Why cooking matters

After a long day do you just throw whatever you have in the fridge together and call that dinner? According to Michael Pollan, Author of Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation and the best seller Omnivore’s Dilemma” how we transform plants and animals into our daily meals really does matter. Renowned author Pollan explores cooking basic techniques in a four-part approach: fire, water, air, and earth.

Be sure to tune in at 3:40 p.m. for the full conversation with Pollan who points out in his book that so much of our cooking is about comfort. “The smell of bread baking never fails to improve a house or mood,” he says in his book.

You can check out a full excerpt from his book below.

Excerpted from COOKED by Michael Pollan. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Michael Pollan, 2013.

At a certain point in the late middle of my life I made the unexpected

but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that

most occupied me was in fact one and the same.

Cook.

Some of these questions were personal. For example, what was the

single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our

health and general well-being? And then what would be a good way

to better connect to my teenage son? (As it turned out, this involved

not only ordinary cooking but also the specialized form of it known

as brewing.) Other questions were slightly more political in nature.

For years I had been trying to determine (because I am often asked)

what is the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help

reform the American food system, to make it healthier and more sustainable?

Another related question is, how can people living in a highly

specialized consumer economy reduce their sense of dependence and

achieve a greater degree of self-suffi ciency? And then there were the

more philosophical questions, the ones I’ve been chewing on since I

fi rst started writing books. How, in our everyday lives, can we acquire

a deeper understanding of the natural world and our species’ peculiar

role in it? You can always go to the woods to confront such questions,

but I discovered that even more interesting answers could be had simply

by going to the kitchen.

I would not, as I said, ever have expected it. Cooking has always

been a part of my life, but more like the furniture than an object

of scrutiny, much less a passion. I counted myself lucky to have a

parent—my mother—who loved to cook and almost every night

made us a delicious meal. By the time I had a place of my own, I

could fi nd my way around a kitchen well enough, the result of nothing

more purposeful than all those hours spent hanging around the

kitchen while my mother fi xed dinner. And though once I had my

own place I cooked whenever I had the time, I seldom made time for

cooking or gave it much consideration. My kitchen skills, such as they

were, were pretty much frozen in place by the time I turned thirty.

Truth be told, my most successful dishes leaned heavily on the cooking

of others, as when I drizzled my incredible sage-butter sauce over

store-bought ravioli. Every now and then I’d look at a cookbook or

clip a recipe from the newspaper to add a new dish to my tiny repertoire,

or I’d buy a new kitchen gadget, though most of these eventually

ended up in a closet.

In retrospect, the mildness of my interest in cooking surprises me,

since my interest in every other link of the food chain had been so

keen. I’ve been a gardener since I was eight, growing mostly vegetables,

and I’ve always enjoyed being on farms and writing about agriculture.

I’ve also written a fair amount about the opposite end of the

food chain—the eating end, I mean, and the implications of our eating

for our health. But to the middle links of the food chain, where

the stuff of nature gets transformed into the things we eat and drink,

I hadn’t really given much thought.

Until, that is, I began trying to unpack a curious paradox I had

noticed while watching television, which was simply this: How is it

that at the precise historical moment when Americans were abandoning

the kitchen, handing over the preparation of most of our meals to

the food industry, we began spending so much of our time thinking

about food and watching other people cook it on television? The less

cooking we were doing in our own lives, it seemed, the more that

food and its vicarious preparation fascinated us.

Our culture seems to be of at least two minds on this subject. Survey

research confi rms we’re cooking less and buying more prepared

meals every year. The amount of time spent preparing meals in

American households has fallen by half since the mid-sixties, when I

was watching my mom fi x dinner, to a scant twenty-seven minutes a

day. (Americans spend less time cooking than people in any other nation,

but the general downward trend is global.) And yet at the same

time we’re talking about cooking more—and watching cooking, and

reading about cooking, and going to restaurants designed so that we

can watch the work performed live. We live in an age when professional

cooks are household names, some of them as famous as athletes

or movie stars. The very same activity that many people regard as a

form of drudgery has somehow been elevated to a popular spectator

sport. When you consider that twenty-seven minutes is less time than

it takes to watch a single episode of Top Chef or The Next Food Network Star,

you realize that there are now millions of people who spend more

time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually

cooking it themselves. I don’t need to point out that the food you

watch being cooked on television is not food you get to eat.

