The New York Times
A while back we purchased a huge cookbook by Mark Bittman who writes columns in The New York Times. That was a gift for our Indian children (formerly graduate students at CSU where we were their "local parents) and had the title How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. We liked the cookbook so much that we purchased a copy for ourselves (we're not vegetarian, but eat that way perhaps 25% of the time and certainly eat more fruits and veggies than meat the rest of the time).
The bookstore had a used copy of his 1998 book How to Cook Everything and I bought that also and then received as a gift from friends on the Times staff his 2008 update of that book. They became two of our favorites, especially since Bittman gives 10-20 options for preparing most items, a real chance to variegate your menu. We later purchased a copy of Bittman's 2009 slender volume Kitchen Express: 404 Inspired Seasonal Dishes You Can Make in 20 Minutes or Less. That's written in a looser style and should appeal to my wife Lynnette, but thus far we haven't used it as often.
So we've become Bittman fans and when I noticed in my online NYT offering for Feb 1st a column by Mark I hurried to read it. The title of that Opinionator piece was "A Food Manifesto for the Future." The coulmn was trenchant, to say the least, and Mark ended by saying he'd expand on its topics in later coulumns.
I think you should try to retrieve it for thorough reading, but I'll summarize his points. They are: end our current huge goverment subsidies that end up supporting the "processed food"industry and shift that money (or at last some portion of it to farmers and even markets that grow and sell "real" food." Get rid of the USDA's conflicting double duty assignment to simultaneously increase sales of corn and soy (among other farm products, but especially those two) and serve as the source for advice on good nutrition (the latter job could potentially go to the FDA).
The issues also include: outlawing CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding opereations), while aiming toward more sustainable metohos that don't pollute our envionoment; help us all to do more of our cooking at home; use govenments taxing powers to decrease the sales of the all-mighty cheeseburger and similar foods; increase recycling while reducing waste (he cites an enormous fertilizer-caused dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico); strenghten truth in labeling laws and put lots of oomph (dollars) behind sustaiable agricuture>
There it is, paraphrased mildly as it's all the things I agree with.
Our American diet isn't what it should be, not by a long ways. One of the most obvious manifestations of that is how many of us are overweight or obese. That's fairly obvious just walking around. What I don't see every day are CAFOs and, since I don't eat fast food, the lines at the chain food outlets. Or, for that matter, the hidden costs of our US subsidies to Big Agriculture.
Thanks for the first in what promises to be a series of columns well worth reading, Mr. Bittman.