Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Bittman

Bittman’s line performs a neat moral judo move: it yanks the conversation away from personal “willpower” and toward the machinery of appetite. By stacking “meat, dairy and refined carbohydrates” alongside the absurdly specific “one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day,” he turns nutrition into a story about scale, not choices. That Coke statistic isn’t just a fact; it’s a cultural indictment, a receipt. You can hear the implied shrug of the marketplace: if we’re drinking it by the billion, who’s to blame?

The key pivot is his insistence on “demand…not our need,” then the tighter twist: “not our need, our want.” He’s attacking the language that industry and economics use to sanitize desire. “Demand” sounds neutral, even rational; “want” is naked, emotional, a little embarrassing. Bittman’s subtext is that modern food culture trains us to confuse craving with necessity, then builds an entire supply chain to meet that confusion at maximum volume.

Contextually, this is Bittman in his familiar lane: a food writer trying to widen the frame from diet fads to systems - subsidies, marketing, product engineering, and the cultural status of certain foods. The sentence’s breathless accumulation mirrors the experience he’s describing: consumption that keeps going past the point of “enough.” He’s not just warning about calories; he’s calling out a civilization optimized to monetize excess, then surprised when our bodies and public health budgets can’t keep up.