Mark Bittman

Transcription

LIV WU: Hi everyone, welcome. I'm Liv, I'm on the food team, and I don't need to say anything but to say Mark Bittman is in the house, I think. [APPLAUSE] LIV WU: So, he's columnist at the New York Times, he wrote about food, and for me, what's most interesting about the man is the trajectory of starting with the pleasures of eating to let me show you how to do it, and you are all, I think, devoted followers of "How to Cook Anything" and Everything. But then he started writing something about food conscience and something about where food comes from, and then this latest, "Vegan Before 6:00", is a very interesting turn in his heart and his mind. So we have what I hope to hear from today is the full man and all of his ideas. Please welcome Mark. MARK BITTMAN: Great to be here. Thank you for coming. So historically, well, it's interesting. I did start-- I was extremely arrogant twice in my life, actually. The first time was I got my first food column by walking into an editor's office and saying you ought to let me review restaurants for you, and he said, I already have someone reviewing restaurants for me. And I said, I'd be better. And he said, try it, and then he hired me. So that was-- I don't know if I feel great about that, but it worked and it was 35 years ago, so I'm over it. But the interesting thing is that led to a transformation that was so-- I guess I have to back up a little bit, but first I'll say that led to a transformation that was so important to me and, in a way, emblematic of what I believe that I think it's worth talking about, even though it goes way back. The reason I thought I was qualified to review restaurants was not because I'd eaten in so many restaurants, because I hadn't, because I couldn't really afford to, but because I'd cooked so much. So at that point, I was about 30, and I had started cooking seriously when I was about 20, and through that period I did many things. I was a community organizer, I was a new father, I was a father of a newborn. I'd gotten married before that, I'd driven a taxi, I'd taught high school, I'd done a bunch of stuff. But through all of that, I cooked, and when I decided I wanted to be a professional writer, a freelance writer, I did what everybody's supposed to do-- what everybody was supposed to do in those days-- which was I consulted this big fat book called "Writer's Market" and its accompanying magazine called "Writer's Digest". And it taught you how to find an editor, write a query letter, pitch a story, I mean, all this thing was sort of done was you're supposed to learn how to do it, and do it by road. So imagine you're an editor and you get a letter from someone you've never heard of that says, I'm going to France in two weeks and I really want to write about restaurants in Leon. Why? But the funny thing is that no matter what I wrote, no matter what I tried to write about, no one was interested. When I tried to write about food, suddenly many people were interested. And that's got something to do with timing and something to do with, evidently, that there was more honesty there, there was more authenticity there coming for me. More arrogance, too. So the funny thing is that this was in New Haven, Connecticut, and I started reviewing restaurants in New Haven, Connecticut, and guess what? After about six restaurants, they weren't very good. I mean, you could find you could find a bunch of good restaurants, but this was 1980. So after you did the requisite two or three pizza places and the requisite one or two hamburger places, and a couple of seafood places, couple Italian places, let's give it the benefit of the doubt and say 12 weeks into it, I'd started eating at places that were considerably worse than what I was cooking at home every other night. So I transitioned the column from a restaurant reviewing column to a cooking column, and I did that by saying, I went to this place and they made me-- and I remember this pretty well-- and they made me this pasta with pesto, and it was kind of bad for these reasons, but you can make it really well at home, and here's how. And so I transformed-- I know, it was very quite elegant, really-- transformed this so-called restaurant-- since they were paying me anyway, way sort of-- so I transformed this restaurant column into a cooking column, and then I continued to do cooking columns from that point on. So through the-- I'm going to just do a little chronology here-- through the '80s and '90s, I wrote about food and cooking for first publications around New Haven, and then Connecticut, and then the Northeast, and then the country. And then eventually I became editor of "Cook's Magazine," which was a predecessor of "Cook's Illustrated", and then I was the first editor of "Cook's Illustrated", with the publisher, Chris Kimball. And then I started writing for the "Times", so all of that sort of happened by 1990. But what was interesting then was that the first interesting thing was that, at the beginning, no one was interested in my recipes, because they were too simple. So they wanted kind of-- this was the '80s, there was a bit of a food as art scene going on. Chefs were really coming on strong, and the more complicated food was the more interesting it was seen to have been. And it was different on the east coast than on the west coast, because here there was starting to be more of a focus on ingredients, local ingredients. But on both coasts, the commonality was that there was some preciousness, and that I wasn't a part of that scene. In the '90s, the appeal of simpler food became greater, and I was kind of allowed to do my own thing more. But a funny thing happened in my life in the '90s and up to about 2000, and in the late '90s, three really big things happened in my life-- they started in the mid '90s. One, I got this column with "The New York Times" called "The Minimalist", two, I wrote a book with Jean-Georges Vongerichten about his cooking, and three, I wrote "How to Cook Everything". So by the end of the '90s, I was a lot more established than I had been at that end of the '80s, say. But funny things that happened, and I lived in and around New Haven for this entire period, and every old-fashioned