Notes on Michael Pollon’s “Cooked”
With Pollon, you know where he stands going in to any book about food or cooking. That the modern American food chain has become hopelessly disconnected from actual food sources (or what every generation of humans save the last couple would have understood as food sources). That American society has largely forgotten and lost not just the nutritional benefits of traditional cooking, but other intangible (call them collectively psychic) benefits of the practice as well. That the wisdom of the old-time farmer and cook is wiser than the knowledge of the modern farming conglomerate, the contemporary nutritional scientist, the food industry chemist, and all manner of modern marketers. I do not doubt that the case contra Pollon could be made better - Pollon doesn’t even try - but who cares? Not this reader. At the end of the day, Pollon is right about all of this, and just about any first world sentient person would probably recognize it.
Where Pollon in his books has tended to display some nerves - and it's true of “Cooked” - is in dealing with the issue of man eating animals. It bothers him - but he can’t take up the cudgels of traditional cookery without being on the side of the meat eaters. Indeed, he gives some data here that show, basically, we don’t thrive without some meat in our diet. Where he probably comes out on this is, yes we can and should eat animals, but we should not abuse or torture them in such service. This is where the case contra might be pressed, if one were of a mind to: could we have the ready (and cheap) availability of meat we enjoy without modern meat-farming methods?
Pollon’s ethos, though, is such that it of necessity must appeal to traditionalists, no matter what. A philosophy that says, in essence, eat what your grandparents ate, the way they ate it - could there be a more comfortable philosophy for an instinctive conservative, or anyone who believes in the collective wisdom of forebears? Set aside all the evolutionary biology that Pollon insists on - who cares if it’s true or not? It’s idle though highly interesting intellectual speculation whether wheat and corn and pigs and cows and microbes “co-evolved” with humans to our mutual benefit. The larger point is that our forebears understood how to deal with grains and yeast and meat - to their and our benefit.
But interesting the speculation is. One of Pollon’s notions is that these cooking methods - the roasting of meat and cooking in pots most particularly - freed homo sapiens from the almost impossible task (for us, given our physiognomy) of chewing and digesting raw meat. The wood fire became our mandible, the cook pot our stomach. All of which freed us, hypothesizes Pollon, to spend more time gaining food and less processing it, all in the service of feeding our outsized and energy-consuming brains.
At the end of the day, this is just a happy and encouraging story, really a noble one. I don’t mean Pollon and his cooking undertakings (though they are pretty admirable). What is noble here is the loud reminder of what we knew but now are near forgetting, to our great detriment.