>> funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of bell specialization, board certified attorneys in your community, experienced, respected and tested. also by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and viewers like you. thank you. >> i'm evan smith, he's a best selling and much admired cook book author, a columnist for the opinion section of the "new york times", and the lead food writer for the paper sunday magazine. he's mark bittman, this is overheard. >> actually, there are not two sides to every issue. >> so i guess we can't fire him now. >> i guess we can't fire him now. the night that i win the emmy.

>> being on the supreme court was an improbable dream. >> it's hard work and it's controversial. >> without information there is no freedom and it's journalists who provide that information. >> window rolls down and this guy says, hey, it goes to 11. [ laughter ] >> mark bittman, welcome. >> thanks, evan. >> great to see you, nice to meet you. what did you eat today? [ laughter ] >> chilly quieles what you call migas. >> i have to say i'm a little disappointed, you make me feel guilty. >> i had grapes for breakfast. >> you make me feel guilty, i think you probably in your zeal for directing us to eat certain ways, probably make other people feel guilty as well, but it's good to know that you actually indulge. >> well, i don't -- i think you

have to read -- i know that you're half kidding when you say i make you feel guilty. >> only half. >> i think you have to read what i write thoroughly to understand that what i'm really saying is, a, eat real food, b, don't be too hard on yourself. >> right. >> c, move toward a plant-based diet, and that kind of stuff is really important, but i never say don't ever have a cheese burger. i never say don't cheat. i never say anything like that. >> in fact you explicitly say the opposite. >> this diet i invented is basically a cheater's diet so i've been doing it for seven or eight years, i feel like my weight and my blood numbers and all that stuff is so stable i don't have to pay that much attention. >> it's all the evidence you need that it works. you're your on guinea pig in that respect. are the book cooks that you produce, for us, which is to say you telling us what to do, or are they are reflection of how

you live your own life. >> well, that's a good question. that's changed, at the beginning they were -- my first cook book was called fish, and it was an a to z of how to buy and cook fish, and i had spent literally ten years researching that. just obsessed with seafood, so it was a very natural first book to write, and then how to cook everything, the first how to cook everything was really everything i -- it was really how to cook everything i know how to cook. >> you knew how to cook. [ laughter ] right. and i was 47 or 48 when that was published, and so i had been cooking for more than 25 year, so there was a lot of food i didn't know how to cook by that time, now it's more market driven, it's what book makes sense, it's more what do we think people want. >> but the important thing is you're not preaching to us lessons or things that you don't hear to yourself. the reality is you're telling us things, while you may not do them all yourself right now, you

would live by that standard as well. >> well vb6 totally, my experience. >> yeah, yeah, that's it. let me go to how to cook everything first. i think of that book for my generation, for our generation as the joy of cooking for the previous generation. >> that's what we like to say. >> in the sense that there doesn't go by a week when i don't pull it out and try to figure out how to do something basic or remind myself how to do something. was that the point? was there a thought in your mind, we're going to do a joy of cooking for the new generation. >> in fact, there's a story i'll try to condense here which was that my publisher owned joy of cooking and then was forced to lose that part of the business, and then a new publisher, a new person came on board and said what was the name of that really big cook book that everybody really liked. >> by what's her name, right? >> my editor said joy of cooking, and my editor said we should do one of those, that's literally how how to cook

everything came about. when i finished the first draft of it, it had some things in it that weren't that basic. it had some trendy, really not that crucial things and we looked at it and we said what we have here is the foundation of a really, really great basic cook book, let's get rid of this, you know, this high fall lieutenanting stuff and let's put in popcorn and grilled cheese, and hamburger and tuna fish, and we did, wouldn't you know the first talk show i went on in '98 when it came out, the host said i'm so happy you taught me how to make grilled cheese. >> you think people would know. >> but they don't. >> that was a good decision. >> if you perceive it to be a book that is -- that is -- where the standards are kind of lowered for the average -- i think it's a fairly high end effort in the sense that everybody, not just basic people who don't know how to cook, even people who have been cooking for a long time benefits from this.

