Cook

A natural history of transformation

MICHAEL POLLAN

INTRODUCTION

WHY COOK?

At a certain point in my adulthood, I unexpectedly but happily discovered that the answer to
many of the questions that worried me was always the same: cooking.

Some of those issues were personal. For example, what was the most important thing we could
do as a family to improve our overall health and well-being? How could I connect more deeply
with my teenager? (As I later discovered, this involved not just ordinary cooking, but a
specialized form known as "maceration.") Other issues were more politically tinged. For years
I've tried to figure out, as I'm often asked, what's the most important thing a regular person can
do to try to reform the American food system into something healthier and more sustainable.
Another similar question is: how can those of us who live in an economy focused especially on
the consumer reduce that feeling of dependence and achieve a greater degree of autonomy?
There were also some philosophical questions that I've been mulling over since I started writing.
How can we acquire, in our daily lives, a greater knowledge of the natural world and the unique
role we play in it? Obviously, the answer can be found by going into the jungle, but I discovered
that even more interesting answers could also be obtained by simply going into the kitchen.

As I mentioned before, I had never expected it. Cooking has always been a part of my life, but
often as a passing thing rather than an object of scrutiny, and never as a passion. I felt lucky to
have a mother who loved to cook, and who made us a delicious dinner almost every night.
When I became independent, I knew how to hold my own in the kitchen quite well, since all
those hours I had spent hanging around while my mother prepared dinner came in handy.
However, although I cooked whenever I could, I hardly dedicated much time to it nor did I
consider it something

MICHAEL POLLAN
of utmost importance. My culinary abilities were quite limited until I was thirty. To be honest, my
most successful dishes were inspired by those made by others, like, for example, when I added
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my incredible butter and sage sauce to the ready-made ravioli I bought at the store. From time
to time I would consult a cookbook, or cut a recipe from a newspaper to add a new dish to my
limited repertoire, or buy a new kitchen utensil, although most of them ended up stored in a
closet.

In retrospect, the subtlety of my interest in cooking surprises me, in part because I have always
had a burning desire to know everything related to the food chain. I have liked gardening since I
was eight years old, I have mainly grown vegetables and I have always enjoyed when I was in a
garden or writing about agriculture. I have also written quite a bit about the other end of the food
chain, that is, about diet and its implications for health. However, I had never paid much
attention to the intermediate links in the food chain, those in which the products of nature are
transformed into the food we eat or drink.

And it didn't occur to me until I started trying to unravel a curious paradox I observed while
watching television: why were we spending more time thinking about food and watching more
shows about cooking just at the historic moment when we Americans were abandoning it? and
we left the preparation of most of our dishes to the food industry? It seemed that the less time
we spent cooking, the more interested we became in food and its indirect preparation.

Our culture seems to be divided on that issue. Studies that have been carried out in this regard
confirm that every year we cook less and buy more prepared meals. The time spent cooking in
American homes has been cut in half since the 1960s, when I watched my mother prepare
dinner, limited to a mere twenty-seven minutes a day. (Americans spend less time cooking than
any other country, although the downward trend is global.) Yet we increasingly talk about
cooking more, watch more shows, read more books, and go to restaurants where we can watch
first-hand how it's done. that job. We live in a time when

MICHAEL POLLAN
Professional chefs have become well-known characters, some as famous as athletes or movie
stars. This activity that many consider a burden provokes as much enthusiasm as a popular
sport.

When you think that twenty-seven minutes is less time than it takes to watch an episode of To
Chef or The Next Food Network Star, you realize that there are millions of people who spend
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more time watching on television how a dish is prepared than they are. cooking. Also, I don't
think it's necessary to say that the dishes we see prepared on television are not the ones we
usually eat.

It is curious, since we do not watch any shows or read books about sewing, darning socks or
changing the oil in the car, three other domestic tasks that we have also left in the hands of
external sources and that we have eliminated from our knowledge. Cooking, however, is
different, since the work, or the process, has an emotional or psychological power that we
cannot or do not want to let go of. In fact, it was after many hours watching cooking shows that I
began to wonder if I shouldn't take this activity that I had always taken for granted more
seriously.

I developed some theories to explain what I called the “culinary paradox.” The first and most
obvious is that watching other people cook is not something new among humans. Even when
“we all” cooked at home, there were many of us who were mainly dedicated to observing: men
for the most part, and also the children. Almost all of us have fond memories of when our mother
was in the kitchen performing feats that seemed like witchcraft concoctions, and that usually
ended up becoming something succulent. In Ancient Greece, the word for a "cook", a "butcher"
and a "priest" was the same, "mageiros", a word with the same etymological roots as "magic". I
watched, enthralled, as my mother prepared her most magical dishes, like the tightly wrapped
chicken Kiev rolls that, when cut with a sharp knife, released a thick layer of melted butter and a
waft of aromatic herbs. Likewise, watching her prepare simple scrambled eggs seemed quite a
spectacle to me, as that thin, yellowish glop suddenly transformed into delicious golden nuggets.
Even the most normal dish underwent an appetizing transformation process to

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magically become something more than the sum of its parts. To this we must add that in almost
all dishes you can find, in addition to the culinary ingredients, those of a story, that is, a
beginning, a development and an end.

