Food Matters with Mark Bittman

Listen to an excerpt and tell us what you think!

We all need it every day. We all love it, most of the time. But we often don’t know much about it. Yes, we’re talking about food. Food Matters with Mark Bittman takes listeners on a rich and entertaining exploration of food from all angles. On Food Matters, Mark Bittman will offer hilarious counsel to callers, such as a young, inexperienced cook who needs advice about how to share a kitchen with her traditional Italian mother-in-law. He’ll investigate what might happen if we all ate 25 percent less meat (one result would be a 6 percent reduction in greenhouse gasses) and show us how to create a delicious meal for four using 4 ounces of steak; he’ll spend time in the kitchen with players from the New York Mets, cooking recipes from their new cookbook; and he’ll explore where our food comes from, visiting ranches, farms, and fishing boats.

Food Matters is like a great conversation over a good meal — relaxed, intimate, and funny. The show’s personality emerges out of Bittman’s signature “Minimalist” style, his broad-ranging curiosity, and his engaging sense of humor. With his sidekick, Emily Nunn, an award-winning journalist from the Chicago Tribune, Mark will talk about food in the news, from intricacies of the farm bill to the growing food shortages around the world. Mark will talk with listeners and with four-star chefs. He’ll show us how food reflects who we are — and also teach us how to make a delicious meal each week.

Mark Bittman is a best-selling cookbook author and creator of the popular New York Times weekly column "The Minimalist," and he’s one of the country’s most widely admired food writers. His flagship book, How to Cook Everything (John Wiley and Sons, 1998), is currently in its 13th printing and has sold more than a million copies. Bittman hosted the PBS series How to Cook Everything: Bittman Takes on America’s Chefs, a 13-part program in which he pits his home cooking against the ultra-style of chefs around the country. Random House recently published his latest cookbook, The Best Recipes in the World: More than 1,000 International Dishes to Cook at Home.

How to Cook Everything won both the Julia Child general cookbook award and the James Beard general cookbook award for 1998 and spent a record 130 weeks on the Los Angeles Times Cookbook Hot List — an unprecedented feat. Bittman created a best-selling collaboration with the internationally celebrated chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Their classic, Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef (Broadway, 1998), won a James Beard award, and is considered to be among the most accessible chef’s cookbooks ever published. Bittman’s first book, Fish:The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking (Wiley, 1994), currently in its eighth printing, is the best-selling book on the subject. He also produced the award-winning "Minimalist Cookbook" series: The Minimalist Cooks at Home, The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, and The Minimalist Entertains (Doubleday/Broadway).

Bittman is a regular guest on the Today show and NPR’s All Things Considered and has also appeared on countless national and local radio and television shows. He has been profiled in this country’s leading newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.

Emily Nunn is a features reporter for the Chicago Tribune, where she frequently writes about the culture of food. For eight years she was an arts editor at The New Yorker magazine, where she covered theater and wrote and edited "Tables for Two," the magazine’s dining column.

Additional links:

Mark Bittman’s blog at the New York Times

Web site for his award-winning cookbook How to Cook Everything

Web site for Mark Bittman

Archive of the “Minimalist” column on NYT

View clips of Bittman Takes on America’s Chefs, Mark’s first PBS series