It's not an overstatement to say thatMichael Pollanhas changed the way many of us eat and think about food. Deciphering, decoding, and deconstructing the entire food chain, from the earth and oceans to our kitchens, has been a passionate quest for this writer and U.C. Berkeley journalism professor; like a modern-day Sinclair Lewis, he has taken on big agriculture and the food manufacturing industry in print, on camera, and in the classroom. Many of Pollan's past six books—Food Rules,In Defense of Food,The Omnivore's Dilemma,The Botany of Desire,A Place of My Own, andSecond Nature—have explored the path that food takes to our tables. In Pollan's latest release,Cooked, he explores what it means to take those ingredients, and—using the four elements of fire, water, air, and earth—transform them into something meaningful and magical. In a word, a meal. Read on for the insights andPork Shoulder Barbecuerecipe the author shared with us during his book tour.
Epicurious:You dedicatedCookedto your wife and son, and also to the ecologist Wendell Berry—why?
Michael Pollan:Wendell Berry has been an important influence on my work ever since my very first book,Second Nature,both as a writer—his prose is stunning—and as a thinker. He helped me see that nature is not just out there in the woods, but also in our gardens and on our plates. Berry famously wrote that "Eating is an agricultural act," and in a way all my work on food has been an exploration of that powerful idea.
My work is very much about connecting the dots between our everyday actions and the larger currents of nature and history. So, the everyday choices you make in the kitchen ramify all the way back to the land [and] help determine whether that land will be nurtured with care by good farming or abused by industrial agriculture. You can view this awareness as an ethical burden, or as a wonderful empowerment, which is how I've come to see it. It gives us a whole other set of votes to cast, every time we eat, and especially when we cook.
Epi:In many of your books, you've traced how food gets to the kitchen. This book addresses what you do with it once it's in your kitchen. What inspired this one?
MP:Cookedcompletes the arc of my work since 2000 or so, when I first began following the American food chain.Omnivore's Dilemma,the first stop on this journey, focused on where the food comes from—the farms, and the earth end of the food chain. Then I jumped to the other end of the food chain, the body end, withIn Defense of FoodandFood Rules,both of which dealt with what the food does to us when we take it into our bodies—that is, the whole question of nutrition and health.
But along the way, I came to appreciate that there was a missing middle link in the food chain that might be the most important of all: how the stuff coming off of the farms, and out of the sea, and even the woods, is transformed by this small set of amazing technologies we call "cooking." Because it turns out that how food is cooked, andby whom,has a tremendous bearing on how it will be grown: When you let big corporations cook processed or fast food for you, they will buy their ingredients from huge monoculture farms and support the most expedient, unhealthy agricultural practices.
The local food movement, which is one of the most exciting social and economic developments in recent years, will only develop so far unless people cook, since it is the home cooks who can best support the small farmers. If you're not cooking, you're not going to the farmers' market. Small can buy from small, but big can only buy from big. So home cooking is, or can be, a vote in favor of local agriculture.
在食物链的另一端,健康的our bodies, cooking matters greatly, too, because humans cook very differently than corporations—always have and always will. Corporations use the cheapest ingredients they can get away with, then disguise the fact with lots of salt, fat, and sugar and a panoply of additives to make the food look fresher than it really is. What home cook keeps these chemicals in their pantry? When you cook for yourself, you use better ingredients, not nearly as much salt, fat, or sugar, and no food additives whatsoever.
But there's another dimension: When corporations cook for us, they make it too easy to eat special-occasion foods like dessert or French fries. I love French fries, but I will only go to the trouble of preparing them once a month or so. Whereas if you're eating industrially, you'll find French fries on your plate twice a day. So the very activity of cooking becomes an unconscious method of improving one's diet, without having to give nutrients or calories so much as a thought. That's why I argue that the most important thing about your diet is not what you eat but the activity: cooking, the best predictor of a healthy diet we have.
Epi:In one page of your book, you go from quoting a Chinese chef from 239 B.C. on the transformative wonders of cauldron cooking to the 20th-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard on the "psychoanalysis" of water. How long did it take to research and write the book?
MP:The book took about three years to report and write, some of it reading widely, as those marvelous quotes suggest, but most of it spent learning how to cook from a succession of great teachers. I apprenticed myself to masters of fire (barbecue); water (home cooking in pots); air (bread baking); and then earth (fermentation). [I wanted] to explore how each of these amazing technologies of transformation, worked—on the raw material, but also on us, for in cooking the cook is transformed, too. [Editor's note: To master fire, see Pollan's recipe forPork Shoulder Barbecue.]
I was very lucky in my teachers, who are some of the most obsessed, riveting, and generous characters I have ever had the chance to meet. I hear their voices in my head whenever I cook.
Epi:InCooked,you deconstruct what is happening when you barbecue, braise, bake, and brew—you covered the "b" techniques—with masters of these arts. What was most surprising as you were trying to master these yourself?
