Brian: It is the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we take a look at a pitch to radically change our food system. The goal to create a restaurant like no other that defines good food as a universal right and makes that food accessible to everyone regardless of income. This comes from Mark Bittman, you know him, food journalist, former New York Times recipe columnist, and author of How to Cook Everything and other cookbooks. He's the man behind this idea. Mark Bittman joins us now to tell us more about it. Hi, Mark. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mark: Hi, Brian. Great to be here again.

Brian: I see this is going to be called Community Kitchen. Start at the beginning and tell us what will differentiate it from other health and sustainability-focused restaurants.

Mark: For one of a better name. As far as I know, this is the first restaurant that is going to try to do everything right. Not just nibble at the margins, but source great food from local farmers, treat workers up and down the food chain, like professionals, cook great food, and then serve it on a sliding scale so that everyone can afford it. Obviously, I can unpack each of those four things as much as you like.

Brian: Well, I think the newest thing to a lot of our listeners will be pricing it so that everybody can afford it. It reminds me of, I don't know, some of the museums maybe in New York where you don't have to pay, but people with the means to pay might feel like they should pay. I don't know, how's that going to work?

Mark: Well, exactly how it's going to work is something that's going to be figured out over time because it's a real challenge. I think one key point is that it's not pay what you want, it's pay what you're able. That's going to be determined once. We have the ability to ask people to assign themselves to tiers. There are places doing this, not museums as it happens, but CSAs and farmers' markets, other pay according to income schemes. Once you're assigned to a tier, whether it's I'm on SNAP or I'm a millionaire, you're in that tier more or less permanently.

You're registered through an app or through a membership card and you don't have to go through that process again. It's not standing at the cash register saying, "I only have $12," or, "I feel like paying $40." It's an assigned amount that will be yours and will be opaque to everybody else. Whenever you go to a Community Kitchen, you're paying the rate that your tier is paying.

Brian: You'll be asking people one time to disclose something very general about their wealth or income?

Mark: It can be as simple as, I don't want to make it sound like it's determined because it's a hard thing to get this right and this is probably the most challenging. You're right to pick it up first because it's probably the most challenging question facing us in the long run. At the same time, I've thought about it and talked about it with many, many people over the last couple of years. It might be as simple as answering or responding to these three questions or these three statements. One statement couldn't be, I can afford to help other people eat well.

The second might be, I can afford to pay for myself to eat well, and the third might be, I need help eating well. It could be almost as simple as that.

Brian: Are there any existing models out there in the world for what you're trying to achieve in that respect?

Mark: It's odd, but the closest model is Brazil in the '90s. Obviously, there are people doing great work all over the food system, but as far as I know, there are no restaurants that are doing this model precisely. Of course, there are people that are pay what you can or pay what you want and there are people who are treating workers well, and there are people who are sourcing well. There are people who are cooking well, but there's no one combining all four of these things.

Brian: How about your treating workers well part, what would that involve?

Mark: I think the easiest thing or what the best starting place is to say, let's look at the MIT living wage scale, which is a comprehensive study of what it costs to live decently just about every community in the United States and pay people accordingly. It's not as simple as saying we're paying $20 an hour, which for many restaurants would be an upgrade. It's saying we want people to work for us who are going to continue to work for us, who are going to feel like they have careers, who are going to get benefits, and so on. I should say at this point since, excuse me, let me just clear my throat.

Brian: Sure. I can take this moment to invite listeners in for Mark Bittman as he describes the project that he's launching called Community Kitchen. That's going to be the name of a restaurant that he says is going to try to do everything right in a food system that generally does everything wrong. That has to do with helpfulness, that has to do with sustainability, that has to do with how workers are treated, and that has to do with allowing everybody to afford to eat there. That part that we've been discussing mostly so far.

If you have a question or a thought, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, maybe something you want him to put on the menu, I don't know. 212-433-9692, call or text. Mark, go ahead.

Mark: The menu is probably the easiest part. I was going to say something neither you nor I have mentioned so far, is that this is a nonprofit. We are a 501(c)(3), and we're going to continue to be that until demonstrated that we don't need to be. The reason we don't have restaurants that do these four things we're talking about is that it's a guaranteed money loser or a nearly guaranteed money loser because restaurants are constantly cutting corners, being forced to cut corners in order to employ people, in order to source their food, in order to cook their food, and obviously, in order to charge for their food.

To do all four of those things right and to make money at the same time, that just seems impossible.

