Books I'm Reading: Michael Pollan's Cooked

I’ve just finished Michael Pollan’s Cooked (Penguin Books, 2013). At its core, the book is a look at how cooking transforms raw ingredients into something new, but it also looks at cooking from the perspectives of human culture and health. The book is organized into four sections, one each for the elemental forces of fire, water, air, and earth. 

Pollan puts himself at the center of each of his four exlorations. He approaches cooking as a curious amateur, documenting his successes and failures as he gradually gains a deeper understanding of cooking with fire (grilling and roasting), with water (braising and boiling), with air (baking), and with “earth” (fermentation), reinforcing the idea that cooking is a skill that most people have become distanced from but that anyone can reclaim. His hands-on experiences –whether mastering slow-cooked barbecue or keep a sourdough starter alive – ground the broader arguments in tangible, relatable moments. Along the way, he introduces us to a number of memorable characters, including Ed Mitchell, the barbecue master; Harry Balzer, who studies food eating habits among consumers; Samin Nosrat, who introduces the author to “grandma cooking;” the baker Chad Robertson; and fermenter Sandor Katz, among others.

Cooked is partly a critique of modern industrial food culture. Pollan argues that the decline of home cooking has had important consequences for public health, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion. He connects the act of cooking to a greater awareness of ingredients, portion sizes, and nutritional value, while also emphasizing the role of home cooking in fostering patience, mindfulness, and shared experience. The book is more than a culinary memoir. It is a work of cultural analysis.

Cooked is entertaining because it combines intellectual enquiry with genuine enthusiasm for food and the act of preparing food. Pollan presents cooking as a practical and deeply satisfying response to contemporary challenges around eating well. Finally, for those inspired by the prose, Pollan provides four recipes in an appendix at the end of the book, one related to each of the four sections of the book. Recommended. Pollan is always worth the time in my experience. 

 

Books I'm Reading: Second Nature

I finished Michael Pollan's Second Nature over the weekend. Have moved on to Walter Piston's textbooks Orchestration, Harmony, and Counterpoint--all over my head at the moment, but I hope something useful rubs off. If nothing else, they'll look good on the bookshelves when I get frustrated enough to shelve them in disgust--although I have no idea where they'd fit. Too many books, never enough shelves.

Pollan is always a good read. This book is a very personal look at what gardens mean to the author, to people today, and to select figures out of the past. I had never thought of gardens as a political statement before. Pollan set me to thinking about that. I've come to no useful conclusions yet, but I'll never look at a lawn the same way again--which is not to say that I'd never contemplated the meaning of a lawn before. Here, in desiccated California, a lawn has come to seem a faintly arrogant extravagance to me. One of the first things we did when we moved into this house was to remove the lawn and replace it with thyme and rocks. Quite a few aloes have crept in among the rocks since then--all plants that tolerate drought. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, lawns weren't part of my daily experience. Asphalt and concrete were. In Ohio, my mother's house had a wonderful wide lawn. Lawns make more sense in a place with summer rain. 

On a less serious note was an analysis of the social and political slants of  plant catalogs (in one of the eerie coincidences that have been haunting me for the past year or so, three fat seed and bulb catalogs arrived in my mailbox the morning I finished reading the book--from companies I've not dealt with in years--as if on cue). 

Pollan's descriptions are hilarious. I found myself laughing out loud at his parade of catalog classes--from the very conservatively augmented East Coast catalogs with their white roses and lilies-of-the-valley to the voluptuous (but somehow still upper crust) catalogs of the southern growers, to the anything-goes-and-bigger-is-definitely-better catalogs still targeting the everyman of an America that hardly exists anymore, to the save-the-planet socially conscious catalogs of the West Coast (and elsewhere). Recommended.