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    Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
    Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
    Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
    Ebook661 pages9 hours

    Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

    By Michael Pollan

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    About this ebook

    Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules, How to Change Your Mind, and This is Your Mind on Plants explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen in Cooked. 

    "Having described what's wrong with American food in his best-selling The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), New York Times contributor Pollan delivers a more optimistic but equally fascinating account of how to do it right. . . . A delightful chronicle of the education of a cook who steps back frequently to extol the scientific and philosophical basis of this deeply satisfying human activity." —Kirkus (starred review)

    Cooked is now a Netflix docuseries based on the book that focuses on the four kinds of "transformations" that occur in cooking. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and starring Michael Pollan, Cooked teases out the links between science, culture and the flavors we love.

    In Cooked, Pollan discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer.

    Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan’s effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse–trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius “fermentos” (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us.

    The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Books
    Release dateApr 23, 2013
    ISBN9781101605462
    Author

    Michael Pollan

    Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, all New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley.

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    Reviews for Cooked

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    • 5/5
      Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources of energy. … Freed from the necessity of spending our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture. {… until} cooking took its fatefully wrong turn: when civilization began processing food in such a way as to make it less nutritious rather than more.

      This was so good, as has been every book I’ve read by Pollan. They take time and they pay off in terrific diversions into science, culture and history. Here, Pollan explores the four classic (and nearly magical) methods that humans have long used to make food more delicious and digestible: fire (grilling), water (braising), air (baking), and earth (fermentation). He locates niche uber-experts and resides with them to learn about such things as barbecue, aromatic mirepoix, bread-baking and cheese-making.

      Even today, as much as a third of the food in the world’s diet is produced in a process involving fermentation. Many of these foods and drinks happen to be among the most cherished, {…} coffee, chocolate, vanilla, bread, cheese, wine and beer, yogurt, ketchup and most other condiments, vinegar, soy sauce, miso, certain teas, corned beef and pastrami, prosciutto and salami-- {…} Basically, it’s all the really good stuff. {…}

      “The big problem with the Western diet, … is that it doesn’t feed the gut, only the upper GI. All the food has been processed to be readily absorbed, leaving nothing for {the microbial residents of} the lower GI.” {…} We have changed the human diet in such a way that it no longer feeds the whole superorganism. … We’re eating for one, when we need to be eating for, oh, a few trillion.
    • 4/5
      Michael can write about food! Each section of this book encouraged me to bake bread, braise some meat, and now make some sauerkraut. I enjoyed this book, partly due to a couple of BBQ restaurants i I enjoy visiting regularly in NC were discussed. If you have seen Cooked on Netflix, it's pretty much the book on TV.
    • 5/5
      This is the fourth book of Pollan's that I have read and I must say that he goes from strength to strength. From his simple mantra for eating (Eat food, not too much, mostly plants) in the Omnivore's Dilemma to his exploration of how food scientists over-emphasize micro elements in food in In Defense of Food, I have been given much (dare I say it) food for thought. This book was no exception.

      The subtitle of this book is A Natural History of Transformation and Pollan examines four types of transformation that our food can go through. Each of these transformations is tied to an elemental force: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. For each section Pollan apprenticed himself to a master of that particular transformation. In Fire, he went to the American south and learned about barbecue. I'm not talking about throwing a piece of meat on the grill for a short length of time; I'm talking about slow cooking a whole pig in a pit for a day. If this section doesn't make you salivate you must be a really dedicated vegan. In Water he also explores slow cooking but it's the type of cooking done in a pot with liquid and some vegetables and some type of meat, probably a cut that would be tough unless cooked this way. Air is all about bread baking and how the air is essential to make a good tasting loaf of bread. He includes a recipe at the back for a sourdough type of bread which made me wonder if all those people who started baking sourdough in the beginning of the pandemic had read this book. As persuasive as he is with his passion for sourdough bread I think I'll probably stick to using yeast. Which gives me a nice segue into the final chapter which is all about treating food with microorganisms to ferment them. Fermentation also takes quite a long time but very little is required from the cook; instead those little bacteria do all the work. I think it might be time to make another batch of sauerkraut but unlike Pollan I'm not going to get a 7.5 liter crock. I'll stick with a quart preserving jar. In addition to vegetable fermentation, Pollan looked at cheese making and beer and wine brewing. Who needs barbecued or braised meat when you could have cheese and wine accompanied by some pickled and/or fermented vegetables? Remember Pollan's mantra and eat mostly plants.

      I see Pollan has branched off into the effects of plants on our minds in his latest books. I will have to see what fascinating insights he has discovered there.
    • 5/5
      This will be saved as one of my favorite books of all time.
      Which is saying a lot because I hate cooking with a passion, but he addresses the reason why and so many other people in this age hate cooking. He makes me want to drive to North Carolina and have some whole hog BBQ, and has given me an appreciation for all the types of food in this book are Slow Food.
      Not only is his journey learning to cook these dishes great but just the general info about food and culture and society is great as well.
      I am going to try my hand at live yeast culture artisan bread this next month and after we have our own garden established we will be canning and fermenting our goods!

      I recommend everyone read this book!
    • 5/5
      If you care about what you eat, you should read this book. If you don't care about what you eat, you should read this book and start to care.
    • 4/5
      A readable account of Pollan's adventures in bbq, breadmaking, brewing, and braising. Quite enjoyable, if typically idiosyncratic.
    • 4/5
      This was heavier going (with less at stake for the reader) than Omnivore's Dilemma, and was more of a book to be read slowly and savored. If you're interested in serious artisanal food, this is a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion.

      I have no idea why I decided to read it, because I don't cook and I don't drink.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book. I listened to via Audible. The author reads the text with enthusiasm, occasionally seeming to speed a little too much for my taste, but still enjoyable.

      I appreciate the depth that Pollan puts into this exploration of the Earth, Air, Fire, Water treatment of traditional cooking.

      I particularly enjoyed the in depth treatment of baking, yeasts, wheats and how virtually all breads available to modern purchasers are faint replicas of the complex foodstuffs eaten by humans up until industrialization and transformation of foods by the industrialized food industries.

      Particularly interesting is the observation that human beings are no longer what they once were. Our bodies are a complex metropolis of organisms but that many that would have been present in or on human beings a century ago have been blasted into extinction by antibiotics.

