Mark Bittman is the master of simplicity.

“I wanted to encourage people to cook. I noticed in the ’70s, the ’80s, the ’90s that people had stopped cooking,” he said.

So in his iconic New York Times column “The Minimalist,” he provided one simple recipe weekly. “Simple” meant ingredients that were mostly common to our pantries and dishes that called for a reasonable list of ingredients, never too many. Techniques were basic, and necessary tools were commonplace in the average kitchen. His cookbooks today take the same approach, making cooking less intimidating and more accessible for new cooks.

Cooking opens up people’s experience with food, he said — it allows them to see and learn about different kinds of food, while shopping the market, for instance.

“It motivates them to put more things in their mouths,” he said.

It gets them thinking about what they’re putting into their bodies, its origins, its production.

That endgame is the same one that now has Bittman traveling the country discussing the myriad issues surrounding the U.S. food system. He injected his signature practical simplicity into a complex lecture Thursday at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Bittman touched on a host of hot-button topics, including industrialized farming, monocrops, greenhouse gases, animal abuse, antibiotic use in livestock, pesticides, destruction of the rainforest, GMO labeling, low wages of food-industry workers, processed food and the marketing of junk food.

“If you were to ask someone what the intention of a food system would be, they would probably say it would be about providing nutritious food to people,” he said. Instead, “executing the healthy choice is only accomplished by extraordinary effort.”

“It’s not an understatement to call the current food system a disaster. Chaos is what we have. ‘System’ implies intent and design. This is not the case,” he said, noting that the food industry’s main focus is profit and that many subsidies for food producers encourage production of processed food.

As to the “food movement” that’s risen in response, Bittman called it “nascent.”

“There will be a food movement when political candidates are forced to discuss food issues,” he said. “Until then there’s plenty of work to be done.”

Bittman boiled down that work for everyday folks to two “personal food policies”: recognizing real food and increasing the intake of plants.

“Food is a nutritional substance eaten to maintain life and growth. It’s wholesome and good for you,” he said. “Poison is capable of causing illness or death. Soda — and all sugar-sweetened drinks — are closer to poison than food. This is true of many things in the supermarket.

“Just define food and eat it, and stay away from a diet of sugar and processed food.”

As to rule No. 2, he said, “I’m not anti-meat. I’m a less-meat-arian.

“Eat more foods from the plant kingdom than last week, then eat more the following week than the week before. Then eat more plants the next month than the previous one, then more the next year.”

The key to all this is to be flexible. “Don’t be a monk. I ate potato chips the other day — and I’m OK with that. Just make your diet food-dependent. And try to source well — support your local farmers.”

Bittman, 66, grew up in New York. His mother, as did the vast majority of mothers of the era, cooked dinner every night.

“It was really American, meat and potatoes,” he said of their diet. “We ate canned and, later, frozen vegetables, and tossed salad with iceberg lettuce and winter tomatoes.

“When I was young there was still some local food in New York. The Northeast is not a bad place for growing food. During the spring and summer seasons, there were lots of things growing.”

Bittman began cooking in college when he was 20 years old, motivated by the bad cafeteria food.

“I cooked out of self-defense,” he quipped. “Then I met other people who liked to cook. It was really fun.”

In his early 20s the newbie journalist worked for a community paper and “wrote whatever I wanted to write. No one was interested in anything I wrote until I began writing about food.”

After a stint in New Haven, Conn., through most of the ’80s, Bittman was hired at the Times and wrote his first “Minimalist” column in 1997. That continued through 2011; then he began writing opinion pieces about food policy and food issues. Six months ago Bittman left the paper and moved to California, where he’s been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Besides lecturing around the country, he also joined the Purple Carrot, a company that provides vegan meal kit subscriptions.

And of course there are the cookbooks, which he’s been publishing for some 20 years. Bittman has a knack for understanding the kind of information and direction that appeal to a newbie cook. Beyond recipes, his books provide practical content such as stocking the pantry, outfitting the kitchen with necessary tools, even providing a guide on how to juggle tasks for time efficiency when executing a recipe.

His recent book, “Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Matrix,” is constructed to visually depict the variations of a single recipe.

“It’s not different from what I’ve been doing all along,” he said. “The ‘Matrix’ is the visual culmination.”

The thread through all his cookbooks is to push an understanding of basic techniques and recipes, then changing up flavors.

“I always say, if someone can cook 10 different things, they can cook 100 or 1,000 things, so long as they think about what they did the last time and how they can do it differently this time.”