Michael Pollan is food-shaming us again, this time in a four-part Netflix docu-series. It’s a gentle sort of shaming, and informative, but unless you’ve previously been converted to Pollanology through his books (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) or his other screen appearances (“Food, Inc.”), you’ll come away feeling mighty guilty about what you eat.
The series, which debuts Friday, is called “Cooked,” and it’s based on Pollan’s 2013 book of the same title, in which he explored food past and present through the four elemental categories — fire, water, air, earth — while trying to improve his own cooking skills. The book certainly lends itself to a cinematic treatment. He and the episodes’ directors (Alex Gibney, Caroline Suh, Ryan Miller and Peter Bull) flesh out his musings with trips to a baker in Morocco, a cheese-making nun in Connecticut, hunters in Western Australia and more.
It’s a long-view history lesson in how innovations that we take for granted transformed the human species. Cooking with fire relieved us of the chore of chewing raw food for hours, among other things. The invention of pots that could withstand flame made it possible to cook with liquids, to mix things in soups and stews.
“It opens up a whole new palette of possible flavors,” Pollan says, “and suddenly you have the birth of cuisine.”
And then there’s bread (the subject of the “Air” episode).
“Bread requires a civilization,” Pollan says. “You need people to grow the grain. You need people to harvest the grain. You need people to mill the grain and shape the dough, and it’s a cooperative venture.”
This is Michael Pollan the food historian, but Michael Pollan the crusader is always hovering, ready to remind us how far we have wandered from our culinary roots. In one way or another, each of these episodes mourns our detachment from our food and how to prepare it.
We have, Pollan notes (especially in “Water”), bought into the idea that we are way too busy to cook, and by “cook” he means create something, not thaw something out and microwave it. We’ve ceded the kitchen to the food industry, which helped create the no-time-to-cook mindset with its advertising and stood ready to assist our busy selves with processed foods of dubious nutritional value.
Pollan’s messages are important to hear and are engagingly presented in this series. Still, there’s a disconnect that’s never addressed. It would be great if all 7.4 billion of us could hunt our own lizards and cook them over an open fire, spend hours baking our own bread from grain milled on stone, and so on. But there’s a gentrification to Pollan’s brand of culinary advocacy.
The world’s poorest people — some seen in idyllic imagery here — have to devote long hours to basic subsistence, and the world’s relatively well off have the luxury to indulge in artisanal cooking. Yet applying his ideas across the whole range of human circumstances is a trickier subject than this pretty series wants to tackle.
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