In a post on his Blog, Mark Bittman highlights the folly of society’s food fixations: Even when it’s easier, more logical, and (little do we know) more tasty, we will choose to eat the food we know…

I write this as I eat my pizza four formaggi — “authentic Italian pizza,” it says here, on this cardboard box — on American Airlines, which I have flown for 10 years because they often go where I want to go, and because they have good outlets for laptops.

It certainly isn’t for the food, and I know it’s stating the obvious (and I further know that some of you are saying “be thankful that you got food,” but on trans-Atlantic flights one still does). But it occurs to me that I spend my days cooking and writing about the simplest food imaginable — I mean, yesterday for lunch I had lentil salad, of which you could make enough in your kitchen to serve a planeful of people in about an hour, and the day before that I ate a few pieces of fruit — and it’s as if I and all the others doing similar writing sometimes seem to have no impact. It has to be 20 years since I wrote my first piece on this subject, and interviewed one culinary luminary or other, who said something like “why can’t they give us an apple and some decent bread and cheese?”

Bittman’s blog, “Bitten”, ON NY Times.