{"id":72,"date":"2013-12-23T16:04:24","date_gmt":"2013-12-23T16:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/?p=72"},"modified":"2013-12-23T16:07:58","modified_gmt":"2013-12-23T16:07:58","slug":"review-cooked-a-natural-history-of-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/?p=72","title":{"rendered":"Review: ‘Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation’"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bill Palladino<\/strong><\/p>\n

My first Michael Pollan book, \u201cThe Botany of Desire,\u201d was one I instantly fell for. That book casually tossed upon my table the relationship humans have with plants, and reciprocally the relationship they seem to have developed with us. It sounded vaguely alien-esque, so I went off into the void of two of my favorite reading genres: food and sci-fi. It was followed by a succession of other Pollan books through the years, each with the promise of keeping my foodie mind burbling with anticipation.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve read Pollan\u2019s other books, “Cooked” one arrives a bit off-camber. It\u2019s not the same rip-out-the-heart, traditional food system skewering we\u2019re used to. \u201cCooked\u201d starts with a frank admission from Pollan:\u00a0\u201cCooking has always been a part of my life, but more like the furniture than an object of scrutiny, much less a passion.\u201d<\/i><\/b>\u00a0 What he\u2019s saying is that he\u2019s made a career out of talking about food without ever understanding its true relationship personally.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cCooked\u201d is a nationwide gustatory road-trip mapped out to right that wrong. While it lacks the ferocity of an Anthony Bourdain treatise, it has a similar effect in that it asks us to question the obvious while leaving us hungering for the forbidden fruit of our guilty pleasures.<\/p>\n

The book is organized around the four classical elements, fire, water, air, and earth. In its simplest form, \u201cCooked\u201d uses each element as a classroom opportunity for Pollan to learn one classic\u2014otherwise mundane\u2014recipe at a time. To examine fire, he seeks out a southern barbecue master. Diving into water, he teams up with a former Chez Panisse chef. For air, he ventures into the ancient art of bread baking. And finally for earth, he seizes upon that mysterious organic process we call fermentation. These all reinforce the subtitle of the book, \u201cA Natural History of Transformation.\u201d\u201cCooked\u201d<\/i><\/b>\u00a0seems more the work of a cultural anthropologist than that of the food systems activist we\u2019ve known.<\/p>\n

FIRE:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"Elements\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Greeks and Egyptians, Persians, and even\u00a0medieval alchemists\u00a0all had some interpretation of the four elements. \u00a0Michael Pollan leads with fire and approaches it quite literally. \u00a0We go with him as he gets in his car and drives to a little town in North Carolina known for its barbecue cookery. This unproven Yankee dons his neophyte hat and wades into a backwoods barbecue pit overseen by a 30-something man with barbecue in his blood named Samuel Jones.<\/p>\n

The section shows in detail the lessons Pollan will need to learn to understand this succulent American right of passage known as barbecue. It starts with a treatise on how our very species invented fire, and then cooking with it as a way to do nothing less than preserve and advance our DNA. Before the section ends, we find some iconic Pollan, regaling us with Freudian references:\u00a0\u201cCooking with fire remains very much a competitive male preserve, and those of us who do it should probably count ourselves lucky Freud isn\u2019t around to offer his analysis of exactly what it is we\u2019re up to.\u201d<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Pollan doesn\u2019t leave classical Greek interpretations of fire alone either. He devotes pages to tales of Zeus and Prometheus and plots of revenge and retribution for betrayals of gods and mortals.\u00a0\u201cThe Prometheus story becomes a myth of the origin of cooking, an account of how animal sacrifice evolved into a form of feasting, thanks to Prometheus\u2019 daring reapportionment of the sacrificial animal to favor man.\u201d<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

The emphatic call to arms of fire is that it was born to cook meat.<\/p>\n

WATER:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

This second section starts with a chef\u2019s most basic of tasks, chopping \u201cveg\u201d for a mirepoix. Pollan\u2019s stop at this juncture is illustrative of the book\u2019s mission. He realizes he\u2019s been part of the problem, which thus far he\u2019s been unwilling to admit in his other books. Recognizing that playing an active role in the preparation and \u201ctransformation\u201d of food is the mea culpa that drives the narrative.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday the typical American spends a mere twenty-seven minutes a day on food preparation, and another four minutes cleaning up. That\u2019s less than half the time spent cooking and cleaning up in 1965, when I was a boy. Somewhat more than half of the evening meals an American eats today are still \u201ccooked at home,\u201d according to the market researchers.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Still, he\u2019s far from taking it all on the chin himself:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe very same activity that many people regard as a form of drudgery has somehow been elevated to a popular spectator sport. When you consider that twenty-seven minutes is less time than it takes to watch a single episode of Top Chef or The New Food Network Star, you realize that there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.\u201d<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Pollan\u2019s work on water examines its important role in the transformation process. Extracting flavors and separating, then reconstituting, chemical compounds in food is critical to our expectations of taste. For this lesson he employs an upwardly reaching chef, Samin Nosrat, formerly of Chez Panisse fame. Pollan spent Sundays with Samin to learn the intricacies of the pot. The subtle combinations of flavors\u2014this vegetable with that\u2014or the order in which we add them to a soup or a braise provide telltale signals to our brain about a food\u2019s cultural origins.<\/p>\n

