Well-known food journalist and best-selling food and cookbook author, Mark Bittman offers some thought-provoking insights with his new book: Animal, Vegetable, Junk.

Mark Bittman, author of Animal, Vegetable, Junk. Photograph: Richard Beaven/The Guardian

In this new book, Mark reveals how food has shaped our past and how we can transform food systems to reclaim our future.

Read his latest interview with The Guardian, as Mark unpacks how history has shaped our appetite for food, farming and corporate wealth, quoting, “Growing food or growing crops in order to sell them and make money became more important than growing crops to feed people.”

Cheap food has had a terrible impact on public health. And yet we cannot get government to consider this a crisis.

He adds that, "if you look at a chart of health care costs versus food costs, it’s perfect like this. As food costs go up, healthcare costs go down. And as food costs go down, health care costs go up... Cheap food has had a terrible impact on public health. As every country switches from a traditional diet to a more American diet, their rates of chronic disease go up. In every single instance. And yet we cannot get government to consider this a crisis."

Sustain is acutely aware of the crisis our food systems faces today: Diet-related ill health is costing the Australian government some $200 bn every year. As noted in our National Pandemic Gardening Survey report, for a fraction of this cost we could improve access to edible gardens and urban food production and vastly impact the state of preventative health.

Read Mark Bittman's interview on The Guardian here. Read more our National Pandemic Gardening Survey here.

Blog Notes

This blog entry was created with the support of Sustain volunteer Margaret Lambeth.