Eating Sanely: A Q&A with Mark Bittman, author of Food Matters

By Josh Hadro with Michael Rau -- Library Journal, 02/19/2009

Mark Bittman believes in eating sanely. I believe in Mark Bittman. By the transitive property, I believe in eating sanely. QED.

Easy enough for a foodie and a recovering philosophy major. But how are others supposed to bootstrap themselves into believing in a rational diet, something that speaks equally to individual health as it does to consumer ethics in terms of the environment, factory farming, and animal rights?

That's exactly the case set out by food writer and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman in Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes, just out from Simon & Schuster. Recently, I and fellow foodie Michael Rau came up with a few questions for Bittman about how he came around to eating sanely, and what we have to gain by tipping our dietary balance in favor of vegetables and away from meat and processed foods.

You've already written How To Cook Everything and How To Cook Everything Vegetarian—that's everything twice. How does Food Matters fit in?
Well, it took me a while to figure that out. When I started working on Food Matters, I was excited because it seemed like such a big departure. But then when I finished and went on a book tour, it didn't feel like a departure at all—I realized that what I'd been doing for years was encouraging people to control what they ate through cooking.

Food Matters is kind of a broadening of that to say, you need to control all of what you eat, not just what you cook. Of course, you can control what you're eating by buying food and cooking it, controlling your ingredients, and not using additives—it's all a little saner. If you think of the first 30 years as my developing this canon of how to cook simple, straightforward, more or less traditional home cooking, now it's how to eat following the same kind of guidelines (but much more specific).

And I've evolved also. It felt gradual, but when I look at what I was writing or thinking eight or ten years ago, it was really different. Back then I wouldn't have really cared much about animal welfare. In fact, someone just reminded me that I said ten years ago, "If pigs were raised in prison, I wouldn't care as long as they tasted good."

Now I feel like it has to go beyond that. I don't subscribe to the all-creatures-are-created-equal kind of theory, and I do think animals are not human. I don't know if that means they're subhuman or just different than humans, but there's certainly no reason to mistreat them as badly as we do. I guess if you're going to kill them and eat them, you're mistreating them to some extent anyway, but there are degrees of that. Animals have become widgets—the environment's not important, animals aren't important, the consumers aren't important; it's just how fast and profitably can we produce meat. If anything is going to affect flavor, that is.

So do examples like the "pigs in prison" line make you want to go back and change anything you've written to fit your current beliefs?
I don't have to go back and change things because I can move forward and change things. When I redid How To Cook Everything in 2005–06, I was constantly going over all these lists. As I was doing that, I thought, "Well, you can't have as big a fish chapter as you used to because there aren't as many fish out there." Not shrimp, and not canned tuna, but flounder, which used to be common, or cod—they're hard to come by now, and very expensive, so why give 30 recipes for those things?

Similarly, I thought, "If I'm eating less meat, and I think everybody should be eating less meat, maybe I don't need 600 or 700 recipes including meat." I thought, "You know, maybe 75 or 100 chicken recipes are enough for a book called How To Cook Everything, and maybe 100 or 150 beef and pork recipes."

The other thing is, if you look at a random ten or 20 weeks of the Minimalist from 2000, then a random 10 or 20 weeks of the column from 2008, you see a complete flip in the proportion of what I used to think of as side dishes and now I think of as main dishes. The whole argument about Food Matters is to flip the proportion of meat to vegetable in your diet.

In LJ's latest Book Buying Survey, cookery ranks No. 2 among top-circulating nonfiction, probably owing to everyone bunkering down and cooking at home to save money. How does eating cheaply figure into the larger scheme of eating sanely?
I think it's a byproduct, but it's a very real and reliable byproduct. If you stock your pantry with whole grains, beans, dried fruit and nuts, and dried tomatoes and mushrooms, you can really cook a huge number of meals with a tiny amount of "fresh" input.

You know, it's funny, when I was finishing Food Matters, those of us who were working on it all looked at each other and said, "It looks like there's some issues about food cost"—this was right at the beginning of the "economic situation"—and we said, "Maybe we should throw a few sentences in there, because this is eating cheap." I keep forgetting to say it when I talk to people, but obviously the cost savings of eating this way are tremendous. I went to the store last week and came home with four shopping bags that cost me $40—obviously because there was so little meat, dairy, and fish.

That's sort of the way I've been doing my cooking recently, which is not to say that I never eat meat or fish, but I have a really well-stocked pantry; I could survive a nuclear war, assuming I survived the initial strike.

Are there any rock-bottom cheap standby recipes that you return to again and again?
It's all of a piece: You cook some grains, you cook some beans, you cook some vegetables, you make a soup, you make a stew—you're sort of mixing and matching. There are recipes for those things in the book, but I don't necessarily pay attention to those recipes anymore. I see that stuff as a pattern.

The recipes in Food Matters are kind of archetypes. You'll find ones that are representative, but for me all of them, and none of them, are standbys—whatever grain I have, whatever vegetables I have, if I have beans, it all goes together. If there are fresh herbs, so much the better. If there aren't, I use Pimentón, cumin, or chiles. It's vegetarian cooking at it's simplest, but it's really just putting stuff together in ways to make it taste good.

In 2007, you took a food-themed road trip across Spain with Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali, and Claudia Bassols for a show called Spain...On the Road Again. How did your Food Matters diet play into eating your way through the Spanish countryside?
There are a couple things I learned: one is that you can't really go to Spain and pretend to be on this diet, especially if you're shooting, because when you're shooting, the producer doesn't want to know what diet you're on, the director doesn't want to know what diet you're on—they want you to eat the pork that's sitting in front of you when the cameras are rolling. And once you start eating, have half a glass of wine. Self-control goes right out the window.

Here's what I did: Whenever I was in or near a good market, I'd just buy as many decent-looking fruits and vegetables that I could eat raw as I could. And that worked pretty well. I was at my all-time low weight (as an adult anyway) when we started the trip, and the fact that we were there for six weeks, and I only gained five pounds was amazing, because I was certainly eating ham every single day.

Al Gore won the Nobel shortly after An Inconvenient Truth. What's next for you?
You mean am I going to win a Nobel? [laughs]. I'd be very happy to get back on the Times best-sellers list. I'm working on a big cookbook that will take this Food Matters approach across the board with somewhere between 300 or 500 recipes instead of 75, which I think are good and representative are just the tip of the iceberg of cooking and thinking this way.

So that'll be The Guide to Being Lessmeatarian?
I love it—it was going to be called The Food Matters Cookbook, but if I could get people using the word "lessmeatarian," I'd be ecstatic.