Food Policy, Made Personal
When I began work on Food Matters in 2007, I had been writing about food for nearly thirty years. So I was in the press box while the American diet underwent huge changes, few of them for the better. Restaurants were booming and people were cooking less and less, while waistlines—and the health problems that accompany excess weight—were growing exponentially.
Yet despite my awareness, my own health had become a problem: I was 57, and 35 pounds overweight. My blood sugar was up, my cholesterol was up, I had sleep apnea, and I had just had knee surgery. My doctor unironically told me to become a vegan. I reminded him that I was a food writer and asked him if he was out of his mind. He reminded me that I was a smart guy and that this was serious. “Figure something out,” he said.
I could have seen this coming; I’d just spent a couple of years working on How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, in part because I saw the writing on the wall. I knew a plant-heavy diet was a healthier diet; I was just unwilling to make the change. Still, when my marching orders came down, at least I knew a lot about cooking without meat.
And there were further incentives: As if on cue, across my (virtual) desk came a paper from the United Nations called Livestock’s Long Shadow, a damning report about the connection between industrial livestock and global warming, which I can sum up very easily: The more animals we raise industrially, the more greenhouse gases we are producing. This study estimated that about 70 percent of all the land on earth is devoted to livestock production and generates 18 percent of our annual greenhouse gas emissions. More recently, analysts at an environmental organization called Worldwatch have reported that livestock and their by-products actually may account for as much as 50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States we eat almost 10 billion chickens, pigs, cows, and turkeys each year. And that’s just us!
So I put all this together—the state of Americans’ eating habits, my own health crisis, the fate of the planet if we don’t reduce the number of animals raised and slaughtered—and I came up with a personal action plan: I follow a strict vegan diet until dinnertime—eating only whole grains, beans, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and seeds. After that I eat whatever I want. That’s my way; your way may be different. The critical thing is simply to shift the proportions of what you eat and make your diet as plant-heavy as you can.
Because what you are eating is just as important as what you’re not. When you reduce the amount of animal products—and processed food, but more on that in a minute—you wind up eating a lot more plants: Beans. Whole Grains. Fruits. Vegetables. These are precisely the ingredients that will improve both your health and the health of the planet. All you have to do is change the proportion of some foods you eat in favor of others. It’s that simple.
Turning the Tables on Animal Consumption
Americans consume 200 pounds of meat per year (that’s about 8 ounces a day, twice the global average), 237 pounds of dairy, and 32 pounds of eggs. That’s more than 469 pounds of animal products per capita, over a pound a day. Industrialized production of livestock—factory farming—is the only way to raise enough animals to produce enough animal products for us to eat at this rate.
But factory farming is just that, a way to produce animals the same way we produce widgets, as quickly and efficiently as possible with little or no thought to how they’re treated for their brief life spans. I won’t get into details here, but industrialized meat production is so colossally inhumane that watching how most livestock is raised and slaughtered in this country would horrify even the most die-hard carnivores. Even if you believe animals were put on earth to be eaten, you probably don’t believe they should be tortured. Nor should the workers who raise them, yet the industrial accident rates in meatpacking plants are among the highest of any industry, the wages are among the lowest, and the working conditions among the worst.
But I didn’t set out to write Food Matters as an animal rights activist, a union organizer, or a vegetarian (remember, I still eat meat). So although I believe that animals’ and workers’ rights are valid issues, they’re far from the only reasons we should reduce our consumption of meat. Equally important are the personal health consequences of overeating meat and the environmental issues I mentioned above.
There are other reasons too: Raising animals to produce food is incredibly inefficient. Consider some numbers: It requires 2.2 calories of fossil fuel to grow 1 calorie of corn, but it takes 40 calories of fossil fuel—in the form of land use, chemical fertilizers (largely petroleum-based), pesticides, machinery, transport, drugs, water, and so on—to produce 1 calorie of beef. At the rate we’re going—we currently raise 60 billion animals each year for food, 10 for every one of us on the planet—we will need to double meat production by the year 2050 just to sustain current consumption levels.
How does this translate to what we have for lunch? Like this: If each of us ate the equivalent of three fewer cheeseburgers a week, it would have the same impact on the environment as getting rid of all the SUVs in the country. And if all the land in the United States that’s used to raise food for animals each year was instead used to feed humans, we could end world hunger.
Our current consumption of animals is simply not sustainable: It requires more land than exists and taxes the earth’s resources beyond what’s available. More than twenty years ago, we reached a point known as “ecological overshoot,” and now the stress we’re putting on the planet—to feed our consumption and absorb our waste—requires 1.3 planet Earths to accommodate it. In other words, our planet needs a year and four months to regenerate the resources we’re gobbling up each year. (If the entire world lived the average American lifestyle we would need over 4.5 planet Earths.) And since that obviously isn’t possible, we’re at the breaking point. The only viable solution is to reduce demand for the foods that take the most resources to raise.