This is peculiar. After all, we’re not watching shows or reading

books about sewing or darning socks or changing the oil in our car,

three other domestic chores that we have been only too happy to

outsource—and then promptly drop from conscious awareness. But

cooking somehow feels different. The work, or the process, 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.

I developed a few theories to explain what I came to think of as the

Cooking Paradox. The fi rst and most obvious is that watching other

people cook is not exactly a new behavior for us humans. Even when

“everyone” still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched:

men for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories

of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes

looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something

tasty to eat. In ancient Greece, the word for “cook,” “butcher,” and

“priest” was the same—mageiros—and the word shares an etymological

root with “magic.” I would watch, rapt, when my mother conjured

her most magical dishes, like the tightly wrapped packages of

fried chicken Kiev that, when cut open with a sharp knife, liberated a

pool of melted butter and an aromatic gust of herbs. But watching an

everyday pan of eggs get scrambled was nearly as riveting a spectacle,

as the slimy yellow goop suddenly leapt into the form of savory gold

nuggets. Even the most ordinary dish follows a satisfying arc of transformation,

magically becoming something more than the sum of its

ordinary parts. And in almost every dish, you can fi nd, besides the

culinary ingredients, the ingredients of a story: a beginning, a middle,

and an end.

Then there are the cooks themselves, the heroes who drive these

ittle dramas of transformation. Even as it vanishes from our daily

lives, we’re drawn to the rhythms and textures of the work cooks

do, which seems so much more direct and satisfying than the more

abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs these days.

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, fi re and water, earth

and air, using them—mastering them!—to perform their tasty alchemies.

How many of us still do the kind of work that engages us in a

dialogue with the material world that concludes—assuming the

chicken Kiev doesn’t prematurely leak or the souffl é doesn’t collapse—

with such a gratifying and delicious sense of closure?

So maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on television and

read about cooking in books is that there are things about cooking

we really miss. We might not feel we have the time or energy (or the

knowledge) to do it ourselves every day, but we’re not prepared to see

it disappear from our lives altogether. If cooking is, as the anthropologists

tell us, a defi ning human activity—the act with which culture

begins, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss—then maybe we shouldn’t

be surprised that watching its processes unfold would strike deep

emotional chords.

The idea that cooking is a defi ning human activity is not a new one.

In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that “no beast is a

cook,” called Homo sapiens “the cooking animal.” (Though he might

have reconsidered that defi nition had he been able to gaze upon the

frozen-food cases at Walmart.) Fifty years later, in The Physiology of Taste,

the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that

cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fi re, it had

“done the most to advance the cause of civilization.” More recently,

Lévi-Strauss, writing in The Raw and the Cooked in 1964, reported that

many of the world’s cultures entertained a similar view, regarding

cooking as the symbolic activity that “establishes the difference between

animals and people.”

For Lévi-Strauss, cooking was a metaphor for the human transformation

of raw nature into cooked culture. But in the years since

the publication of The Raw and the Cooked, other anthropologists have

begun to take quite literally the idea that the invention of cooking

might hold the evolutionary key to our humanness. A few years ago,

a Harvard anthropologist and primatologist named Richard Wrangham

published a fascinating book called Catching Fire, in which he argued

that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors—and

not tool making or meat eating or language—that set us apart from

the apes and made us human. According to the “cooking hypothesis,”

the advent of cooked food 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 (brains being notorious

energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes

much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other

primates our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and

spend many more of their waking hours chewing—as much as six

hours a day.

Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion

and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources of

energy. Also, since cooking detoxifi es 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 (and chewing)

it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic

resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice

of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something

new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have

likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or,

come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we’ve more recently become,

grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and

wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact,

sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.

“Around that fi re,” Wrangham writes, “we became tamer.”

Cooking thus transformed us, and not only by making us more

sociable and civil. Once cooking allowed us to expand our cognitive

capacity at the expense of our digestive capacity, there was no going

back: Our big brains and tiny guts now depended on a diet of cooked

food. (Raw-foodists take note.) What this means is that cooking is

now obligatory—it is, as it were, baked in to our biology. What Winston

Churchill once said of architecture—“First we shape our buildings,

and then they shape us”—might also be said of cooking. First we

cooked our food, and then our food cooked us.

