Forget religious leaders—Americans feel spiritually vacant
without a dieting guru, and we’ve been without one since that rumored
Atkins heart attack incident. I’d like to nominate cookbook author and
New York Times columnist Mark Bittman to fill the vacancy.
Bittman is a practical, no-nonsense advocate for home
cooking—one imagines that if you told him that you’re “just not a
good cook,” he’d hand you a copy of his invaluable How to Cook
Everything and tell you to get over yourself. His new book Food
Matters is equal parts environmental polemic and diet plan, couched
in accessible pragmatism and prompted, Bittman says, by a UN report
that attributed one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases to livestock
production. To put that number in perspective: “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 the lights on at
home.” The solution to both global warming and imminent fatness? Eat
more plants.
But wait, didn’t Michael Pollan already tell us that? Well, yes, but
Pollan didn’t provide 100-plus pages of recipes explaining how exactly
one goes about it. And other than the highly sensible edict of getting
as many of your calories as possible from plant sources and avoiding
over-processed junk food, the Food Matters diet isn’t
particularly prescriptive—where Pollan ad-
vocates eating
locally, Bittman’s focus is on mitigating the effects of industrial
farming by reducing the amount of meat in the average diet.
“I think the answer is, eat any vegetables you can,” he tells me in
a phone interview from San Francisco. “I have no problem with
locavorism, I have no problem with organic food, but I don’t think that
those are the primary solutions. Organic is well and good, but you
cannot produce meat in the numbers we produce it now and make it well.
You can call for grass-fed beef or you can call for organic beef and
that still doesn’t solve the basic problem: The land isn’t there for
it. The water isn’t there for it.” And what’s good for the environment
is good for the waistline, as consumption of meat and processed corn
syrup aren’t doing anyone any favors.
“At this point it’s really all about balance. The gist of my
argument is to eat more plants. If you want to get one-third of your
calories from alcohol and two-thirds from Brussels sprouts, that’s
still probably better than most people.”
The problem is that without livestock, the land loses fertility. The prairies evolved with ruminants eating and trampling organic matter and building topsoil.
Cattle are being raised on grass, in number 4 times what was thought to be possible. The problem is government subsidies for corn, wheat, soy, etc.. That has thrown the system out of balance. Organic/Biodynamic (having multiple crops chickens with grapes) agriculture has been shown to produce 80% more food than conventional. The problem is that it is not competitive as the government subsidizes grain and it is more labor intensive. But hey we are trying to create jobs, lets return to where 30% of the population was employed in the agriculture sector.
The prairies did NOT evolve with the density of cattle that modern ranching has inflicted, though. Soil compaction from overgrazing is not good for prairie ecosystems.