The Story of Junk
The news would be bad enough if meat were our only problem. But, unfortunately, processed food—often a brew of ultrarefined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and so on) and fats (oils, hydrogenated vegetable shortening or “trans fat,” and super-refined animal products) based almost entirely on corn and soybean products (remember, animals are mostly fed corn and soy)—are also a significant part of the typical American diet. These largely empty calories not only have little benefit for human health, they’re destructive. And like livestock production, the processing and packaging of junk foods are incredibly energy inefficient. How inefficient? Producing a single can of calorie-free diet soda (which has no caloric or nutritional value) consumes 2,200 calories of energy.
Almost one-third of our total caloric intake comes from nutrient-poor foods like sweets, salty snacks, and fruit drinks. Soda alone accounts for a whopping 7 percent of our total daily caloric intake, with doughnuts, cheeseburgers, pizza, and potato chips not far behind. Incredibly, less than 6 percent of our calories come from unprocessed fruits and vegetables—perhaps the healthiest food group of all. And though manufacturers are in the process of rejigging junk food to reduce or eliminate trans fat (the solid form of vegetable oil that’s worse for your heart than butter or lard) their products are still loaded with gratuitous oil and chemicals.
And as our overconsumption of processed foods is exported, so are our ailments: heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain cancers are now showing up like never before in places that embrace the American way of eating. The common denominator among these health issues is obesity, which has reached epidemic proportions around the globe; over 1 billion adults are currently considered overweight. (Meanwhile, 1 billion people also go hungry every day.)
Change is in the air: Many public health officials, researchers, legislators, nutritionists, and, yes, even food writers are beginning to compare obesity to smoking and advocating similar policies to combat its impact on public health. Though the United States isn’t making the biggest strides—other countries are far ahead on this—there is a growing movement to do something: a soda tax, mandatory labeling on fast-food menus, improved school lunch programs and nutritional education, restricted junk food advertising to children. Everything is now on the table, and it’s about time.
In Food Matters I outlined how advertising, government supports, and other marketing tools have fueled our overconsumption of processed food and animal products, both here and abroad, for years. It’s actually a fascinating history, and if you’re interested in learning more about how we got to where we are, I urge you to read those chapters. For our purposes here, I’m more interested in getting you cooking. But before we can do that, let’s talk a little more about “sane eating.”
An Introduction to Sane Eating
By some calculations, at least 70 percent of the calories Americans eat come from food that is either animal based or highly processed. That leaves less than 30 percent that comes from what we used to call natural or whole foods—meaning fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes. Frankly I think these numbers are conservative; the USDA shows that Americans get about 5 percent of their daily calories from fresh fruit and vegetables. But for argument’s sake let’s use these numbers.
Think of a seesaw, the heavy side loaded down with animal products and junk, the light side with the food that’s actually good for us. Sane eating—eating like food matters—means that we flip this seesaw in the other direction, loading the heavy side with plant foods while minimizing meat, poultry, fish, dairy, and processed foods. In a perfect world the seesaw would instantly invert and we’d all be getting 70 percent of our calories from plants, or even more.
Oddly enough, the beneficial ratio of plant-to-animal foods is similar to the way our ancestors ate, and people still cook and eat that way throughout parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America—places where meat and processed foods are too rare or too expensive to dominate the diet. But here in the United States, the combination of government support and industrialized production artificially lowers the price of animal products and processed foods.
Of course, these cheap products still come at a cost: We wind up paying for the cost of obesity and other dietary diseases in our health care system, and there will be huge environmental costs that are only now being recognized. And the price tag is significant. Obesity-related diseases cost the American taxpayers an estimated $840 billion annually. Other costs remain incalculable, but they’re equally huge.
Environmental damage, for example, involves every aspect of food production from land clearing to raising and slaughtering livestock, and from transporting and packing to consumption and waste disposal. One expert I’ve interviewed estimates that producing a single burger gobbles up as much as 50 feet of tropical rainforest, degrades up to 2,500 gallons of water, and loses as much as 300 pounds of topsoil. These numbers are staggering, but they raise some vital questions. How can we possibly put a cost on the loss of such a diverse range of plant species? What if the cure for cancer is in the section of rainforest destroyed by our burger consumption? The discussion quickly becomes philosophical and complex, but we need to raise the issue. If, as some scientists claim, a single burger costs up to $200 in terms of total environmental degradation, but we’re only paying $2 for it at the drive-through, how do we reconcile this discrepancy? If the real costs were clearer, wouldn’t our consumption patterns change?
Well, they can, and it’s easier than you might realize. Rethinking the seesaw might at first feel as extreme as trading in your car for a bicycle, and difficult to maintain over the long term. But small, gradual, incremental change makes it easy and is much more likely to stick. And it’s small change that I propose when I talk about sane eating. You might start by eating one less meat-based meal a week or go entirely meatless one day a week. If you also swap your daily vending machine snack for an apple or carrot sticks, that’s real progress; build from there.