supermarket closed. And by old-fashioned supermarket, I mean like the one in my neighborhood where I originally lived in New Haven catered to the three major ethnic groups who lived in that neighborhood, and at that time, that was Jews, Italians, and blacks. So you'd see tripe next to pigs feet, next to chicken fat. And that was-- everybody was sort of fine with that. That closed, and first turned into a local chain called Stop & Shop, and then later turned into what it is now, a Walgreens, which almost everything is. But when it became a Stop & Shop, that whole sort of ethnic flavor, multiethnic flavor was gone, and it also became clear that food was becoming more corporate tied, less local, there was more stuff coming-- you know how you started to see meat that had been pre-packaged in Iowa at the big slaughter house, rather than sides of meat coming into the supermarket. You started to see things like, I don't know, pre-wrapped strawberries that were packaged in Mexico, whatever, instead of boxes that came from somewhere nearby, and so on. You all saw this, too. And what I saw in my own life was that I first joined a CSA, probably the first CSA in New Haven, if not Connecticut, and then started gardening quite avidly, and then started buying eggs, and dairy, and chickens, and a big half a pig, or a quarter of a veal, or both every year from nearby farmers. I didn't think that much of this, I just thought I'm-- I don't know why I put this on. What had happened, or what was happening, was that I was beginning to recognize that it was easier for me to get decent food because I had the time and ability to work for it or pay for it or whatever, but the fact is, not only had my standards maybe gone up a little bit, the availability of what I had been used to had gone down a lot. And so, when you look at what happened in and around, say, 2000, you're looking at the publication of "Fast Food Nation", you're looking at Morgan Spurlock doing his thing, you're looking at Pollan writing "Omnivore's Dilemma", and you're looking at these people who were saying what's wrong with our food system? Which I thought was a very good question, and one that I hadn't really asked. Which was, in retrospect, a little bit surprising, because I had been pretty good, I thought, in my life in synthesizing or at least in thinking about how things that were wrong, that I perceived as being wrong or going wrong in the world, in the United States, were tied together and were coming from the same kind of routes. But I never really saw that in food, and I think it's probably because I never really thought much about agriculture, and that's because I had been a, a very urban person and b, someone who wrote about cooking. So around about that time, I started to think more about eating in addition to cooking, and when I thought about eating, I thought one thing that's interesting about eating is that the writing is on the wall. We're going to eat a more plant-based diet. This is really clear, and this was clear to anyone I was thinking about this stuff carefully 10 or 12 or 15 years ago. I was a little late to the game by my standards, but anyway. So I decided to write a book called "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", not because I wanted to channel my inner vegetarian, because my inner vegetarian doesn't exist, but because I wanted to just become more familiar with plants, and I was-- "How to Cook Everything", the original, is a very honest book. There's nothing in there that I didn't cook, there's nothing in there that I don't understand at least pretty well. But there's always room to learn, and if you mess around with stuff in the kitchen, everybody has this experience, you get to know it much better. So I thought, I'll set myself this goal of writing "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", I will spend a lot of time with whole grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, of course, and I will sort of understand this world. And as an aside I will say, well, first I'll give myself the pat on the back, which is that it was seen by my publishers to be a niche book and it immediately sold on the same level as "How to Cook Everything", so that was good. But I will then say it seems now to me that's it's a very Moosewood-style of cookbook, which is to say-- one third of you are nodding your heads-- which is to say it has, to my current tastes, way too much dairy and eggs in it. So not to say you shouldn't buy it, I mean, come on, support your local cookbook writer, but I'm going to redo it and it's going to become much more vegan-ish. And I think that that's part of the discussion which we can have or not, I'm not going to go into it in this talk, but someone can certainly ask questions. It's part of the discussion about the difference between a heavily plant-based diet and a so-called vegetarian diet. "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" was published in 2007, I believe, or 2006, and in the intervening period between writing it and starting to write it and its publication, a number of very interesting things happened. One is that the notion that a plant-based diet was not only desirable but inevitable became more and more compelling to me. Two is that I started to cook that way much more often anyway. And then three is that-- well three and four, which are the keys, actually, are one, there was a publication of a UN paper called "Livestock's Long Shadow", which some of you may have seen, but if not, it's online, it's findable. And "Livestock's Long Shadow" said in some 18% of greenhouse gases are generated by industrial livestock production, and that industrialized livestock production was, in fact, the second greatest generator of greenhouse gases after energy production. There are people who have argued since, by the way, that the real number associated with agriculture in general, industrial agriculture is something closer to 50% of greenhouse gases, and so it doesn't matter what the actual number is, the point is that industrial ag and especially industrial livestock production is a big generator of greenhouse gas, is a big contributor to climate change. The second thing that happened at that time was