If cooking is as central to human identity, biology, and culture as

Wrangham suggests, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking in

our time would have serious consequences for modern life, and so it

has. Are they all bad? Not at all. The outsourcing of much of the work

of cooking to corporations has relieved women of what has traditionally

been their exclusive responsibility for feeding the family, making

it easier for them to work outside the home and have careers. It has

headed off many of the confl icts and domestic arguments that such a

large shift in gender roles and family dynamics was bound to spark.

It has relieved all sorts of other pressures in the household, including

longer workdays and overscheduled children, and saved us time that

we can now invest in other pursuits. It has also allowed us to diversify

our diets substantially, making it possible even for people with no

cooking skills and little money to enjoy a whole different cuisine

every night of the week. All that’s required is a microwave.

These are no small benefi ts. Yet they have come at a cost that we

are just now beginning to reckon. Industrial cooking has taken a substantial

toll on our health and well-being. Corporations cook very

differently from people do (which is why we usually call what they

do “food processing” instead of cooking). They tend to use much

more sugar, fat, and salt than people cooking for people do; they also

deploy novel chemical ingredients seldom found in pantries in order

to make their food last longer and look fresher than it really is. So it

will come as no surprise that the decline in home cooking closely

tracks the rise in obesity and all the chronic diseases linked to diet.

The rise of fast food and the decline in home cooking have also

undermined the institution of the shared meal, by encouraging us to

eat different things and to eat them on the run and often alone. Survey

researchers tell us we’re spending more time engaged in “secondary

eating,” as this more or less constant grazing on packaged foods

is now called, and less time engaged in “primary eating”—a rather

depressing term for the once-venerable institution known as the meal.

The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life,

the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire

the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating

differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the

“cultural contradictions of capitalism”—its tendency to undermine

the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display today

at the modern American dinner table, along with all the brightly colored

packages that the food industry has managed to plant there.

These are, I know, large claims to make for the centrality of cooking (and not cooking) in our lives, and a caveat or two are in order.

For most of us today, the choice is not nearly as blunt as I’ve framed

it: that is, home cooking from scratch versus fast food prepared by

corporations. Most of us occupy a place somewhere between those

bright poles, a spot that is constantly shifting with the day of the

week, the occasion, and our mood. Depending on the night, we might

cook a meal from scratch, or we might go out or order in, or we might

“sort of” cook. This last option involves availing ourselves of the various

and very useful shortcuts that an industrial food economy offers:

the package of spinach in the freezer, the can of wild salmon in the

pantry, the box of store-bought ravioli from down the street or halfway

around the world. What constitutes “cooking” takes place along a

spectrum, as indeed it has for at least a century, when packaged foods

fi rst entered the kitchen and the defi nition of “scratch cooking” began

to drift. (Thereby allowing me to regard my packaged ravioli with

sage-butter sauce as a culinary achievement.) Most of us over the

course of a week fi nd ourselves all over that spectrum. What is new,

however, is the great number of people now spending most nights at

the far end of it, relying for the preponderance of their meals on an

industry willing to do everything for them save the heating and the eating.

“We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods,” a food-marketing

consultant told me, “and now we’re going to have a hundred years of

packaged meals.”

This is a problem—for the health of our bodies, our families, our

communities, and our land, but also for our sense of how our eating

connects us to the world. Our growing distance from any direct,

physical engagement with the processes by which the raw stuff of

nature gets transformed into a cooked meal is changing our understanding

of what food is. Indeed, the idea that food has any connection

to nature or human work or imagination is hard to credit when

it arrives in a neat package, fully formed. Food becomes just another

commodity, an abstraction. And as soon as that happens we become

easy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real

thing—what I call edible foodlike substances. We end up trying to

nourish ourselves on images.

Now, for a man to criticize these developments will perhaps rankle

some readers. To certain ears, whenever a man talks about the importance

of cooking, it sounds like he wants to turn back the clock, and

return women to the kitchen. But that’s not at all what I have in mind.

I’ve come to think cooking is too important to be left to any one gender

or member of the family; men and children both need to be in

the kitchen, too, and not just for reasons of fairness or equity but

because they have so much to gain by being there., In fact, one of the

biggest reasons corporations were able to insinuate themselves into

this part of our lives is because home cooking had for so long been

denigrated as “women’s work” and therefore not important enough

for men and boys to learn to do.

