Vegetarian Star

Food writer and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman once said that “if pigs were raised in prison”, he “wouldn’t care as long as they tasted good.”

Ten years later, he tells what is seemingly a more caring storing about animal welfare.

“I don’t know if that means they’re subhuman or just different than humans, but there’s certainly no reason to mistreat them as badly as we do,” he told Josh Hardow and Michael Rau at the Library Journal.

“I guess if you’re going to kill them and eat them, you’re mistreating them to some extent anyway, but there are degrees of that.”

One has to question some of his motives for better animal welfare, as he added that if anything would affect the taste of meat, it would be the industry’s disregard for both animals and the environment through their mass production methods of bringing it to the supermarket.

But you must give him credit, as he’s including fewer and fewer meat meals in both his personal diet and his cookbooks.

While by no means a vegetarian (yet), in his newest book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes, he’s advocated switching to a more plant based diet.

It all started while he was revising one of his How To Cook Everything books (one of which is vegetarian) in 2005-2006. “If I’m eating less meat, and I think everybody should be eating less meat, maybe I don’t need 600 or 700 recipes including meat,” he said of his revisions.

While going all the way is ideal, part time vegetarians or flexitarians still have much to gain in terms of reducing food costs and improving health, not to mention lessening environmental impact and animal suffering.

And Bittman seems to agree.

“It was going to be called The Food Matters Cookbook, but if I could get people using the word “lessmeatarian,” I’d be ecstatic.

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