personal, and in a way, everything you talk about, when you talk about food now, everything you talk about falls into personal-- that is, a sort of nutritional realm-- and, you might say, political or environmental realm. And of course, they have an effect on each other, and you can talk about them together, and there are some happy and sad coincidences about these things, but you can separate them also. While I was thinking about this stuff on the bigger environmental realm, something happened to me which happens to many, many middle aged people, and I was 57 at the time that I'm talking about, and that is, I had all this health stuff sort of go wrong, and it was all diet-related. And it was being overweight by 40 pounds, which, if that sounds like a lot and you're 20 years old now, think about gaining a pound a year for 40 years, and you can see how readily that can happen. Seeing my cholesterol level, which had always been 25 or 50 points under 200, which is some marker, a marker, was suddenly 25 or 40 points over 200. Blood sugar level, which was always on the good side of I think it's three, whatever the right number is, was suddenly on the wrong side of three. I had sleep apnea, and I had bad knees. I've been a runner my whole life, my knees never bothered me, and now suddenly they were bothering me. So I had this conventional doctor who basically said, yeah, we can do the apnea, that's a little minor surgery, or we can get you this thing that you wear on your face at night that makes you look like Hannibal Lecter called a CPAP. And for the statins, there's a drug for that, and the blood sugar, well, we might be able to control that with diet, but if not, there's always insulin. Well, the weight loss, we'll have to figure something out, and the knees, there's always surgery for that. So I thought, all of this stuff, this is 100% diet-related. Even I could figure this out. So I went and talked to an older hippie-ish, or let's say more thoughtful, really, holistic, if you want, doctor. He had been my daughter's pediatrician and was an iconoclastic genius, or a brilliant iconoclast, however you like. He became my doctor over the years, but he lived far away, so I couldn't see him often, so it was almost like he had guru status in my mind, he did and does. And his name is Sid. And I went to Sid, and I said here's this stuff. And he said, this is interesting, because you've always been on the right side of all this, and now suddenly you're on the wrong side of all this. And I said, OK, what do you think? And he said, you should become a vegan. It was really like that. And I said, you know what I do for a living, and I'm also kind of old, and at this point, I don't think I'm ready for such a radical change. I'm not even sure I believe this. But I don't know, what's option two? And he said, option two is, you're a smart guy, so figure this out. So I thought, OK, that's a challenge. I like challenges. And I knew something about myself, by this point, I knew something about rules for myself. And I can give two examples of those. One is that, when I was 26, I think, I stopped smoking. And I stopped smoking by doing this thing of-- I went to see this doctor, and he said, I'm going to hypnotize you and you're going to stop smoking. And I said great. Go ahead. And he said, no, no, no, we need you to do some stuff first. So I said, OK, what? And he said, first thing I want to do is smoke half as many cigarettes as you're smoking now. So I said, OK, same kind of thing. It was a challenge, it was a rule. I went home I smoked half a pack of cigarettes a day instead of a pack of cigarettes a day. I went back two weeks later, and I said, OK, I'm ready. Hypnotize me. He said, well, we have another step here. I said, what's that? He said, I want you to smoke less, I don't care how much less, I want you to smoke as little as you can, and I want you to write down every cigarette that you smoke, the time of day, the blah blah blah. Did that. Went back two weeks later, he was on vacation. Now, when you're young and impressionable, you sometimes think people do things for reasons other than why they're doing them. And I, of course, thought he was on vacation to trick me into going another two weeks smoking not as many cigarettes as I wanted to smoke. But I dutifully did that, and then he came back from vacation and he never hypnotized me, basically. He said, when you want a cigarette, I want you to go into a quiet place and do a sort of very simple meditation, and think about the fact that you want your health, and that cigarettes are robbing you of your health. And imagine yourself in a peaceful place, going down the stairs, the whole meditation thing. You're more relaxed with every step, and blah, blah, blah, and then get up and don't smoke a cigarette. It worked. I mean, it really worked. So that's how I stopped smoking. But what I realized is that I couldn't just smoke less. I had to get to a place where there are rules and there was this thing that would eventually get me to stop smoking. The second sort of instance I had of making rules was that I was always making rules for myself to drink less wine. And alcoholism is obviously a serious subject, but it's also a spectrum. So many people think they drink more than they ought to, and I'm sometimes one of those people. And I couldn't get to the place where I drank one glass of wine a night. Sometimes I could, but mostly I couldn't, and I know why that is. It's because I like drinking, and as soon as you have a glass of wine, your willpower-- this is why you drink, right? You soften up, your willpower is out the window. The rule doesn't make any sense anymore. It's not a good rule. So some people can do that, and some people can smoke two cigarettes a day. So I stopped drinking for a year. I just said that's it, I'm going to stop drinking for a year. So needless to say, at the end of year, I started drinking again. But so when I started thinking about this eating thing, I thought, I need rules. And I actually don't think veganism was the right goal for me or is the right goal for very many people, and here's why. I think there's a spectrum, and the spectrum, like all spectrums, looks something like this. Starts