Title: Fit or Fat Target Recipes

Title: Fit or Fat Target Recipes

Author: Covert Bailey with Lea Bishop

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Date: 1985

ISBN: 0-395-51084-8

Length: 160 pages

Quote: "[F]oods are graded on a target, with low-fat foods at the center. As foods get progressively fatter, they are placed in rings farther from the bull’s-eye.”

So many diet books were out there in 1985 that Bailey needed a marketing gimmick for a diet book series that sold very well for a short time. He was a nutritionist, not a doctor. Of course his “four food groups” scheme of nutrition would soon be superseded by the “food pyramid”…

This book is not primarily about the weight-loss diet industry so I’ll skip the rant on that subject and consider these recipes simply as recipes. Would you and the people who share your table enjoy eating them? The answer is that you probably will enjoy the vegetable-rich dishes, if you can get good-quality glyphosate-free veg. The desserts, not so much, if you’re like me and feel that fruit is best not cluttered with cream, wine, or similar junk. When I soil more dishes to make a dessert, I favor total, decadent, sugar splurges. Most of the time, nutritious fruit adds all the sweetness a reasonable adult wants, and the best way to serve fruit is all by itself if it’s prime-grade, cut up in a mixed fruit salad if some of it is starting to dry out. And I’m not really a big fan of motorized kitchen appliances, either, except when cooking for people who can’t chew up food and swallow it in the usual way.

Here are lots of things to do with fruits, vegetables, rice, whole-grain flours, beans, and meats. Most recipes do not direct the cook to add junk calories (and ruin the adults’ digestion) by dumping dairy products into everything. There are milk-and-egg custards and cheesy casseroles, and then there are recipes consisting of more digestible food. Most recipes don’t direct you to sneak wheat flour into vegetable dishes to thicken the sauce (when they mention thickening sauce, they usually specify cornstarch), or add sugar to vegetable dishes in a vain hope of making stale cooked veg taste fresher, although a few do. Many recipes feature meat, the idea being to surround a little lean meat with a lot of veg to make it psychologically easier for more people to eat more veg. Several recipes are vegan. A few recipes suggest using alcohol as a flavoring; most don’t. Generally these recipes are stripped down to their main ingredients (however many main ingredients they may have—Bailey has no objections to twenty-different-bean soups), without the traditional additives. Some recipes even suggest softening the firm vegetables, like onions, carrots, or turnips, in water or broth rather than butter.

If you notice any damage done to recipes by Bailey’s rules of reducing or eliminating every unnecessary calorie, it’ll be the not-really-sweet desserts. Some people like bland, bready muffins and sour fruit mixtures. Bailey’s desserts are for them.

If you want to lighten up your cooking and eat more fruits and vegetables, I think Mary and Heather McDougall generally do that better, but that’s just me. You’ll like some of these recipes. You’ll just have to experiment to find them…

Er-herm…I have to rant a little bit. If you’re not overweight but just like the idea of lighter, less expensive recipes, you can and should enjoy books like this one. If you are overweight and seriously want to fix this, you should get out of the kitchen, go for a long walk that takes up all the time you had for cooking, and nibble on a raw fruit or vegetable when you come in. It’s not a complete accident that I’ve worn the same dress size since grade nine. When I’m not wearing other things underneath them, and the fat pants still seem to fit better than the skinny britches do, I take that as a sign to stop cooking. This plan may help others stop wasting time and money on so-called diet books, too.