Mark Bittman's Food Matters

I just listened to an interview on NPR with Mark Bittman, The New York Times food columnist and author of Food Matters. Bittman’s book is about the environmental impact of industrial farming, something those of you who have been reading my columns will find familiar, and how to make individual changes in diet to have a positive impact. As Bittman points out, all industrial farming has an environmental impact, so it is about being conscious of how much of your diet is reliant on industrial farming.

Bittman’s advice is simple; eat more fruits and vegetables and cut down on meat and dairy consumption by 10%. The U.S. processes 10 billion pounds of animal products every year, so a 10% reduction is a reduction of 1 billion pounds. Considering that meat and dairy farms contribute 30% of greenhouse gases globally, that is no small impact.

And Bittman repeats something that I have believed for a long time – doing something good for the environment has all kinds of personal benefits:

As for Bittman's personal diet, it used to be that he'd eat bacon and eggs for breakfast and a hamburger for lunch. But a few years ago, he changed his ways. Now, a typical day's fare might include a bowl of oatmeal (see Bittman's recipe for porridge) with maple syrup for breakfast, fruits and vegetables for lunch, then a more "old-style" type meal — which might include meat — for dinner.

After just a few months of the new diet, Bittman says, he noticed improvements to his health: "I lost 35 pounds — which is about 15 percent of my body weight — my cholesterol went down 40 points; my blood sugar went from borderline bad to just fine; [and] my knees, which were starting to give out as a result of running at too high a weight, got better."

All of those things — and, he says, he's shrinking his carbon footprint.

"Feeling like you're changing the world," he says. "That's a nice thing, too."

As Bittman writes in his book, which also has recipes, all of this can be done without much sacrifice. He has not ‘given up’ meat, he just doesn’t eat it for every meal. He writes that “the principles are simple: deny nothing; enjoy everything, but eat plants first and most. There's no gimmick, no dogma, no guilt, and no food police.”

It’s a smart way to live and a smart way to help the planet.