over here, and it ends over here. And over here is Morgan Spurlock, and over here is the ideal diet, which we actually don't know quite what that is, and bearing in mind that vegans can drink Coke and eat fries and stuff, so it may or may not be a vegan diet, but over here is like the ideal diet. Every single person we have ever known and every person who's in this room is on the spectrum, and almost no one has ever been on either extreme of the spectrum. And I think what's important-- and this is all post-figuring this stuff out a little bit-- but I think now what's important is that we move down the spectrum. That almost all of us have a reason to be moving in this direction, to my left, towards the sort of plant-based diet and away from the brilliant but misfortune Morgan Spurlock diet. And that if you get, say, 20% of your calories from unprocessed fruits and vegetables-- which for an American these days is actually a lot-- and you then, a year later, are getting 40% of your calories from unprocessed fruits and vegetables, you may not have become a vegan, but you've improved your diet. And so, if you start with a sort of typical American who gets maybe 10% of his or her calories from unprocessed fruits and vegetables and then moves to 20%, that's progress too. And I think the important thing-- I'm jumping ahead of my story, but I think the summary almost is that the important thing is that we're all able to change the proportion of unprocessed plant foods in our diet to make them be a greater percentage of our caloric intake. And that that's sort of almost the bottom line, with the addendum that those new calories from plants have to replace something else. Because what's happened, in a way, in the history of government intervention into dietary advice in the last 30, 40, 50 years has been because of the pressures of industry on USDA, USDA could never have said in the '70s, which is the advice that the USDA was getting in the '70s, was tell people to eat less meat and less sugar. Tell people that. And USDA was unable to do that, largely because of industry pressure. So instead of saying eat less meat and less sugar, it said things like eat fewer foods that are high in saturated fats. So there was sort of a switch from beef to chicken, and there was sort of a switch from food that was high in fat to food that was low in fat, but the food that was low in fat was not necessarily low in calories, and the food was low in fat tended to be high in processed carbohydrates and sugar. And as a result, we've seen the biggest weight gain in the history of the world in this country in the last 30 or 40 years. So to back up, I mean, put quite simply-- and I don't want to get too deeply into this, because I know you have questions, I want to save time for them-- but quite simply, in 1970, the per capita production of high fructose corn syrup in the United States was zero. Zero pounds per year, zero pounds per ever. And now the production of high fructose corn syrup-- per capita production of high fructose corn syrup for Americans is between 50 and 60 pounds a year, which averages out to about 200 calories a day per person in the United States, which obviously-- and we're eating that. It's not being thrown away, which obviously explains, at least in large part, our collective weight gain in the last 20 or 30 years. So what I figured out was, for me. What I figured out was not for anyone else. What I figured out was for me, and what I figured out was there are some things I need in my life. I need pleasure, I need socializing, I need wine, I need good food, I need to cook, I need to cook, I like good meat and other animal products. I want to keep that stuff in my life. On the other hand, I know Sid's right. I need to have more plants in my diet. So I invented this thing with a friend. I invented this thing of let's be like maniacally strict during the day. Unprocessed fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, no white flour, no white foods, really, nuts and seeds, nothing processed, no sugar, blah, blah, blah. We quickly adapted that to say but we're allowed to cheat some, and I'll get into that. Someone will ask the question that'll get me into that. And then at night, we kind of go back to doing whatever we want. We have dinner, we have wine, and we have steak. Not that often, but whatever we want. So we tried it, and she lives in Kansas City, this woman, and we talk almost every day, work together, and after some period of time, a week or two, or three, or whatever, she said, so have you been doing this VB6 thing? And I said, the what thing? And she said the vegan before 6:00 thing. I said, oh yeah, I actually have been doing it. She said, yeah, me too. It's not that hard. No it's not that hard. And it wasn't that hard. And so six weeks went by, and I tried not to think about it much. I was just accepting it as a challenge and as a thing that I do. Six weeks went by and I weighed myself and I'd lost 15 pounds. So I said, well, that is real positive reinforcement. And I didn't do anything else. Another six weeks went by, I lost 15 more pounds. And let's see, my wife said, well, you're not doing that weird snoring thing at night anymore. And then, if you look up sleep apnea, most sources will say that if you're sort of overweight, not super obese but sort of overweight, if you lose 10 or 15% of your body weight, your sleep apnea will go away. And I had lost precisely 15% of my body weight. So that went away. My running, my knees were much better, and every time I carry a 30 pound backpack, I remember that I used to be 30 pounds heavier, because my knees get tired. My cholesterol went down 50 points, my blood sugar went back into the good range, and I was enjoying myself. Sid was very happy, Sid is now back to calling me the champion of middle aged blood levels, or something. And I wrote some about this stuff in "Food Matters", a book that I published in 2009, but it's not a coming out thing, I just didn't want to proselytize because it seemed too soon. And now it's been six years, and it seems right. And I'm just going to say why I think it seems right, and then I'll take questions, because I've already spoken for longer than I intended