Though it’s hard to say which came fi rst: Was home cooking denigrated

because the work was mostly done by women, or did women

get stuck doing most of the cooking because our culture denigrated

the work? The gender politics of cooking, which I explore at some

length in part II, are nothing if not complicated, and probably always

have been. Since ancient times, a few special types of cooking have

enjoyed considerable prestige: Homer’s warriors barbecued their own

joints of meat at no cost to their heroic status or masculinity. And ever

since, it has been socially acceptable for men to cook in public and

professionally—for money. (Though it is only recently that professional

chefs have enjoyed the status of artists.) But for most of history

most of humanity’s food has been cooked by women working out of

public view and without public recognition. Except for the rare ceremonial

occasions over which men presided—the religious sacrifi ce,

the July 4 barbecue, the four-star restaurant—cooking has traditionally

been women’s work, part and parcel of homemaking and child

care, and therefore undeserving of serious—i.e., male—attention.

But there may be another reason cooking has not received its

proper due. In a recent book called The Taste for Civilization, Janet A.

Flammang, a feminist scholar and political scientist who has argued

eloquently for the social and political importance of “food work,”

suggests the problem may have something to do with food itself,

which by its very nature falls on the wrong side—the feminine side—

of the mind-body dualism in Western culture.

“Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell, and

taste,” she points out, “which rank lower on the hierarchy of senses

than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to

knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is

associated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized

men have sought to overcome with knowledge and reason.”

Very much to their loss.

II.

The premise of this book is that cooking—defi ned 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. This is not something I fully appreciated

before I set out to learn how to cook. But after three years

spent working under a succession of gifted teachers to master four of

the key transformations we call cooking—grilling with fi re, cooking

with liquid, baking bread, and fermenting all sorts of things—I came

away with a very different body of knowledge from the one I went

looking for. Yes, by the end of my education I got pretty good at making

a few things—I’m especially proud of my bread and some of my

braises. But I also learned things about the natural world (and our

implication in it) that I don’t think I could have learned in any other

way. I learned far more than I ever expected to about the nature of

work, the meaning of health, about tradition and ritual, self-reliance

and community, the rhythms of everyday life, and the supreme satisfaction

of producing something I previously could only have imagined

consuming, doing it outside of the cash economy for no other

reason but love.

This book is the story of my education in the kitchen—but also in

the bakery, the dairy, the brewery, and the restaurant kitchen, some

of the places where much of our culture’s cooking now takes place.

Cooked is divided into four parts, one for each of the great transformations

of nature into culture we call cooking. Each of these, I was

surprised and pleased to discover, corresponds to, and depends upon,

one of the classical elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.

Why this should be so I am not entirely sure. But for thousands of

years and in many different cultures, these elements have been regarded

as the four irreducible, indestructible ingredients that make up

the natural world. Certainly they still loom large in our imagination.

The fact that modern science has dismissed the classical elements,

reducing them to still more elemental substances and forces—water

to molecules of hydrogen and oxygen; fi re to a process of rapid oxidation,

etc.—hasn’t really changed our lived experience of nature or the

way we imagine it. Science may have replaced the big four with a

periodic table of 118 elements, and then reduced each of those to evertinier

particles, but our senses and our dreams have yet to get the

news.

To learn to cook is to put yourself on intimate terms with the laws

of physics and chemistry, as well as the facts of biology and microbiology.

Yet, beginning with fi re, I found that the older, prescientifi c

elements fi gure largely—hugely, in fact—in apprehending the main

transformations that comprise cooking, each in its own way. Each

element proposes a different set of techniques for transforming nature,

but also a different stance toward the world, a different kind of

work, and a different mood.

Fire being the fi rst element (in cooking anyway), I began my education

with it, exploring the most basic and earliest kind of cookery:

meat, on the grill. My quest to learn the art of cooking with fi re

took me a long way from my backyard grill, to the barbecue pits and

pit masters of eastern North Carolina, where cooking meat still means

a whole pig roasted very slowly over a smoldering wood fi re. It was

here, training under an accomplished and fl amboyant pit master, that

I got acquainted with cooking’s primary colors—animal, wood, fi re,

time—and found a clearly marked path deep into the prehistory of

cooking: what fi rst drove our protohuman ancestors to gather around

the cook fi re, and how that experience transformed them. Killing and

cooking a large animal has never been anything but an emotionally

freighted and spiritually charged endeavor. Rituals of sacrifi ce have

attended this sort of cooking from the beginning, and I found their

echoes reverberating even today, in twenty-fi rst-century barbecue.