>> i did cook for 25 years before i wrote it, in a way, the funny thing, it's now 15, 16 years old, and in that time we've spent a lot of time sort of chasing the people who say i don't want to know how to cook everything. i want to know how to cook a few things. or i only want to know how to cook fast stuff. so -- >> well, in fact, it was how to cook everything vegetarian which came subsequent to that, i'm a vegetarian, i appreciated the nod in that direction. >> more than a nod, it's a thousand pages. >> a very, very big nod. then you had another one coming out that's how to cook everything fast. >> fast. >> that actually is about to come as we sit here. it will be out in a couple of week, what is in that -- give me an example of something in that that wouldn't have been in the first one. >> for example, there's egg plant parmesan, and it took us

literally six months to say we want to invent recipes that reflect how people actually cook. not -- not how chefs cook, not how food service people cook, how experienced cooks cook. so we've really formatted, we thought about this, we written them differently, it's a different kind of cook book. >> i'm nervous, i know you are going to tell me i have no reason to be nervous. a dish i'm modestly familiar with, the how to cook everything version of that imagines i assume fresh ingredients, you sort of do this and that, this lovely home cooked meal, fast to a lot of people means sauce from a jar, cheese from a bag. >> yeah, those compromises are not there. >> how do you do egg plant parmesan fast without resorting to store bought, processed, blah, blah, blah. >> you pre-heat a pan while you start to chop something, you put some oil in the fan. you put the first thing in the oil while you turn on the

broiler, you put the second thing in the pan. >> it's technique. >> well -- >> and strategy. >> it's strategy and it's acknowledging that you can prepare food and cook it at the same time, the myth of -- the myth of most cook books including all of mine up until this point is that you go into the kitchen, you take everything out of the refrigerator, you chop the garlic, you peel the onion, you dice the onion, you have these nice little balls as if you were going to do a stir fry. the fact is everybody who knows how to cook, goes in the kitchen, puts oil in the pan, starts chopping the garlic, and does prep and cooking concurrently. >> yeah. >> and that's -- that's the way people cook. >> you understand even for well meaning people who think of themselves, they pull out diana kennedy, they open it up, they see the length of the recipe, the number of steps, they get depressed. you can fill any name in there.

the point is for people who have aspirations and ambitions but don't want to say cancel my next two days worth of appointments, you want to have a way you can accomplish something great and have it be fresh but do it within a reasonable time frame. >> this gets into what is really wrong about cooking and thinking about food today which is that many people, a small number of people, but it's a big country, so winds up being an absolute large number of people cook as a hobby, and it's as if they're building model airplanes. they will open that and they will say i'm going to spend the weekend making this mole that has 27 ingredients in it, it's going to be unbelievable. >> first i'm going to drive to the mexican supermarket that has the ingredients i need. >> that cooking is a hobby. my interest has never been that, my interest is helping people get food on the table however many nights a week they're able to do that, when my kids were growing up, that was six nights a week, when i was growing up

it's six nights a week, that's a hard thing for people to do these days and i think my goal for all of these years has been, here, you can do it, forget the competitive cooking shows, forget the complicated stuff, forget the fact that you ate at a 3 star restaurant and you want to cook like that, figure out how to make the grilled cheese, in a good honest way with fresh, real ingredients. >> i want to come to the vb6 book in a second, but i want to stay with the how to cook everything book, because i heard you tell at least once i think to the commonwealth club on the west coast that you were not for that title initially, is that true. >> no, i thought that title was the most embarrassing thing. >> the publisher came to you and said we want to do a book called how to cook everything and your response was basically no. >> no, the publisher said we want to do this joy of cooking book, i said great, the working title was how to cook, which was fine, then the marketing people went into a room without me, and they came out and they said it's

