book report by m-c

authors:	Mollie Katzen & Walter Willett
title:	Eat, Drink & Weigh Less:
	A Flexible and Delicious Way to Shrink Your Waist Without Going Hungry
publisher:	Hyperion, 2006
no illustrations
design:	Pauline Neuwirth
length:	282 pages
page size:	normal hardcover size (6¾" wide, 9½" high)

I am not on a diet. I am not going on a diet. If diets worked, I would be startlingly thin. I'm not going on diets any more.

Nonetheless, our cookbook of the month is a kind-of, sort-of diet book, written by two giants in their fields:

Mollie Katzen, whose Moosewood Cookbook is a classic, perhaps the classic vegetarian cookbook, and who has written numerous other cookbooks, most recently The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without (Hyperion, 2007).

Walter Willett, who is a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard Medical School and who has not only led three authoritative nutrition studies but has taken the responsibility of interpreting those studies for lay people, first in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy (Simon & Schuster Source, 2001), then in an article called "Rebuilding the Food Pyramid" (available for a fee) in Scientific American written with Meir J. Stampfer (January 2003), and now in this new book with Mollie.

So if I'm not on a diet, what's going on?

Walter Willett's attempts to bring the science of nutrition to the lay public are so generous and decent that it's as if Butler W. Lampson volunteered to help you scrape the gunk off your computer mouse or Roger D. Kornberg offered to check out your oven cleaner to be sure it's working right. (Who are Butler Lampson and Roger Kornberg? Butler is the 1992 Turing Award winner, the highest honor in computer science, and Roger is the 2006 Nobel laureate in chemistry.) Thanks to his efforts on my behalf, I've come to think of Walter as a friend even though I've never met him. So as Margaret and I struggle over what might make a recipe "healthy," or better yet "healthier," it seemed time to put myself once again in his competent hands.

Mollie and Walter give us nine axioms, "turning points," they call them, to help us shift our eating and our lives in a healthier direction:

1. Eat lots of vegetables and fruits.
2. Say yes to good fats.
3. Upgrade your carbohydrates.
4. Choose healthy proteins.
5. Stay hydrated.
6. Drink alcohol in moderation (optional).
7. Take a multivitamin every day.
8. Move more.
9. Eat mindfully all day long -- mindfully as in I shouldn't take another raisin or another nut every time I pace by the dining room table thinking about how to write this report. If I really want to eat more, I should sit down and eat it, not pick my way through the evening. And all day long as in don't skip meals, three or four or however many suits you.

The one we've been having problems with is "Say yes to good fats." OK, we know if we change from butter to olive oil that's good, but what about changing from 2 Tablespoons of olive oil to 1? Is that good, bad, or indifferent?

Studying the recipes and the menu plans in this book should provide specific insights where the general guidelines are too abstract.

For instance, the very first recipe (page 147) is for scrambled eggs with spinach, and the recipe serves one. (I had hoped for many more recipes that serve one because the meals I eat alone are the hardest ones to make moderate. Nobody's looking.)

Two large eggs, half a teaspoon of olive oil, half a teaspoon of butter (butter! my friend butter!), and about 2 ounces of spinach. Yummo.

OK, one serving, but what's the rest of the breakfast like? Aha, here's the recipe in the context of day 11.

A whole cup of raspberries, a teaspoon of sugar or honey, coffee or tea with low-fat milk (if desired).

Hmm. I'd rather skip the sweetener and the milk and have a slice, or half a slice, of whole‑grain toast instead. Or have a side of some cooked whole grain like wild rice or quinoa. A teaspoon of sugar is 16 calories, 2 ounces of low-fat milk is 30 calories, so I could have a quarter of a cup of quinoa and feel much happier.

And so it goes. The book is a chance to get calibrated on healthy eating -- on non‑excessive eating. For me the part of "healthy eating" that calls for fruits and vegetables and whole grains and plant oils is not the problem. The problem is how much of those good things to eat.

The recipes are all very basic, in what I think of as the "food is good" vein: You take some food, maybe you combine it with some other food, you cook it a little, and it tastes darn good. I happen to love this kind of cooking, although it makes for peculiar reading. To have so distinguished a guide as Mollie Katzen in the enterprise is pleasant. Aha, she thinks food is good too.

If I were to treat this as a diet book, it would be doomed to the failure of all diet books. It is not possible to "shrink your waist without going hungry" (subtitle of the book). I hate to tell you, but a person who burns 2,000 calories a day and eats only 1500 or 1600 (page 97) is going to be hungry. The "ten safe treats" (page 109) are disgusting for those of who crave meat and cheese and butter rather than sweets: 2 sugar-free Fudgsicles? 15 jelly beans? Etc. etc. I could go on and on about the deficiencies of the book as a diet book.

If I were on a diet, I would find the answer to my question about 2 Tablespoons olive oil versus 1 Tablespoon very frustrating. The answer is that is really doesn't matter. Low‑level fiddling with any one recipe is not going to make any difference. Portion control is going to make the difference. If using 2 Tablespoons of olive oil makes a dish so delicious that one cup of it is completely satisfying, while using only 1 Tablespoon makes such a mingy, skinflint version that I have to eat three cups plus potatoes and gravy on the side, well, then, using 1 Tablespoon wasn't such a good bargain, was it?

So I'm not on a diet. I'm using the book to help me learn how to eat well (and move well and breathe easy) every day. I am trying to lose one pound, no more than one pound. This particular pound I've been trying to lose for about ten days, and I haven't lost it yet, but I will eventually. And meantime I'm not on a diet, and Mollie and Walter are helping me not be on a diet, and I suspect they understand that full well.

Margaret actually met Mollie Katzen (May I touch you, may I touch you?). At the time, she, Margaret, wrote:

"She's exactly how she comes across in her books, sweet and genuine and totally unpretentious. We talked about food and being moms and I even had a chance to tell her that I thought the recent article featuring her in Food & Wine was awesome.

"And she cooked for us, from her new cookbook (The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without), some delicious carrots fried in olive oil with cinnamon, cumin, crushed red pepper, garlic, and fresh mint."

I'm looking at that recipe even as we speak ... it's on pages 38-39. Perfect for tomorrow night's supper.

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