Sane eating is flexible: You can structure the day strictly to eat “vegan before six,” as I do: Avoid all animal and processed foods (except for maybe some milk on your cereal or sugar in your coffee) until dinnertime; then eat whatever you’d like. Or you might substantially reduce the amount of meat, fish, poultry, and dairy you eat at every meal—down to an ounce or two per sitting. Others have great success eating a vegetarian or vegan diet on weekdays and splurging on the weekend. A friend of mine allows himself five meat splurges a month. For some people, eating a big meal at noon works best. You can come up with whatever plan works for you, and change and adjust as needed.
The point is to look at each snack, each meal, each day, and ultimately each month and year, as an opportunity to flip the seesaw, using the basic Food Matters principles for sane eating:
1. Eat fewer animal products than average.
The average American eats a half pound of meat each and every day, but no one (least of all me) is suggesting you become a vegetarian: Just aim for less, a pound or two a week. Start thinking about fish, poultry, meat, eggs, and dairy the way traditional cultures do: as a garnish, seasoning, or treat—almost as a condiment. When used as a flavoring ingredient rather than as the focus of the meal, a little meat goes a long way. But don’t drive yourself crazy; cream in your coffee or milk on your cereal is totally fine, though experimenting with dairy alternatives is a fine idea too (see page 32).
2. Eat all the plants you can manage.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks—turn first to fruits and vegetables. Salads, cooked vegetables, raw vegetables, whole fruits, nuts, seeds … eat them with abandon. You really can’t go overboard, because when you satisfy your hunger with plants, you’re automatically reducing the amount of animal and junk foods and tipping the seesaw in the right direction.
3. Make legumes and whole grains part of your life.
This means every day. These foods are the workhorses of sane eating. Both are loaded with fiber, and beans especially provide a lot of protein. You don’t want to gorge on them as you do other plants, but any time you eat beans instead of meat or whole grains instead of white bread, rice, and pasta, you’re doing yourself a favor. (This book is loaded with good recipes for cooking beans and grains, so you’ll never tire of them.)
4. Avoid processed foods.
You know what they are—foods where most of the calories come from fat or sugar, or those with more than five ingredients, one or more of which you can’t pronounce. None of these is going to be as good for you as a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts or other real food. A candy bar or a Pop-Tart won’t kill you; it’s the continual eating of these kinds of things that will. Save your splurges! (And see Rule 5.)
Many so-called convenience foods are neither convenient nor satisfying. By the time you wait in line at the takeout counter, you could have cooked a bowl of pasta or thrown together a stir-fry. How much time do you waste going back and forth to the vending machine at work? A simple grab bag of nuts, apples, and maybe a few whole grain crackers can easily fuel your entire afternoon.
5. Everything else is a treat—and you can have treats daily.
Sane eating is about moderation, not deprivation, so feel free to eat the foods you’d miss, just in smaller portions and less frequently. Drink wine or beer with dinner or eat a decadent dessert now and then. As long as you’re making real changes in the way you eat most of the time, an indulgence every day is well deserved. I’m also confident that as your diet changes, so will the sorts of foods you crave.
Thinking Like Food Matters
Sane eating will naturally change the way you think about putting meals together, no matter where you are. You’ll begin to gravitate toward vegetables automatically, and then make room for a little meat on your plate. You might still be making pork chops, but since you’ll have just a pound of them in the fridge—you bought a smaller package than you used to—you’ll be even more interested in how to season the cabbage and sweet potatoes you’re cooking with them.
Since you’re changing the way you eat, you’ll probably change the way you cook—more imaginatively and creatively. You might find yourself cooking vegetables for breakfast. You’ll buy one chicken and use it for two meals instead of one, or serve eight people instead of four. You might add cooked grains to hamburgers, using half as much beef. This line of thinking will soon become second nature.
You’ll also pay more attention to labels. Ignore the claims on the package, which are usually misinformation for marketing purposes; just focus on what the product actually contains. If you follow Rule 4 on page 9 (“Avoid processed foods”) and keep loading up on fruits and vegetables, you won’t give a hoot about whether the carton in your hand is vitamin fortified.
Snacking, eating out, and eating while traveling can be a bit more challenging, but mostly because of how we’ve been trained to eat, not because finding real food is particularly difficult. I frequently share fish or meat entrées with my dining companions and order vegetable soup, salads, and side dishes. Whenever possible I pack a bag of food and bring it with me, or buy decent snacks or light meals from the produce section of supermarkets: apples, carrots, nuts, whole grain crackers, premade hummus … even decent chocolate once in a while.
But I’m not perfect, and you won’t be either. That’s part of what makes sane eating so appealing: its flexibility and forgiveness. We do what we can, knowing that adjusting our food choices as individuals will have a cumulative effect on all the plants, animals, and humans that share our planet. It’s the aggregate of all our small changes that will bring about bigger ones.