called how to cook everything, i said over my dead body, which is not something you should say unless you're prepared to carry it out. [ laughter ] but, you know what, i got over it very quickly because in a way it's self mocking. i mean it's not how to cook everything. >> but millions of copies later, obviously people have gotten comfortable with the idea this this is kind of my bible. >> well, now it's, you know, the terrible word of the -- so vb6, tell if you can in brief the story of how vb6 came to be, because this is as you said a case of it absolutely being an outgrowth of your experience. >> vb6 stands for vegan before 6, need to know that. one is that i was becoming increasingly aware that the writing was on the wall, we were all going to have to move toward a plant based diet in our lifetimes or certainly in our children's lifetimes. so that was number one, i

started writing about the environment, the environment of food and policy and all of that other stuff that i do. number two i had turned 57, and after a life of really good health, all my blood numbers went in the wrong direction, kind of all at once, and this sort of creeping weight gain of middle age had -- i wish i could think of a funny way to put this, but had kept to the point where it was obvious, and i needed to do something, and, you know, i went to one doctor, more conventional doctor, he said, we can put you on statins for the cholesterol, we can give you high blood pressure medication, then i went into an old friend of mine who is a doctor. he said just become a vegan, it will take care of all of this stuff in no time flat. just become a vegan, i said i'm not going to become a vegan, and he said, well, you're a smart guy, figure something out. that was really the whole conversation. >> literally. >> swear to god. >> here is my bill, right.

>> i owe him everything. >> right. >> so i went home, i like discipline, i like rules, i thought, okay, i'll make a rule, the rule is i'll be a vegan until dinnertime, then at dinner i'm going to do whatever i want. the word vegan, it's really not an adequate word for you vegans out there, forgive me, it doesn't really mean enough, because it means you don't eat animal products, but it doesn't mean you don't eat junk food, so the idea of vegan before 6 was i was going to eat not only no animal products but nothing hyperprocessed during the course of the day, and no sort of white food, no white rice, no white flour. i gave up on eating no pasta pretty quickly n. theory it's no pasta either, and no junk, so that snacks would have to be fruits and vegetables or nuts or seeds and breakfast was fruit salad or oatmeal or rice and beans or a stir friday left over from the night before. lunch was pretty much the same thing.

and the pounds fell away. but the thing is that it's not -- it's not a two-week diet. >> you said specifically after six weeks you were 15 pounds lighter. >> after six weeks. >> -- >> blood work returned to the right direction. >> after six weeks, i didn't think about it much, it was a game, after six weeks i weighed myself, i lost 15 pounds, i thought, okay, i'll do another six week, that's pretty impressive. then i went and got my blood work done and it showed -- >> everything was like 20% down. >> what i -- what i loved about this was you're not a storm trooper about the whole thing. somebody said can i have a little milk in my coffee, or are you going to come to my house and punch me in the nose. >> this is why i objected to you're saying i make you feel guilty. >> you make me feel guilty anyway. >> i put milk in my coffee. >> even as a vb6 person, your attitude putting milk in your coffee, you were like, fine, go ahead and do it. >> at the beginning i didn't --

i used so i milk in my coffee, which is really detestable in a way. but i wanted to be -- i wanted to be strict, and then as the months and now it's been seven years as i said went by, it doesn't matter if you put a table spoon of half and half, how could that possibly matter. >> the other point, somebody said to you, i had this conversation with you -- >> you don't need me here. >> no. [ laughter ] but i was curious about you're saying this, if you're going to be a vegan before 6, what if you just are like crazy indulgent after 6 and you undo all the good of before. i'm sorry, you're going to tell me what i said. >> yeah. you say what you said, but there's an answer, there's an answer to this, eventually you change your behavior after 6 even though you're unrestricted, right? >> well, there's two things. yes, you get used to eating in a different way, start to appreciate plants and so on.

