To Eat Less Meat, Maybe We Should Just Be Ourselves

In yesterday's post about eating less meat, I said I would comment on a video Mark Bittman gave at TED, the annual ideas conference. Little did I know I would have cause to respond to it so soon.

In today's Dining section of the New York Times, Bittman has an article entitled "Putting Meat Back in Its Place." The article is a series of pragmatic recommendations for eating less meat; the video is a polemic against eating meat. If you agreed with the latter, you're going to need the former.

If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend watching Bittman's talk at TED. Here it is:

The video begins with an image of a humble cow, followed by an image of a mushroom cloud, while Bittman narrates. He says: "I think that this [the image of the cow], may be this generation's version of this [mushroom cloud]."

The juxtaposition of images is striking, if a bit confusing. Here in 2008, nuclear technology is a distant memory. We think of the threat posed by nuclear technology primarily through the lens of security -- political, social -- and forget that it posed a significant threat to our environment, and our public health, as well.

What this juxtaposition does make clear is that Bittman has stepped out of being simply an apolotical cookbook author, and into a slightly different role. Following the release of How To Cook Everything, which is now in its fourteenth edition and has sold over a million copies, Bittman has established himself as a purveyor of good food, reduced to its most essential parts. Now he's dispensing advice not only on how to eat, but what to eat. He admits as much when he says, "I write about food, I write about cooking. I take it quite seriously, but I'm here to talk about something that's become very important to me in the last year or two. It is about food, but it's not about cooking, per se."

Oh really?

This is a clever distinction, but really, cooking is a means of exploring food.

Yet exploring food is something that Americans did little of in the latter half of this century. We followed home-cooked dinners and fast food for how little time they require. What we gained in time, we lost in knowledge. Food became a mystery to us.

The wave of interest in food over the past few years has been, in part, not so much a trend but an awakening. Americans were hungry not simply for food, but for an explanation of where food came from. We are now eating not simply for nutrition, but for information. Hence the popularity of Michael Pollan and of Alice Waters, to say nothing of figures like Alton Brown.

It seems to me that this has been part of Bittman's project from the beginning. He did not simply set out to write a cookbook, but to write the cookbook. It was to be comprehensive; from this book you could build a kitchen, for it contains not only recipes, but advice on what you need, and how to cook what you want. It's about educating the humble, intimated home cook so they can cook for themselves.

Common to all of these people is a simple hope: that educating people to become cooks will mean educating people to diversify the food they eat. None of them are arguing that you become a vegetarian. They are arguing that you become what humans have evolved to be: omnivores. Maybe a part of the answer to the climate consumption question is that we simply need to be ourselves.

And so what do we do?

Following the publication of How To Cook Everything, Bittman also published How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. Interestingly, if you go to the How to Cook Everything website, it's not the first and most famous book that gets center stage, but the vegetarian follow up. Bittman has argued that you "don't preach." He says, "No one likes a proselytizer."

Bittman is trying -- and has so far managed -- to do both.