Cheap Bastid Writes a Book Report: “Cooked” by Michael Pollan

OK, get this low-pitched, hoarse sounding baritone voice in your head.  It’s saying: “In a world…”

Yep, in a world full of cookbooks and magazines featuring food and fantastic photos, why would some goofy Cheap Bastid of a foodblogger write a “book report”.  Well, that’s because I came across a book on cooking worth reading because it about a lot more than cooking.

I saw this guy one day on “The Chew” talking about his new book and his really quick synopsis of it was fascinating—not because of the recipes, there’s only a couple of those, but because of the theme.  It’s more about what I would call the anthropology of food and cooking than anything else (but there’s plenty of cooking) and, even though it’s tough slogging in places, “Cooked” by Michael Pollan is well worth reading.

So I immediately pointed it out to Mrs. CB and suggested to her that my birthday was coming up and this would make a nice gift—even nicer than new “Gold Toe Fluffies”.

Pollan separates the world of cooking into Fire, Water, Air and Earth and describes each of those in terms of their place in our physical and cultural evolution as well as our world today.

“Cooking allows us to digest more of what we eat, and to use less energy doing it.”  This is simply, the premise of Pollan’s book.  He also writes about “the cooking hypothesis” which suggests that it was the ability to “turn the stuff of nature into something that is not only more tasty and digestible but more human as well…that most 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 and our guts to shrink.”  According to Pollan, it seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest.  “Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside the body, using outside sources of energy…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 it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.”

Now, while that’s a dry piece of reading, it’s also incredibly fascinating in its premise.

Pollan starts with Fire which is the first element in cooking and is what kick-started our ultimate evolution into the human species we are today (for better or worse).  He relates the story of slow-pit barbecue cooking whole hogs.

Applying the heat of a fire to food transforms it in several ways but all with the same result:  heat “denatures” proteins—unfolding their origami structures in such a way as to expose more surface area to the action of our digestive enzymes.  …Heat also turns the tough collagen in the connective tissues of muscle into a soft readily digestible jelly.  In the case of plant foods, fire “gelatinizes” starches, the firs step in breaking them down into simple sugars…Other foodstuffs the cook fire purifies, by killing bacteria and parasites…

He transitions to Water saying that “historically, cooking with water comes after cooking with fire, since it awaited the invention of pots to cook in…(about 10,000 years ago).”  He writes of braising and boiling, and the magical transformations that take place while creating wonderful slowly cooked meals.

The third part of his treatise on food deals with 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 natures gives us in a handful of grass seed.”  It’s about bread—both artisanal, naturally leavened bread with sourdough starter and a quasi-indictment of mass-produced breads and what has been done to flour over the years.

And the fourth part is Earth about which he says, “like the earth itself, the various arts of fermentation rely…on biology to transform organic matter from one state to a more interesting and nutritious state.  This last portion deals with fermentation of vegetables like cabbage into kimchee, milk (into cheese), and alcohol into mead and beer.

This fascinating book is a treatise and celebration of the various basic forms of cooking which have defined us as humans and which are shared basic concepts irrespective of culture or ethnicity or geography—for we are all human and these are things that humans share.

“…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.”

And Pollan’s passion for cooking permeates each page.  But he has an equal passion for people who cook—not high-brow “foodie” types of chefs for whom the results of cooking produce a work of food-art as sculpture on a plate but the people who perform this amazing alchemy for its own sake as sustenance and as reflection of what makes us unique as humans.

He does not hesitate to climb up on a soap box to indict many in the food industry.  Pollan talks about a cooking as a continuum—home cooking from scratch versus fast food prepared by corporations.  According to him, there’s not a whole lot of scratch cooking going on in most households.  The very definition of cooking has changed over the last century when packaged foods first entered the kitchen and the “scratch cooking” definition began to drift.  “What is new, is the great number of people now spending most nights…relying for the preponderance of their meals on an industry willing to do everything for them save the heating and the eating.”

Pollan’s writing touches on this theme again and again.  He talks in terms of how our new reliance on prepared meals and processed foods has closely paralleled the epidemic of obesity in our society.  Is there a relationship?  Pollan seems to think so.

His discussion of the realm of cooking when using Water and Air weaves how industry has transformed food and cooking and nutrition while economics has transformed family and the way we eat.  At one point he discusses a family experiment of going to the grocery store to buy prepared meals (frozen, microwaveable packages) which when gathered for a family meal ended up costing significantly more and taking more time to prepare than a meal which is cooked “from scratch” leaving even less opportunity for a family gathering as each person “zapped” their own meal making multiple trips to the kitchen to check the progress.

I was concerned because I didn’t see a section or chapter containing a conclusion.  The conclusion didn’t come until 416 pages into the book when Pollan talks of an experience in Korea making kimchee.  He was visiting with a woman known for her traditional kimchee.

Pollan tells of the woman mentioning that Koreans traditionally make a distinction between the “tongue taste” of food and the “hand taste” of food.  Tongue taste was self-evident—did it taste good.

But “hand taste” was something else altogether.  It’s the more complex experience of a food that bears the signature of the individual who made it—“the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it.  Hand taste cannot be faked…”

What “hand taste” is, according to Pollan, is the taste of love.

Get the book.  It’s worth reading.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way:  Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!