Healthy Food Options From Europe

Food columnist Mark Bittman talks with host Marco Werman about how Europe is leading the way on food policy and why many European nations have been resistant to the kind of industrial agriculture that is now dominant in the US.

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MARCO WERMAN: Those healthier options have been widely available for some time in Europe. Mark Bittman is the author of Food Matters and a food columnist for the New York Times. He says the Europeans have much to teach us about healthy food.

MARK BITTMAN: Much of Europe has been resistant to the kind of industrial agriculture that’s really dominant in the United States now, especially in the production of animals. So you have what you might call mega-dairies being defeated in England and CAFO’s, Consolidated Animal Feeding Operations, also being kept out of agriculture areas around the continent because people want smaller or medium-sized farms and they don’t want to give up their agriculture to industry.

WERMAN: Why is that in Europe? I mean, why is it happening there and here we kind of have this Food Inc. view of food production?

BITTMAN: We are less rooted in a food culture than most of the countries over there and it was the work of big food companies after World War II to convince us that it was in our interests to have convenient food and lots of it produced in imminently marketable and imminently edible forms and we were vulnerable to that because we weren’t really steeped in a, more or less, homogeneous food culture the way a lot of people are over there.

WERMAN: And yet we hear that fast, convenient food is becoming a very large part of Europe’s diet and the rest of the world’s diet. You still remain thankful to Europe though?

BITTMAN: Well, it’s all a matter of degree. The English-speaking world, the United Kingdom and former colonies and former members of the Commonwealth, excluding India, lead the world in obesity. So, the U.K. is not that different from the United States, but it is in the U.K. where McDonald’s, for example, only sells cage-free eggs. The mega-dairies are being defeated and you’re not seeing those kinds of things and supermarkets sell 15% of chickens that are raised under reasonably decent, or relatively shall I say decent, conditions as opposed to 1% here. So those are indications that things are somewhat better there.

WERMAN: You mentioned obesity in the U.K. It’s interesting because Britain’s conservative leader, David Cameron, is considering backing a tax on unhealthy food. The Danes have already imposed a surcharge on foods with more than 2.3% saturated fat and Hungarians are doing something similar. Do you think this idea of fat taxes is going to take off globally and here in the U.S.?

BITTMAN: The fact that Cameron says he’s talking either about a soda tax or a fat tax is pretty interesting. You know, the Danish thing is very well intentioned, if a bit misguided, because taxing the saturated fat in butter is really not going to change much. But I think one of the really progressive things that could happen in food in the next 10 years or so would be, to put it generally, to discourage the consumption of unhealthy foods, foods that are objectively bad for us and encourage the consumption of good foods.

WERMAN: And, Mark Bittman, I spent some time this past summer on a friend’s organic farm in France and what really struck me about the experience was the pervasive sense that eating anything that wasn’t from the region was almost criminal. I mean, no one said it but you felt it. Like the local cornichon factory, the local pickle factory, they’re now getting their cornichon from Pakistan. I’m just wondering if you think small farms in Europe and ones in the U.S., will they always be able to push back effectively against globalization?

BITTMAN: The examples that you just gave are really interesting because they point to two ends of a spectrum and I think most of us need to be somewhere in between. I think it’s nuts to think that food that doesn’t come from your region is criminal and I think it’s equally nuts to be importing staples from half-way around the world when you could be growing them nearby. Somewhere in between there is a happy medium of regional agriculture that supplies most of our needs and importation of things that you can’t get or you can’t grow or that are grown much more easily elsewhere, like coffee, olive oil, and rice and things that here in the Northeast, for example, we don’t do well.

WERMAN: You spend a lot of time with food writers, Mark, and cooks and chefs from all over the globe. I know a lot of the world has harvest festivals, but what do these food writers make of the American Thanksgiving, our take on it? Do they see it as over the top?

BITTMAN: You know, I see it as an honorable and wonderful holiday. I see it is as a celebration of the harvest, which is certainly something that we need to be reminded of. I also see it as a time when we obsess about our overeating, whereas we don’t think that much about our overeating during the rest of the year, which is something of a shame.

WERMAN: Just like we’re doing right now.

BITTMAN: You know, it’s very hard to say anything negative about Thanksgiving and I don’t think there’s much reason to, but I think it’s important to spend some time thinking about what it means to have a feast at the end of the harvest, what it meant to people who were looking at three or four or five months of not eating as well as they were in the months from June until November and what it means to have super abundance largely of things that we probably shouldn’t be eating.

WERMAN: Food writer Mark Bittman. Great to have you on our Thanksgiving show.

BITTMAN: It’s great to be here, Marco. Thank you.

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