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Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, by Michael Pollan
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**Now a docu-series airing on Netflix on February 19, 2016, starring Pollan as he explores how cooking transforms food and shapes our world. Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney exectuve produces the four-part series based on Pollan's book, and each episode will focus on a different natural element: fire, water, air, and earth. **
“Important, possibly life-altering, reading for every living, breathing human being." --Boston Globe
In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he 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.
- Sales Rank: #91949 in Books
- Published on: 2013-04-23
- Released on: 2013-04-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.43" w x 6.38" l, 1.65 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 480 pages
- a natural history of the transformation of cookery
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2013: Who has untangled the nature of modern America’s relationship with food more effectively than Michael Pollan? After sharing the experience of growing his own food in Second Nature, he illuminated how our appetites drive the evolution of edible plants with The Botany of Desire. Then he pondered The Omnivore’s Dilemma, weighing our precarious food chain and popularizing the pleasures of eating local; In Defense of Food and Food Rules distilled his conclusions into a manifesto and a manual. With Cooked, he closes the seed-to-table loop with a passionate exploration of the satisfying transformation of grilling, braising, baking, and fermenting--and their primal roots. Learning to cook elevated humans from lone animals into increasingly intelligent, civilized groups, and though we spend scant time doing real cooking, we’ve become obsessed with watching people cook--a paradox that points to longing for a lost experience. Through his own experiences making and enjoying food with pit masters, chefs, bakers, and “fermentos,” he retraces our path to connection with real ingredients and health for people and planet. Whether you’re sympathetic or skeptical, you can’t help but appreciate Pollan’s genius for conveying the elemental appeal of making a meal. --Mari Malcolm
From Booklist
*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. Pollan visits pit masters to learn what constitutes authentic barbecue. An Italian-trained Iranian American teaches him the subtleties of proper cooking in pots, how to coax maximum flavor from humble vegetables, herbs, meats, and water. Baking trains Pollan to watch, listen, and feel the action of living yeasts in doughs. The harnessing of fungi and molds to ferment sauerkraut and beer and produce cheeses illuminates the fine and ever-shifting boundaries between tastiness and rot and how the human palate can be trained. 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. --Mark Knoblauch
From Bookforum
Even when he's championing his ethical concerns, Pollan is a researcher, a prodigious gatherer and synthesizer of vast reams of information. Having throughly scutinized every other link in the food chain, he finally turns his skills to the one link missing from his repertoire. And in the process, he learned to cook. The chapters and their signature recipes are meant to stand in for the traditional four elements (water, earth, air, and fire). And each of these natural forces, Pollan writes, signifies one of the "great transformations of nature into culture we call cooking." The author's project is, in fact, nearly as all encompassing and essential as the elements themselves, ranging across several disciplines, embracing perspectives both stringently objective and deeply personal, and introducing us to a novel's worth of colorful characters whom he enlists to teach him the cooking method at hand. Cooked is a potently seductive invitation to discover—or rediscover— our most primal connection to the natural world, and it will likely induce more than a few readers to dust off their little-used pots and pans and to brush up on some essential knife skills. The only problem with Cooked is that, at a lengthy—albeit entrancing—450-some pages, it'll be quite a while before you get back into the kitchen. —Linda Delibero
Most helpful customer reviews
222 of 241 people found the following review helpful.
Why cook? Here's why.
By Kristine Lofgren
Michael Pollan has the amazing ability to take the mundane (corn, building a workshop, plant seeds) and make it fascinating. So it shouldn't come as a surprised that Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation could take something many of us take for granted and turn it into an incredible journey.
Pollan opens the book by explaining the day that realized that all of the questions that occupy his time seem to lead back to cooking. How to improve your health? Cooking. Good way to connect with the family? Cooking (and brewing). The most important thing we can do to help reform the American food complex? Cooking. Pollan admits he has always been mildly interested in the act, but it wasn't until he realized how important it could be that he began wanting to learn how to do it in earnest. Pollan realized that though American's seem to be obsessed with cooking (Top Chef, The Taste, Anthony Bourdain, Hell's Kitchen) we seem to do very little of it.
