Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's Michael Pollan Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1594204217 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2013: Who has untangled the nature of modern America’s relationship with food more effectively than Michael Pollan? After sharing the experience of growing his own food in
Second Nature, he illuminated how our appetites drive the evolution of edible plants with
The Botany of Desire. Then he pondered
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, weighing our precarious food chain and popularizing the pleasures of eating local;
In Defense of Food and
Food Rules distilled his conclusions into a manifesto and a manual. With
Cooked, he closes the seed-to-table loop with a passionate exploration of the satisfying transformation of grilling, braising, baking, and fermenting--and their primal roots. Learning to cook elevated humans from lone animals into increasingly intelligent, civilized groups, and though we spend scant time doing real cooking, we’ve become obsessed with watching people cook--a paradox that points to longing for a lost experience. Through his own experiences making and enjoying food with pit masters, chefs, bakers, and “fermentos,” he retraces our path to connection with real ingredients and health for people and planet. Whether you’re sympathetic or skeptical, you can’t help but appreciate Pollan’s genius for conveying the elemental appeal of making a meal.
--Mari Malcolm From Booklist
*Starred Review* Pollan’s newest treatise on how food reaches the world’s tables delves into the history of how humankind turns raw ingredients into palatable and nutritious food. To bring some sense of order to this vast subject, he resurrects classical categories of fire, water, air, and earth. Pollan visits pit masters to learn what constitutes authentic barbecue. An Italian-trained Iranian American teaches him the subtleties of proper cooking in pots, how to coax maximum flavor from humble vegetables, herbs, meats, and water. Baking trains Pollan to watch, listen, and feel the action of living yeasts in doughs. The harnessing of fungi and molds to ferment sauerkraut and beer and produce cheeses illuminates the fine and ever-shifting boundaries between tastiness and rot and how the human palate can be trained. Four recipes accompany the text, and an extensive bibliography offers much deeper exploration. Pollan’s peerless reputation as one of America’s most compelling expositors of food and human sustainability will boost demand. --Mark Knoblauch
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Books with free ebook downloads available Download Epub Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1 edition (April 23, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1594204217
- ISBN-13: 978-1594204210
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Michael Pollan has the amazing ability to take the mundane (corn, building a workshop, plant seeds) and make it fascinating. So it shouldn't come as a surprised that Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation could take something many of us take for granted and turn it into an incredible journey.
Pollan opens the book by explaining the day that realized that all of the questions that occupy his time seem to lead back to cooking. How to improve your health? Cooking. Good way to connect with the family? Cooking (and brewing). The most important thing we can do to help reform the American food complex? Cooking. Pollan admits he has always been mildly interested in the act, but it wasn't until he realized how important it could be that he began wanting to learn how to do it in earnest. Pollan realized that though American's seem to be obsessed with cooking (Top Chef, The Taste, Anthony Bourdain, Hell's Kitchen) we seem to do very little of it.
Pollan breaks down his education into four sections, much like he broke down The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma. The first section, called Fire, starts out at a North Carolina BBQ. It's here that Pollan strives to solve the mystery of "pig-plus-wood-smoke-plus-time" and what makes it so darn good. He spends time with pit-masters, learning the find art of the fire, which involves everything from Freudian theory, ancient gods and the Bible to chemistry and, of course, Big Meat. Before his fire education will be over, the reader will journey with Pollan to Manhattan, Berkeley, Spain and back again.
From there we dive into Water, which starts out, inexplicably, with chopping onions.
To state the obvious, few people can write about food and food related issues like Michael Pollan. He has changed the way our culture--or at least well-read segments of our culture--thinks about our industrial food complex. In Cooked, Pollan takes his keen eye from large scale systems and focuses it on the kitchen and cooking (while naturally showing the connections to bigger issues). I suppose, I should write "my" kitchen, as Pollan is directing us to make this intimate and personal account. To build our relationship with food, we need to cook for ourselves, and from scratch (at least most of the time). While cooking has lost much of its esteem in our fast-paced, fast-food society, Pollan reevaluates the significance of cooking in everyday life: "Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to work directly in our own support, and in the support of the people we feed. If this is not `making a living,' I don't know what is" (pg23).
In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan pairs his sharp journalism skills with his acumen as a thoughtful analytic essayist to look more deeply at the way we transform plants and animals into food--and why a better understanding of how and why we do it matters. He observes: "The work, or process, [of cooking] retains an emotional or psychological power we can't quite shake, or don't want to. And in fact it was after a long bout of watching cooking programs on television that I began to wonder if this activity I had always taken for granted might be worth taking a little more seriously" (pg4). Not surprisingly to anyone familiar with Pollan's work, he uses cooking to help restore our connections to a healthier natural world.
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