Cooked
"Fire, water, air, earth--our most trusted food expert recounts the story of his culinary education In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements--fire, water, air, and earth--to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture. Both realms are transformed by cooking, and so, in the process, is the cook. Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan's effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements.^ A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse-trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius "fermentos" (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
5people
2015–2022years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The fine article mentions Michael Pollan, whose book Cooked [0] was recently given to me. The chapter on the history of wheat is great.
Pollan says that humans have been trying to make their bread whiter as long as we've been making bread. But we didn't get really good at it until the roller mill was invented in the mid-1800's. In the olden days every community had a flour mill, because milled flour only lasted 2 weeks before it became stale. At first the white flour was a modern miracle: perfectly airy/fluffy bread, flour able to be stored, transported and shipped long distances, etc. Then degenerative diseases started appearing.
Fortification started around 1940's / 1950's, after the Army noticed the recruits for WWII weren't nearly as healthy as in decades past. The joke of fortification is that they only replace some of what was removed by turning wheat into white flour.
Haven't finished the article yet, but it's great.
Besides the widespread fortification and consumption of white flour, what other science-mistakes have become endemic?
edit: [0] https://michaelpollan.com/books/cooked/
- Two recommendations that I think will be especially suited to the personality type that’s already matched to software development:
1) The Professional Chef - This is the textbook used in culinary schools. It’s advanced but it starts out from first principles assuming no prior knowledge and just methodically walks through literally every concept one could ever encounter. Not for everyone but if you’re the type that likes to just RTFM this is it.
2) Cooked by Michael Pollan - This is basically the opposite of the textbook I recommended, it’s all high level and narrative and conceptual but as someone who was just starting to cook seriously I found it life changing, it did so much to contextualize what I was doing, so it wasn’t just procedural recipies. This helped me a lot in learning how to open up the fridge pick some ingredients and just know what to do next. Also it’s a breezy read.
- pork-belly contains a ton of fat and is just innately unhealthy
Citation needed. Not all fats are created equal.
For example Inuits consume 50% of their calories from fat [1]. They do not have the "western diet disease" (obesity, heart disease, etc.)
It really IS the processed fats that are bad for you. You can see this all over the world when Aboriginal peoples are introduced to industrial cooking / ultra-processed foods / "western corporate diet".
They literally get addicted, and their body size increases by double digit percentages within a generation. This also happened in the US, but happens faster around the world. The average body weight for a man in the US increased from ~166 in the 1960’s to ~196 today [2].
This is an amazing fact that needs an explanation if you don't believe it's a result of the rise in industrial cooking.
And if you believe in capitalism, you would have to explain how this would NOT happen. Why wouldn't companies gradually develop cheap, consistently manufactured, addictive foods? The profit motive would lead them there, even if it weren't intentional.
I suggest reading some of Michael Pollan's books like Omnivore's Dilemma or Cooked; they talk about this (and probably talk about Inuits specifically as far as I remember)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/12/look-...
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Another anecdote: I know someone from the Midwest with "industrial cooking disease" who dropped from 350 lbs to 200 lbs in a year by going on the "carnivore diet", where he ate exclusively beef and chicken (yes, literally).
I remember someone else remarking the same thing on HN, and observing that going vegan can have the same effect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177116 (not sure if this is the thread but there are many of them on HN)
Hypothesis: Both the carnivore diet and a vegan diet are BOTH suboptimal. The reason that they help many people with "western diet disease" is that you eliminate industrial cooking / ultra-processed foods from your diet.
The human body is extremely flexible and can metabolize a wide variety of things in the environment. What it apparently can't metabolize is addictive foods that corporations have created...
- Cooked by Michael Pollan.
Great history about food, how cooking made us "human," links to religion, feminism, consumerism, and much more. Very insightful and at times heart felt. Not recommended if you don't eat food.
- A small tangent, but Michael Pollan's "Cooked" makes a reasonable counter-argument.
By delegating everything that we're not "most valuable" at to others, we potentially end up becoming impotent and un-informed, unable to make intelligent decisions outside our area of expertise. Thus we lose our ability to be good citizens.
He specifically makes the point in the context of cooking, something he argues is so fundamental to our survival that it is a skill all humans should have at least some basic ability to do.
Just a thought. :-)
Edit: you can read some of his argument starting on page 20 of the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Cooked-Natural-Transformation-Michael-...
And reviewed here - http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/24/michael-pollan-cooke...