Brian: Well, though, without the profit motive, one might wonder how are you going to generate, or I guess maybe you already answered that question when we talked about the sliding scale, generate enough money to pay people well. Generally, nonprofits don't pay as well as commercial organizations in the same field.

Mark: Well, we're going to start with philanthropy. I don't think that the sliding scale is going to generate enough income to sustain one of these restaurants. I think there's going, certainly, to start, we need philanthropy. That's the stage I'm at now, is fundraising. There's a long-run answer to that question also, which, as you said in your introduction, and again, thank you for that. As you said in your introduction, in the long run, it's important that the United States and every country in the world define nutritious food as an inalienable right.

The UN does that, and a few countries have adopted that as a right, but the United States hasn't. We do more or less through food stamps and WIC, we do pretty much guarantee that most people won't starve, which is a start. There's no belittling that. It's an imperfect system. It doesn't work seamlessly, but our government's intent to make sure that Americans get enough calories to live. We know about the public health crisis. You and I have talked about this. I'm sure you've had dozens of other guests who've talked about the links between our diet and chronic disease.

Brian: Sure.

Mark: That's a result of our country supporting a food system that prioritizes calories over nutrition. If we're going to, in the long run, if we want a healthy population, we need to produce healthy food. The same is true if we want a healthy environment, we need to treat farming differently than we treat farming now. In the long run, these are going to be policy decisions and these are going to be things that the government prioritizes as rights for our people, just as we agree or at least pretend to agree that we all have a right to defend our borders or have our borders defended, that we all have a right to a decent public education, Again, that we all have the right to not starve. We have roads, we have communications, and so on. These are all heavily subsidized by the federal government.

What's subsidized by the federal government food-wise right now is the ability for US agriculture and for big food, ie. fast food and so on, to make money. What's not subsidized and what should be is our right to farm well and our right to feed ourselves well.

Brian: Since you're describing these big structural problems that would require structural policy decisions to affect at any scale, how do you see opening a single restaurant or a chain of restaurants as affecting that?

Mark: It's just to nail the logistical thing. I don't see this as a chain. I see this as two restaurants and our current plan calls for one in Northern Manhattan or the Bronx and one in southern Westchester, or let's say in Westchester. This is a demonstration project. This is a model, and this model will show in a way that hasn't been shown before that those four things we keep talking about, agriculture and the environment, labor, good food, and access affordability are all possible under one roof.

We could do this in schools, we could do it in supermarkets, we could do it in hospitals but restaurants are where most people get most of their meals at this point, and they're very visible. That's the decision we've made, is to do this in two restaurants in metro New York, and to use those restaurants as a model, as an argument for this kind of food system, and it'll be very easy to mimic model.

We'll be open about what we're doing. We'll help anyone else who wants to do this anywhere they want to do it, but as I said, at the beginning, it's going to have to rely on philanthropy, and 20 or 50 years from now, the optimistic view is that it relies on good policy-making decisions by the federal government.

Brian: Jennifer in East Harlem, you're on WNYC with Mark Bittman. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Yes. Good morning, Brian. Thanks so much for taking my call again. Mr. Bittman, I'm a huge fan of your excellent work, and as you were talking-

Mark: Thank you

Jennifer: -with Brian, I looked up-- You're welcome. Your article, Fight Poverty, Not Cooking that was published in 2014, and I was just curious as to your assessment of why almost 10 years later, we're grappling with such an excellent idea that it is just beginning to take hold and why it's taken so long, given the urgency of the issue.

Mark: Let me answer that. Thank you for all of that, and sometimes things take a while, I guess. There's an argument that this is just a dumb idea and that none of it is ever going to happen. I do believe the Community Kitchen will happen, but the impact is obviously down the road. Imagine if the last 10 years, we had let's say a progressive president and a progressive Congress, I think things would look a lot different from many perspectives in the United States right now.

The optimistic view of Community Kitchen and other progressive nonprofits is that eventually these ideas are going to spread to Capitol Hill, and they're going to become possible. We spend $4 trillion a year on healthcare in this country. That's our most expensive-- It's not a budget item, I mean, part of it is, but that's our most expensive expenditure.

That number could be reduced dramatically by providing good food for everybody in this country because if you look at any graph of healthcare costs versus food costs, the more a country or an entity spends on good food, the less they spend on healthcare, and the less they spend on good food, the more they spend on healthcare. The United States notoriously spends less money on good food than any country on Earth, and of course, equally, notoriously more on healthcare.

Brian: Jennifer, thank you for your call. Shivan in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hello, Shivan.