to. It seems right because of the proportion thing that I said before, and it seems right. Someone will inevitably ask the question about why would you have your biggest meal at dinner when some data, not all, but some data point to the notion that you're better off not eating your biggest meal of the day at night. And my answer to that is I wanted to create a diet that was not a sort of crash diet. It was not a six week diet, it was not a do this for a while and then go back to eating normally, because everybody knows that doesn't work. I wanted to create a diet in the sense of what the word diet originally meant, which was style of eating. I wanted to create a style being that you could stick with, and I think that many of us, most of us, like to have the big meal at the end of the day because we've done working, we want to take our shoes off, we want to kick back, we want to have a glass of wine, we want to be able to eat what we want to eat. We don't want to go out with our friends and say I'm going to have the vegetable soup and nothing else. For some people, that's fine. For me, that was not fine. So that's why I think it's good, but there's a sort of bigger picture here, and I'll just say this. The big picture is this-- there is no disputing that as a community, as a society, we need to move towards a more plant-based diet. That's good for us as individuals, and that's good for us as a society, and it's actually good for us as a race, as the human race. That is pretty much indisputable. It's also pretty much indisputable that those plants should take the place of the foods that didn't exist 100 years ago-- that is, highly processed food-like substances that don't even really meet the dictionary definition of food. It's also true, although not inarguably, but it's also true that that plant-based diet should decrease the amount of animal products we use, because the earth can't sustain the amount of animal products we're using now, and that amount is increasing in the developing world. All of that doesn't even address humane and ethical issues of raising animals the way that we tend to raise them, which I think is important, but we could just leave that aside for a second, because I don't want to get into ethics, I want to talk about the science. The science is that we need to be eating a diet that is more plant-based. So what's VB6? VB6 is a strategy. It's a strategy to integrate what we know, what science tells us, into our own diets. And I don't want to leave here without saying it's not the only strategy there is. It's a strategy I came up with the works for me and has worked for a number of other people, an increasingly large number of other people, but a number of other people. And some of you are going to think it's completely idiotic, and some of you were to think it's really coolm and and some of you will try doing it, and some of you will not. But if you think it's idiotic or you don't try it, then I strongly suggest you think about what your strategy is to get more plants into your diet, because I think that that's the important thing. The important thing is to move towards a plant-based diet, and the less important thing is how you do it. And I'm offering a strategy that I believe works, but any other strategy that you think works is equally fine with me, as long as the goal is about the same. So I think I'll stop now and take some questions. AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming, and I wanted to ask you, a month or two months ago, you wrote a column talking about a study that Dr. Lustig published that basically said the link between sugar and metabolic syndrome is as clear now as any of the science we have about cigarettes and lung cancer, and this just needs to end. And it seems like your column was about the only place I actually saw that study mentioned, and nobody else has picked it up since then. So I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. MARK BITTMAN: I can talk about it. It's tricky, because I didn't perhaps do what I should have done at that time, which was hedge a little bit. But the fact is that what Rob Lustig's study-- which was not a clinical study, but an epidemiological study-- shows a very, very clear link between sugar intake and metabolic syndrome, and we know about the link between metabolic syndrome and diabetes. What I think it demonstrates is that you can get type 2 diabetes-- not the kind that's genetic, but the kind that's environmental-- you can get type 2 diabetes without even being overweight or obese. You can just get type 2 diabetes by consuming too much sugar, and this study pretty much demonstrates that. His study was rejected by two or three of the bigger journals and was accepted by another big journal, but whether it's because it's not a convincing enough study for scientists to accept it, or it's just too threatening, or people are waiting for more of the same evidence, I can't say. I find it incredibly convincing, the people I'm closest to in the science world find the convincing. Needless to say, you can go online and find people who think we're all idiots. I mean, that's easy enough, because there are many ways of interpreting this kind of stuff. But in my gut, I believe that's right, and I believe we're going to see more of that. AUDIENCE: My question has to do with-- I appreciate what you're saying and how you chose to have dinner-- you want to be able to enjoy dinner as your big meal to be social, and I agree with that. I also feel like, here at Google, we have access to such amazing food that I guess I'm wondering how you feel about or if you would say, do you think most of your success is also related to the consistency of having the same diet every day so your metabolism got used to that, or do you think that there could also be success in you mix it up? So you have animal products one meal a day, versus after a certain time? MARK BITTMAN: Absolutely. I think the first part of your question is did my body get used to this? No. I think I just needed a discipline. And I understand what it's like here, and I understand you can do that. The danger for me-- and I know nothing about you or anyone else, right? The danger for me would be I'd say, oh, I'm