      This is a well thought out and interesting book.
    • 4/5
      This book was worth reading for the chapter on bread alone. I also really enjoyed the story of the mirepoix and how it became the basis for recipes around the world.
    • 4/5
      Articulate and thoughtful as always. I have to admit that it took me a couple of tries to get through this book. Pollan’s musings about transformations and the four elements are just too metaphysical for my taste. (This is particularly true of the chapter about barbecue, with all its talk of cooking and fire and primitive man making sacrifices to the gods.) But I did enjoy being a fly for the wall as he tagged along with various people -- especially the cheesemaking nun -- and it was inspiring, if somewhat intimidating, to watch his own efforts to cook more frequently and to do more complicated recipes. I have a feeling I know one of my New Year’s resolutions already ...
    • 3/5
      I managed to get a new copy and listened to this over the course of a couple of days. I learned a lot of interesting things about the history of different cooking techniques and I found the anecdotes about his own experiences really funny and interesting a lot of the time. There were a couple of really really science-y parts particularly in cheese making that were excruciatingly dry.
    • 5/5
      Me chael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Apprenticing himself to a successino of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fiee, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everythng from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture. Both realms are transformed by cooking, and so, in the proceas, is the cook.
    • 4/5
      Michael Pollan is firmly established as an author of books about food, partcicularly about the production of food. He is not only characterized as a writer, but also as an activist and lecturer. The early years of Pollan's authorship are a bit difficult to trace. In 1975, he attended the Mansfield College, Oxford University and after taking an MA degree in English in 1981, supposedly, he worked for nearly two decades as an editor and journalist. Some of his earliest essays in the early 1990s demonstrate an interest in natural history, particularly plants, botany, and food, or the intersection of the natural world and culture. While in his early books, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991) and The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001) botany was forefronted, Pollan's recent four books have all focussed on the food industry, particularly man's domination of nature and near destructive influence on the ecology of food yielding crops. Particularly, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals forms the backbone and basis of Michael Pollan's crusade against the food industry. In this book, he describes the origins of human's food, demonstrating how mankind developed food resources from hunting-gathering, through agriculture to agribusiness with industrial characteristics, and how man's domination of nature threatens to destroy our health and the eco system, foreboding an apocalyptic food scarecity scenario. Following the publication of the The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Pollan has published several books, which cab be seen as spin-offs from this book, mostly advocating better food habits, such as In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008), Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (2009) and Pollan Family Table (2014). While the former is theoretical, the latter three books are all very practical, containing tips for better eating.

      Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013) is a book that moves back a little bit along the spectrum, to discuss the intersection between culture and nature, in the form of discussing the way humans have prepared and eaten. Like, The Omnivore's Dilemma, the book is divided into four parts, each describing a method of food preparation, symbolized by one of the four elements: fire, water, air and earth. The first part of the book is formed by a more or less anthropological description of "fire pit" hog roasting. This is a fascinating piece of writing of a unique way of roasting meat. By focussing on a single, spectacular type of roasting, Pollan circumvents the necessity of tedious explanation of methods of barbecuing that everyone would be familiar with. Apparently, the type of roasting described by Pollan is sufficiently obscure to be interesting and new to the majority of both domestic and international readership. Unfortunately, the piece is too long, and repetitive. While the original description is great and interesting, a similar case at a different location is included, which, though described in less detail, creates an unnecessary repetition. This clearly seems to be a filler, to lengthen the chapter. The second part of the book describes all forms of stewing, braising and boiling in water. This is the shortest chapter. It is fleshed out with an explanation of umami the fifth taste, with which not very many are familiar.

      While everone can imagine the role of fire and water in the preparation of food, the author stretches the imagination of the reader a bit by the next two categories: air and earth. This is not obvious at all. Part three describes the baking of bread, while Part four describes various ways of fermentation. The artificiality of this division is obvious. After all, the function of yeast in bread is also a form of fermentation, while in the fermentation processes of wine and beer, described in Part four, "air" is also formed. However, this is obscured by the author. Part three describes the role of yeast in the production of artisan bread, while Part four describes the role of microbes in the production of wine, beer and cheese.

      Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is a very interesting book, that combines background, history and cultural description, with writing about food, and food preparation. The book also contains various DIY recipes, suggesting readers to put into practice. The book is much more optimistic and lighter than The Omnivore's Dilemma.

      However, even with regular readers of the work of Michael Pollan a certain fatique with the topic must be noticeable. The division into four parts is strained, as discussed above. Pollan's writing style bears all the typical characteristics of journalistic writing. So, every part is identified by a particular named individual, a person who functions as a kind of anchor, and is described as a grotesque caricature. At the same time, the author places himself in the position of the person who experiences, tastes, smells and tries everything: the eyes and ears of the reader. Both books have a mystifying sub title. In fact, A Natural History of Transformation comes close to having no meaning at all. It is neither "natural history" nor "transformation".

      Michael Pollan is not a great thinker or original mind. His books are well-crafted, but bear all the characteristics of paucity in scholarship and lacking a critical and objective mind. Thus, Pollan's view are elitist, driven by commercialism and activism, rather than sound scholarship. Pollan's work is better understood as popular science, and very readable. However, it is hoped the author will soon turn to another topic.
    • 5/5
      The author covers four basic methods of cooking: BBQ (fire), Pot (Water), Bread (Air) and Fermentation (earth). Very well written and insightful information. Only complaint I have was the philosophical bits that seemed to lead to nowhere and became a bit of a distraction from an otherwise excellent description of the history of man's interaction with his food.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed another session with Michael Pollan. Broken out into four sections - Fire, Water, Air and Earth. The section on cheese was particularly fascinating.
    • 4/5
      I wasn't sure about this when I started it but I'm so glad I stuck with it. I enjoyed the way this book was set up - dividing the types of cooking by the four elements and then exploring the history, social history and science behind each one as well as Michael Pollan's attempt to cook in the various ways he discovers. So fire was cooking meat over fire, water was cooking soups and sauces, air was all about bread and earth was about fermentation - pickled vegetables, cheese and beer. I found the parts about air and earth the most interesting, but that's because I enjoyed the science behind them the most and I love bread and cheese. :)

      I think anyone who is interested in the history and science of food and cooking would enjoy this, even if, like me, you're not much of a cook.
    • 3/5
      Michael Pollan is one of my very favorited people. This is not my favorite of his books- however, it's still a good book. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't gotten on one of my OCD sprees last year and read everything I could about food. So this book for me was going over old ground.

      I did like the BBQ (fire) chapters, except they made me hungry.

      I loved the Bread (air) chapters, except they made me hungry.

      I liked the brasing (water) chapters, they did make me hungry.

      The fermentation chapters (earth) were great but yep..hungry.

