Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve asked several food-and-film loving friends this question and their answers are remarkably similar: Big Night, Babette’s Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, Chocolat. These answers aren’t wrong; all are excellent films with great food! But why is the short list so short? There are dozens, hundreds of other movies that teem with, even center around, food.

The California coast, from Davenport south through Santa Cruz, Watsonville, and Castroville, is Brussels sprouts country, and the vast majority of the people who harvest Brussels sprouts are Mexican. Most are migrants from the states of southern Mexico—immigrant workers who’ve crossed the border to labor in these fields. Their experience defies common preconceptions about immigrants.

Digging into some old gems, both serious (!!) and playful: it’s easy to roast them, but the truth is, they’re mesmerizing. Whereas many old cookbooks might help you get a grasp on what people ate during a specific era, these two show us something different: what the gatekeepers believed we should want to eat.

For decades we’ve been encouraged to eat way more protein than we need—and we’re eating more every year. As a result, each American eats on average almost 800 pounds of protein-heavy animal products a year, or as much as 6 ounces of pure protein. And that provides way more protein than we need, perhaps twice or even three times as much.

Over the past year, I visited or reported on bars that have been operating as de facto social clubs for fifty years or more, where people, young and old, cool and uncool, still come together to eat and drink, jovially, under ancient, well-preserved rules of engagement. 

We’re interrupting our regular Friday programming to share a Q&A that Mark and Kate did with the writer and chef ​Aliza J. Sokolow​, who has been ​a guest on Food with Mark Bittman​ a couple of times and has become a pal of Kate’s.

Cooking has to become hip. It has to become just as much fun, just as prestigious, just as much a part of the culture as watching others cook. This does not seem so far-fetched to me, and, indeed, is happening in neighborhoods and among friends and families all over the country. When it happens among 20 million or 50 million of us, it will become a super-trend; whether this will take ten years or fifty, I don’t know, but I’m quite certain it’s the future.

Perennials, roughly speaking, are plants that live for more than one year. You might have even eaten some perennial foods today: Tree nuts and tree fruits are obvious ones, but grass-finished meat raised on perennial pasture might be a candidate for this designation as well. What these foods all have in common is that they come from farms where plants stay in the ground for multiple seasons. Which means their roots can go to work.

Cooking is a process, one that takes time and effort. It also requires energy. But much of that is human energy, the kind that doesn’t deplete the environment. Our monoculture-weighted food chain has become extremely efficient at consuming the kind of energy that does. As have we.

Few of us understand the human effort it takes to get broccolini onto our dinner tables—and farmworkers know this. So appreciating the taste of broccolini, somewhat sweeter than regular broccoli, should mean giving credit to them.

Cooking at home doesn’t mean relying exclusively on local ingredients. But it probably means relying more on local ingredients. It certainly means eating less processed junk, and that is where the environmental benefits of cooking become starkly evident.

The problems caused by our current food system hide in plain view; the hurdle is awareness. It takes time, energy, and desire to get up to speed on contemporary food policy: But because food production and consumption overlap with virtually every major political issue facing our society, eating is like voting three times a day.

Anyone who prepares meals and snacks as opposed to buying them is one less person fueling the industrialized food complex. Cooks choose a different food chain. Instead of trying to decipher the information on labels, cooks peek in cartons of eggs, thump melons, and squeeze tomatoes. Then they bring home what they think looks good and turn it into dinner.