here, it's so great, blah, blah, I'm going to have this big meal at lunch and I'll have a very meager dinner. And then someone would call, or my wife would come home, or whatever, and we crack open a bottle of wine, and next thing I know I'm making pasta a little piece of fish, or whatever, and it becomes oh, well now I'm having two big meals a day. But like I said, the goal is the same, the strategy is different, and whatever strategy works for you, by all means. I think if I worked in a place where-- I happen to work in a place with really terrible food. Like just-- this is going online, right? So I'm on record, here. I mean, the Times cafeteria is really-- I'm going to say shameful. And it's not free. I mean we don't expect-- you don't expect every place to have free food. This is unusual, right? But if I could graze during the course of the day on salads, and grilled vegetables, and stir, fries, and whole grains, and beans, and that stuff was out? I would probably eat a lot of that. I do eat a lot of that, but I kind have to hunt around my neighborhood, bring stuff from home, do all kinds of things. But if that stuff was at my disposal, I think that this diet would be much easier to do than it is for those of us who have to kind of scramble. As I have scrambled today. I mean I go into a hotel in the early morning, and I had oatmeal and fruit, and then I went to an airport, and I had a really, really bad salad in a plastic clamshell container, and then I went to the hotel and I had 18 handfuls of nuts, or whatever. And I'm starving. But I think to the extent that you have access to good food all day long, this is easier, not harder. I give this talk to lots of different kinds of people, and everybody-- and those of you who travel, who are not on this campus every day know exactly what I'm going to say-- everybody says lunch is a bitch. Lunch is really hard. Lunch is hard if you don't work in a place like this. Lunch is really hard if you're on a plane or in a cafeteria-- I mean, on the road or in a strange city or in someone else's office where they're gracious enough to provide lunch, and they bring out deli sandwiches one after the other. AUDIENCE: You mentioned earlier that someone would end up asking about cheating or getting exceptions. That's what I wanted to ask about. And just going off of your last answer, I started VB6 last week, and I think this place is the easiest place to do it. I've had the best lunches, I've had-- MARK BITTMAN: Yeah, I'm sure. AUDIENCE: But then the weekend rolled around, and even though I live in San Francisco, the first place I went to for brunch, the only vegetarian option was a grilled cheese sandwich. MARK BITTMAN: Brunch is deadly. Brunch-- you shouldn't have brunch. But anyway. No, but I mean, there's so many different ways of addressing this. And I want to take you back to the part of when I was talking, and I said-- I mean, this is so elemental-- but when I said 20% is better than 10%, and 60% is better than 40%, and so on. It's not a black and white situation. So I am on the verge of starting this talk by saying I'm VB6, but I put cream and sugar in my coffee, because I do. And because I think I'm not going to be perfect in any case, but am I going to approach this kind of goal that I set out for myself, and am I going to be better at approaching it this year than I was last year? And to me that's the thing. And the problem you're describing specifically is that, unlike most people, you have an amazing place to eat during the week. So that's great, but it sounds like maybe you don't cook. I don't know whether you cook. But for those of us who do cook, this kind of style of eating is dead easy if you're home. Because my home is kind of like here. Because it doesn't take me long to cook something, and it's good, and it's what I want it to be, and if it's not free, it's usually not very expensive. So for everyone, the answer is a little bit different, but I do think that it's for those of you who like to cook, keep doing it, do it more. And for those of you who haven't had that particular come to Jesus moment, you might try. Because cooking makes good eating much easier. AUDIENCE: I was a vegetarian for a very long time, and at some point, I realized that even though it was easy to give you myself a pat on the back, I was actually a very bad vegetarian, because my vegetarian diet was just very imbalanced, tons of dairy, tons of cheap carbs, and stuff like that. So my wife and I kind of in tandem tried to kind of refactor our eating a little bit. We ended up moving to a very meat-heavy diet, and it's been working well for me, in the sense that's it's helped wean me off of cheap carbs, which was like, the biggest risk factor for me. But at same time, I feel kind of conflicted about it, because it's obviously moving in the opposite direction on the spectrum, right? MARK BITTMAN: Well, it's not so simple, because if the spectrum over here is animal products and processed junk, and you moved away from one but back towards the other-- in a half an hour talk, I'm not going to cover every base that there is to be covered, right? Frankly, I think you're better off, but I think what you need to do is eat more plants. I mean, it's really simple, and you're not going to start eating more Cheetos. So you clearly get that, and you're clearly-- now this is like a Car Talk or something. You're calling in to talk about your car and I'm psychoanalyzing. But clearly, you've got some ambivalence there, so just grill that onion and that pepper with the meat that you're eating, and start eating more of that stuff. And smaller portions, too. I made a stir fry for six people the other night and it had 10 or 12 ounces of meat in it, which is two ounces or less. We didn't even finish it, so it was less than two ounces of meat per person, so that's a meal with meat in it, but it's not a meal with a lot of meat in it. AUDIENCE: Fair enough. Thank you. MARK BITTMAN: I am reminded of my friend, Craig, who I lived with when I was about 23 or 24, who was a vegetarian. Everybody flirted, or many people flirted with vegetarianism back then-- we're talking the early '70s. My own particular flirtation with it was because this woman