Eatdrink #42 July/August 2013

56 www.eatdrink.ca
№ 42 | July/August 2013
books
COOKED
A Natural History of Transformation
by Michael Pollan
Review by Darin Cook
Michael Pollan probably knows
that many good things come
in trilogies. His latest work
completes a three-book food
journey he started in 2006 by following food
from its origins in nature and agriculture
with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, to the effects
it has on our bodies with In Defense of Food.
Pollan has now written Cooked: A Natural
History of Transformation (Penguin Press,
2013, $29.50) to show us that the preparation
of food, the stage in between coming from
nature and going into our bodies, could
be the most vital link in the food chain.
His previous research took him to farms,
feedlots, and McDonald’s, but the legwork for
Cooked started and ended in his own kitchen.
Along the way, he got help from bread bakers,
barbecue pit masters, beer brewers, artisanal
picklers, and cheese makers.
About experimenting in his own kitchen
Pollan writes: “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.”
Cooking is a primal activity, using
the fundamental sources of plants,
animals, and fungi with the core
elements of fire, water, air, and earth
to create everyday culinary works of
art. Pollan’s wish is that we embrace
these sources and elements as a foundation
of sustenance in our own kitchens.
The elements actually provide the
backbone of the book’s four chapters: Fire,
Water, Air, and Earth. Cooking with Fire
takes Pollan to the barbecue pits of North
Michael Pollan
Carolina where
he gets his
hands into whole
hog barbeque with legendary
pit master Ed Mitchell. Chopping bellies,
loins, shoulders, and skin used in barbeque
preparation, he works so frantically to
prepare barbeque sandwiches for ravenous
crowds that he finds himself covered in pig
oil at the end of the day. He even suggests
the elegant concept of terroir, used mostly
in reference to wine, can apply to a pulled
pork sandwich, because the sense of
history that North Carolina has put into
what real barbeque is all about is tasted in
those sandwiches.
The chapter on Water gets him into
soups, sauces, and stews — dishes that
combine multiple ingredients in a pot to
simmer in a bubbling liquid. Quite the
opposite of roasting a single joint of meat
over a fire, cooking with pots, casseroles,
and tagines allows for a marriage of
ingredients which become unified with a
braising liquid to create new flavours. The
same can be said about the magic
of bread making. The chapter on
Air informs us that along with
yeast, water, and flour, a loaf of
bread consists of 80 percent air;
it is the magical ingredient that
allows bread to rise and the air
pockets in bread are where the
flavour and aroma reside.
There is even an evolutionary
theory uncovered by Pollan
called “the cooking hypothesis”, which
claims that modern homo sapiens
evolved from early ancestors only after
they discovered fire, started cooking
food, were able to quicken their digestive
processes, and had excess energy for brain