Then as now, the mood in fi re cooking is heroic, masculine, theatrical,

boastful, unironic, and faintly (sometimes not so faintly) ridiculous.

It is in fact everything that cooking with water, the subject of

part II, is not. Historically, cooking with water comes after cooking

with fi re, since it awaited the invention of pots to cook in, an artifact

of human culture only about ten thousand years old. Now cooking

moves indoors, into the domestic realm, and in this chapter I delve

into everyday home cookery, its techniques and satisfactions as well

as its discontents. Befi tting its subject, this section takes the shape of a

single long recipe, unfolding step by step the age-old techniques that

grandmothers developed for teasing delicious food from the most

ordinary of ingredients: some aromatic plants, a little fat, a few scraps

of meat, a long afternoon around the house. Here, too, I apprenticed

myself to a fl amboyant professional character, but she and I did most

of our cooking at home in my kitchen, and often as a family—home

and family being very much the subject of this section.

Part III takes up the element of air, which is all that distinguishes

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an exuberantly leavened loaf of bread from a sad gruel of pulverized

grain. By fi guring out how to coax air into our food, we elevate it and

ourselves, transcending, and vastly improving, what nature gives us

in a handful of grass seed. The story of Western civilization is pretty

much the story of bread, which is arguably the fi rst important “food

processing” technology. (The counterargument comes from the brewers

of beer, who may have gotten there fi rst.) This section, which

takes place in several different bakeries across the country (including

a Wonder Bread plant), follows two personal quests: to bake a perfect,

maximally airy and wholesome loaf of bread, and to pinpoint 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.

Different as they are, these fi rst three modes of cooking all depend

on heat. Not so the fourth. Like the earth itself, the various arts of

fermentation rely instead on biology to transform organic matter from

one state to a more interesting and nutritious other state. Here I encountered

the most amazing alchemies of all: strong, allusive fl avors

and powerful intoxicants created for us by fungi and bacteria—many

of them the denizens of the soil—as they go about their invisible work

of creative destruction. This section falls into three chapters, covering

the fermentation of vegetables (into sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles of all

kinds); milk (into cheese); and alcohol (into mead and beer). Along

the way, a succession of “fermentos” tutored me in the techniques of

artfully managing rot, the folly of the modern war against bacteria,

the erotics of disgust, and the somewhat upside-down notion that,

while we were fermenting alcohol, alcohol has been fermenting us.

I have been fortunate in both the talent and the generosity of the

teachers who agreed to take me in—the cooks, bakers, brewers, picklers,

and cheese makers who shared their time and techniques and

recipes. This cast of characters turned out to be a lot more masculine

than I would have expected, and a reader might conclude that I have

indulged in some unfortunate typecasting. But as soon as I opted to

apprentice myself to professional rather than amateur cooks—in the

hopes of acquiring the most rigorous training I could get—it was

probably inevitable that certain stereotypes would be reinforced. It

turns out that barbecue pit masters are almost exclusively men, as

are brewers and bakers (except for pastry chefs), and a remarkable

number of cheese makers are women. In learning to cook traditional

pot dishes, I chose to work with a female chef, and if by doing so I

underscored the cliché that home cooking is woman’s work, that was

sort of the idea: I wanted to delve into that very question. We can

hope that all the gender stereotypes surrounding food and cooking

will soon be thrown up for grabs, but to assume that has already happened

would be to kid ourselves.

Taken as a whole, this is a “how-to” book, but of a very particular

kind. Each section circles around a single elemental recipe—for barbecue,

for a braise, for bread, and for a small handful of fermented

items—and by the end of it, you should be well enough equipped to

make it. (The recipes are spelled out more concisely in the appendix,

in case you do want to try any of them.) Though all the cooking I

describe can be done in a home kitchen, only a portion of the book

deals directly with the kind of work most people regard as “home

cooking.” Several of the recipes here are for things most readers will

probably never make themselves—beer, for example, or cheese, or

even bread. Though I hope that they will. Because I discovered there

was much to learn from attempting, even if only just once, these

more ambitious and time-consuming forms of cookery, knowledge

that might not at fi rst seem terribly useful but in fact changes everything

about one’s relationship to food and what is possible in the

kitchen. Let me try to explain.

