MICHAEL POLLAN'S COOKED: half baked or a reet rivitin read?

Cooked, a Natural History of Transformation - is Berkeley journalism professor and best selling author Michael Pollan's sixth book. So, how is it?

The Pollan effect has become something of a thing in the world of food politics. His succinct phraseology – “eat food, mostly plants, not too much” – fluid style and thoroughgoing research have made him a foodie's hero and as close to a household name as a food writer who isn't a celebrity chef can be.

(Pic Copyright Oliver Moore, of Cooked with bottle of Raw milk from Cloughjordan CSA)

This book is, in small part, a step into chef-world. While there are recipes, and while he practically engages in and describes a range of natural food processing techniques, Cooked is not a cookbook.

Instead, Cooked explores transformations – social and physical - that happen to and through foods. The style is personal and conversational, which stems from Pollan's self-realisation, that, although he was a dedicated food issues writer, he didn't really know how to make, prepare or, essentially, cook food – at least not very well.

Thus unfolded an epic voyage with varying parts Americana road trip, Greek Odyssey, globetrot and alchemy: the latter melding hard (microbiology) and very soft sciences (psychology, sociology and anthropology).

Cooked is structured around four sections – fire, water, air and earth – which represent the classical, pre-periodic table elements. These four elements are represented by recipes related to meat, specifically whole pit roasted hog (fire); pot cooking (water); bread, mostly sourdough (air); and fermented foods (earth), especially raw milk washed rind cheeses and alcoholic drinks.

Pollan relies on various experts to help him cook, prepare and process natural foods. To remain true to the world as it is but not necessarily as it should be, Pollan's people encounters explicitly and deliberately reflect the dominant genders involved in each of the areas – men for meat and bread, women for cooking and (to a lesser extent) cheese.

The first, fire section read in parts like the best US road novels. Memorably, he takes the reader into “the vestibule of hell” - the smoky infernal depths of the last remaining hog roasting pits. This reveals plenty about the American south, about how food expressed and repelled race problems over the years, and how cooked, outdoor meat expresseth the man, and not the woman, for eons. To explore this, Homer, Zeus, Freud and some introductory socio-anthropology are used to good effect. The science of hygiene first gets an airing here too – how societies manages that balance between boringly, uniformly clean and charactered but possibly risky.

Water, the most self-consciously foodie chapter, while still strong, is weaker than the rest. While fascinating in breaking down the core techniques of pot cooking (and then using its simple formula to structure the chapter), in revealing the delicate dedication of cooks, and even in sociological understanding of feminism and cooking, Pollan unfortunately reverts to rant mode at times. Cue exclamation marks and personalised parenthesis interjections as he rails against corporations and poor cooks. “Microwave night”, where his family cook only with the microwave, feels contrived and set up to fail. Like Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, Pollan's polemic here serves to eulogise the, yes, nuclear family and thus ostracise others. That he could just enlist a Chez Panisse chef as his expert guide, who materalised from his Berkeley courses, adds an unfortunate touch of 'let them eat cake'.

Pollan's rarefied diktats can ,when at their worst, be exclusionary, hegemonic and disembedded from the real world of actual local (mostly working class) people who must make a virtue of necessity through affordable though nutritionally appalling foods. These poor food consumers are however in systemic relations: if it was as easy for them to change their ways as Pollan (and more especially his fans) can make it sound, change would already have happened.

Poignantly, in this section Pollan, to use words he likes, is something of a synecdoche or italization of 'her indoors', the housewife trapped in the kitchen, ostensibly though slightly hysterically complaining about the world, but perhaps complaining more about her own confinement.

He's back on form with section three – the element air and bread - though 20 pages of (yes, clearly explained) science to introduce the processes of real bread making may be too much for some. He leaves behind the kitchen and an unbridled road trip returns, on which we meet messianic makers of sourdough bread. Off grid evangelists up in the hills and laconic sun shine surfers help him get hands-on with the suprizingly erotic sourdough bread and its burgeoning movement.

The final, fourth section, on earth and fermentation, positively sparkles. This section's beaded bubbles don't so much wink at the brim as overfloweth with exuberance, flamboyance and a piquant edge forged by science, religion and those two tabloid headline-grabbers - death and sex. Its all in there, including a raw milk cheesemaking Nun with a PhD in microbiology, who chimes with the notion of the washed rind cheese as an erotics of disgust, and who somehow makes the case coherently for cheese as inadvertently missing from the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Really.

Of all chapters, the scientific meanders work best here. The inner space microbiology in the human gut, and at the same time, always everywhere in the ether, reveals a new frontier of health and food research. Here, genuinely excited researchers are slowly uncovering just how varied, important and, in a way not previously understood, part of us, microbes actually are.

99% of our DNA and 90% of our cells are in our microbes, Pollan, himself excited, tells us.

Idiosyncratic characters encountered on route, obsessives of the (re)new(ed) global Dionysian food tribe are the real highlight of Cooked: the next Joel Salatin's of Pollan's breakthrough book The Omnivore's Dilemma.

So expect to hear more of Sandor Katz, Chad Robertson, Sister Noella Marcellino, and Jim Stillwaggon. These “Johnny Appleseeds” of their respective domains are moonwalkers and mavericks who manage to have their heads in the stars but their feet on terra firma. And watch out for the fermentos – fervent fermented and fermenting food fanatics – surely the next food movement.

Cooked is a romp through that most magnificent yet mundane of subjects, food. Pollan selects, blends and distills many apt elements through the four elements, for the most part as expertly as any Michelin starred chef would in the kitchen.

Here's Michael Pollan's own site...

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