Laura Miller on the anti-foodies’ foodie:
The essence of the Bittman approach is simplicity, ease and quality, but that means he has to walk a fine and constantly shifting line. Americans’ attitudes toward what we eat are laden with class and cultural baggage. It’s no coincidence that when the conservative Club for Growth PAC produced its famous 2004 television commercial featuring an elderly couple telling Howard Dean to go “back to Vermont,” two out of the seven outré practices Dean and his “left-wing freak show” were accused of involved comestibles: latte drinking and sushi eating. Yet the rules keep changing. Some delicacies once considered exotic — balsamic vinegar and chipotle chile, for example — seem to have infiltrated every Applebee’s and Boston Market, while others — poor, blameless arugula — remain synonyms for yuppie pretension and self-indulgence. We invest food with a tremendous amount of meaning; you routinely hear people touting the ethnic harmony of their town or neighborhood by describing the diversity of its restaurants, as if an understanding of Hinduism or Mogul architecture can be ingested along with a plate of chicken tikka.
Now Bittman has waded even further into the fray by publishing “Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating With More Than 75 Recipes,” an unusual blend of manifesto, self-help manual and cookbook designed to convince people that they can drastically improve their diets with relatively little discomfort. Not only that, but in doing so, Bittman avows, they can also save the planet and relieve some of the pressure on their pocketbooks. As promises go, that’s a whopper, a super-trifecta encompassing the major obsessions of the current moment: weight loss, environmentalism and penny-pinching.
The formula is very simple (Bittman is the Minimalist, after all): “Eat less of certain foods, specifically animal products, refined carbs, and junk food; and more of others, specifically plants, in close to their natural state.” It is a recommendation that owes much (as Bittman repeatedly acknowledges) to the work of Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food”; the spirit of Pollan presides over this book like the Virgin Mary over a Catholic Church. In fact, you could describe “Food Matters” as “applied Pollan,” because Pollan, for all his endlessly inventive, inquisitive and adventurous writings on American eating and food production, lacks Bittman’s pragmatic touch.
Wouldn’t it be good if we could come to understand the very real problems that come with our industrial food system before we have a rude awakening brought on by an agronomic version of the financial crisis?
More on Mark Bittman from a NY Observer profile last November, and his Dec 2007 Ted Talk (which contains elements found in Pollan’s — later — Dear Mr. President-Elect). His is a dowdy kitchen but, said one reader, “it’s not the size of the kitchen that counts, but how you use it.” Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (Completely Revised 10th Anniversary Edition) was at the top of Ezra Klein’s list of favorite cookbooks.
So far as I can tell, the book has nothing to do with the film.