Skinny Bitch & AR Veganism Twice on NYT Best Seller List

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/dining/02skin.html?_r=2 & pagewanted=1 & oref=slogin Still Skinny, but Now They Can Cook By JULIA MOSKIN Published: January 2, 2008 GRAPEFRUIT, cabbage soup and maple syrup have had their moments. Now a new weight-loss ingredient is all the rage: Rage. “Skinny Bitch,” a diet book that is political, profane, passionately pro-animal rights — and hard-core vegan to boot — was published in 2005 and sold more than 850,000 copies. With its drawing of a svelte “Sex and the City” type on the cover, “Skinny Bitch” looked like a beach read, but it read like boot camp. The authors, Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman, dressed readers down

for following low-fat and low-carb diets, drinking diet soda, entrusting their health to the Food and Drug Administration, and most of all for ignoring the miserable realities of the American meat and dairy industries. Despite its seemingly indigestible qualities, “Skinny Bitch” (Running Press) became one of the hottest-selling vegan books ever published. Now, the book’s peculiar combination of girl power, tough love and gross-out tales from the slaughterhouse has been translated to the kitchen. The authors’ new cookbook, “Skinny Bitch in the Kitch,” was published in December and reached No. 6 on the New York Times best-seller list in the paperback advice category last week. “Skinny

Bitch in the Kitch” helpfully condenses the entire content of the first book down to three pages (meat is murder; carbohydrates do not make you fat; always read the ingredients and don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce). The first book barely mentioned cooking, suggesting an eating style based on fruit, snacks and frozen food from the health-food store. It was a vegan version of the fast-food diet the authors say they used to follow equally zealously. “I know I ate at Burger King every single day of 1992,” Ms. Freedman said. “For years, if it didn’t come from a drive-through or a can, I wasn’t interested.” She first adopted veganism, a diet that avoids not just animal proteins like meat but also foods animals make like milk, eggs and honey, not as a health or weight-loss regime, but as an outgrowth of her interest in animal rights. At the time she was a booker for runway models, and Ms. Barnouin was one of

her clients. Eventually, Ms. Freedman left the modeling agency to work as an animal-rights activist. By that point, she said, she had “harangued” Ms. Barnouin with so much information about the meat and dairy industries that she also became vegan. With a vague notion of educating other “regular” people, Ms. Barnouin went on to study holistic nutrition through an unaccredited school for alternative health. Ms. Freedman went further down the vegan path, to the point that her dogs, Timber and Joey, eat a meat-free, dairy-free diet. (“And no, neither me nor my dogs wear leather,” she said.) They wrote “Skinny Bitch,” thinking that no publisher would accept it without drastic editing. They were wrong, and then they became famous. But, they say, they still did not really know how to cook. After “Skinny Bitch” was published, the authors were overwhelmed by requests for recipes and menus. “There comes a time in your life when you have to learn to

cook,” Ms. Barnouin said. “For us, this was it.” Ms. Barnouin had learned the basics of French cooking from her husband, a chef from Provence, in France. (They met in 2001, when she still ate butter and cheese.) But she and Ms. Freedman were still unsure enough of their cooking and publishing skills that they hired a vegan “cookbook consultant” to write the recipes. They say they came up with the list of just over 100 recipes and wrote the headnotes, such as: “‘Chicken’ Noodle Soup: Just like Mom used to make — minus the pieces of decomposing, rotting chicken carcass.” The cookbook makes little use of traditional Asian meat substitutes (there is one recipe each for seitan and tempeh) but there is a lot of frozen Italian “sausage” and vegan creamer sprinkled around. Recipes without those foods were tastier, such as spaghetti squash with spicy braised greens, raisins and nuts, a huge hit at my table because of

its subtle infusion of chipotle chilies. Still Skinny, but Now They Can Cook Published: January 2, 2008 (Page 2 of 2) The authors go beyond veganism at many points, rejecting olive oil for cooking in favor of coconut oil (they believe heating olive oil makes it dangerous to health) and disallowing non-whole-grain foods like semolina pasta and white rice. The authors’ ferocious conviction, despite their lack of formal credentials for evaluating most of the nutritional and medical research in the books, has clearly been the books’ driving force. Karen F.

Daniels, a retired massage therapist in Cottonwood, Ariz., said the book provided motivation. She said she responded with laughter and concern to the advice-abuse in “Skinny Bitch.” (Samples: “You are a total moron if you think the Atkins diet will make you thin”; “Soda is liquid Satan”; “Eggs are high in saturated fat and completely disgusting when you think about what you are eating. After buying a copy for herself recently, she ordered three more as Christmas presents for her daughters and sister. “You get hit between the eyes with their tone, but if it affects even half of your choices, that’s a lot of changes,” she said. “They get you mad and scared, and you don’t even want those foods any more.” Ms. Barnouin said, “I do think we tapped into the anger and frustration a lot of people feel about food and dieting and body image.” “You know how you feel when a tall, thin, pretty woman walks by and something inside

you wants to say, ‘That skinny bitch!’?” said Ms. Barnouin, who happens to be tall, thin and pretty. “The book takes that envy and anger and gives you a new place to put it.” Those places include the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., white flour and sugar, low-fat dairy products (there is no such thing, the authors assert), aspartame, and several other villains, including lazy readers who might be inclined to whine about eating fruit and herbal tea for breakfast every day for the rest of their lives. “We knew that there were a lot of girls out there who would never read a vegan book, never buy a diet book that told them they had to give up coffee and Diet Coke,” Ms. Freedman said. “So we decided to package it differently.” From that casual bit of cynicism, a phenomenon grew. “I don’t think most of the people who buy it here know that it’s a vegan book,” said Lisa Garner, a manager of the boutique Kitson in Los Angeles, a chief

Hollywood purveyor of things trendy and frivolous. Normally in the business of selling “it” boots, leopard-print hoodies, and so on to the likes of Nicole Richie and Jessica Simpson, Kitson has sold more than 2,000 copies of “Skinny Bitch.” “They just like the title,” she said. Kimberly Latham, a fashion publicist in New York, said: “I would never have read ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma.’ I’m not even sure I know what an omnivore is. But I know what a skinny bitch is, and I know I want to be one.” Debbie Rasmussen, the publisher of Bitch magazine, a feminist journal in Portland, Ore., has mixed feelings about the Skinny Bitch phenomenon. “Obviously I’m in favor of assaults on the food industry,” said Ms. Rasmussen, a vegan. “On the other hand, the constant equating of skinny and healthy is something I have a real problem with. And replacing junk food with vegan junk food is not my idea of how to change our unhealthy food culture.” The authors do occasionally take a break from swearing to write loving disclaimers in which they say health and well-being are more important than skinniness, disavow bitchiness as a way of life and encourage readers to eat their fill of foods like avocados, nuts and fruit without worrying about calories and carbs. “We really want everyone to stop doing all this stupid math,” Ms. Freedman said. “Just stuff yourself with things that are good for you, and you will be fine.” They also express solidarity with readers who might suffer from cravings for what they call vice items. “I still have a weakness for anything with high fructose corn syrup,” Ms. Barnouin said. “There are these vegan riblets in barbecue sauce that I literally could eat three times a day.” Laboring heroically to make a vegan diet seem like the simplest thing in the world, Ms. Freedman said: “We are normal girls.

We like reality TV and purses, all the fun stuff. But we just happen to know that most of what normal girls put in their bodies on a daily basis is barely even food.” Related Recipe: Spaghetti Squash With Spicy Braised Greens, Raisins and Pine Nuts (January 2, 2008) A Diet Book Serves Up a Side Order of Attitude (August 1, 2007)

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