My immediate family (husband, two grown sons age 18 and 22) includes every diet preference from steak loving carnivore to vegan. As the family cook, attempting to satisfy this range of diets has resulted in my cooking lots more vegetables (which is easy because I already loved cooking veggies) and less meat over time, or serving meat more as a side dish or condiment than as the star player in the meal. Frankly I prefer to cook that way.
One of the things I appreciate about Mark Bittman's cooking is that his style is very similar. I just discovered this short video of a talk he gave about the crucial implications of our diet not only for our health, but for the state of the world's ecology. Simply put, we simply cannot afford to consume the current (and abominable) "standard American diet" that is very heavy on meat and industrially prepared foods. Nor can we afford to simply "buy organic" and forget the rest.
I hope you have a chance to view the video and apply these ideas to your own food choices. I am not willing to give up meat, but the fact is I can easily feed a family of four adults on one roast chicken a week and maybe some fish plus "everything else", by which I mean vegetables and grains, some of which we can grow ourselves. Oh yeah and nuts and peanut butter!
The video also includes a brief history of the American diet in the last 100 years. Good stuff. Don't miss it!
Comments