Food matters

Mark Bittman is my hero. He loves food, but isn’t a food snob. His blog and webcasts over at NYTimes.com are informative, engaging and useful.

His previous books, How To Cook Everything and How To Cook Everything Vegetarian are for the practical cook who wants simple, delicious food.

His latest book Food Matters presents a way of eating that addresses issues near and dear to all of us. He says that eating judiciously will help us save the earth, save money and lose weight.

Where do I sign up?

He writes: “Industrialized meat production has contributed to climate change and stimulated a fundamental change in our diets that has contributed to our being overweight, even obese, and more susceptible to diabetes, heat disease, stroke and perhaps even cancer.”

He points out that the livestock industry contributes more greenhouse gases than the automobile industry. And here you were thinking you had to buy a hybrid car to be greener. Turns out, you only have to eat less meat.

Bittman proposes a “responsible” way of eating (he refuses to call it a diet) that “depends on foods that require little or no processing, packaging, or transportation, and those that efficiently convert the energy required to raise them into nutritional calories to sustain human beings.”

This means shifting your food diet to more whole food — food with ingredients you can actually see — and mostly plants. He wages war against snack food and anything that has more than five ingredients on the packaging, or has ingredients with more than three syllables.

Further, he proposes to shift our choices to foods that have low caloric density. That is, food that has less calories for per kilogram of weight.

He writes early on: “It doesn’t take a scientist to know that a handful of peanuts is better for you than a Snickers bar, that food left closer to its natural state is more nutritious than food that has been refined to within an inch of its life, and that eating unprecedented quantities of animals who have been drugged and generally mistreated all their lives isn’t good for you.”

When he says no to bread and potato chips, you start wondering if he’s insane. But still the eating plan isn’t militant or terribly restrictive. It just refocuses your thinking and presents options you’ve not previously considered.

He deals with cravings easily: have a steak, if you must have one, but try not to do it too often.

Recipes here, much like in his previous books, are easy to enough execute and don’t require ingredients that we can’t get locally.

I think the easiest argument to make for this plan is that Bittman himself lost 35 pounds in the six months it took to write this book — and hasn’t gained any back since then.

So. Buy it, read it, LIVE IT. You can find more of my hero at MarkBittman.com.

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Meanwhile, you can find me at http://fastfoodie.net or e-mail me at annaria@gmail.com.