The power of the chop (we\u2019re talking veggies here) combines with water (or oil or other liquids) to create a myriad of flavors, all of which require tending. Pollan refers to this\u00a0\u201cdrudgery\u201d\u00a0<\/b><\/em>as the\u201cantithesis\u201d<\/b>\u00a0of what fire requires. \u201cIndeed,\u201d he continues,\u00a0\u201cThe only time the grill man or pit master deploys a knife is at the very end of his show.\u201d<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

Water it seems was designed for the pot, and in the pot we find veg.<\/p>\n

AIR:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

This chapter focuses on part of a cooking tradition that is akin to religion. In fact some of the greatest books on bread-baking are still published by Jesuit brothers and priests. Pollan joins the ranks of millions of us in search of salvation from that perfect loaf because, he intimates, we\u2019re either meant to be bakers, or we\u2019re not.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had baked one or two loaves years before with only middling results, and had concluded baking was probably not for me.\u201d<\/b><\/em>\u00a0This conclusion is one I\u2019ve heard espoused by many of my own friends. Even my wife, an otherwise accomplished cook, claims she\u2019s had far too many catastrophes to make any further attempts at baking. So here\u2019s something of his work that certainly speaks to all of us. One way to think about bread, he suggests,\u00a0\u201cis simply this: as an ingenious technology for improving the flavor, digestibility, and nutritional value of grass.\u201d \u00a0<\/em><\/b><\/p>\n

Pollan peeks behind the curtain of naturally fermented breads, too. He talks about the mysteries and vagaries of rising dough, of the care and feeding of a sourdough starter, and the downright bizarre rituals discussed by authors and bloggers about how wild yeasts and strains of bacteria find their way into mason jars hidden in the dark recesses of San Francisco apartments. Then Pollan incriminates himself as just another foodie-mortal powerless to the seductions of bread with this mouth-watering description of the finished product.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best bread I ever tasted was a big country loaf shot through with holes the size of marbles and golf balls\u2014easily more air than bread. It had a tough hide of a crust very nearly burned, but held inside a crumb so tender, moist, and glossy it made you think of custard. There was something sensual about the strong contrast between these two realms\u2014outside and inside, hard and soft. The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it.\u201d<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Air explains to us the importance of the places in between, and the role we have as humans to manipulate that space to our own ends.<\/p>\n

EARTH:<\/h2>\n

Michael Pollan doesn\u2019t let this sensual loaf seduce him to distraction. He also looks towards other aspects of fermentation in the food system, reminding us that before refrigeration, canning, and chemicals, fermentation was the primary form of preserving food over long periods of time. He talks of Korean kimchi buried in the backyard, Russian kefir, yogurt, and of breadfruit aging in Fiji pits to eventual odiferous perfection as something resembling the scent of road kill after a week in the sun.<\/p>\n

Finally he covers something dear to many of my friends: the role of fermentation in making alcohol, and specifically beer. This, as it turns out, is another specialty of the religious. If you\u2019ve ever had Belgian ale, you can thank a monk.<\/p>\n

Speaking of fermenting cultures he says,\u00a0\u201cIt not only seems alive, it is alive. And most of this living takes place at a scale inaccessible to us without a microscope.\u201d\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Earth is really about stuff that lives and breathes and changes food from one form into another. As humans we are sometimes the instigators, but mainly bystanders in a process that closely mimics the very way life is thought to have emerged from that primordial ooze.<\/p>\n

\u201cCooked: A Natural History of Transformation\u201d is an eye-opening read, but it pries your lids up in a very different way than his previous books. Gone are the diatribes and stabs at American corporate agriculture that many of us grew to appreciate from him. That edge is replaced with a new foundation of self-discovery, one akin to the sense of wonder served up by children. It begs you to turn the page, grab some ingredients, and push upon the edges of your own food comfort zone.<\/p>\n

Michael Pollan is the author of seven books including: The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, An Omnivore\u2019s Dilemma, A Place of My Own, Second Nature, Food Rules, and Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. \u00a0All these books are available at our local books stores throughout northwest Lower Michigan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bill Palladino My first Michael Pollan book, \u201cThe Botany of Desire,\u201d was one I instantly fell for. That book casually tossed upon my table the relationship humans have with plants, and reciprocally the relationship they seem to have developed with us. It sounded vaguely alien-esque, so I went off into the void of two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,5],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cooked","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.resilience-reads.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}