I was going out with only ate brown rice and broccoli. So for like two or three weeks, I ate brown rice and broccoli. Not sustainable, by the way, nor was the relationship. But my friend Craig was a vegetarian, and he'd sit around eating Snickers, all the time eating Snickers. And I'd say, you're a vegetarian. And he'd say, it's vegetarian. I'm like, yeah, but this can't possibly be what your intent is in being a vegetarian. And he said, we all have our little inconsistencies. And it's true. We all have our little inconsistencies. AUDIENCE: Thank you again for coming. I'm going to take your ideas to a little bit of a different level in terms of impact on food politics and stuff, so stop me if I'm taking it too far. MARK BITTMAN: No, no. Believe me, you're not going to say anything I haven't thought of. AUDIENCE: So, you're really advocating for a plant-based diet, and obviously, I think some people have noted that one difficulty of moving to the plant-based diet, and especially veganism is getting protein and feeling full. And so I know a lot of people have started eating more protein-rich greens like quinoa, and one big offset of this happening is that these places where these food products are made, like quinoa, end up impacting the native people who've been growing them. And there's currently a big issue in South America where quinoa's been around for centuries, and now they're getting priced out of the market, and so native people aren't able to eat the quinoa that they've been growing and has been sustaining them for so long. So I was just wondering what your thoughts were on having people turn to this plant-based diet, but also be conscious of where those plants are coming from and how that affects the local economies. MARK BITTMAN: Well, the quinoa, I won't claim to understand it fully, and with all due respect, I don't think you do either, and I mean with all due respect. My most recent understanding of this, and I could be wrong, is that the farmers who are selling quinoa are actually doing better because they're selling it for a higher price, and people around the farmers who are used to buying quinoa at a lower price are not doing better, are less able to buy quinoa. So is it an issue? Yeah, I'm in total agreement with you, is it an issue. There is no no impact diet, and there is certainly no no impact diet when you're a wealthier nation in a world of less wealthy nations. Almost everything we do has an impact on other countries, on people in other countries. If we had more regional agriculture, we could probably better deal with this. I think the funny thing is that the quinoa issue-- it's interesting that you bring it up, because the quinoa issue is a very singular thing, because quinoa has this reputation of being high protein. But I think the reason people who switch to a more plant-based diet feel hungry is not because they're lacking in protein, because for the most part, they're not, but because they are lacking in fat. And that if you eat your vegetables, and your brown rice, and your whatever else, your beans, whatever, if you eat that stuff with a healthy splash of olive oil-- and by healthy, I wasn't meaning it's good for you, I was meaning a lot-- you get fuller. You really get fuller if you cook those vegetables with a lot of oil. And I don't mean a cup, but I mean, this thing of let's steam everything, now you've got no fat. You've just got no fat, and you need fat, and you need especially fat that's high in monosaturates and high in omega-3's, and blah, blah, blah, and there's a whole argument about how all of that part of our diet is completely whacked out also. But you do need fat, and I think-- and I know it's true for me-- that it's not about protein, it's really about fat. It's fat that fills you up. AUDIENCE: Thank you. MARK BITTMAN: You're welcome. AUDIENCE: Thanks so much for coming today. My question is actually to do with my parents. So they tend to eat very unhealthily, they eat lots of things that come out of packages, and they also have a lot health problems. And my dad has always been the sort who yo-yo diets. He tries sort of the latest fads. I was wondering if, because you're about their age, if you could speak to your-- [AUDIENCE LAUGHS] --sorry. MARK BITTMAN: I'm like 41. AUDIENCE: Oh. But I was sort of curious that speaking from your peer group, any other sort of arguments or particularly the ones that are most important from your book that you would find would win people over-- MARK BITTMAN: Well, I mean the lifelong habits are-- I always cooked, so I obviously had a head start. And I always cooked from scratch. If you look at "How to Cook Everything", first published in 1998, no blatant health conscious stuff, none, but it's all from scratch stuff, and it's all well-balanced, and it's all pretty decent food. And you could cook from that and eat pretty well. If you have a lifetime of eating badly, then it's harder to change. But again, I think-- I once had the opportunity to write a non-food book with three psychologists about how people change. And it was a self help book, so of course there are seven stages of change, or six, I can't remember. You have to go in sequence down all these-- but the first important stage of change is intent. So if they don't want to change, they're not gonna. You're not going to convince them and neither am I. But if they do want to change, I think if you say, look, there are these three or four principles-- I'm sorry-- if you paid attention to these things you could probably do OK. And one is you've got stop with the packaged stuff. Two is you have to be more plants at the expense of the packaged stuff. Three is you probably need to eat less super high fat animal products. And to my mind it always becomes sour cream, not that people eat so much sour cream, but that that's sort of iconic, in a way. And then, as I said, this is a strategy for doing that. They can come up with any other strategy they want, but if they're willing to think about it, then that's the direction they need to go in. Good luck. AUDIENCE: Hopefully they'll listen to you. MARK BITTMAN: Good luck. They won't listen to me. AUDIENCE: So I lived in Japan for a few years, and that's supposed to be a