Mark Bittman wants you to know he’s not dead.

Since his departure from The New York Times in 2015 to join a food start up, Mr. Bittman has had the unsettling feeling that people think he’s six feet under.

“It was like I kind of fell off the map,” Mr. Bittman said.

But the 69-year-old journalist and author of 20 books, including “How to Cook Everything,” is very much alive. And now he is going to work for Medium, the online platform and publisher, to head Salty, an online magazine focused on food.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” Mr. Bittman said in a phone interview from the South by Southwest conference this month in Austin, Tex. “I pitched it to several different people and came close a bunch of different times.”

Mr. Bittman wrote for The Times for three decades and started his column “The Minimalist” in 1997. It lasted until 2010. He spent five years as an opinion columnist and food writer for The New York Times Magazine. Over 1,200 of Mr. Bittman’s recipes can still be found in The Times’s Cooking section and app.