At bottom cooking is not a single process but, rather, comprises a

small set of technologies, some of the most important humans have

yet devised. They changed us fi rst as a species, and then at the level of

the group, the family, and the individual. These technologies range

from the controlled used of fi re to the manipulation of specifi c microorganisms

to transform grain into bread or alcohol all the way to the

microwave oven—the last major innovation. So cooking is really a

continuum of processes, from simple to complex, and Cooked is, among

other things, a natural and social history of these transformations,

both the ones that are still part of our everyday lives and the ones

that are not. Today, we’re apt to think of making cheese or brewing

beer as “extreme” forms of cookery, only because so few of us have

ever attempted them, but of course at one time all these transformations

took place in the household and everyone had at least a rudimentary

knowledge of how to perform them. Nowadays, only a small

handful of cooking’s technologies seem within the reach of our competence.

This represents not only a loss of knowledge, but a loss of a

kind of power, too. And it is entirely possible that, within another

generation, cooking a meal from scratch will seem as exotic and

ambitious—as “extreme”—as most of us today regard brewing beer

or baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crock of sauerkraut.

When that happens—when we no longer have any direct personal

knowledge of how these wonderful creations are made—food will

have become completely abstracted from its various contexts: from

the labor of human hands, from the natural world of plants and animals,

from imagination and culture and community. Indeed, food is

already well on its way into that ether of abstraction, toward becoming

mere fuel or pure image. So how might we begin to bring it back

to earth?

My wager in Cooked is that the best way to recover the reality of

food, to return it to its proper place in ours lives, is by attempting to

master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.

The good news is that this is still within our reach, no matter how

limited our skills in the kitchen. My own apprenticeship necessitated

a journey far beyond my own kitchen (and comfort zone), to some

of the farther reaches of cookery, in the hopes of confronting the essential

facts of the matter, and discovering exactly what it is about

these transformations that helped make us who we are. But perhaps

my happiest discovery was that the wonders of cooking, even its most

ambitious manifestations, rely on a magic that remains accessible to

all of us, at home.

I should add that the journey has been great fun, probably the

most fun I’ve ever had while still ostensibly “working.” What is more

gratifying, after all, than discovering you can actually make something

delicious (or intoxicating) that you simply assumed you’d always

have to buy in the marketplace? Or fi nding yourself in that

sweet spot where the frontier between work and play disappears in

a cloud of bread fl our or fragrant steam rising from a boiling kettle

of wort?

Even in the case of the seemingly most impractical cooking adventures,

I learned things of an unexpectedly practical value. After you’ve

tried your hand at brewing or pickling or slow roasting a whole hog,

everyday home cooking becomes much less daunting, and in certain

ways easier. My own backyard barbecuing has been informed and

improved by my hours hanging around the barbecue pit. Working

with bread dough has taught me how to trust my hands and my senses

in the kitchen, and to have enough confi dence in their reporting to

free me from the bonds of recipe and measuring cup. And having

spent time in the bakeries of artisans as well as in a Wonder Bread

factory, my appreciation for a good loaf of bread has grown much

more keen. Same for a wedge of cheese or bottle of beer: What had

always been just products, good or bad, now reveal themselves as so

much more than that—as achievements, as expressions, as relationships.

By itself, this added increment of eating and drinking pleasure

would have been enough to justify all the so-called work.

But perhaps the most important thing I learned by doing this work

is how cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and ecological

relationships: with plants and animals, with the soil, with farmers,

with the microbes both inside and outside our bodies, and, of

course, with the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Above all

else, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking connects.

Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us in

the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side

and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between

nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation.

Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in

the process, I discovered, so is the cook.

III.

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that,

much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing

without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of

mental space for daydreaming and refl ection. One of the things I refl

ected on is the whole question of taking on what in our time has

become, strictly speaking, optional, even unnecessary work, work for

which I am not particularly gifted or qualifi ed, and at which I may

never get very good. This is, in the modern world, the unspoken

question that hovers over all our cooking: Why bother?

By any purely rational calculation, even everyday home cooking

(much less baking bread or fermenting kimchi) is probably not a wise

use of my time. Not long ago, I read an Op Ed piece in The Wall Street

Journal about the restaurant industry, written by the couple that publishes

the Zagat restaurant guides, which took exactly this line. Rather

than coming home after work to cook, the Zagats suggested, “people

would be better off staying an extra hour in the offi ce doing what

they do well, and letting bargain restaurants do what they do best.”