the other thing is there's some common sense here, of course you're not going to go on a diet where you are vegan before 6 and then you eat 4,000 calories after 6:00. yo have to be dumb to do that. did you really want to do this or just -- you know, and then a friend of mine said, well, i'm going to be vegan five days a week, eat what i want on weekends, i said makes great sense. >> somebody said i want a healthy breakfast with bacon and eggs, then vegan the rest of the day, it's just a strategy for moving toward including more plants and for eliminating junk. >> it' whaver works and it' an iividl disio right? the discussion of processed foods and everything else makes me where you fit on the michael pollen continuum. big meat and agri business and the food industry has gotten out hand and thas par of wha we're comting with these decisions. >> yeah, that's what i write about almost every week in my opinion column, that's one of

the great tragedies of our time and overcoming that is going to be as big a challenge as fighting climate change. >> how do you overcome it? >> well, i think it is like climatehange in that -- in order to really fix the food system, we need to fix democracy, we need to have more control over how things happen in this country. right now things are run by a partnership between big corporations and what many people would call big government, although i think government is not powerful enough in a way, because it's certainly not powerful enough to fight these corporations. >> to stand up to. >> right. so what we have is a very, very mechanized, highly profitable food system that doesn't serve the needs of the people who live here. >> yeah. >> serves the needs of the people who are making money off of it. so, you know, i assume i don't need to talk about the health care crisis that we're in as a result of our diet.

a third of us are obese. a third of us are overweight, we have diabetes in sky rocketing numbers, heart disease, and this is a result of bad indict, and the bat diet is a result of hyperprocessed foods, and hyperprocessed foods are a result of us not determining what we eat. how do we fix that? we make individual decisions to eat better, which doable, but we're constantly barraged by billions of dollars worth of marketing. >> you don't think the solution is a solution that relates to democracy, but a solution that relates to education. >> it's the same answer, how are you going to get the education? there's no budget for education. neoliberalism means that government is increasingly shrinking and public services are increasingly getting cut back, so where is your money -- >> the big guys win. >> you know, in a way you say that the biggest issue facing us right now is campaign finance reform, it's almost the biggest

issue that there is, because -- >> of all of the things i expected to talk about today -- [ laughter ] [ applause ] >> i thought we would talk about peaches -- >> how do you make changes without a representative democracy. >> you've got to bread crumb it back to that. >> and we're not going to get that on a national level any time soon, so what that then means is that we have to work locally, we have to work municipal my, we have to work in our neighborhoods, we have to work in our families, we have to work on ourselves, because the big picture is just too hard. i'm not saying we shouldn't talk about it. i'm not saying we shouldn't struggle, i'm saying the battles that can be won are really on local levels right n. >> let's move away from that into something else, is the era of the celebrity chef a good ou don't have to be a real celebrity to be a celebrity chef. >> you know what's funny is that people go to cooking schools because they wanto be celebrity chefs. they don't want to cook, they just want to be on television. >> it feels like the food

network and the related networks have become this kind of like creeping, you know, sort of taking us over, every time you turn on the television now, there's some show with real people trying to emulate chefs or chefs showing you how to do stuff, it's become kind of a whole thing. >> i'm not good at discussing this, i'm better discussing everything we've discussed up to this point. i don't watch that stuff, but i think it's probably like do i have to watch project runway in order to put my socks on in the morning. [ laughter ] i don't. if that stuff doesn't do anybody good, if they find it entertaining. >> you're not opposed to it. >> cooking is not a spectator sport, if people tell me i don't have enough time to cook and then they go watch food television or something like that, i have a problem with that. >> living their lives vicariously through -- >> if you're watching food television and eating fast food at the same time, i have a problem with that. >> i wonder if it's more of a symptom of the larger a

