"Slow global warming! Lose weight!" Oh, and stop cruelty to animals. And save money.
So trumpets Mark Bittman's Web site about his latest book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating.
Bittman seems to be everywhere these days: issuing huge tomes on cooking everything; traipsing through Spain with my gal Gwynnie; cooking on YouTube. One can be forgiven for thinking: Can there be anything new to uncover? Perhaps not. This new book is less a unique idea than a compendium of a few New York Times articles Bittman has done or contributed to about why eating too much meat is bad for the environment, and what he, Bittman, did about it.
However, these things do bear repeating. Meat, especially beef, takes huge amounts of energy to grow and transport, energy that could go toward feeding people instead -- or warming houses or putting gas in cars. One of the more stunning facts Bittman cites: It requires 40 calories to produce one calorie of beef protein. "Eating a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent, energy-wise, of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home." Say what? Oh, and meat production is supposed to double globally by 2050.
There are other gems, too, like the 2,200 calories it takes to produce a can of diet soda, or the 2,400 calories it takes to make a 1-quart polyethylene bottle of water. Just the bottle. I love this stuff!
Bittman's recourse is almost brutally simple: Don't eat animal products before 6 p.m. (Nor any junk food. Nor any alcohol. But let's not ruin the simplicity of the message.) In doing so, he reigned in his iffy cholesterol and blood sugar numbers and lost 25 pounds. He freely admits that he's an all-or-nothing kind of a guy, so this may not work for everyone. But for many of us, like yours truly, its a fabulous idea to impose more discipline during daylight hours, when you're feeling more alert and perky. It does work. In fact, it's taken me closer to going meatless than anything else I've tried. And it's nice to think I'm doing my green bit, too. Like getting your workout done early in the day.
Plus, Bittman has an ace. His recipes almost always rock (I have several of his books), and this book has some 70 of them. I might buy the book for these alone, particularly the awesome breakfast ideas: breakfast couscous, bread pudding, burritos. It also includes many, many strategies for cooking and storing beans, an important staple if you're cutting back meat and dairy.
If you want a full modern food education, wade through Michael Pollan's An Omnivore's Dilemma and its companion, In Defense of Food. But for a shortie intro, this is your book. Me, I'll take 'em all -- from the library, of course, thereby saving the energy required to print and distribute new books.
~BurbMom
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