      Mr. Pollan is the reason that I started eating healthier and give alot more thought to what I put in my mouth. His writing is always easy to understand and very personal for me.
    • 4/5
      Thought this was a pretty great read. It really outlines the relationship of food to so many things: family, the senses, creativity, the rise of the agro-industrial movement, marketing, psychological well-being, and on and on. I won't soon forget the part where he talks about the best cheeses smelling like the human body. As someone who spends a lot of time in front of screens, cooking is always something I tried to use as leisurely activity, rather than as a burden. And this book tries to get one to look at food as an activity rather than simply as a source of nutrients/calories. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This is the first of Michael Pollan's books I've read but it won't be the last. It's an in-depth exploration of the process of cooking and its place in human society from its origins to the present day. Pollan takes many perspectives in this book, historical, philosophical, practical, sociological and so on, which is what keeps it interesting.

      His introduction sets out his thesis which is to answer a number of questions in regard to food and our relationship with it, for example "...what was the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being … what is the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help reform the American food system, to make it healthier and more sustainable … how can people living in a highly specialised consumer economy reduce their sense of dependence and achieve a greater degree of self-sufficiency … how, in our everyday lives, can we acquire a deeper understanding of the natural world and our species’ peculiar role in it? There could hardly be more important and pertinent questions.

      He decides to look for the answers by going to the kitchen and by experiencing first hand "the dramas of transformation”. The book is divided up into four parts - one for each of the big transformations by which raw material is converted into food - Fire, Water, Air and Earth. As an examination of “cooking as a defining human endeavour” it's a fascinating read, although there were parts that became heavy going, where he seemed to get bogged down somewhat in reporting every detail of his various experiments in culinary creation. But ultimately it's a book worth persisting with despite those passages.
    • 4/5
      Pollan writes eloquently about cooking with fire (barbeque), water (braises, sofrito, etc.), air (baking bread), and earth (fermentation), arguing that there’s a benefit to despecializing in our cooking instead of letting corporations cook for us. He was most convincing on the “water” section, I thought, because baking bread sounds like a pain and I have no desire to make my own kimchee. There are a lot of discussions of the psychological role of cooking, and how others have thought of it, with a reasonable amount of attention paid to gender and an occasional nod at race, with an apparent detachment from those issues consistent with Pollan’s identity as a white man. Cooking is deeply psychological and fulfilling in this book, but only here as an indicator of one’s relationship with the physical world or occasionally one’s desire to build community—“power” doesn’t really come into his account.
    • 5/5
      Inspiring, but ultimately too challenging for me to adopt much of any of the slow food movement as a single working adult.
    • 3/5
      He made many valid points throughout the book relating to evolution and sociology. Many of which I had never considered. Although I enjoyed the book, I would suggest sampling this as a audiobook. In print form, it's just too long. Many readers won't have the patience to continue reading this in book form. I did enjoy it overall and am hoping to read THE BOTANY OF DESIRE in the future.
    • 4/5
      Summary: Cooking, some people have argued, is what truly makes us human, what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. And cooking is a process of transformation, of turning raw ingredients into food. In Cooked Pollan looks at the four basic processes of cooking, which he equates to the four fundamental elements, and asks what they say about our history, our culture, and our relationship to the natural world. In "Fire", he looks at the art of Barbecue - not grilling, but of cooking a real animal (often whole) over a real fire. In "Water", he moves into the kitchen and takes on the pot-dish: braising meat in liquid. In "Air", he takes up baking in a quest to understand what makes the perfect loaf of bread, and in "Earth", he deals with the microorganisms that make beer and other fermented foods (including cheese, sauerkraut, and others) possible.

      Review: Even though I really enjoyed The Botany of Desire, I'm still a little wary when it comes to Pollan's work. (Even though I agree with what he has to say, he can come off as kind of lecture-y at times, and I don't like feeling bad about what I eat.) But Cooked seemed like it would be right up my alley - I love microhistories, I love foodie and cooking books, and I love science, so a microhistory of cooking that throws in some of the science of food? I was on board.

      And again, as was the case with The Botany of Desire, I was pleasantly surprised. I won't claim that there were no lectures, but they're mild, based on common sense and things I was already trying to work on anyways, and interspersed with a lot of interesting information. I mean, I know I should cook more and eat out less. But rather than badgering me about that, Pollan went and did it, and enthused about how great it was for the length of a book, and that passion is infectious. (Although I think he sometimes doesn't take into account that while it's easy for him to bake bread with long, slow rises or braise a tough cut of meat for hours, that sort of thing doesn't work quite as easily for someone who doesn't work from home. I had the same problem with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, actually. Writers! Your schedules are not like ours!) But all the same, it was a reminder that I do enjoy cooking, that it's a very satisfying activity, and that even if it does take more time than ordering a pizza, it is time well spent all around.

      (He did manage to make me feel guilty in the bread section, though. I bake bread - I really enjoy baking bread - so I'm sort of doing it right. But I totally buy into the "white flour industrial complex," plus I use fast-acting yeast rather than a sourdough starter. I'm a Philistine, clearly. But at least now I understand the chemistry of why my bread is different if I use the white whole-wheat flour.)

      Pollan reads the audiobook version of this book, and I definitely recommend it. His delivery is very friendly and laid-back, but you can definitely hear the enthusiasm in his voice, which really helps in terms of selling the tale he has to tell.

      So am I going to go out and barbecue a whole pig anytime soon? No. Am I going to start making my own cheese or fermenting my own cabbage? Also no. I'm probably not even going to start braising meat all that often. (But I might start a sourdough culture. Damn guilt.) But what this book has done is to make me more aware of what I'm eating, and who has cooked it, and made me think a bit every time the answer is "not me" - an answer which I am doing my best to reduce. 4 out of 5 stars.

