Andrew Brusso
There's something reassuring about Mark Bittman's attitude toward cooking. The longtime author of "The Minimalist" recipe column for The New York Times food section has always advocated a simple and direct approach.
What home cooks tend to like about Bittman's recipes is that they're quick and customizable; he creates the feeling that you can't mess them up. They don't go on for pages, and you don't have to start prepping three days in advance. Maybe you might want to soak some beans overnight, but if you don't get around to doing that, that's okay too. Don't have any millet or farro on hand? Use rice. Nearly every recipe is followed by easy variations. A recent feature in the Times Sunday magazine was less recipe than flow chart, a mix-and-match guide to coming up with inventive egg dishes from flavorful basics like salad greens, caramelized onions, soy sauce and even humble toast.
Following a health scare, Bittman in 2008 published Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, a more dramatic wake-up call that encompassed the health and environmental dangers behind the United States' immense consumption of meat and processed foods. The American diet isn't just making people sick, it's a large contributor to global warming, Bittman wrote, from the greater amount of energy that it takes to raise and feed on meat compared to plants, to the energy devoted to packaging and delivering junk food - "food" that sometimes provides no nutrition. It takes 2,200 calories of energy to make a 12-ounce can of diet soda, Bittman noted in the introduction; 70% of that goes to the production of the aluminum can.
Bittman's idea was not to give up meat entirely but to eat vegetarian, almost vegan, before 6 p.m., and increase overall the beans, grains, fruits and vegetables eaten. Processed foods are largely out the door. But it's a positive, not a punitive, path. The 75 recipes included in Food Matters were meant to be straightforward enough to get people into the kitchen and tempting enough to counter the onslaught of advertising for fast and processed foods. Bittman followed it with The Food Matters Cookbook, more recipes in a like vein, although he may still be best known for his two walloping go-to references, How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.
Early in 2011, Bittman retired "The Minimalist" to write a weekly opinion column on food for the Times as well as advice on cooking weekly in the Sunday magazine section. Column topics have ranged from school lunches to the farm bill, from McDonald's requiring its suppliers to phase out gestation crates (and why that's key across the industry) to the bankruptcy of Hostess. Often, he takes on the hidden human costs of the industrialization of the food supply.
Mark Bittman comes to Monona Terrace on Saturday, April 21, to speak at Isthmus Green Day. In an interview, he muses over whether Monsanto is more evil than Pepsi and whether the government should put a tax on fat. He also discusses the "pleasures and joys and thrills of cooking and eating."
What prompted your move from writing "The Minimalist" cooking column to writing opinion columns for the Times about food and food policy? Was it a feeling that writing about cooking and recipes wasn't enough anymore?
Personally, yes, it wasn't enough anymore for me. I wanted new challenges, and I was frustrated by not having a platform for talking about things that I saw as being important.
I will also say that writing recipes, encouraging people to cook and making recipes doable for people is a very important thing. I would never stop doing that, and as you know I haven't stopped. I just felt I had the energy and the wherewithal to branch out into an area that's obviously related - something that I was fairly conversant with then, and am more conversant with now.
The irony is that the people I'm closest to in the food world right now feel there's a danger of us moving too far in the direction of thinking about what's wrong and what needs to be fixed, and not talking enough about the pleasures and joys and thrills of cooking and eating.
Do you have any evidence that people are starting to cook at home more?
There is some evidence of that. The trend is positive.
What do people say is the greatest impediment, if they hit a wall?
I guess I don't hear from [those] people - I'm not saying it doesn't happen. It's like when recipes don't work, it's rare for someone to tell me that. I urge people to tell me that, but often people blame themselves. But I know that not every recipe is perfect.
What about cooking intimidates people?
They don't know how to do it and they want it to be magic. It's like buying running shoes and assuming that you're going to be a runner, or joining a gym and assuming you're going to be in good shape. And buying a cookbook and assuming it's going to make you a cook doesn't work.
What works is practice. In all of those cases what works is repetition. The willingness to make mistakes, practice and learn by repetition is all you need to be a decent cook. Obviously you need some money, you need some recipes. You do not need some kind of special hand-eye coordination the way you do to be a good tennis player. It's more like driving, something that 99% of the people in this country do.
A while back you wrote about a Danish law taxing foods with high levels of fat and sugar.
They started with just fat, actually - they are talking about extending it to sugar.
It seems like the political climate in the U.S. right now would make a law like this extremely unlikely. Do you think things could ever move in that direction?
Yes, but that's because I'm an optimist.
What would it take?
It's interesting. Even people that I think are progressives and allied with me, and think kind of the way I think, are sort of anti-tax. They'd rather do carrots than sticks. Myself, I think we need and want both. What is it going to take? If President Obama wins, gets 60% of the vote, and Democrats control the House and the Senate, it'll be interesting to see what happens. But I still don't think we'll see a tax.
I think taxing fat is the wrong idea anyway. I think taxing soda, taxing junk food, regulating or eliminating marketing [of it] to kids, putting age limits on how old you have to be to buy soda by yourself without an adult, is the right idea.
I think treating soda, especially soda, the way we've treated tobacco is an important thing to do. Anything in that direction I think is really good. Right now we've seen very little on the national level, and I don't think we're going to see much on the national level. But we are going to see some stuff on the municipal and county and maybe even state levels, and that might spur things to happen more nationally.
It's a long process. It took us a long time to get into this situation and it's going to take us a while to get out of it.
