Mark Bittman, NY Time writer, apologizes for calling Chick-Fil-A exec ‘pig’ while announcing his death
New York Times food writer and reporter Mark Bittman issued an apology on his nytimes.com blog on Tuesday for a critical post on the recent death of Chick-fil-A’s vice-president for public relations Donald Perry.
“In a recent blog post, I used an inappropriate phrase to refer to the late VP of PR for Chick-fil-A. My choice of words did not rise to either my own standards or to The Times’s, and the phrase has been removed from the post. I regret this lapse.”
Bittman deleted the phrase in bold below from an August 3 round-up blog post. Here’s the text of the original post and a screen shot below.
Sysco is the latest food giant—it’s the largest food distributor in the country—to come out against gestation crate confinement of pigs. The National Pork Producers Council’s communications director was quoted in the National Journal saying: “So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets…I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around.” Really.
Speaking of pigs, the VP of PR for Chick-fil-A dropped dead of a heart attack the week after the chain’s latest homophobia/anti-gay marriage scandal. Here’s an obit, and here’s more about him. Meanwhile, Chick-fil-A had record-breaking profits after its President, Dan Cathy, drew a line in the sand over same-sex marriage.
The “Speaking of pigs” was removed, while the “dropped dead of a heart attack” remains.
Bittman is no stranger to injecting politics into his food articles.
A March 29, 2011 column for the print edition Bittman announced he was fasting in protest against a Republican plan to cut food stamps: “These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts – they’d barely make a dent – will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now….This is a moral issue; the budget is a moral document….we can sink further into debt and amoral individualism by demonizing and starving the poor. Which side are you on?”