      Recommendation: Recommended for people who like cooking, or those who don't like cooking themselves but want to know more about its history, its effect on human evolution, and on our culture.
    • 5/5
      Pollan does not disappoint in this fascinating and inspiring piece of food writing. He flawlessly combines science, human evolution, and modern dilemmas with respect to how our species interacts with food. I loved listening to the author read his work. .
    • 5/5
      Being a big fan of Michael Pollan, I was really looking forward to this highly touted book. It took some months before I was able to lay my hands on a copy of it at my local public library. Unfortunately, the copy I got was part of the HITS collection--one week loan period with no renewals. And I foolishly (and predictably) allowed myself to get distracted by another book during that single week. The end result was that, when I returned the book to the library today, I had only made my way through about two-thirds of this wonderful and information-dense book.
      Pollan does a marvelous job of interweaving fact, fable, and passion about food. His contention is that it is cooking (as much as language) that separates man from the lesser beasts. Classically, he structures the book in four broad areas corresponding to the four elements identified by Aristotle: 1) fire (the earliest form of cooking was roasting pieces of animal flesh over open flames); 2) water (a much wider set of culinary techniques became available once the invention of pottery and metalworking allowed man to cook with water and other liquids); 3) air (bread, which quickly became so essential to the rise of human culture that we still hear it alluded to as the staff of life, only became possible when man accidentally discovered the wonderful activities of yeast); and 4) earth (fermentation, by which microbial action transforms foodstuffs into items as varied as cheese, sauerkraut, and beer).
      In order to better understand the art and science in the transformation of plants and animal flesh into haute cuisine, he informally apprentices himself to four practitioners. One is a pitmaster of whole hog barbecue. One is a fledgling chef who gave him weekly lessons in his home on cooking technique. The third is a baker renowned for his bread. And I won't know who the fourth mentor is until I get my hands on the book again to finish it.
      Which I will.
    • 5/5
      In his latest book, Michael Pollan talks about cooking in terms of the four elements. Looking for the ultimate expression of cooking with fire takes him to North Carolina, where he learns to barbecue a whole hog over a wood fire. In order to master cooking with water, he hires a former student with restaurant chops and Persian roots to teach him the art of slow braised dishes. Cooking with air leads him to several different bread bakers, who all contribute different insights on creating the perfect sourdough loaf. Finally, he equates earth with fermentation, which leads first to the art of making sauerkraut and kimchi, and then to brewing beer. Along the way, he ranges from archaeology to history to philosophy to psychology. He also includes plenty of portraits of the characters he met in creating this book. It made me think about cooking, which is one of my passions, in a new way.
    • 5/5
      Really good book - only four recipes but boy did he do a lot of research and thinking. The premise is looking at cooking with fire, water, air, and earth by really exploring one recipe (pit BBQ, braising, bread, & fermentation, e.g. beer, cheese, and pickles)- but mostly it's how getting back into cooking will help you reawaken your connections - with people, the environment, yourself. The philosophy is easy to take, but really thought-provoking. I so wish I could write like that.
    • 4/5
      I love Pollan's other books. He's always provided good information, the hows and whys to ditch "big food" and embrace more traditional methods of food preparation and dining. This book is all about methods of cooking. When pimping this book on The Colbert Report, Pollan suggested that people would eat a lot less French fries if they made them themselves from scratch. I anticipated the book would follow that line of reasoning -- just as in an earlier book, Pollan suggested reading labels and considering whether you grandmother would recognize all of the ingredients (if not, don't buy it). However, there is a lot less proselytizing this time around, and more out and out indulgence. Polland's obsessions in this book include whole-hog BBQ, home made beer, kraut and kimche, sourdough bread, and cheese. While he discusses the challenges of making truly healthy, and tasty whole-grain bread; trying to make a whole BBQ pig healthy requires a more tangential line of reasoning (that being it's a social, communal activity).

      Pollan's affable style makes Cooked an enjoyable read. It's missing the "you gotta read this!" punch his other books have had, but if you're a fan, you shouldn't miss this one. It just won't create too many new fans on its own merits.
    • 5/5
      Delightful, thought-provoking, as much fun as Omnivore's Dilemma. Made me want to try some of the techniques and approaches Pollan explores in the book - especially fermenting.
    • 4/5
      Pollan assays a history of food through process or its transformation: fire, e.g., barbecue ; water, e.g., braises; air, e.g., bread; and, earth, e.g., fermentation. He illustrates each by focusing on a particular artisan or expert and details his own attempts to master the processes. He adds a rich historical gloss to each, providing insight as to how each changed and furthered human culture. The book is extremely well written and draws you in. My only criticism is that Pollan gets way too technical at times, when for example he details the numerous bacteria transforming milk into cheese. This, however, is a minor grouse considering the book's overall excellence.

    Book preview

    Cooked - Michael Pollan

    Cover for Cooked

    Praise for Michael Pollan’s Cooked

    A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

    A Guardian Best Food Book of the Year

    A Portland Monthly Magazine Favorite Cookbook of 2013

    A Library Journal Top Ten Best Book of the Year

    [A] rare, ranging breed of narrative that manages to do all . . . It’s nothing short of important, possibly life-altering, reading for every living, breathing human being. . . . In Pollan’s dexterous hands, we get the science, the history, the inspiration, ultimately the recipe. What feels like all of it. It doesn’t hurt that he also happens to be very funny.

    —The Boston Globe

    "Because of the power of his prose and his reasoning, Cooked may prove to be just as influential as Pollan’s seminal book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. . . . The results are fascinating, but the magic of Cooked lies not in its ability to unlock the secrets of slow-roasting a whole hog or brewing beer. . . . No, what Pollan pulls off is even more impressive: He manages to illuminate the wealth of connections that stem from our DIY time in the kitchen."

    —The Washington Post

    "As in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan is never less than delightful, full of curiosity, insight, and good humor. This is a book to be read, savored, and smudged with spatterings of olive oil, wine, butter, and the sulfuric streaks of chopped onion."

    —Outside

    The book’s surplus of fascinating tidbits—about everything from barbecue (which Pollan connects to ritual animal sacrifice) to the mysterious workings of bread yeast—makes it a feast for intellectual omnivores.

    —Entertainment Weekly

    "Through cooking, Pollan argues, we clear a space, allowing ourselves not only to consider our sometimes troubled bond with nature but to reestablish our ties to one another, and to become makers instead of consumers. Cooked is a potently seductive invitation to discover—or rediscover—our most primal connection to the natural world."

    —Bookforum

    "Spurred by a number of objectives—improving his family’s general health, connecting with his teenage son, and learning how people can reduce their dependence on corporations, among others—Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma; In Defense of Food) came to the realization that he’d be able to accomplish all those goals and more if he spent more time in his kitchen. He began cooking. Divided into four chapters based on the four elements, [Cooked] eloquently explains how grilling with fire, braising (water), baking bread (air), and fermented foods (earth) have impacted our health and culture. . . . Engaging and enlightening reading."

    —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    "New York Times bestselling author Pollan (The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma) delivers a thoughtful meditation on cooking that is both difficult to categorize and uniquely, inimitably his. . . . Intensely focused yet wide ranging, beautifully written, thought provoking, and, yes, fun, Pollan’s latest is not to be missed by those interested in how, why, or what we cook and eat."

    —Library Journal (starred review)

    "Having described what’s wrong with American food in his bestselling The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), New York Times contributor Pollan delivers a more optimistic but equally fascinating account of how to do it right. . . . A delightful chronicle of the education of a cook who steps back frequently to extol the scientific and philosophical basis of this deeply satisfying human activity."

