Skip to main content

Cooked - Michael Pollan - Book review

I didn't know what to expect from Michael Pollan's latest book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (sent to me by Penguin).  I am among what I suspect is a very small minority of people who have not read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I had seen a youtube video in which Michael Pollan interviewed Joel Salatin, so I had an idea that I might like what he had to say.  I guess a friend of Joel Salatin's is bound to be a friend of mine!

The book is arranged in four chapters based on the four elements of ancient Greek phylosiphy, Fire, Water, Air, Earth, and in each chapter Michael examines a different type of cooking with the aim of pinpointing "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".  This is a subject with which I am currently a little obsessed, especially since I've been cooking more and more of our food from scratch in order to avoid all the unnecessary ingredients in processed foods.

eight acres: review of Michael Pollan's book, Cooked


The first chapter, fire, is about whole pig BBQ, which is a technique used in the southern states of the US.  Personally, I had never heard of this style of BBQ before, so I found it interesting to learn about it, but then I found the chapter a bit long, maybe its more of a man-thing.  However, I bravely persevered and fortunately, the next chapter, water, was about braising meat and the woman's role in the kitchen, which I could relate to, as we end up with plenty of meat for stewing when we have a steer butchered.  I learnt a bit about mirepoix (which sounds like a disease, but its the chopped up veges that you use to flavour a stew) and umami (the Japanese concept of savoury taste).  I enjoy Pollan's style of digressing to trivia related to the topic, and then back to the story of learning to cook a braise.  Pollan writes that "the shift towards industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the workforce, or even from feminists eager to escape the drudgery of the kitchen, but was mainly a supply-driven phenomenon" - there was an excess of processed food after the war, which draws strange parallels to the invention of tampons to use up the extra bandages.... women beware, they are trying to trick us!

It was the third chapter that I found most riveting.  Air is about making sourdough.  Light sourdough, not brick sourdough like I made.  There is so much more to know about sourdough than I ever realised and Pollan covers the subject in great detail, down to the flour, wild yeast and cooking techniques.  It made me think that maybe I could attempt it again, although doing it right appears to take considerable time. This lead nicely to the final chapter, earth, which is about fermenting (my other favourite subject), including saurkraut, raw milk cheese and beer, and an excellent discussion of the importance of microbes (bacteria!) to our overall wellbeing.  I learnt some new words, I think I am a "fermento" and a "post-Pasteurian" because I don't believe all bacteria are bad.  In this chapter Pollan writes:
"Under the pressures of broad-spectrum antibiotics, a Pasteurian regime of "good sanitation", and a modern diet notably hostile to bacteria, the human microbiota has probably changed more in the last hundred yearers than in the previous ten thousand, when the shift to agriculture altered out diet and lifestyle."
Overall, it would have been difficult for me to not like a book about cooking from scratch and how the processed food industry has ruined our collective health, but I wasn't expecting to learn so much from the book either.  For a journalist with no formal scientific education, he does a great job of interpreting the many scientific papers referenced throughout the book and making the underlying biological and chemical processes accessible to the general reader.  I think he comes to the same conclusion that I have, food is complicated, and the more we learn about it through sophisticated scientific methods, the more we realise that our ancestors probably had some pretty good ideas, including eating raw milk, fermenting foods, preparing stocks and stews from real ingredients, and eating lots of butter.  We can keep researching to understand why these things are good and try to replicate them in processed foods, or we can just cook from scratch like our grandparents did and probably feel better for it.  I think this is one that I will read again.

Read any good books lately?


Comments

  1. mmm maybe I should read it again, i didnt really enjoy it that much, but you seem to have got a lot out of it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. just don't get stuck on the first chapter, read about the bread first and you will be hooked :)

      Delete
  2. :-) I will have to look into it. It is highly interesting how everything starts with women. You change society through women. Education. Help women and society will evolve.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good review and it sounds like an interesting book. I've been terrible lately and not read much other than books on growing fruit and grafting! I'm a boring person I fear!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. haha grafting's not boring, I hope you're going to write a post about it, I don't even know where to start!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Garden Update - July 2013

This month I'm joining the Garden Share Collective , which was started last month by Lizzie from Strayed from the Table , to allow vege gardeners to share their successes and failures and generally encourage everyone to grow more of their own food organically.  This first month, I'll give a detailed update on everything that's growing in my garden, for anyone who hasn't been following for long.  I'll do my normal farm update on Tuesday as well. If you've just joined me, welcome to my vege garden.  I recently wrote about gardening in our sub-tropical climate , so if you're wondering about the huge shade structure, that's for protecting the garden during our hot, humid summers.  At the moment though, the garden is full of brassicas, which grow best here in winter, and are suitably frost-proof.  The garden is about 12 m long by 5 m wide, and surrounded in chicken mesh to keep out the chickens and the bandicoots.  The garden has spilled out around the edg