Mark Bittman

You said that my writing was good.

I think that in 1980, when I started writing about food, people who could really write did not choose to write about food.

They were all writing about something else.

So the fact that I could put together a sentence and a paragraph around the recipe made me unusual.

And now...

You know, there are great writers writing about food all over the place.

Um, but I think then, and you see it in How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything, a thousand pages long,

a thousand recipes, a thousand variations, whatever it is, is really a well-written book, and I'm pleased with that.

And so I could do that.

From the get-go, I could write pretty well about food, and I think that was important.

I don't think I... Did you grow up with it?

I am working on this memoir, so I'm exploring these questions.

There's no answers.

Did I... Why do I like fish?

Oh, I went on a school trip to Fulton Fish Market when I was 10.

Why do I like... And it's like, no, these aren't good reasons.

Reasons are tricky.

They're granular and compounded.

And so...

I was writing about food.