 Aspen Ideas Institute. He is currently a professor of practice at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, and the founder of The Bittman Project, which produces a newsletter, website, and the podcast “Food, with Mark Bittman.” He is the founder and leader of Community Kitchen, a non-profit restaurant startup and, he says “The most important project I’ve ever worked on.”
Bittman lives in the Hudson Valley with his partner, Kathleen Finlay, who is the executive director the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming and the founder of Pleiades, a national network of women leaders addressing environmental and social justice.