Food and Drink Issue NYT

By MARK BITTMAN

Food and Drink Should I be afraid of low-calorie sugar substitutes? Is there afish I can eat guilt-free? What's the single best way to make coffee? Why does it matter thatfamilies eat together? Find these answers and more atnytimes.com/magazine.

This Food and Drink Issue of the magazine — the fourth annual — is full of questions. I have two of my own, and they're the same questions I've been asking myself since I began cooking 40 years ago. How can food change my life? And how can food change the world?

I grew up during a time when the awareness of the quality of food was practically nil. It's true that in the '50s and even the '60s people still cooked, even if much of the food was "convenient," like Jell-O mold or tuna tetrazzini. It's also true that pigs were still raised on farms, most vegetables were seasonal and hyperprocessed junk hadn't yet achieved hegemony. But back then we took the good stuff for granted and never thought it would get anything but better.

The '70s and '80s were a more optimistic era, because cooking was in the news and the American food revolution was in full swing. It turned out, though, that it wasn't a revolution but a civil war. Our side featured good people arguing for real, mostly simple cooking done with fresh, well- raised ingredients, a retreat from convenience and overly fancy stuff and a return to the basics. Arrayed against us in this fight — a struggle for the American palate and ultimately the global diet — was Big Food, spreading like/.../