Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Bittman

Bittman’s line lands because it refuses the purity test while still calling out a moral blind spot. “I’ll never stop eating animals” is a strategic confession: he preempts the eye-roll that often meets food ethics, especially when the conversation slides into identity politics (the vegan, the carnivore, the guy who “just likes bacon”). By planting his flag as an omnivore, he buys credibility with the mainstream and makes the next clause harder to dismiss as sanctimony.

The pivot is where the real argument lives. He’s not asking for personal sainthood; he’s demanding structural attention. “Stop raising them industrially” targets the hidden machinery of cheap meat: concentrated animal feeding operations, outsourced pollution, antibiotic resistance, precarious labor, and an ethics system designed to keep the consumer comfortably ignorant. It’s policy and supply chain dressed up as personal choice.

Then comes the sting: “stop eating them thoughtlessly.” That word reframes the issue from diet to behavior. Thoughtlessness is the modern luxury Bittman is indicting: the ability to treat meat as a default setting rather than a decision with consequences. He’s not calling for abstinence so much as friction - a pause long enough to feel the true cost that industrial efficiency works overtime to erase.

Context matters: Bittman has long positioned himself as a pragmatic reformer, not a lifestyle guru. This quote fits a broader cultural moment where “eat less meat” became a climate and public-health argument, not just an animal-rights one. It’s an invitation to complicate comfort, without demanding anyone join a new tribe.