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Monday, Jul 6, 2009
Mark Bittman's revolutionary "Food Matters" is both a cookbook and a manifesto that shows us how to eat better -- and save the planet.
By Laura Miller
Read more: Books, Environment, Laura Miller, Dieting, Cooking, Reviews, Book reviews, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel
Jan. 5, 2009 | Mark Bittman is the anti-foodies' foodie, one of the few culinary writers around who don't indulge in either the precious chefolatry of the Gourmet magazine set or the remedial pandering of Rachael Ray. In his instant-classic cookbooks and "The Minimalist" columns for the New York Times, he treats the preparation of food as an enjoyable daily activity that needn't be fetishized but that also shouldn't be reduced to layering prepared foods in a casserole dish, popping it in the oven, and chirping "Yummers!" At a time when one-half of America seems to view cooking as an elite hobby while the other regards it as an esoteric mystery, Bittman is that blessed thing, a practical cook.
The essence of the Bittman approach is simplicity, ease and quality, but that means he has to walk a fine and constantly shifting line. Americans' attitudes toward what we eat are laden with class and cultural baggage. It's no coincidence that when the conservative Club for Growth PAC produced its famous 2004 television commercial featuring an elderly couple telling Howard Dean to go "back to Vermont," two out of the seven outré practices Dean and his "left-wing freak show" were accused of involved comestibles: latte drinking and sushi eating. Yet the rules keep changing. Some delicacies once considered exotic -- balsamic vinegar and chipotle chile, for example -- seem to have infiltrated every Applebee's and Boston Market, while others -- poor, blameless arugula -- remain synonyms for yuppie pretension and self-indulgence. We invest food with a tremendous amount of meaning; you routinely hear people touting the ethnic harmony of their town or neighborhood by describing the diversity of its restaurants, as if an understanding of Hinduism or Mogul architecture can be ingested along with a plate of chicken tikka.
Now Bittman has waded even further into the fray by publishing "Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating With More Than 75 Recipes," an unusual blend of manifesto, self-help manual and cookbook designed to convince people that they can drastically improve their diets with relatively little discomfort. Not only that, but in doing so, Bittman avows, they can also save the planet and relieve some of the pressure on their pocketbooks. As promises go, that's a whopper, a super-trifecta encompassing the major obsessions of the current moment: weight loss, environmentalism and penny-pinching.
The formula is very simple (Bittman is the Minimalist, after all): "Eat less of certain foods, specifically animal products, refined carbs, and junk food; and more of others, specifically plants, in close to their natural state." It is a recommendation that owes much (as Bittman repeatedly acknowledges) to the work of Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food"; the spirit of Pollan presides over this book like the Virgin Mary over a Catholic Church. In fact, you could describe "Food Matters" as "applied Pollan," because Pollan, for all his endlessly inventive, inquisitive and adventurous writings on American eating and food production, lacks Bittman's pragmatic touch.
Granted, it's a blast to read, in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," about Pollan's efforts to bond with a conventionally raised beef steer or to serve up a meal made entirely out of foraged materials, but a delightful reading experience doesn't always translate into a course of action for the average person. Conversely, Pollan's prescription for judicious eating -- "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" -- is catchy enough to have achieved mantra status in some corners of the Internet, but as recommendations go, it proves a tad gnomic, like the utterance of a Zen master that becomes harder to get a hold on the longer you think about it. "Food Matters," by contrast, explains exactly how to follow Pollan's advice and why.
The first part of Bittman's book provides a concise, streamlined overview of data that Pollan and nutrition experts like Marion Nestle have offered before in greater detail. In brief, our current meat-heavy system of food production is unsustainable, a waste of resources and a source of pollution in the form of pesticides and hormones as well as methane gas from livestock manure. Our overreliance on a few big crops (especially corn and soy) depletes the soil, demanding the use of ever greater quantities of chemical fertilizers, whose manufacture requires massive amounts of fossil fuel. The foods produced by agribusiness, in the form of highly processed flours, fats and -- above all -- high-fructose corn syrup, have little nutritional value and foster a host of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure as well as obesity. The industries fabricating these foods have bought and paid for American politicians and government agencies, costing taxpayers billions of dollars per year in subsidies and other benefits paid to businesses who profit while eroding the public's health.
For Bittman personally, the moment of truth was twofold. At 57, he'd gained 50 pounds over his college weight and had developed high cholesterol, high blood sugar (especially scary for someone with a family history of diabetes) and sleep apnea, a condition caused by his excess weight. At the same time, as a food writer he could no longer ignore his "increasing disgust with the way most meat is grown in this country." The lives of factory-farmed livestock can only be characterized as "misery," and the resulting meat and dairy products are full of nutritionally dubious additives like hormones and antibiotics (which in turn wind up in the water supply, further damaging everyone's health).
With a colleague, Kerri Conan, Bittman devised a plan they called "vegan until six." They ate almost no animal products at all until dinnertime, no simple carbohydrates and no junk food. (Simple carbs are sugars, white flours and other processed grains like white rice.) At dinner, they ate as they had before, although in time Bittman found that even his evening meals came to include more "vegetables, fruits, legumes and whole grains and less meat, sugar, junk food, and overrefined carbohydrates." It was easy, and in a matter of months he'd lost 35 pounds, lowered his cholesterol and blood sugar, and had no trouble sleeping through the night. Most important, he continues to eat this way and is content to do so for the rest of his life.
After the statistics-rich opening chapters, the latter half of "Food Matters" resembles a traditional diet book in tone, complete with testimonials and assurances that the reader has plenty of options to do "whatever works best for you." It's not Bittman's fault that most of the books written in this manner are snow jobs, presenting bizarrely distorted dietary regimes as sensible designs for living. I'm not sure how else he could have asserted that his method is genuinely flexible and reasonable, as opposed to masquerading as such the way most diets do. Diet book authors coopted the rhetoric of prudence (not to mention quasi-scientific lingo about ketosis and glycemic indexes) long ago, leaving laypeople with nothing to guide them through the wilderness of fads and crazes but their own good judgment.
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