Mark Bittman is an American food journalist, author, and former columnist for The New York Times.

TRANSCRIPT:

ZAK: If you're a home cook you probably know the name, Mark Bittman. He's a legendary food writer. I've been cooking out of his How To Cook Everything book which my cousin, the goatman gave me when I was in college. I love Mark Bittman. He has a new podcast it's called Food with Mark Bittman and he's here on Food Friday with some very simple, yet profound advice.

ZAK: You said something. I think it was in your show that truly re-wired my brain, which is this. If you don't want to cook dinner...DON'T!

MARK: I did a story, literally 30 or 40 years ago where I called people who I respected in the food world who were that prior generations' famous food writers...they're all dead...and I said, what do you do when you don't want to cook and one guy said, you know, there's nights where we have a tuna fish sandwich and a glass of milk and we're really happy about that. So, the advice, the straightforward advice there is look at the big picture. It doesn't really matter what your diet is on any given day. It just matters what your diet is in the long-run. Doesn't matter if you have snickers for dinner one night as long as the majority of your diet is sound, it's not like you're going to go into insulin shock and die. You know, or if you decide to eat a big steak that you're gonna have a heart attack. It's like, what are you doing on a day in, day out, basis and if you follow the sort-of...if I say the phrase, good diet, what comes to everybody's mind is the same thing. It's more fruits and vegetables, more unprocessed plants in general, less junk food, fewer animal products. Done. There's nothing else to say. So if you have that attitude over the course of the year then whether you have ice cream or snickers for dinner. As I said to somebody the other day, I'm eating a lot of licorice. It's not an important thing. It's not the big considering and one of our problems is that we look for silver bullets. We look for evil-doing things. Like, don't eat X. Don't drink Coke. Yeah, don't drink Coke all the time but a Coke is not gonna kill and I think it's important...nor is a head of broccoli gonna save you. It's what you do the majority of time that matters.

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