Pollan breaks down his education into four sections, much like he broke down The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma. The first section, called Fire, starts out at a North Carolina BBQ. It's here that Pollan strives to solve the mystery of "pig-plus-wood-smoke-plus-time" and what makes it so darn good. He spends time with pit-masters, learning the find art of the fire, which involves everything from Freudian theory, ancient gods and the Bible to chemistry and, of course, Big Meat. Before his fire education will be over, the reader will journey with Pollan to Manhattan, Berkeley, Spain and back again.
From there we dive into Water, which starts out, inexplicably, with chopping onions. As any home cook knows, onions are a basic element of cooking, but did you ever consider what evolutionary advantage onion tears could possibly have for the onion? In this section, Pollan tackles water in a seven-step recipe that walks through copping, saut�ing, browning, braising and finishing. But of course, this being Michael Pollan, nothing is quite that simple. While learning about braising the reader also gets an education in chemistry and the mystery of umami.
On to Air, which is all about baking. Pollan breaks down bread into its most pure form "an ingenious technology for improving the flavor... of grass." Here we learn about evolution and, as Pollan spends his time with master bakers, fermentation. Any other author might have trouble linking such disparate ideas as bacteria and engineering, but this section ambles easily between the two ideas. Pollan doesn't spend all of this time in his home kitchen mastering the art of crumb and crust, however, and he takes us from the blue surf waves of the ocean to the industrial Hostess plant all in the name of understanding air (can I have his job?).
Finally, we come to earth, or "Fermentation's Cold Fire." As you would imagine, it is here that Pollan turns his eye to vegetables and animals, but the section starts out with death. Bacteria, mold and even Jello gets its due as Pollan takes us into the garden and into the soil for making kimchi. From there we head to the dairy farm where we learn about milk and its more popular big brother, cheese. Pollan works along side cheese master Sister Noella in Connecticut, learning the amazingly intricate ins and outs of cheese creation. This section is also the one in which Pollan address alcohol, which is right at home among the vegetables, it turns out. The story of beer and spirits is one of biology, of course, but also history and culture.
In the end, this isn't just a book about learning to cook, nor should it be considered an addendum to The Omnivore's Dilemma. Though Pollan tackles some of the same issues (health, agribusiness and the human body), Cooked is the retelling of a journey. And the opportunity to meet these culinary superstars is wonderful, but it is only a fraction of the story. Of course there is the requisite finding of the satisfaction of making your own foods, but the bigger aspect is the author and reader's education in the nature of the world and of human culture. Whether you are familiar with Pollan's previous work or not, this is a must read for anyone who is even remotely curious about the world around us.
114 of 122 people found the following review helpful.
Classic Pollan
By Lukester
I think I've read every one of Pollan's books. I loved some, especially Omnivore's Dilemma, while others were just good (In Defense of Food). With Cooked, there were parts I loved, while other parts I was ready to skim over. In the end, I enjoyed the book immensely, but not as much as some of this others.
Like many of his other books, Pollan divides Cooked into thematic sections (Here: Fire [Grilling], Water [Cooking in water], Air [baking], and Earth[fermenting/pickling]) but they seemed a little forced, as Pollan himself seems to acknowledge. You need fire for three of the four, and yeast plays a pretty big role in both beer and bread. I get what he was trying to do, but it felt like it didn't quite work to enhance the themes of the book rather than merely provide breaking points.
His introduction sets the stage for the entire book. He identifies a dilemma in modern culture: we spend less time cooking than ever but more time watching and idolizing others who cook. Pollan explains that contemplating this dilemma triggered something in him to write this book, and I think he makes an important overarching observation: although cooking may not be the most efficient use of time, it is an alchemic process that transforms both raw foods and people. Without cooking, humans would not be what we are today. The modern trend to remove cooking from everyday life, therefore, is likely to have huge consequences on who we are. As Pollan notes, our fascination with cooking reflects the deep-seated position it holds in our lives.
The book contains long sections with meditations on what cooking is and what it means to culture, both ancient and modern, and for the most part I enjoyed them. For example, although it is somewhat tangential to cooking, Pollan discusses the role that microbiotics play in our gut and the effect on our health. Tying this topic into modern cooking, he raises some very interesting questions about the effect of a "no-microbe" policy on our health. As Pollan excels at pointing out repeatedly, the food we eat today is at the long end of the combined evolution of man and food: we eat what we eat and cook food the way we do because it is necessary to our survival. Removing certain types of food (e.g., whole grain bread, fermented vegetables) without thinking of the consequences is fraught with peril.
