BOOK OF THE DAY: Cooked by Michael Pollan

A Natural History of Transformation

6 min readNov 26, 2015

MICHAEL POLLAN is one of my favorite intellectuals, and it is a pleasure to offer you an introduction to his writing with Cooked as The Book of The Day.

Pollan’s clear, abundantly well-researched writing elevates your mind to new heights — new perspectives beyond your own — without being condescending in his tone or intent. My first encounter with his work was not through his writing at all — but the documentary Food Inc.

Trailer for “Food Inc” narrated by Michael Pollan

Pollan introduces to the viewer a dramatic look beyond the cardboard and cellophane-wrapped food products we take for granted, to show us what is behind the majority of the food we eat.

It’s interesting, then horrifying, angering, depressing, and finally you discover acceptance. But not passive acceptance. It’s the kind of acceptance that you experience on the out-breath of watching the film, and on the next in-breath you take action. A renewed vigor for whole foods, local foods, more plant-based and fresh organic foods — without… well, it’s like the line from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas:

How could it be so? It came without ribbons!… it came without tags!… it came without packages, boxes, or bags!

The documentary Food, Inc. is based on the book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and while not the documentary or book of the day, those two pieces are well worth considering before — or with — a reading of Cooked, which continues with the themes of Omnivore’s and Food Inc. (let’s move beyond processed food to something more personally and culturally meaningful &healthful) but brings it even closer to the personal, artful, culturally creative act of food prep in your own life at home.

Cooked by Michael Pollan: An Introduction

“The premise of this book is that cooking — defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and drink — is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we humans do.” — Michael Pollan

Cooked lends great meaning to the history of the art of food preparation, and its importance to us as human beings… as if the preparation of food itself is encoded in our individual and cultural DNA.

Pollan poignantly observes that, at present in western industrialized society, even as the time spent in the preparation of food at home is at an all time low, the viewing of cooking shows is at an all time high. He calls this the “Cooking Paradox”:

Our culture seems to be of at least two minds on this subject. Survey research confirms we’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals every year. The amount of time spent preparing meals in American households has fallen by half since the mid-sixties, when I was watching my mom fix dinner, to a scant twenty-seven minutes a day. (Americans spend less time cooking than people in any other nation, but the general downward trend is global.)
And yet at the same time we’re talking about cooking more — and watching cooking, and reading about cooking, and going to restaurants designed so that we can watch the work performed live. We live in an age when professional cooks are household names, some of them as famous as athletes or movie stars. The very same activity that many people regard as a form of drudgery has somehow been elevated to a popular spectator sport.
When you consider that twenty-seven minutes is less time than it takes to watch a single episode of Top Chef or The Next Food Network Star, you realize that there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves. I don’t need to point out that the food you watch being cooked on television is not food you get to eat.

That last line is reminiscent of this page from Ram Dass’ Be Here Now:

So why all the time viewing painted cakes made by professionals? Pollan notes that while we have handed over most of our sewing, sock darning, and car oil changes to others, we don’t widely watch shows on these things. But cooking is different…

“In ancient Greece, the word for ‘cook,’ ‘butcher,’ and ‘priest’ was the same — mageiros — and the word shares an etymological root with ‘magic.’… Eveb the most ordinary dish follows a satsifying arc of transformation, magically becoming something more than the sum of its ordinary parts.”

Indeed. Pollan’s answer to the Cooking Paradox (watching cooking even without the time or energy to do it) is that we really do miss it. We are not prepared to see it disappear from our lives altogether, so at least watching cooking and seeing beautiful photos keeps the joy closer to us.

“If cooking is, as the anthropologists tell us, a defining human activity — the act with which culture begins, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss — then maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that watching its processes unfold would strike deep emotional chords.”

Whetting your appetite for a dive into Cooked and cooking? Today I will leave you with this beautiful montage of commentary by Michael Pollan and contemporary chefs and colleagues posted by THNKR, and below, some significant writings by Michael Pollan you will certainly want to delve into no matter where you are in your dietary/health evolution up what I call The Spectrum of Diet.

About Michael Pollan, author of Cooked, the Book of the Day

MICHAEL POLLAN is the author of six previous books, including Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times, he is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. You can find his work at www.MichaelPollan.com