The New Puritanism

I like Mark Bittman’s cookbooks. We have a couple of them, one a general primer on cooking fish and another an even more elemental tome entitled “How to Cook Everything”, a label that is more truth than hyperbole, as the book has helped us out with many a meal, from whipping up an old-fashioned breakfast to making sure that we knew what to do with an odd Mediterranean vegetable we picked up at a farmers market.

But whereas keeping the pulse of the latest trends may be useful in running a restaurant or jousting with Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray for the title of America’s Chef, it can get in your way if you are attempting to critique the American diet and the industry that feeds it. Over the weekend, Bittman wrote a fairly extensive op-ed column for the New York Times titled “Rethinking the Meat Guzzler,” filled with enough half-facts and hyperbole that I had to take issue with it. I’ve attached a link to the article below so that you may read it for yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

First, like most trend-following urbanites living on the coasts, gaggles of whom have worked themselves into high dudgeon over the issue of industrial food production yet live hundreds of miles away from where their food is grown or raised, Bittman gets some of the basic facts wrong.

For instance, Bittman blames the expansion of corn and soy production, the bulk of which he rightly notes is used to feed livestock, for “the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.” Well yes, it is true that the Asian livestock industry, particularly those involved in the production of hogs and poultry, increasingly rely on soymeal produced from Brazilian and Argentine soybeans to feed their animals. However, virtually none of these soybeans come from rain forest. First, Argentina doesn’t have a rain forest, and the crops are grown in native grasslands not that different from those in the U.S. Midwest. And while the great expansion of the global soybean industry over the past decade has been into Brazil, the vast majority of this expansion has been into either traditional agricultural land or the open Cerrado, a native savanna with few trees sitting on flat plains and plateaus that run unbroken for several hundred miles.

But there is more to Bittman’s narrative than the trudging out of predictable boogiemen. He couples it with a variant of the New Puritanism, one which, as befits our trivial age, is concerned not with our souls, but something much more mundane, in this case our stomachs. The thrust of his argument is that the U.S consumer eats too much meat, it’s a bad thing, and the rest of the world is catching up to us fast. I won’t argue the basic fact, except that Bittman’s notion of what it means to eat a more varied diet is just as bad, if not worse, for the environment than good, old American carnivorism.

I will agree with one thing about a meat-less diet: if this means getting a huge bag of beans and a bag of rice and then living off them for the next couple of months, as many families still do in places like sub-Saharan Africa where they can’t afford a better option, well yes, that does indeed leave a much smaller footprint on our planet than eating at McDonalds several times a week. But if by “vegetarian” you mean buying the broccoli or arugala dish at some fancy restaurant in Manhattan, or going to Whole Foods to buy organic pea pods, well that is a very inefficient way to get your 2,000 calories a day. Besides all the acreage it takes to grow these plants, and all the water that has to be piped into the deserts where these types of tender crops tend to be grown, not to mention all the migrant laborers that have to stoop in the fields to pick them, just the transportation issues alone make the entire operation an ecological nightmare. A truckload of meat shipped in from western Kansas will fill the stomachs of an awful lot of Chicagoans. A truckload of broccoli, not so much.

There has developed a fetish over the farmers market, one that Bittman perpetuates, and one that I also admit to falling prey. I love going to the local farmers market in the summer and picking out fresh picked fruits and vegetables. But this is not an efficient way to feed people. It works great as long as the market only attracts that odd foody with enough discretionary income to afford such a luxury. If a significant portion of our population tried buying their food from these markets, it would quickly turn into a logistical nightmare. Having a group of small farmers fill up their pickups and drive 50-100 miles into a parking lot to wait for customers to drive by and buy some of their goods is just not an efficient way to feed people. 300 million people at 3 meals a day: that’s almost a billion meals to be made in this country, 365 days a year, and the free market prices it so that most will choose the most efficient option to get their calories. You want to leave a small footprint on the planet? Well then, stop spending money on things, and stop going places. Find yourself a cave like the Desert Fathers, and start to fast. It is a sign of my privileged status, as well as Bittman’s, that we are able to pay for the luxury to eat fresh, locally produced food.

There is also the seasonality of farmers markets to deal with. Farmers markets in Chicago are a valid option about 4 months of the year. For two-thirds of the year, we’d be living off root vegetables, pulling a boiled potato and maybe a parsnip or two out of our pockets for lunch, like our ancestors did. And before my L.A. friends get all cocky on me, yes you have a year-around growing season, but you live in what is essentially a desert, your have to pump, truck, or ship everything you need to live in the place from other locales and, other than odd bergs like Las Vegas that shouldn’t exist at all, you’ll be the first to go if there’s ever a global collapse. But it doesn’t matter what the town, all major metropolises are parasites.

All the folks who carefully monitor their diets should get over the notion that they are actually helping the planet by eating a big plate of salad for lunch. They are as big a part of the problem as anyone. But Bittman’s argument conveniently reinforces their cosmogony, one in which all “healthy” personal choices are also healthy for the world around you. It is an enlightened selfishness, made only more pristine by the abrogation of the normal pleasures it takes to achieve this enlightened self.

In this New Puritanism, living long and healthy lives is an inherently good thing, and the rest of unwashed humanity who engages in the traditional worldly pleasures, all of those nasty vices like nicotine, saturated fat, and demon rum, are not just making poor health decisions, they are morally weak, regressive, faintly reprehensible.

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was a normal thing to sit down and order a beer on your lunch break, but today such a wanton act of pleasure would be sure to get you the hairy eyeball from at least some of your co-workers. Butter, cream, beef: these are just a few of the things being castigated in our pursuit of health, despite the fact that these are all really good things to eat, at least if done as the occasional treat. It may have all started with young women trying to fit into their size zeros, but now a lot of men eat like women, chewing on dry chicken sandwiches for lunch, ordering egg white omelets at the diner for breakfast. That may increase your odds of extending your life, but does it really make me less moral if I prefer a meal rich with flavor and buoyed with fat?

From using his cookbooks, I know that Mark Bittman would probably agree with me about most of this, that he loves flavorful food, and he is not afraid to use all the classic ingredients, things like milk and butter, in his recipes. But in his Times commentary, Bittman proves himself to be a victim and perpetuator of the contemporary urban mindset, that somehow my diet of meat and potatoes is more destructive to the planet than the spinach salads and eggplant paninis being downed by the dietary Puritans. It is a common conceit. I’ll grant that most of the food in the grocery baskets at Whole Foods is probably healthier for you than what I tend to eat. But if the entire world lived on a diet made as inefficiently as that found at these specialty grocery stores, then Malthus would have been right, and most of us would have died of starvation long ago, because it is the mass production of the industrial food industry that has allowed us to feed the vast majority of the seven billion mouths on this planet. Can our diets be improved? Sure, and maybe eating a little less meat is a good start. But Bittman and his ilk need to get off their high horses long enough to see the forest from the trees.

Waiting at the drive-thru in your air-conditioned SUV to order a Teriyaki chicken salad is a sorry asceticism. Besides, at least from my reading of the Bible, God tends to reveal Himself to the passionate, and by this I don’t mean that He comes to those who are “passionate” about business, or some great moral cause, which a is contemporary perversion of the term, but that he comes to the drunks and the whores, to the lustful and egotistic, to those bold enough to want to experience all the joys of our planet.