affliction that we all have these days, we're just so obsessed with food and food culture, now television and the entertainment industry has risen up to give us this -- it seems like it is actually -- it's more a part of our daily lives, discussion of food, we've gotten better educated or better aware of it. i think food journalism is hotter now, transformed, is that your sense also. >> how do you jive that with the fact that people can't cook? people can't feed themselves. that's not a rhetorical question. i don't have the answer. how does that work? we're so sophisticated, we know so much about food, we read about it, we watch television, we talk about it, only we eat junk food all the time. it doesn't track. >> is it laziness, is that what ultimate will i is the reason. >> well, i think, you know, we are trained as young people to crave what amounts to bad food, and the habits that we learn went we're young are very hard to break. after we fix the campaign

finance reform, then we come back to we have to really restrict marketing of junk food to children. >> the war against doritos is the next battle front. >> kids can't be sold soda when they're two years old, kids can't be sold cocoa puffs, not to single that out. vending mhines in schools.anti >> y cld put carrots in a vending machine. >> right. >> it's not the machine's fault, it's what you put in the machine. >> machines don't kill people, doritos kill people. i get that. >> you can put water in a vending machine, but you can get rid of the vending machine and put a water fountain where it used to be. >> for all the sophistication we claim to have, we go see chef fifteen times, i think your "new york times" magazine, not every week, but office, the kind of gridded deal where you take a particular staple of our food lives and you show us how to do, that's my favorite thing, more than the puzzle even.

i ripped all those out, so the thought process there is here is how to do stuff, it's in some ways an extension of the cook book, it's how to cook everything. >> it's all i do. it's not all i do. it's a big part of what i did. >> that is one way to combat the problem for people for all of their supposed sophistication, not knowing how to do stuff. >> that's how i justified my career, yes. >> okay, good, i'm glad we were able to distell everything down to like 30 seconds. >> thank you, dr. smith, yeah. >> we have just a couple of minutes left. had you become this guy, what was it about your childhood that led you to do this as opposed to something else? >> you know, i will say i spent a lot of years teasing my mother publicly. she didn't really care what stuff tasted like that much, but she put dinner on the table every single night, and that was an amazing thing, you know, i owe her a debt of gratitude for that, i grew up in new york, so the flavor that i didn't get from my mother's cooking i got on the street, and when i left

new york i had neither. there was just terrible food everywhere, because i was in college, notoriously bad, so i started cooking, and then one thing, and i wanted to write, and when it was time the write for a living, the thing i knew most about was food. >> have you come to believe that outside of new york you can -- you can do better for yourself. >> oh, everything has changed, yes. >> talk about that. >> women, second and third and fourth and i don't know what tier cities, there's good food everywhere, and that is because people are leaving austin or they're leaving wherever and they're cooking with -- with really good chefs around the country, and then they're saying, i'm not going to open my restaurant in brooklyn, i can't afford to do that, i'm going to go home where i can afford to do it, they return to austin or pittsburgh or indianapolis or reno or wherever they're from and they open good restaurants and i've seen this trend for the last five or eight years and every year it's -- it really is growing very, very quickly. >> despite the fact that your focus has largely been on

teaching us to cook, you have as much passion for restaurant culture -- >> well, i travel a lot, so i have the opportunity to do it, and i've always written about restaurants. i like restaurants, i'm a fan of restaurants. >> have you ever thought about being a critic. >> i've done it, i don't like it. it's not fun. the obligation to eat out five times a week -- >> it's too much. >> yeah. restaurants should be a treat. so should many other things be a treat, what should be the staple is cooking at home. >> that's a great place to leave it, i look forward to the new cook book, but i tell you what, that old one is getting so worn through, it's a gift, mark, very nice to meet you, continued good luck on everything, thanks so much, mark bittman. [ applause ] we'd love to have you join us in the studio, visit our webs at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q and a's with our audience and guests and archive of past episodes. >> i think that if you eat a

largely plant based diet it's almost impossible to overeat. i really do. vegans who don't eat junk do not get fat, it's really, really -- [ music playing ] >> funding for "overheard" with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community, and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community, experienced, respected and tested. also, by hillco partners, texas government affairs consultancy, and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health, and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation, and viewers like you. thank you.x0