    —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

    Pollan’s newest treatise on how food reaches the world’s tables delves into the history of how humankind turns raw ingredients into palatable and nutritious food. To bring some sense of order to this vast subject, he resurrects classical categories of fire, water, air, and earth. . . . Four recipes accompany the text, and an extensive bibliography offers much deeper exploration. Pollan’s peerless reputation as one of America’s most compelling expositors of food and human sustainability will boost demand.

    —Booklist (starred review)

    PENGUIN BOOKS

    COOKED

    Michael Pollan is the author of nine books, including This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Made the Modern World. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan also teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

    ALSO BY MICHAEL POLLAN

    Food Rules

    In Defense of Food

    The Omnivore’s Dilemma

    The Botany of Desire

    A Place of My Own

    Second Nature

    PENGUIN BOOKS

    An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

    penguinrandomhouse.com

    First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

    Published in Penguin Books 2014

    Copyright © 2013 by Michael Pollan

    Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

    A portion of Chapter Two first appeared under the title Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, in The New York Times Magazine, July 19, 2009.

    Ebook ISBN 9781101605462

    THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

    Pollan, Michael.

    Cooked : a natural history of transformation / Michael Pollan.

    pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN 9781594204210 (hc.)

    ISBN 9780143125334 (pbk.)

    1. Cooking. 2. Cooks. I. Title.

    TX652.P646 2013

    641.5—dc23

    2012039705

    Cover design: Darren Haggar

    Cover photograph: Nino Mascardi/Getty Images

    btb_ppg_148350566_c0_r5

    FOR JUDITH AND ISAAC

    AND FOR WENDELL BERRY

    CONTENTS

    Praise for Cooked

    About the Author

    Also by Michael Pollan

    Title Page

    Copyright

    Dedication

    INTRODUCTION: WHY COOK?

    PART I:

    FIRE

    CREATURES OF THE FLAME

    PART II:

    WATER

    A RECIPE IN SEVEN STEPS

    PART III:

    AIR

    THE EDUCATION OF AN AMATEUR BAKER

    PART IV:

    EARTH

    FERMENTATION’S COLD FIRE

    AFTERWORD: HAND TASTE

    APPENDIX I

    Four Recipes

    APPENDIX II

    A Short Shelf of Books on Cooking

    Acknowledgments

    Selected Sources

    Index

    _148350566_

    INTRODUCTION

    WHY COOK?

    I.

    At a certain point in the late middle of my life I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same.

    Cook.

    Some of these questions were personal. For example, what was the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being? And what would be a good way to better connect to my teenage son? (As it turned out, this involved not only ordinary cooking but also the specialized form of it known as brewing.) Other questions were slightly more political in nature. For years I had been trying to determine (because I am often asked) what is the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help reform the American food system, to make it healthier and more sustainable? Another related question is, how can people living in a highly specialized consumer economy reduce their sense of dependence and achieve a greater degree of self-sufficiency? And then there were the more philosophical questions, the ones I’ve been chewing on since I first started writing books. How, in our everyday lives, can we acquire a deeper understanding of the natural world and our species’ peculiar role in it? You can always go to the woods to confront such questions, but I discovered that even more interesting answers could be had simply by going to the kitchen.

    I would not, as I said, ever have expected it. Cooking has always been a part of my life, but more like the furniture than an object of scrutiny, much less a passion. I counted myself lucky to have a parent—my mother—who loved to cook and almost every night made us a delicious meal. By the time I had a place of my own, I could find my way around a kitchen well enough, the result of nothing more purposeful than all those hours spent hanging around the kitchen while my mother fixed dinner. And though once I had my own place I cooked whenever I had the time, I seldom made time for cooking or gave it much consideration. My kitchen skills, such as they were, were pretty much frozen in place by the time I turned thirty. Truth be told, my most successful dishes leaned heavily on the cooking of others, as when I drizzled my incredible sage-butter sauce over store-bought ravioli. Every now and then I’d look at a cookbook or clip a recipe from the newspaper to add a new dish to my tiny repertoire, or I’d buy a new kitchen gadget, though most of these eventually ended up in a closet.

    In retrospect, the mildness of my interest in cooking surprises me, since my interest in every other link of the food chain had been so keen. I’ve been a gardener since I was eight, growing mostly vegetables, and I’ve always enjoyed being on farms and writing about agriculture. I’ve also written a fair amount about the opposite end of the food chain—the eating end, I mean, and the implications of our eating for our health. But to the middle links of the food chain, where the stuff of nature gets transformed into the things we eat and drink, I hadn’t really given much thought.

    Until, that is, I began trying to unpack a curious paradox I had noticed while watching television, which was simply this: How is it that at the precise historical moment when Americans were abandoning the kitchen, handing over the preparation of most of our meals to the food industry, we began spending so much of our time thinking about food and watching other people cook it on television? The less cooking we were doing in our own lives, it seemed, the more that food and its vicarious preparation transfixed us.

    Our culture seems to be of at least two minds on this subject. Survey research confirms we’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals every year. The amount of time spent preparing meals in American households has fallen by half since the mid-sixties, when I was watching my mom fix dinner, to a scant twenty-seven minutes a day. (Americans spend less time cooking than people in any other nation, but the general downward trend is global.) And yet at the same time we’re talking about cooking more—and watching cooking, and reading about cooking, and going to restaurants designed so that we can watch the work performed live. We live in an age when professional cooks are household names, some of them as famous as athletes or movie stars. The 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 Next 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. I don’t need to point out that the food you watch being cooked on television is not food you get to eat.

    This is peculiar. After all, we’re not watching shows or reading books about sewing or darning socks or changing the oil in our car, three other domestic chores that we have been only too happy to outsource—and then promptly drop from conscious awareness. But cooking somehow feels different. The work, or the process, retains an emotional or psychological power we can’t quite shake, or don’t want to. And in fact it was after a long bout of watching cooking programs on television that I began to wonder if this activity I had always taken for granted might be worth taking a little more seriously.

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    I developed a few theories to explain what I came to think of as the Cooking Paradox. The first and most obvious is that watching other people cook is not exactly a new behavior for us humans. Even when everyone still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat. In ancient Greece, the word for cook, butcher, and priest was the same—mageiros—and the word shares an etymological root with "magic." I would watch, rapt, when my mother conjured her most magical dishes, like the tightly wrapped packages of fried chicken Kiev that, when cut open with a sharp knife, liberated a pool of melted butter and an aromatic gust of herbs. But watching an everyday pan of eggs get scrambled was nearly as riveting a spectacle, as the slimy yellow goop suddenly leapt into the form of savory gold nuggets. Even the most ordinary dish follows a satisfying arc of transformation, magically becoming something more than the sum of its ordinary parts. And in almost every dish, you can find, besides the culinary ingredients, the ingredients of a story: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

    Then there are the cooks themselves, the heroes who drive these little dramas of transformation. Even as it vanishes from our daily lives, we’re drawn to the rhythms and textures of the work cooks do, which seems so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs these days. Cooks get to put their hands on real stuff, not just keyboards and screens but fundamental things like plants and animals and fungi. They get to work with the primal elements, too, fire and water, earth and air, using them—mastering them!—to perform their tasty alchemies. How many of us still do the kind of work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world that concludes—assuming the chicken Kiev doesn’t prematurely leak or the soufflé doesn’t collapse—with such a gratifying and delicious sense of closure?

