Mark Bittman Brings Vegan Meal Kits to Masses
During the question-and-answer period following his , Mark Bittman was coy when an audience member asked for details about why he’d left the New York Times. (In his farewell column, Bittman wrote that he was going “to do what I’ve been writing about these many years: to make it easier for people to eat more plants.”)
“Monday all will be revealed,” he said from the stage.
And today, it was.
“In case you missed it,” Bittman posted on his website this morning, “I’m joining The Purple Carrot as co-founder, partner and chief innovation officer.”
Purple Carrot is a meal-kit delivery service that sends boxes of the pre-measured ingredients — non-GMO and mostly organic — needed to create fresh vegan meals at home. The recipes are developed and tested by Bittman, according to the company’s website. Purple Carrot currently ships throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and West Coast of the U.S. and offers two meal plans — one for two people and one for four.
When host Randy Cohen asked Bittman last Thursday whether he thought there had been progress made in cooking in recent years, Bittman was pessimistic: “Food is probably, generally speaking, much worse than years ago,” he said. “Things change, but I don’t know if you’d call it progress.”
Then, in response to a question from a woman who was concerned that she might not be cooking healthfully enough if she wasn’t using organic foods, Bittman replied, “If you start with real food and you cook it decently, you’re fine. You’re cooking more healthfully than 95 percent of the people in this country are eating.”
His numbers sound a bit off to me, but I get the point and appreciate the idea that with his new venture, Bittman is taking a small-if-concrete step toward improving the ratio of people cooking plant-focused meals at home.
Liza Schoenfein is food editor of the Forward. Contact her at schoenfein@forward.com
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