Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Bittman

Bittman’s jab lands because it frames a public health “crisis” not as an accident of biology but as a story we were sold - with villains, talking points, and a body count. Calling it “the evil empire” is knowingly comic-bookish, but the exaggeration is strategic: it shrinks sprawling systems (industry, policy, advertising, research funding) into something you can recognize as power. Not fate. Not personal failure. Power.

The pivot phrase “We were told, we were assured” does heavy lifting. It mimics the cadence of a broken promise, the language of PR and paternal authority. Subtext: this wasn’t just misguided nutrition advice; it was reassurance delivered from on high - government guidelines, doctors trained in a meat-centered paradigm, the food industry’s well-oiled influence machine. “Assured” implies a soothing certainty that discouraged skepticism, especially when people were being asked to build their identity and prosperity around postwar abundance.

Then comes the neat, American triad: “meat and dairy and poultry.” Listing the categories like a grocery aisle underscores how normalized these products became as default health foods, not occasional indulgences. Bittman is also nudging the reader toward a broader critique: chronic disease didn’t rise in spite of the modern diet but alongside a set of incentives that made animal protein a moral and nutritional emblem.

Context matters: Bittman’s work has long targeted the gap between what nutrition science cautiously suggests and what the market loudly declares. The line is less about shaming eaters than about shifting blame upstream - from individual willpower to a manufacturing of “healthy” that conveniently tracks corporate profit.