Continuing my real food reading list, I recently finished Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes“Food Matters A Guide to Conscious Eating, by the legendary Mark Bittman.

Bittman writes a popular column at the New York Times (probably the only thing worth reading in that paper) as well as having written a few cookbooks (the How to Cook Everything…series.) I’m most familiar with his column; his recipes are precise and always garner rave reviews. They never feature cream of cr*p soup and often are vegetarian, satisfying main dishes. Love the column!

Food Matters, not so much.

Food Matters is about why food matters as well as being the how-to book for Bittman’s diet plan, which is famously summed up with “Vegetarian until 6. He calls it sane eating in the book. That is, eat vegetarian meals all day and indulge at dinner, if you wish. It’s a diet not of deprivation but of planned luxury.

As is the case with similar diet/food ecology and nutrition books, the first part is an exploration of the deplorable state of American nutrition. Bittman has a slightly different angle, often focusing on the ecological aspects of eating meat, including the impact of corn diets and CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations, or meat factories, basically).

Indeed, the book opens with Bittman’s inspiration for changing his eating habits:

Two years ago, a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture landed on my desk. Called Livestock’s Long Shadow, it revealed a stunning statistic: global livestock production is responsible for about one-fifth of all greenhouse gases- more than transportation.

This part is best left skimmed. The book was published before all of the new information regarding the manipulation of man-made global warming data and the scandal at the CRU; he’s one of the intellectuals who drank the man-made global warming kool-aid in a big way. The message to eat less meat to save the earth runs throughout the book.

The tagline of the book is Lose Weight, Heal the Planet and that’s what you can expect to read about – how if we would just change our eating, all will be right with the world. The birds will sing, the ground will light up when we walk, and nature will finally be able to nurture. Okay, it might not be quite that extreme, but I found myself mentally rolling my eyes more than once.

Bittman only superficially touches on many subjects to drive home the “US Meat Consumption=Bad” message, without exploring the nuances of choices and political realities. For example, on p. 24 he writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that soy and corn are killers, whether directly (soy oil is used to make trans fat, and high fructose corn syrup is about the most useless form of calories ever created) or indirectly (their cultivation is an environmental nightmare, and as animal feed in factories they’re perpetuating a destructive system.) And their use in these capacities is depriving millions of the food they desperately need. If we simply shifted resources to growing crops that fed people directly, we’d go a long way toward resolving many issues of health, agriculture, and the environment.

I agree with the first part of the paragraph, but found the solution – to simply shift resources – a gross misunderstanding of the issues involved. The truth is, even if we did not make HFCS out of corn, we couldn’t ship it to starving people in Africa. Those countries would literally rather let their people starve than let GMO grain into their countries. If we switched from high yield corn and soybeans, the farmers who have bought into Monsanto’s arms race with ever bigger farms would likely face bankruptcy- leaving American farmland untended. And, if Americans didn’t have access to cheap corn (in the form of cheap processed meals) there would be a political shake up and possibly riots; Americans see cheap, easy, quick food as a right and often consider nutrition a distant priority after convenience, cost, and taste. Feeding the world isn’t as simple as fat Americans eating fewer cows, no matter how easy it is to rely on that stereotype.

Other chapters predictably lament the obesity epidemic, discuss local sustainable farming, critique the current food pyramid, and so on, again, without in-depth analysis or thoughtful consideration. Quite frankly, I had higher expectations for Bittman’s journalism skills, based on his excellent writing in other venues, and I was mightily disappointed.

He does mention that sane eating might take more effort.

You don’t have to cook to eat sanely, but cooking helps, and cooking is what part II of Food Matters is about. (p. 104)

Bittman spends a bit of time discussing the Food Matters kitchen, and this is the most useful part of the book. He discusses how to plan to eat more plants, how to prepare a salad to last the week, how to use the freezer, and how to eat out. Unfortunately, this section is not quite four pages long.

The second half of the book explores Bittman’s diet, and includes menu plans for two weeks and recipes. The recipes don’t seem nearly as tasty as the ones regularly featured in his column, perhaps because there are no luscious photographs to drool over. The format of the book is a poor one to take with you into the kitchen.

Overall, it is the same information found in other books, but with a more preachy style and an attempted eco-guilt trip thrown in. Does eating meat use more natural resources than eating beans? Yes. Do we need to feel like we are personally destroying Mother Nature as we tuck into a steak? No. Bittman admits he is not, and never will be a vegetarian, and his version of sane eating involves eating meat only once a day. A sensible compromise, and about the only useful thing I took away from the book. Actually, I already pretty much did that, but now I can name drop that I eat lunch the Bittman way; the book wasn’t a total loss.

My advice? Skip the book; watch Food, Inc. and read his column, instead

Previous reviews:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Made From Scratch by Jenna Woginrich

HFCS

CAFO

GMO