This past year refocused attention on the banks and Wall Street and their profits at the expense of the poor and middle class. How food corporations reap profits at the expense of the health of consumers can be seen as similar. What do you think people can do politically to start making changes?
First of all, I would vote, and I would vote for the most progressive candidate you can find. Then I would work to make changes on a municipal and county level. They're easier to make; we have more control over local politics. That's obviously not going to affect Big Food in a big way, but it could affect it in a small way.
My guess is that we would not be having this particular aspect of this conversation were it not for the Occupy movement, and I do believe that the Occupy movement changed the tenor of the conversation in the U.S. A year ago, people were saying, "We all have to take a hit, the economy is down, everybody has to take less and be less." And in the last year, what's happened is people have said, "Actually, there's a lot of people in this country who are doing extremely well, and it is at the expense of most of the people."
That is a different attitude, and I think it is more widespread than we've had in the U.S. since maybe the 1970s. Obviously I'm a fan of that.
I was reading a post making the rounds on Facebook recently about boycotting Monsanto. There was a list of food companies supposedly owned by Monsanto, and somebody commented that the point shouldn't be whether they are Monsanto-owned or not, but that these are all companies producing highly processed foods that we shouldn't be eating anyway.
Ah, very good point. That's fantastic. I was thinking of doing a piece to be called something like, "Is Monsanto truly evil?" Like, is there true evil in the world, and does Monsanto represent it? It was a passing fancy, it's not really worth discussing, because I'm not sure Monsanto is "worse" than Pepsi, for example, or any number of other companies that basically market things that are bad for us and profit from them. It would be nice if that didn't happen.
But picking on Monsanto or Pepsi, or McDonald's, which I do myself a lot - let's not miss the point that the stuff they make is made by plenty of other people. Monsanto may be the exception. But in general, the bad food that Pepsi makes is made by plenty of other companies, so boycotting Pepsi is not really as effective as just changing your diet.
In changing one's diet, in eating more whole foods, how important is it to go organic as opposed to just buying, say, a green pepper in the bin at the regular grocery store?
My simple answer is the real choice here is not between a head of broccoli and an organic head of broccoli. It's between a head of broccoli and Tater Tots or a cheeseburger or a bag of chips or Cheez Whiz. The first choice to make is to eat more real food. If you want to worry about organic stuff after that, fine; organic stuff is probably preferable. But the difference between not real food and real food is enormous, and the difference between organic and non-organic is much less enormous, in my view.
The other thing is that organic doesn't mean what it used to mean. People who sell organic food follow the letter of the law, but many, many fewer follow the spirit of what organic meant 10 years ago - so you have industrial production of organic food. I think most people who want to buy organic food want also to buy non-industrial food. And many people assume that organic means non-industrial, and that it means "fair." It does not mean either.
It means pesticide-free, antibiotic free, GMO-free maybe, because that's very hard to regulate at this point. But it does not mean the workers are being treated well; it does not really mean that the land is being replenished in a way that it's replenished on a small farm.
Local food, regional food, let's say, is a better judge of quality than so-called organic food. But I want to reiterate that I really think that the important choices to make are choices between real foods and processed foods. When it comes to your personal decision-making, the best thing you can do is not say, "I'm having an organic cheeseburger," but say, "I was going to have a cheeseburger, but I'm going to have rice and beans instead." Worry about the rice and beans' pedigree later on.
That's a comforting thought.
I'm not the guy who brings up organic. I'm not the guy who brings up local. I'm the guy who brings up eating real food. I think you can shop at Key Food or whatever your local crummy supermarket is and eat quite well. People with little money can eat non-junk food. And I am adamant about this.
How do you feel about the trend of nose-to-tail eating?
As an eater, I'm completely in love with it. As someone who is concerned about the ecology of eating, it is a good trend. If you're going to kill an animal, you might as well eat every single part of it. Our problem is that we eat chicken breasts and nothing else. If we ate chicken livers, if we ate chicken legs, we'd be killing fewer chickens - we'd be getting our craving for meat and high levels of protein from other products.
Head-to-tail is a cool thing from an eater's perspective. It's also an important thing from the perspective of people who want to eat animals but who understand that they need to be raised, slaughtered, processed and eaten more efficiently. It's a nasty-sounding word, but it's true. If you're not interested in pork livers or brains or tongues or whatever, I guess I wouldn't say that should disqualify you from eating pork, but you might think about what this means about your eating of animals. It's not the most important question, but it's an interesting consideration.
What are you cooking these days?
I'm hoping to cook tonight, tomorrow night and Sunday night. I have fantastic beans at my house, so I try to have cooked beans all the time. Whenever I travel, I look for whatever they're growing locally in the world of beans, which is really fun. They're easy to carry, and it's not quite smuggling if you're carrying them internationally. I try to have greens and other vegetables, I try to have long-keeping vegetables, and I try to have herbs. It's a luxury to have fresh herbs in the house, but it's so much fun.
So that's how I cook. I might have pasta with lettuce, butter, Parmesan and dill tonight, or I might end up stopping at the store and, if there's a nice piece of fish, buying it. It's really quite spontaneous. And I want to start writing about that kind of spontaneity in cooking. That's the thing I really enjoy.
Mark Bittman will speak at Isthmus Green Day, the free environmental expo at Monona Terrace. It runs from 9 am to 5 pm on Saturday, April 21, with Bittman scheduled to give the keynote address at 2 pm. Isthmus Green Day also features booths with an emphasis on sustainability and demonstrations by local chefs.