MP:I was most intimidated by [bread] baking, which I had always thought of as rocket science. You know, every quantity had to be precisely measured, you needed a digital scale, no margin of error—scary stuff for an amateur like me. A sourdough starter seemed intimidating, too. But after baking for a year or so, I tossed out my recipe and began to rely on my senses—it's all about feel, there's a tremendous margin for error, and if you follow your senses of smell and taste and touch, youll produce a great loaf of bread. And my starter is a lot tougher and more resilient than I thought—you don't have to baby it, and in fact I can lose it in the back of the fridge for six weeks and then revive it without a lot of trouble. Learning to trust your senses in the kitchen is perhaps the most valuable lesson of all. Don't let other people intimidate you!
Epi:You write, "Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes—and in our lives." Do you feel that this, ultimately, has led to our reliance on eating processed foods, largely on the go or out of the house?
MP:Yes, We feel panicked about time, and, especially when we're in the kitchen, we feel like there's something else we should be doing. But I would argue much of this panic is self-generated, and much of the rest is generated by food marketing, which is constantly telling us—since it helps sell processed foods—that we don't have time to cook, that we're lucky if we can slip a cereal bar in our kid's pocket as they race out the door to school. Well, how about setting the alarm 10 minutes earlier and scrambling an egg?
We are busy, and we Americans in particular work way too hard, yet we have found about two hours to surf the Internet every day in the last 10 years, so where did that time come from? The day is still 24 hours long! The fact is, we find time for what we value. My goal inCookedis to get people to value the act of cooking a little more, so they then will make a little more time for it. The rewards are great.
Epi:What is the Cooking Paradox?
MP:The Cooking Paradox is the fact that Americans are cooking less and less yet watching other people cook more. The average American spends only 27 minutes cooking [per day] today, half as much time as in the mid '60s, which means there are millions of people now spending more time watching other people cook on TV than they cook themselves. I don't need to point out that the food you watch getting cooked on TV isnotfood you get to eat! So what's the appeal? I argue there are deeply felt things we miss about cooking, about hanging around the kitchen watching our moms prepare dinner, perform all those amazing and aromatic alchemies—that cooking goes very deep, and we're not prepared to see it disappear from our lives entirely. But TV is a poor substitute for the real thing, in the same way that pornography is.
Epi:Is cooking—"little dramas of transformation," as you call it—the best way for an individual to help reform our global food system? What are some others?
MP:套用Wendell Berry,烹饪是一种agricultural act. Even more so than eating, because the cook knows a lot more about his or her ingredients—where they came from, how they were prepared—and can more easily vote to support one food chain, or another. Read labels, pay more for better ingredients (then eat a little less to make up for it), support farmers doing good work—these are all ways of "voting with our forks," which is surprisingly powerful. After all, such votes have helped create a $30 billion market in organic food in the last 30 years, and a $7 billion market in local food—not bad. But we also need to vote with our votes for better agricultural policies—and specifically for a farm bill devoted not to overproduction of junk calories, as it is now, but to explicitly supporting the goals of health, both in the population and on the land.
Epi:What inevitably follows, as the result of cooking's decline?
MP:The industrialization of agriculture and, just as bad, the industrialization of eating—which is to say, eating alone and eating processed food. In time, people come to believe that food should be fast, cheap, and easy—rather than something beautiful, communal, deserving of our full attention, sometimes even sacred. From this error flows the collapse of the family meal—that great institution!—and with it the rise of obesity and chronic diseases. It's all connected.
Epi:I personally follow your ethos of "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants" and discovered another deceptively simple mantra in these pages that I believe could have a deeper life message: "When chopping onions, just chop onions." What did you mean by that?
MP:We need to learnto bein the kitchen, without feeling pulled this way and that. What happens in the kitchen can be viewed either as drudgery or the most wondrous alchemy—it's all in how you approach it. A lot of my work in this book involved transforming my own approach. I used to hate chopping an onion, which to me is the great symbol of drudgery, not to mention literal irritation. When I began to actually enjoy dicing onions as a kind of meditation—and I don't pull this off every time, God knows—I knew I had passed over to another place in the kitchen, and really began to enjoy the work, as a respite from what I do for a living, as a way to get away from screens of every kind, as a way to re-engage my underemployed senses, all five of them. Cooking offers us so much, and I sincerely believe we are robbing ourselves of these satisfactions by outsourcing so much of this work to others—others who aren't very good at it and who we know don't have our best interests at heart.
Photo: Fran Collin
See more interviews with chefs and experts:
- Daniel Humm and Will Guidara: Why They Love New York
- Deborah Madison on Growing—and Loving—Vegetables
- David Bouley: A Career Retrospective Captured on Video
- A Conversation with the Slanted Door's Charles Phan
