Life's Pleasures Quote by Mark Bittman

Bittman doesn’t argue; he cross-examines. The opening, “Let me pose you a question,” is courtroom theater, a way to frame the reader not as a consumer with preferences but as a juror with responsibility. And the question he chooses is engineered to make “organic” sound less like a standard and more like a loophole you can drive an industry through.

The intent is to puncture a marketing halo. “Organic,” in this setup, isn’t a philosophy of farming so much as a label that can be stapled onto a supply chain even when the animal’s life looks nothing like the story the word is meant to tell. Bittman’s subtext is that we’ve allowed certification to become a kind of bureaucratic absolution: if the feed qualifies on paper, the living conditions fade into the background.

Notice how he stacks the evidence. First, the diet: salmon are carnivores, and “nothing to do with its natural diet” signals an ecological mismatch dressed up as compliance. Then the crowding: “packed tightly in pens” evokes factory farming’s most visceral imagery. Finally, the clincher: “swimming in their own filth,” a deliberately ugly phrase that collapses any remaining pastoral fantasy. He’s not being delicate because the point isn’t refinement; it’s revulsion as a moral wake-up.

Context matters here: Bittman has long targeted the gap between food-system rhetoric and food-system reality. Farmed salmon, a supposedly sustainable alternative, becomes his exhibit A for how “better” can be sold without being substantively better. The question isn’t whether organic feed exists; it’s whether the label still means what people think they’re buying.