Cooked by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is a great writer who has a few interesting ideas about food and how it has changed over the past hundred years or so.  He’s not a big fan of the Industrial Revolution, Processed Foodstuffs, and the general fall and decline of the quality of life that comes from eating fake food.

In Cooked Michael talks about the changes in the way we prepare-or more precisely how we don’t prepare-our food.  He starts off by breaking up his topic into the traditional methods of food cooking-Fire, Water, Air, and

Earth.  It’s a bit of a stretch, but it works.  My favorite section was the first one on Fire, where he takes up Whole Pig Barbecuing and talks about how Real Men cook.  Along the way he discovers that Industrial Hog Farmers don’t like Pit Bosses who prefer farm raised, hormone and chemical free, free range pigs.  Of course, most of us are not going to Williams-Sonoma for a $125 pork chop-we’re looking for the cheapest thing we can find, which was likely commercially raised in absolutely horrendous conditions.

One of the interesting topics covered is how most people don’t cook at home any more-if there is any way they can avoid it.  Fast Food restaurants and fancy Super Markets want to do all the cooking for us-and we say, sure, why not?  Michael has all kinds of reasons why not.  I’m not sure I agree with all of them, but he does have a few good points about family life and the quality of the food being prepared.

Food and how it can be transformed from raw ingredient into a meal is still something of a mystery to many people.  Barbecuing, pickling, baking, and generally heating up foodstuff is still a pretty magical bit of business.

Once again Michael talks about the evils of the Western Diet and how we all need to have more bacteria in our diets.  He talks about making sourdough bread, making pickles of all sorts, making beer, and about making crackling for his whole hog bbq.  This is all great stuff and Michael has a great writing style that makes a lot of often dull topics sound not dull at all.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformationis a great book, unless you happen to be part of industrial agribusiness, in which case you come off as the embodiment of greed and evil.  Well, you could try going organic and letting the pigs and chickens out of jail once in a while.   If the side effect of that is putting Wal-Mart and McDonalds out of business, well, so be it.  But really, whining about the Western Diet doesn’t take up that much space, Cooked is about cooking and enjoying the process.

Cooked shows that it’s possible to add such things as baking and pickling to your daily life-and that once you do, that life will be better than it was before.  That’s worth something, isn’t it?

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