The meditations are interspersed with stories about masters of cooking and Pollan's own personal experiences. In each section, Pollan seeks out the masters in each particular field to teach him about cooking. As with his other books, Pollan always finds the philosophers within a certain field that combine their expertise with an ability to discuss their field in a way that opens your eyes. Who knew that bread baking would be so complex and more of an art form than simple mixing? Pollan is a masterful storyteller, combining an ability to explain complex issues with a sharp sense of humor and self-deprecation.
With Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan changed how I think about the world. For me, Cooked was different in that rather than changing how I see the world of food, he reinforced ideas I already have and gave voice to some subconscious thoughts I had about the importance of cooking my own food. Although I have always enjoyed cooking, Pollan helps highlight WHY cooking is so enjoyable and so worthwhile. I especially enjoyed his section on brewing beer and have been inspired to try to brew my own batch. As he notes in his afterword, many of these endeavors seem at first glance to be an incredible waste of time and totally inefficient. As Pollan explains, however, there is a "satisfaction that comes from temporarily breaking free of one's accustomed role as the producer of one thing -- whatever it is we sell into the market for a living -- and the passive consumer of everything else." Over the course of the book, Pollan successfully proves that cooking is special and shouldn't be given up so easily, and there are benefits to slowing down and becoming immersed in something so basic as the food we eat. So while I can't claim that Cooked is as eye-opening as some of Pollan's other works, I enjoyed it immensely.
92 of 102 people found the following review helpful.
Seeing Your Kitchen and Food with Fresh Eyes
By Margaret Thompson
To state the obvious, few people can write about food and food related issues like Michael Pollan. He has changed the way our culture--or at least well-read segments of our culture--thinks about our industrial food complex. In Cooked, Pollan takes his keen eye from large scale systems and focuses it on the kitchen and cooking (while naturally showing the connections to bigger issues). I suppose, I should write "my" kitchen, as Pollan is directing us to make this intimate and personal account. To build our relationship with food, we need to cook for ourselves, and from scratch (at least most of the time). While cooking has lost much of its esteem in our fast-paced, fast-food society, Pollan reevaluates the significance of cooking in everyday life: "Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to work directly in our own support, and in the support of the people we feed. If this is not `making a living,' I don't know what is" (pg23).
In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan pairs his sharp journalism skills with his acumen as a thoughtful analytic essayist to look more deeply at the way we transform plants and animals into food--and why a better understanding of how and why we do it matters. He observes: "The work, or process, [of cooking] 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" (pg4). Not surprisingly to anyone familiar with Pollan's work, he uses cooking to help restore our connections to a healthier natural world.
Pollan looks at cooking from an almost magically scientific perspective: "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" (pg5). Accordingly, the four elements--fire, water, air, and earth (which correspond to the essential ways we turn to raw materials into meals)--organize the book. Fire = grilling; water = using liquids to cook; air = baking; earth = fermenting. Granted, it's not a neat categorization (after all, you need fire to bake bread*), but metaphorically the organizing principles work in the sense that Pollan is trying to get us to look at food afresh and referencing the basic elements helps do that, at least poetically (and a writer as good as Pollan works on the subconscious/subtle level). Going further, he cites research and the stories of "deep foodies," to get us to see with beginners mind. This is his gift; and it makes us care.
Pollan looks at the process and science of cooking (barbecuing, baking, fermenting, braising/steaming, etc.) along with each method's effect on us. For example, cooking over high heat contributed to primates' brains growing larger through eating more efficient with easier and faster to digest foods. Fermented foods help increase healthy bacteria in our intestinal tract. And "microbiologists believe that onions, garlic and spices protect us from the growth of dangerous bacteria on meat." (It's likely not just a coincidence that we are drawn to such flavors.)
In short, this is classic Pollan (ahem) fare. Anyone who has enjoyed MP's other books, are likely to find this one well worthwhile as well.
*Example of quote illustrating classification: "To compare a loaf of bread to a bowl of porridge is to realize how much of bread's power, sensory as well as symbolic, risdes in those empty cells of space. Some 80 percent of a loaf of bread consists of nothing more than air." (pg. 249)
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