    So maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on television and read about cooking in books is that there are things about cooking we really miss. We might not feel we have the time or energy (or the knowledge) to do it ourselves every day, but we’re not prepared to see it disappear from our lives altogether. If cooking is, as the anthropologists tell us, a defining human activity—the act with which culture begins, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss—then maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that watching its processes unfold would strike deep emotional chords.

    33202.png

    The idea that cooking is a defining human activity is not a new one. In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that no beast is a cook, called Homo sapiens the cooking animal. (Though he might have reconsidered that definition had he been able to gaze upon the frozen-food cases at Walmart.) Fifty years later, in The Physiology of Taste, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had done the most to advance the cause of civilization. More recently, Lévi-Strauss, writing in The Raw and the Cooked in 1964, reported that many of the world’s cultures entertained a similar view, regarding cooking as the symbolic activity that establishes the difference between animals and people.

    For Lévi-Strauss, cooking was a metaphor for the human transformation of raw nature into cooked culture. But in the years since the publication of The Raw and the Cooked, other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the idea that the invention of cooking might hold the evolutionary key to our humanness. A few years ago, a Harvard anthropologist and primatologist named Richard Wrangham published a fascinating book called Catching Fire, in which he argued that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors—and not tool making or meat eating or language—that set us apart from the apes and made us human. According to the cooking hypothesis, the advent of cooked food altered the course of human evolution. By providing our forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet, it allowed our brains to grow bigger (brains being notorious energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing—as much as six hours a day.

    Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources of energy. Also, since cooking detoxifies many potential sources of food, the new technology cracked open a treasure trove of calories unavailable to other animals. Freed from the necessity of spending our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.

    Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we’ve more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us. Around that fire, Wrangham writes, we became tamer.

    Cooking thus transformed us, and not only by making us more sociable and civil. Once cooking allowed us to expand our cognitive capacity at the expense of our digestive capacity, there was no going back: Our big brains and tiny guts now depended on a diet of cooked food. (Raw-foodists take note.) What this means is that cooking is now obligatory—it is, as it were, baked into our biology. What Winston Churchill once said of architecture—First we shape our buildings, and then they shape us—might also be said of cooking. First we cooked our food, and then our food cooked us.

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    If cooking is as central to human identity, biology, and culture as Wrangham suggests, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking in our time would have serious consequences for modern life, and so it has. Are they all bad? Not at all. The outsourcing of much of the work of cooking to corporations has relieved women of what has traditionally been their exclusive responsibility for feeding the family, making it easier for them to work outside the home and have careers. It has headed off many of the conflicts and domestic arguments that such a large shift in gender roles and family dynamics was bound to spark. It has relieved all sorts of other pressures in the household, including longer workdays and overscheduled children, and saved us time that we can now invest in other pursuits. It has also allowed us to diversify our diets substantially, making it possible even for people with no cooking skills and little money to enjoy a whole different cuisine every night of the week. All that’s required is a microwave.

    These are no small benefits. Yet they have come at a cost that we are just now beginning to reckon. Industrial cooking has taken a substantial toll on our health and well-being. Corporations cook very differently from how people do (which is why we usually call what they do food processing instead of cooking). They tend to use much more sugar, fat, and salt than people cooking for people do; they also deploy novel chemical ingredients seldom found in pantries in order to make their food last longer and look fresher than it really is. So it will come as no surprise that the decline in home cooking closely tracks the rise in obesity and all the chronic diseases linked to diet.

    The rise of fast food and the decline in home cooking have also undermined the institution of the shared meal, by encouraging us to eat different things and to eat them on the run and often alone. Survey researchers tell us we’re spending more time engaged in secondary eating, as this more or less constant grazing on packaged foods is now called, and less time engaged in primary eating—a rather depressing term for the once-venerable institution known as the meal.

    The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the cultural contradictions of capitalism—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display today at the modern American dinner table, along with all the brightly colored packages that the food industry has managed to plant there.

    These are, I know, large claims to make for the centrality of cooking (and not cooking) in our lives, and a caveat or two are in order. For most of us today, the choice is not nearly as blunt as I’ve framed it: that is, home cooking from scratch versus fast food prepared by corporations. Most of us occupy a place somewhere between those bright poles, a spot that is constantly shifting with the day of the week, the occasion, and our mood. Depending on the night, we might cook a meal from scratch, or we might go out or order in, or we might sort of cook. This last option involves availing ourselves of the various and very useful shortcuts that an industrial food economy offers: the package of spinach in the freezer, the can of wild salmon in the pantry, the box of store-bought ravioli from down the street or halfway around the world. What constitutes cooking takes place along a spectrum, as indeed it has for at least a century, when packaged foods first entered the kitchen and the definition of scratch cooking began to drift. (Thereby allowing me to regard my packaged ravioli with sage-butter sauce as a culinary achievement.) Most of us over the course of a week find ourselves all over that spectrum. What is new, however, is the great number of people now spending most nights at the far end of it, relying for the preponderance of their meals on an industry willing to do everything for them save the heating and the eating. We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods, a food-marketing consultant told me, and now we’re going to have a hundred years of packaged meals.

    This is a problem—for the health of our bodies, our families, our communities, and our land, but also for our sense of how our eating connects us to the world. Our growing distance from any direct, physical engagement with the processes by which the raw stuff of nature gets transformed into a cooked meal is changing our understanding of what food is. Indeed, the idea that food has any connection to nature or human work or imagination is hard to credit when it arrives in a neat package, fully formed. Food becomes just another commodity, an abstraction. And as soon as that happens we become easy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real thing—what I call edible foodlike substances. We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.

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    Now, for a man to criticize these developments will perhaps rankle some readers. To certain ears, whenever a man talks about the importance of cooking, it sounds like he wants to turn back the clock, and return women to the kitchen. But that’s not at all what I have in mind. I’ve come to think cooking is too important to be left to any one gender or member of the family; men and children both need to be in the kitchen, too, and not just for reasons of fairness or equity but because they have so much to gain by being there. In fact, one of the biggest reasons corporations were able to insinuate themselves into this part of our lives is because home cooking had for so long been denigrated as women’s work and therefore not important enough for men and boys to learn to do.