really good diet, and so forth, and I lost a little bit of weight, but not a huge amount eating mainly Japanese style. But it seemed to me that part of the reason why people were thinner there is you just walk a lot more when you live there, especially if you live in Tokyo or Osaka. And you haven't mentioned anything about exercise in this. MARK BITTMAN: Well, exercise is, as we say, part of a healthy lifestyle. And it's clearly true, but it's also not what I'm about. I mean, there's nothing to say. I totally agree. New Yorkers are among the least obese people in the United States for precisely that reason, and it makes sense, but the data show that exercise is very good at helping you maintain weight, it's not really great at helping you lose weight. Helping you lose weight pretty much happens by eating the right kind of food and fewer calories. But no argument there, certainly exercise is important. AUDIENCE: So I was glad you brought up cooking your own food as a way to control what's going into your body. I see that as a primary way that I feel like I have control. But I know a lot of people who don't like to cook. They don't see the point, they don't care, not interested, especially if you live in a big city like we do, you can just walk down the street and get something. And I saw in here, I haven't read the book yet, but that you have a lot of recipe recommendations. Do you have a recommendation for like a gateway recipe that would convince somebody-- MARK BITTMAN: Like a gateway drug. AUDIENCE: --who doesn't see the point? Yeah. MARK BITTMAN: Well, that's a really good question. The cooking thing is kind of about priorities, and I think a lot of people want control over their lives, and they get it in different ways. But I think we can agree that eating is a really important things in our lives, and the way that you get control-- I mean, I go out to eat all the time, too, but I do recognize when I'm going out to eat that I have no idea what's in the food. Like the salad I had for lunch, which had some white dressing on it, I don't know what was-- I have no clue what was in that dressing. When you cook, you can't make food that's as bad as the food that you buy. And that's not true of everything that you buy when you go out. We all succumb to temptations, and we've all got, or most of us have junk food that really appeals to us for one reason or another. And you don't know what's in that stuff, whereas when you cook, you really have control and you actually do know, as someone once said, the active ingredient in broccoli is broccoli. Things that don't have labels on them don't have labels on them because we know what they are by looking at them. So as for gateway recipes, I did do a piece in "The Times" a couple of years ago called-- I'm only remembering two of them-- but it was like "The Three Most Important Recipes in the World". Oh, I know what they were, rice and beans, which is symbolic of all legumes and all grains, which can all be cooked the same way, and can all be cooked in advance, and can all be cooked in quantity, and can all be combined in different ways. So that's one thing. Chopped salad, which is sort of self evident. There's ways to make it better and ways to make it worse, but it is what it is, and most people pretty much like it. And stir fry, which is addition which you get to put, if you want to, various animal products or high protein foods that we tend to crave, but combine them with many, many other things. And again, infinitely variable. And I swear, if I were to break down every variation I could think of those three recipes, I could write a cookbook with 3,000 recipes in it. My style happens to be here's how you make a stir fry, now go figure out how to make it in different ways. But those are three really good recipes, I think. Oatmeal is also very important. AUDIENCE: I'll wrap it up. I have a two, almost three part question. Other than less pain in your knees and maybe sleeping better, were there other benefits from your weight loss and the change in the way you ate that kept you on the diet? Did you feel like you thought better? Were you more productive? MARK BITTMAN: I still drink a lot of coffee. I never felt bad in the first place, so I can't say I feel better, I have so much more energy. I'd like to be able to say those things, but I also like to think that I'm not a huckster and they're not true. So I feel fine, and I felt fine then. I mean, I am six years older than I was then, so I'm not feeling much older, which is nice, but I can't-- in fact I don't sleep better, but the reason I sleep badly I don't think has anything to do with my health or my diet, it's because I'm overworked and nervous. I'm sure no one else in this room has ever had that experience. What's the second part? AUDIENCE: The second part is what's at home in your refrigerator right now? MARK BITTMAN: Well, I'm not there, so probably things that are going bad. When I go home, I go shopping the next day, I figure out how many days I'm going to be in town, which is sometimes two weeks, in which case it's infinite, and sometimes two days, in which case, I have to be careful. But I buy-- I do believe that shopping is a really important part of eating well, because I go, and I go to the vegetable part first, and I try to really fill my shopping cart with vegetables, and then I fill in with other stuff here and there. So there's usually a couple kinds of greens and a couple kinds of harder vegetables like broccoli and eggplant and stuff, and tofu. Staples like potatoes, and onions, and Parmesan and that. It's not exotic. If you're looking for an exotic answer. AUDIENCE: Actually, I'm looking for a ratio of plant-based to-- animal product. MARK BITTMAN: Well, volume-wise, the bags of greens take up lots of room. So volume-wise it's way, way more vegetables. You don't need a lot of animal products to have enough. I tend to eat much, much less meat than I used to, and most of that's kind of in the freezer and gets pulled out from time to time, and I might go to the store by fish on a given day, or I might just have pasta with vegetables for dinner or like that. AUDIENCE: Thank you so very much. MARK BITTMAN: Well, thank you all for coming.