Here in a nutshell is the classic argument for the division of labor,

which, as Adam Smith and countless others have pointed out, has

given us many of the blessings of civilization. It is what allows me to

make a living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow my

food, sew my clothes, and supply the energy that lights and heats my

house. I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching

than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is

undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also

debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and,

eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of

one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest

of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary

role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires

we delegate to specialists of one kind or another—our meals to the

food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to

Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug

company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to

the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard

to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves—anything, that is,

except the work we do “to make a living.” For everything else, we feel

like we’ve lost the skills, or that there’s someone who can do it better.

(I recently heard about an agency that will dispatch a sympathetic

someone to visit your elderly parents if you can’t spare the time to do

it yourself.) It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but

a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs

or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much

to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all

this work for us.

One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy

is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility,

between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences.

Specialization makes it easy to forget about the fi lth of the coal-fi red

power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking

labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the

misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon.

Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our

behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.

Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a

powerful corrective to this way of being in the world—a corrective

that is still available to all of us. To butcher a pork shoulder is to be

forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made

up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from

feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of

the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen.

In my hands its fl esh feels a little less like the product of industry than

of nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow the

greens I’m serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem to

grow back almost as fast as I can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’s

abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are

turned into delicious things to eat.

Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production

and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary

effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection

that the supermarket and the “home-meal replacement” have succeeded

in obscuring, yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so

is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very

least, a little less glib in one’s pronouncements.

Especially one’s pronouncements about “the environment,” which

suddenly begins to seem a little less “out there” and a lot closer to

home. For what is the environmental crisis if not a crisis of the way

we live? The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total

of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer

spending represents nearly three-quarters of the U.S. economy)

and the rest of them made by others in the name of our needs and

desires. If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character,

as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970s, then sooner or later

it will have to be addressed at that level—at home, as it were. In our

yards and kitchens and minds.

As soon as you start down this path of thinking, the quotidian

space of the kitchen appears in a startling new light. It begins to matter

more than we ever imagined. The unspoken reason why political

reformers from Vladimir Lenin to Betty Friedan sought to get women

out of the kitchen was that nothing of importance—nothing worthy

of their talents and intelligence and convictions—took place there.

The only worthy arenas for consequential action were the workplace

and the public square. But this was before the environmental crisis

had come into view, and before the industrialization of our eating

created a crisis in our health. Changing the world will always require

action and participation in the public realm, but in our time that will

no longer be suffi cient. We’ll have to change the way we live, too.

What that means is that the sites of our everyday engagement with

nature—our kitchens, gardens, houses, cars—matter to the fate of the

world in a way they never have before.

To cook or not to cook thus becomes a consequential question.

Though I realize that is putting the matter a bit too bluntly. Cooking

means different things at different times to different people; seldom

is it an all-or-nothing proposition. Yet even to cook a few more nights

a week than you already do, or to devote a Sunday to making a few

meals for the week, or perhaps to try every now and again to make

something you only ever expected to buy—even these modest acts

will constitute a kind of a vote. A vote for what, exactly? Well, in a

world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose

to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against the total

rationalization of life. Against the infi ltration of commercial interests

into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to

devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence

from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment

into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our

nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating

notion that, at least while we’re at home, production is work

best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is

consumption. This dependence marketers call “freedom.”

Cooking has the power to transform more than plants and animals:

It transforms us, too, from mere consumers into producers. Not

completely, not all the time, but I have found that even to shift the

ratio between these two identities a few degrees toward the side of

production yields deep and unexpected satisfactions. Cooked is an invitation

to alter, however slightly, the ratio between production and

consumption in your life. The regular exercise of these simple skills

for producing some of the necessities of life increases self-reliance

and freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations.

Not just our money but our power fl ows toward them whenever we

cannot supply any of our everyday needs and desires ourselves. And

it begins to fl ow back toward us, and our community, as soon as we

decide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves. This has

been an early lesson of the rising movement to rebuild local food

economies, a movement that ultimately depends for its success on our

willingness to put more thought and effort into feeding ourselves.

Not every day, not every meal—but more often than we do, whenever

we can.

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. In the

calculus of economics, doing so may not always be the most effi cient

use of an amateur cook’s time, but in the calculus of human emotion,

it is beautiful even so. For is there any practice less selfi sh, any labor

less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious

and nourishing for people you love?

So let’s begin.