In a sit-down interview with Dr. Mark Hyman, food writer and guru Mark Bittman covers a wide range of issues—including this big question: If we had a food system in this country, what would it look like?

Bittman argues that we don’t have a food system in this country:

“What we call a food system is a bunch of rich people just trying to get richer. The goal of the people who determine what we eat is to make money, and they make money by selling chemicals, by selling fertilizers, by selling seeds, by selling equipment, by selling us hyper-processed food that makes us sick.”

If we did have a food system, Bittman asks, what would it look like? He argues that most people, if you asked them, would say that the overarching goals of a food system would be to “feed as many people as we can, as well as we can, while doing as little damage as possible to the environment.”

How do we bridge the gap between that vision for a food system, and “a bunch of rich people trying to get richer?” Bittman does a good job in this interview of connecting the dots between the problems with our food system, and so many other critical issues facing us—including income inequality, epidemics of obesity and chronic illness, soil degradation, climate and on and on.

We think the Green New Deal is the best roadmap to come along since the original New Deal—and our best shot—for the kind of transformational change we need in order to have a real food system, based on what people really need and want, while at the same time addressing a host of other problems, including and especially, our current climate emergency. 

Watch ‘Why Food Matters More Than You Think: From Plate to Planet’

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