Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation [Kindle Edition] Author: Michael Pollan | Language: English | ISBN:
B008EKOIN8 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Download electronic versions of selected books Download Epub Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation [Kindle Edition] for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link “Important, possibly life-altering, reading for every living, breathing human being." --Boston Globe
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.
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. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us.
The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.
Books with free ebook downloads available Download Epub Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
- File Size: 936 KB
- Print Length: 481 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594204217
- Publisher: The Penguin Press; 1 edition (April 23, 2013)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008EKOIN8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,880 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Books > Science & Math > Agricultural Sciences > Food Science
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Culinary Arts & Techniques - #18
in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Cooking Education & Reference > Essays - #18
in Books > Science & Math > Agricultural Sciences > Food Science
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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