Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forward 50 2011

Mark Bittman

For many people, Mark Bittman’s name is synonymous with “The Minimalist,” the food column he wrote in The New York Times for 13 years, and later, the accompanying video series in which he prepared simple recipes for the Times’ Dining section. Through his column and numerous cookbooks, including “How To Cook Everything,” Bittman has made home cooking accessible to even the most timid cook.

In January, Bittman, 61, left the Dining section for the Op-Ed pages of the Times and became a food columnist for the paper’s Sunday magazine. In his opinion writing, he has used food as a lens through which to discuss key issues related to health, politics and the environment. In his first opinion piece as a columnist, titled “A Food Manifesto for the Future,” Bittman outlined some of the issues he planned to tackle: battling against subsidies for processed foods, outlawing concentrated animal-feeding operations and taxing unhealthy foods like soda and fast food. “The essential message is this,” he wrote. “Food and everything surrounding it is a crucial matter of personal and public health, of national and global security. At stake is not only the health of humans but that of the earth.” Bittman has taken on these topics and drawn attention to food justice and the environment, issues that are at the heart of the work of numerous Jewish organizations.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.