We must also mention the cooks, the heroes who carry out these small works of transformation.
Although we may not realize it in our daily lives, we are drawn to the rhythms and textures of his
work, as we find it much more direct and satisfying than most of the abstract tasks that the rest

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of us perform in our current jobs. Chefs work with living matter, not only with keyboards and
screens, but with fundamental things like plants, animals and fungi. They also work with the
elements: fire, water, earth and air, and use them—they master them!—to perform their
delicious alchemies. Who among us does a job that engages us in a dialogue with the material
world and concludes—assuming the chicken Kiev doesn't leak too soon or the soufflé deflates—
with such a delicious and gratifying feeling of closure? ?

So maybe the reason we like to watch shows on television and read cookbooks is because
there are aspects of it that we really miss. We may believe that we don't have the time or energy
(or knowledge) to cook every day, but we are not yet ready for that activity to disappear from our
lives completely. If cooking, as anthropologists say, is a specifically human activity—the act by
which culture begins, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss—then it should come as no surprise that
we are moved to see the process unfold.

The idea that cooking is a specifically human activity is not new. In 1773, Scottish writer James
Boswell, observing that "no animal cooks," called Homo sapiens the "cooking animal" (though
he might reconsider that definition if he saw the boxes of frozen foods currently sold at
Walmart). Fifty years later, in his book Physiology of Taste, French gourmet Jean-Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin stated that cooking made us who we are, since learning to use fire "has been the
greatest progress of civilization." More recently Lévi-Strauss, writing in 1964 The Raw and the
Cooked, said that many cultures shared a similar point of view, since they consider the act

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MICHAEL POLLAN
of cooking as a symbolic activity that "establishes the difference between men and animals."

For Lévi-Strauss, cooking was a metaphor for the human transformation of raw nature into
cooked culture. However, since the publication of The Raw and the Cooked, other
anthropologists have begun to take up literally the idea that the invention of cooking could have
been the evolutionary key to our humanity. A few years ago, a Harvard University anthropologist
and primatologist named Richard Wrangham published a fascinating book called Catching Fire,
in which he claimed that it was the discovery of cooking—not tool-making, meat-eating, or
language. — what differentiated us from primates and made us humans. According to the
"cooking hypothesis," the discovery of cooked foods changed the course of human evolution. By
providing our ancestors with a greater amount of energy and an easier-to-digest diet, it
increased the size of our brain (which is a glutton for energy) and reduced the size of our
digestive system. Apparently, raw foods require more time and energy to be chewed and
digested, which is why other primates of the same size have a larger digestive tract and spend
more time chewing, almost six hours a day.

There is no doubt that cooking reduced much of the work carried out by chewing and digestion,
and carried it out outside our body, using external sources of energy. Cooking also removes
many toxic particles from food, making countless calories unavailable to other animals available
to us. By not having to spend most of the day collecting large amounts of raw food or having to
chew it incessantly, humans were able to devote more time and more metabolic resources to
other purposes, such as creating a culture.

Cooking provided us not only with food, but also with the opportunity to eat together in a certain
place and at a certain time. That was something totally new, since the raw food gatherer
probably ate alone and on the go, like other animals. (And, if you think about it, like the industrial
diner we have recently become, gobbling down anything in a service area or anywhere else.)
The act of sitting down to share food, maintaining eye contact and exercising the 5
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MICHAEL POLLAN
moderation, made us civilize. "Around the fire," Wrangham writes, "we became more docile."

For this reason, cooking transformed us, and not only by making us more sociable and civil.
After cooking allowed us to expand our cognitive capacity at the expense of our digestive
capacity, there was no way back, and our larger brain and smaller stomach began to depend on
a diet based on cooked foods. (Raw food eaters should keep this in mind.) That means cooking
is mandatory; That is to say, it is as if it had been baked into our biology. What Winston Churchill
once said about architecture—“first we shaped buildings, but then they shaped us”—can also be
applied to cooking. First we were the ones who cooked the food, but then they cooked us.

If cooking, as Wrangham suggests, is so essential to human identity, biology and culture, then it
is reasonable to think that the current decline of cooking has very serious consequences for
modern life, as can be seen. But are they all negative? Absolutely. Delegating much of culinary
activity to corporations has freed women from what has traditionally been their sole
responsibility of feeding the family, allowing them to work outside the home and develop
professionally. Likewise, it has avoided many of the domestic conflicts and arguments that
would have arisen with such a change in gender roles and family dynamics. It has eliminated
many pressures at home, including long work hours and highly scheduled children, giving us
more time for other purposes. It has also allowed us to substantially diversify our diet, allowing
people who do not have great culinary skills or much money to enjoy a different dinner every
day of the week with only a microwave.