Shivan: Hi, thank you so much for taking my call, Brian. This is an absolutely fascinating segment. I'm a general manager of a restaurant here in Brooklyn, and we really pride ourselves on our sourcing of food as well as how we maintain and take care of our employees. My question is, as you stated before, only looking to do maybe two restaurants. The underlying fixed costs of the brick-and-mortar of a restaurant really always throw loopholes for us. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you're going to factor in those margins.

Insurance for your employees is always skyrocketing now, and other little costs when the dishwasher breaks down, when you need to get a refrigerator. All of those things that tend to what we have to do, raise food costs, even though we're sourcing really well to make sure that we are taking care of the brick-and-mortar prospect as well as our employees. Where are those margins at?

Mark: I appreciate that you're trying to do the right thing, and I understand that it's ever increasingly difficult. What we're going to do is different in that, we're not going to try to make money, and we are going to be villain based on philanthropy, at least to start. I have a budget. I'm happy to share it with you if you'd like to see it. I'm Mark at markbittman.com. We're going to open and we're going to see what it really costs, and we're going to be public about that. As I said before, the reason no one is doing anything like this is exactly the kind of costs that you're talking about.

If you just source good food and pay workers well, you are already an expensive restaurant, which means you've already priced yourself out of the range of a third or a half or two-thirds of the people in this city or maybe in this country. If you want to do those things, source well, cook good food, pay workers well, and make it affordable, I think we're both agreed that it's impossible to make money at the same time.

Brian: Interesting. Shivan, thank you very much. Listener texts, "I'm so happy to hear about this project. For years, I've had a dream of opening a sliding-scale soup kitchen that would serve healthy seasonal, delicious soups that were so good that everyone would want to eat there. Mark's description of how it would work is so inspiring." Another listener texts, "Jon Bon Jovi has a similar model. Maybe he can share some advice." Are you familiar with that?

Mark: I am. How do I say this without being critical, it's a noble enterprise. It's not trying to do everything that I'm talking about doing. It's pay what you can on a per-visit basis. The food sourcing is as far as I can tell, and they haven't shared any information with me, though, I've asked the food sourcing is let's say decent, but not fabulous. I don't know how workers are being paid, and the menu, frankly, is not super appealing.

I think people who've followed my work for years will believe me when I say my intention is to make the food at this restaurant so good that everyone is going to want to eat there. I don't think that's a huge challenge that many, many people could do that, but I'm tired of seeing so-called newfangled fast food restaurants that open with so-called healthy food that really just have variations on standard fast food and what we might call junk food. This is going to be different.

Brian: On everyone wanting to eat there, often wealthier people seek to avoid those experiencing economic hardship. I could imagine that people with more money, certainly select people with money would, but in general, maybe, or large swaths of people who are relatively wealthy, wouldn't want to eat next to someone experiencing homelessness and all that comes with that as they perceive it. Do you expect that to be a barrier?

Mark: I think that is such a great question and there is currently not an answer to it. Some of these questions are going to be answered through experience, and I think what we're seeing right here, thanks to you and thanks to your callers and texters and so on, is that people like this idea, people are supportive of this idea. What we need is for people with money to step up and be supportive of this idea and I do, as I've said, I believe that's going to happen. How do you resolve that question of building a community where people of different income levels and people of different races, let's be candid about this, are happy eating together?

That's one of our fundamental questions, and it's a question I'd very much like to find the answer to.

Brian: One more call. Jay in Queens. Jay, you're on WNYC.

Jay: Yes. Hi, how are you? Thank you for what you guys are doing. My question is how did you come up about the two locations that you want to open these two restaurants, upper Manhattan and the Bronx and Westchester? Why specific those two locations, especially since in Westchester, it's a more affluent community, I would say.

Brian: Westchester has diverse income communities. The county is diverse, but yes, why and finish it up Mark by telling us when.

Mark: Okay. Thanks again, Brian. I think, as you said, Westchester has many diverse cities. I was just in Peekskill which is pretty enthusiastic about this project which is basically a third Black, a third white, and a third people of Central and South American origin. Westchester is plenty diverse enough, and Northern Manhattan, the Bronx, I want to stay out of Midtown forgive me, I just do. When? I have no excuse after this but to go fundraise. That's what I'm going to do. I'm hoping we can open the first two Community Kitchens early in 2025, and if things go well, we'll be able to do that.

Brian: All right, Mark Bittman's Community Kitchens, hopefully coming to a community near you. Always good to have you on, Mark. Thanks for backing people think and feel around this.

Mark: Okay, take care. Bye.

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