Food Matters

I've always been interested in food-related books. Especially those that include a little history of food. I think it really started when I went to culinary school. Once you start reading and knowing what/where food came from--it changes everything. The way you cook, shop and eat. Example, I started strictly reading food labels and not buying foods that have high fructose corn syrup. Once you do things like read food labels, you start to buy and eat whole, good tasting foods (you have NO idea how much corn syrup vs real cane sugar affects the taste of something, like say, bbq sauce.)

Some food-related books I've read and loved: 

 Luncheonette by Steve Sorrentino 

All of Molly Wizenberg's books. 

Most cookbooks. I don't have a favorite cookbook because I love them all! But I do prefer church fund-raiser cookbooks--some of those older recipes are fantastic.

I recently finished Food Matters by Mark Bittman. (Which I'm not putting on the list of books I've loved.) A lot of reviews stated that this book is similar to Michael Pollan--which maybe true, but I would have no idea since I have yet to read ANY of Pollan's books (I know, I know). This book IS, however, highly repetitive. Bittman basically writes (and repeats!) that the Western/American diet is bad for physical health as well as ecological health. It takes over a day's worth of calories (2,200 worth of corn, pesticides that were used on the corn, all that processing to make corn into feed) to make one calorie of consumable beef. While organic beef is better, it's still red meat...full of cholesterol and other bad stuff. If we want to do the most good, we'd start eating plant-based foods. Bittman states that we don't have to start becoming vegetarians, but tone the whole meat thing. The one thing I really enjoyed with the fact Bittman wrote about calorie density (in short, you can get a lot of low-energy/calorie with a large amount of food...examples include most fruits and veggies.) For me, I'm constantly making calorie dense food choices. Even though I already knew about calorie density, I'm glad Bittman wrote about it so others know about it too! 

The reason I can't put this book on my "favorites" list is because it's super repetitive. It's a quick read and I learned very little. ALTHOUGH, the recipes (at the end) were/looked good. AND I did gain some new insight. AND I DO really like the title of the book. Because food really does matter...if we want to live a long and health life what we eat greatly affects how we'll live tomorrow--and not just physically, but ecologically as well.