These are considerable benefits that must be taken into account. However, they have been
obtained at the cost of something that we are now beginning to perceive. Industrial cooking has
caused enormous damage to our health and well-being. Corporations cook very differently than
people; That's why we call what they do "food processing" and not "cooking." Typically, they use
much more sugar, fat and salt, and they also use new ingredients

MICHAEL POLLAN
chemicals rarely found in our pantry to make food last longer and appear fresher than it really is.
For this reason, it should not be surprising that the decline of homemade food has led to an
increase in obesity and a series of chronic diseases linked to diet.

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The rise of fast food and the decline of home cooking have also affected the institution of
potluck, encouraging us to eat different things, usually on the go and often alone. Scientists
warn us that we spend too much time on what is now called "secondary food" - that is,
constantly gobbling down packaged foods - and less time on "primary foods", a rather
depressing term for what was once a venerable institution. known by the name of "the food."

Shared food is something very important. It is the basis of family life, the place where our
children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening,
taking turns, exchanging opinions and arguing without offending. What we have called the
"cultural contradictions of capitalism"

—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms on which it depends—are clearly
manifested during dinner in contemporary American life, along with the colorful packages that
the food industry has managed to install in it.

I know that they are great claims for the importance of cooking (or not cooking) in our lives, and I
would like to qualify them a little. Nowadays, for many people that choice is not as clear as I
have pointed out, that is, it is not so easy to choose between homemade food made from
scratch or fast food prepared by corporations. Many of us occupy an intermediate place that
changes depending on the day of the week, the occasion or our mood. Depending on the night,
we can prepare dinner, go out to dinner, order it or cook it "halfway." This last option consists of
resorting to the many useful shortcuts that the industrial food economy offers us: a package of
frozen spinach, a can of salmon in the pantry, a box of ravioli bought at the corner store or any
other another place in the world. "Cooking" covers a broad spectrum, as it has for at least a
century, when packaged foods first entered our kitchens and the definition of "cooking from
scratch" began to blur (thus allowing me to consider it a great achievement culinary my
packaged ravioli with butter and sage sauce). During

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MICHAEL POLLAN
of the week, most of us walk that spectrum, but what is new is the large number of people who
almost every night find themselves at the far end, delegating most of their meals to an industry
willing to do whatever it wants. necessary for them, except heating it and eating it. "We've been
eating packaged foods for a century," a food marketing consultant told me, "and now we're in for
another century of packaged foods."

prepared."

That's a problem, not only for health, family, community, and the earth, but also for our
understanding of how food connects us to the world around us. Our growing distance from any
direct and physical engagement with the processes by which nature's raw materials are
transformed into cooked foods is altering our concept of what food is. The idea that food is
connected to nature, human labor or imagination is difficult to conceive when it arrives to us in a
package, fully prepared. Food becomes another commodity, an abstraction, and when that
happens, we become very easy prey for corporations that sell synthetic versions of the real
thing, something I call "edible, food-like substances." meal". We end up feeding ourselves based
on images.

I know some readers may be offended by a man criticizing such developments. Some people
think that when a man talks about the importance of cooking, he wants to go back and get
women back in the kitchen. However, that has nothing to do with what I think, because I believe
that cooking is so important that it should not be delegated to a single gender or a single
member of the family; Men and children must also be present in the kitchen, and not only for
reasons of justice or equity, but because they will benefit greatly if they do so. In fact, one of the
main reasons corporations entered our lives was because home cooking was long considered a
"women's activity" and therefore not important enough for men to do. men and boys learned it.

However, it is difficult to know what happened first, whether home cooking was looked down
upon because it was a job that was primarily done by women, or whether women had to
dedicate themselves exclusively to cooking because our culture denigrated that work. The 8
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Cooking-related gender politics, which I discuss in more depth in part two, are quite
complicated, and probably always have been. Since ancient times, certain types of cuisine have
enjoyed great prestige. Homer's warriors grilled animals without questioning their heroic status
or virility. Since then, it has always been socially acceptable for men to cook publicly and
professionally, as long as they do it for money (although it has only recently been that
professional chefs have acquired the status of artists).

However, for most of history, women have been in charge of cooking privately and without
public recognition. Except for certain ceremonies presided over by men—religious sacrifices, the
Fourth of July barbecue, four-star restaurants—cooking has been a feminine activity, an integral
part of housework and childcare, and, therefore, not worthy of special attention from men.

However, there may be other reasons why it has not been given due importance. In a recent
book titled The Taste for Civilization, Janet A. Flammang, a feminist scholar and political
science professor who has eloquently argued for the social and political importance of "culinary
labor," suggests that the problem may lie with the food itself, which, by its very nature, is found
in the wrong side—the feminine—of the dualism between mind and body that prevails in the
Western world. «Food is perceived through the senses of taste, smell and touch – he points out
–, located below, in the hierarchy of the senses, sight and hearing, which are taken as the
sources of knowledge. In almost all philosophies, religions and literatures, food is associated
with the body, animals, women and appetite, things that civilized men have tried to overcome
through reason and knowledge.

Their loss.