Despite the rise of the Food Network, cooking shows and competitions on virtually every channel, and celebrity chefs who have turned restaurants into a new form of dinner theater, Americans are more disconnected from their food than ever.
Forget our admiration for celebri-chefs. The amount of time we spend in our own kitchens has fallen by 40 percent since 1965, Michael Pollan writes in his new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Now, we spend our time in front of TVs and computers, "outsourcing," as he puts it, the job of cooking to corporations and restaurants. The result? A serious obesity problem and an industrial agriculture system reliant upon unsustainable methods.
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After years spent writing about both those issues, he writes, "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." So he did. His book documents his efforts to learn the art of Southern barbecue, the delicate craft of braises, and breadmaking, and even how to ferment beer and cheese, all in an effort to better appreciate how the simple act of cooking can transform eaters from unhealthy bystanders into capable cooks declaring their independence, he writes, "from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption."
He sat down with us to answer a few questions on cooking, eating, and the frustration of french fries:
In your first book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, you focused on the problems with the industrial food system. In your second, In Defense of Food, you concentrated on the modern Western diet and the innumerable health problems it's causing. What were you hoping to tackle with this book?
Cooking is the middle link in the food chain that I've been writing about. In his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser told the story of how fast-food companies drove industrial meat production and industrial potato production looking for single suppliers to sustain them. If you're going to outsource your cooking, you're supporting these large industrial monocultures. The two are inherently linked.
On the other end, when you cook food industrially, you have to make the foods shelf stable. You have to take the fiber out, you tend to use chemicals, more salt, fat, and sugar. And you wind up with the kinds of foods we now know are the basis of obesity: snack foods and drinks and foods that are eaten on the run.
Cooking is the most important link in the food chain for shaping health and agriculture, and it pushes you toward what you should be eating: good ingredients cooked simply.
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You summed up In Defense of Food with a catchy saying, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Do you have a similar saying for this book?
No, except that I'd add the words "and cook it" to those seven. What I came to realize is that the most important thing about your diet is who's cooking your food. Is it you or the corporations? Cooking is the key to health. And yes, health is about chemistry and nutrients, but cooking is the best way to ensure you're going to get the right nutrients. Corporations cook so badly and use such lousy ingredients—too much sugar, fat, and salt, and additives that no human keeps in their pantry.
Corporations also excel at cooking labor-intensive foods made from cheap ingredients. French fries are the perfect example. If you want to cook them at home, you have to wash the potatoes, cut the potatoes, fry them in oil, figure out what to do with the oil once you're done. It's a nightmare! But done on a corporate scale, all that can be done really quickly and really cheaply, with the result that people can now eat french fries twice a day. They've taken a special-occasion food and made it so ubiquitous, and that gets people in trouble, healthwise.
And we are eating a lot more. As the "time cost" of food—the cost of the time and work involved to get food cooked—has gone down, people eat more. So we're cooking less but eating more. That's not what you would expect to see, but that's what's happened.
Did any of your forays into cooking cause major shifts in they way you think about or approach food?
It changed my focus. Before I was very much focused on the environmental and biological side of food, and this book made me pay attention to the social implications—having a meal and sharing it with people, as opposed to eating on the run.
The meal is a really important institution of civilization and of democracy. I really do think that the family meal is nursery of democracy. It's where children learn how to share, take turns, and argue without offending, and they learn the news of the day from adult conversation. Humans are a complicated species. Food is not just fuel. It's communion and a medium of social life. I guess the more I've cooked, the more I've become aware of and sensitive to the social meanings of food and how important it is to so much more than health.
You do touch on the communal aspects of food a lot, whether it's a bunch of men gathered around a barbecue pit or your own family trying to eat a dinner of microwaveable frozen meals. What did that teach you?
When you eat from the same pot, magic things happen. When everyone is eating something different and at a different time, it does get very disjointed. Some day, I really do think we'll have science showing us if everybody's eating coq au vin, eating the same chemicals, it's putting us on the same emotional page. There's been similar research on people who are all drinking beer or all drinking wine. Food and mood are closely related.
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What advice do you have for people who think cooking is too daunting or boring, or just not worth their time?
If you have someone in your social circle who's really good at baking or cooking or anything else, ask if you can come over and help someday. Recipes are daunting. One of the advantages of learning from a human being is that you pick up very subtle things when you're cooking side by side. When you touch dough and a baker tells you, "This feels done," you acquire a permanent muscle memory of what that feels like. That's hard to learn from a book. One session with a person is worth reading 10 recipe books, I think.
Taking cooking classes is great. I find anything that makes cooking more social in general is very positive. People who regard cooking as drudgery are usually alone in the kitchen. Having people around and the extent to which you can make cooking a social occasion makes it much more fun.
What's the one thing you want people to take away from your book?
Just how everything is connected. I've always been inspired by Wendell Berry's quote "Eating is an agricultural act." Something as routine as cooking has a bearing on the whole food chain, from the earth to your body. You can't separate all these things. If we're going to insist on cooking industrially, we're going to have to have industrial agriculture.