    Though it’s hard to say which came first: Was home cooking denigrated because the work was mostly done by women, or did women get stuck doing most of the cooking because our culture denigrated the work? The gender politics of cooking, which I explore at some length in part II, are nothing if not complicated, and probably always have been. Since ancient times, a few special types of cooking have enjoyed considerable prestige: Homer’s warriors barbecued their own joints of meat at no cost to their heroic status or masculinity. And ever since, it has been socially acceptable for men to cook in public and professionally—for money. (Though it is only recently that professional chefs have enjoyed the status of artists.) But for most of history most of humanity’s food has been cooked by women working out of public view and without public recognition. Except for the rare ceremonial occasions over which men presided—the religious sacrifice, the July 4 barbecue, the four-star restaurant—cooking has traditionally been women’s work, part and parcel of homemaking and child care, and therefore undeserving of serious—i.e., male—attention.

    But there may be another reason cooking has not received its proper due. In a recent book called The Taste for Civilization, Janet A. Flammang, a feminist scholar and political scientist who has argued eloquently for the social and political importance of food work, suggests the problem may have something to do with food itself, which by its very nature falls on the wrong side—the feminine side—of the mind-body dualism in Western culture.

    Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell, and taste, she points out, which rank lower on the hierarchy of senses than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is associated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized men have sought to overcome with knowledge and reason.

    Very much to their loss.

    II.

    The premise of this book is that cooking—defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and drink—is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we humans do. This is not something I fully appreciated before I set out to learn how to cook. But after three years spent working under a succession of gifted teachers to master four of the key transformations we call cooking—grilling with fire, cooking with liquid, baking bread, and fermenting all sorts of things—I came away with a very different body of knowledge from the one I went looking for. Yes, by the end of my education I got pretty good at making a few things—I’m especially proud of my bread and some of my braises. But I also learned things about the natural world (and our implication in it) that I don’t think I could have learned any other way. I learned far more than I ever expected to about the nature of work, the meaning of health, about tradition and ritual, self-reliance and community, the rhythms of everyday life, and the supreme satisfaction of producing something I previously could only have imagined consuming, doing it outside of the cash economy for no other reason but love.

    This book is the story of my education in the kitchen—but also in the bakery, the dairy, the brewery, and the restaurant kitchen, some of the places where much of our culture’s cooking now takes place. Cooked is divided into four parts, one for each of the great transformations of nature into the culture we call cooking. Each of these, I was surprised and pleased to discover, corresponds to, and depends upon, one of the classical elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.

    Why this should be so I am not entirely sure. But for thousands of years and in many different cultures, these elements have been regarded as the four irreducible, indestructible ingredients that make up the natural world. Certainly they still loom large in our imagination. The fact that modern science has dismissed the classical elements, reducing them to still more elemental substances and forces—water to molecules of hydrogen and oxygen; fire to a process of rapid oxidation, etc.—hasn’t really changed our lived experience of nature or the way we imagine it. Science may have replaced the big four with a periodic table of 118 elements, and then reduced each of those to ever-tinier particles, but our senses and our dreams have yet to get the news.

    To learn to cook is to put yourself on intimate terms with the laws of physics and chemistry, as well as the facts of biology and microbiology. Yet, beginning with fire, I found that the older, prescientific elements figure largely—hugely, in fact—in apprehending the main transformations that comprise cooking, each in its own way. Each element proposes a different set of techniques for transforming nature, but also a different stance toward the world, a different kind of work, and a different mood.

    Fire being the first element (in cooking anyway), I began my education with it, exploring the most basic and earliest kind of cookery: meat, on the grill. My quest to learn the art of cooking with fire took me a long way from my backyard grill, to the barbecue pits and pit masters of eastern North Carolina, where cooking meat still means a whole pig roasted very slowly over a smoldering wood fire. It was here, training under an accomplished and flamboyant pit master, that I got acquainted with cooking’s primary colors—animal, wood, fire, time—and found a clearly marked path deep into the prehistory of cooking: what first drove our protohuman ancestors to gather around the cook fire, and how that experience transformed them. Killing and cooking a large animal has never been anything but an emotionally freighted and spiritually charged endeavor. Rituals of sacrifice have attended this sort of cooking from the beginning, and I found their echoes reverberating even today, in twenty-first-century barbecue. Then as now, the mood in fire cooking is heroic, masculine, theatrical, boastful, unironic, and faintly (sometimes not so faintly) ridiculous.

    It is in fact everything that cooking with water, the subject of part II, is not. Historically, cooking with water comes after cooking with fire, since it awaited the invention of pots to cook in, an artifact of human culture only about ten thousand years old. Now cooking moves indoors, into the domestic realm, and in this chapter I delve into everyday home cookery, its techniques and satisfactions as well as its discontents. Befitting its subject, this section takes the shape of a single long recipe, unfolding step by step the age-old techniques that grandmothers developed for teasing delicious food from the most ordinary of ingredients: some aromatic plants, a little fat, a few scraps of meat, a long afternoon around the house. Here, too, I apprenticed myself to a flamboyant professional character, but she and I did most of our cooking at home in my kitchen, and often as a family—home and family being very much the subject of this section.

    Part III takes up the element of air, which is all that distinguishes an exuberantly leavened loaf of bread from a sad gruel of pulverized grain. By figuring out how to coax air into our food, we elevate it and ourselves, transcending, and vastly improving, what nature gives us in a handful of grass seed. The story of Western civilization is pretty much the story of bread, which is arguably the first important food processing technology. (The counterargument comes from the brewers of beer, who may have gotten there first.) This section, which takes place in several different bakeries across the country (including a Wonder Bread plant), follows two personal quests: to bake a perfect, maximally airy and wholesome loaf of bread, and to pinpoint the precise historical moment that cooking took its fatefully wrong turn: when civilization began processing food in such a way as to make it less nutritious rather than more.

    Different as they are, these first three modes of cooking all depend on heat. Not so the fourth. Like the earth itself, the various arts of fermentation rely instead on biology to transform organic matter from one state to a more interesting and nutritious other state. Here I encountered the most amazing alchemies of all: strong, allusive flavors and powerful intoxicants created for us by fungi and bacteria—many of them the denizens of the soil—as they go about their invisible work of creative destruction. This section falls into three chapters, covering the fermentation of vegetables (into sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles of all kinds); milk (into cheese); and alcohol (into mead and beer). Along the way, a succession of fermentos tutored me in the techniques of artfully managing rot, the folly of the modern war against bacteria, the erotics of disgust, and the somewhat upside-down notion that, while we were fermenting alcohol, alcohol has been fermenting us.

