Mark Bittman, op-ed columnist, cookbook author and the magazine's lead food writer, wrote this week's cover article for the Food and Drink Issue about developments in the fast-food industry. His article about California's Central Valley was the cover story for last year's Food and Drink Issue.
Why write about fast food?
Because everybody eats it. We all know people who say, "I never eat at McDonald's," and I suppose there are such people. But they are rare. If it's not McDonald's, it's somewhere else. I got two e-mails from friends today saying that they also order off the "fresco" menu at Taco Bell. Everybody who travels, or has kids, or is in a hurry, eventually eats fast food. There's a little part of this story that went unsaid. I've spent many, many years encouraging people to cook. There certainly hasn't been a cooking revolution. On the contrary, there's been something of an un-cooking revolution. So if you really want people to eat well or eat better, it's not enough to just say that everyone should cook their own food. If we all did that, we'd be in pretty good shape. But I don't think there is a time in the near future or maybe ever when people are going to cook two or three meals a day again. So where is the food coming from? It's mass-produced, and it's fast. Big cities are a little different, but people generally eat in company cafeterias, or they go out and they grab fast food. So it is important to ask how we can make that food better.
Still, in your ideal world, everyone would cook much more often?
When you cook, you know what's going in the food. That's the only time you know what's going in the food, something I touched on in my essay "Cooking Solves Everything." When you're eating out or eating fast food, you really don't know. Even if they list ingredients, they're not listing all the ingredients. I keep expecting or hoping that people will want this control. But let's face it: It's a question of priorities. Do you want to collapse when you get home, or do you want to start cooking when you get home? Or do you not want to go home at all? Some argue that millennials might be different, but people are still choosing not to cook.
Did you first hear of the "better" fast-food places like Lyfe and Veggie Grill before or after you started working on this article?
Lyfe was something that I've been hearing about for a long time. I'm a California-phile: I used to live there, and I go there a lot. But to be clear, this is not just a California phenomenon. There are more healthful chains like Freshii in Chicago and a lot of other cities, and ShopHouse in D.C., which is the new place from Steve Ell of Chipotle. I have an ongoing argument with some vegan friends, including Ethan Brown, a guy I wrote about last year who makes vegan "chicken," about whether there should be a halfway point where people eat fake meat instead of real meat and whether we should be supporting that. As a nonvegan, I don't give a damn if people are vegan or not; we should just eat real food and more plants than we are eating now.
In a world with no time or financial constraints, we'd all be superhealthy. But who can really afford healthful food?
It is more complicated than that, because Veggie Grill really is junk food, but it's vegan junk food, and it's not cheap. Lyfe is actually a real restaurant with real food, and it is even more expensive. And that's why I included recipes with the article. Surely you could make a black-bean burger and sell it for the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger. And you could make sweet-potato fries and sell them for a dollar or two. But there is a difference between a $5 McDonald's check and a $15 dollar Veggie Grill check. There is something in between. People might be willing to pay a small premium for real food. When you start talking about economics and scale, you can't say only, "Well poor people can't afford this, so it's no good." That makes it sound like this matters only to low-income people. While I think it is important to address what they are able to afford and eat, it also matters what everyone else eats. What we have is people in the top 10 percent of income who eat very well. And a lot of people who are scraping by. But you can't ignore the people in the middle. There are a lot of people in that group.
You write about a plan you had a few years ago to open a healthful fast-food restaurant, McBitty's. Was this article secretly a way to test out your business plan?
No, but I'm open to anything.
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