    I have been fortunate in both the talent and the generosity of the teachers who agreed to take me in—the cooks, bakers, brewers, picklers, and cheese makers who shared their time and techniques and recipes. This cast of characters turned out to be a lot more masculine than I would have expected, and a reader might conclude that I have indulged in some unfortunate typecasting. But as soon as I opted to apprentice myself to professional rather than amateur cooks—in the hopes of acquiring the most rigorous training I could get—it was probably inevitable that certain stereotypes would be reinforced. It turns out that barbecue pit masters are almost exclusively men, as are brewers and bakers (except for pastry chefs), and a remarkable number of cheese makers are women. In learning to cook traditional pot dishes, I chose to work with a female chef, and if by doing so I underscored the cliché that home cooking is woman’s work, that was sort of the idea: I wanted to delve into that very question. We can hope that all the gender stereotypes surrounding food and cooking will soon be thrown up for grabs, but to assume that has already happened would be to kid ourselves.

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    Taken as a whole, this is a how-to book, but of a very particular kind. Each section circles around a single elemental recipe—for barbecue, for a braise, for bread, and for a small handful of fermented items—and by the end of it, you should be well enough equipped to make it. (The recipes are spelled out more concisely in appendix I, in case you do want to try any of them.) Though all the cooking I describe can be done in a home kitchen, only a portion of the book deals directly with the kind of work most people regard as home cooking. Several of the recipes here are for things most readers will probably never make themselves—beer, for example, or cheese, or even bread. Though I hope that they will. Because I discovered there was much to learn from attempting, even if only just once, these more ambitious and time-consuming forms of cookery, knowledge that might not at first seem terribly useful but in fact changes everything about one’s relationship to food and what is possible in the kitchen. Let me try to explain.

    At bottom cooking is not a single process but, rather, comprises a small set of technologies, some of the most important humans have yet devised. They changed us first as a species, and then at the level of the group, the family, and the individual. These technologies range from the controlled use of fire to the manipulation of specific microorganisms to transform grain into bread or alcohol all the way to the microwave oven—the last major innovation. So cooking is really a continuum of processes, from simple to complex, and Cooked is, among other things, a natural and social history of these transformations, both the ones that are still part of our everyday lives and the ones that are not. Today, we’re apt to think of making cheese or brewing beer as extreme forms of cookery, only because so few of us have ever attempted them, but of course at one time all these transformations took place in the household and everyone had at least a rudimentary knowledge of how to perform them. Nowadays, only a small handful of cooking’s technologies seem within the reach of our competence. This represents not only a loss of knowledge, but a loss of a kind of power, too. And it is entirely possible that, within another generation, cooking a meal from scratch will seem as exotic and ambitious—as extreme—as most of us today regard brewing beer or baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crock of sauerkraut.

    When that happens—when we no longer have any direct personal knowledge of how these wonderful creations are made—food will have become completely abstracted from its various contexts: from the labor of human hands, from the natural world of plants and animals, from imagination and culture and community. Indeed, food is already well on its way into that ether of abstraction, toward becoming mere fuel or pure image. So how might we begin to bring it back to earth?

    My wager in Cooked is that the best way to recover the reality of food, to return it to its proper place in ours lives, is by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made. The good news is that this is still within our reach, no matter how limited our skills in the kitchen. My own apprenticeship necessitated a journey far beyond my own kitchen (and comfort zone), to some of the farther reaches of cookery, in the hopes of confronting the essential facts of the matter, and discovering exactly what it is about these transformations that helped make us who we are. But perhaps my happiest discovery was that the wonders of cooking, even its most ambitious manifestations, rely on a magic that remains accessible to all of us, at home.

    I should add that the journey has been great fun, probably the most fun I’ve ever had while still ostensibly working. What is more gratifying, after all, than discovering you can actually make something delicious (or intoxicating) that you simply assumed you’d always have to buy in the marketplace? Or finding yourself in that sweet spot where the frontier between work and play disappears in a cloud of bread flour or fragrant steam rising from a boiling kettle of wort?

    Even in the case of the seemingly most impractical cooking adventures, I learned things of an unexpectedly practical value. After you’ve tried your hand at brewing or pickling or slow roasting a whole hog, everyday home cooking becomes much less daunting, and in certain ways easier. My own backyard barbecuing has been informed and improved by my hours hanging around the barbecue pit. Working with bread dough has taught me how to trust my hands and my senses in the kitchen, and to have enough confidence in their reporting to free me from the bonds of recipe and measuring cup. And having spent time in the bakeries of artisans as well as in a Wonder Bread factory, my appreciation for a good loaf of bread has grown much more keen. Same for a wedge of cheese or bottle of beer: What had always been just products, good or bad, now reveal themselves as so much more than that—as achievements, as expressions, as relationships. By itself, this added increment of eating and drinking pleasure would have been enough to justify all the so-called work.

    But perhaps the most important thing I learned by doing this work is how cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, with the soil, with farmers, with the microbes both inside and outside our bodies, and, of course, with the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Above all else, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking connects.

    Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.

    III.

    As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection. One of the things I reflected on is the whole question of taking on what in our time has become, strictly speaking, optional, even unnecessary work, work for which I am not particularly gifted or qualified, and at which I may never get very good. This is, in the modern world, the unspoken question that hovers over all our cooking: Why bother?

    By any purely rational calculation, even everyday home cooking (much less baking bread or fermenting kimchi) is probably not a wise use of my time. Not long ago, I read an Op Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal about the restaurant industry, written by the couple that publishes the Zagat restaurant guides, which took exactly this line. Rather than coming home after work to cook, the Zagats suggested, people would be better off staying an extra hour in the office doing what they do well, and letting bargain restaurants do what they do best.

    Here in a nutshell is the classic argument for the division of labor, which, as Adam Smith and countless others have pointed out, has given us many of the blessings of civilization. It is what allows me to make a living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow my food, sew my clothes, and supply the energy that lights and heats my house. I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

    Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another—our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves—anything, that is, except the work we do to make a living. For everything else, we feel like we’ve lost the skills, or that there’s someone who can do it better. (I recently heard about an agency that will dispatch a sympathetic someone to visit your elderly parents if you can’t spare the time to do it yourself.) It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us.

    One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.

    Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective to this way of being in the world—a corrective that is still available to all of us. To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen. In my hands its flesh feels a little less like the product of industry than of nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow the greens I’m serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem to grow back almost as fast as I can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’s abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious

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