Home > Work > Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
101 " Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources of energy. "
― Michael Pollan , Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
102 " which the Indians called barbacoa "
103 " a daily reminder of nature’s abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat. "
104 " The palate of taste is limited to the five or six primary colors that the tongue can recognize; olfaction, by comparison, is seemingly limitless in the shadings and combinations it can register and archive—and retronasal olfaction can perceive aromas to which even the nose is blind. "
105 " beer making, which began in earnest around the same time that farming did, helped the early agriculturists compensate for the decline in the nutritional quality of their diet as they turned from hunting and gathering a great many different foods to a monotonous diet of grains and tubers. The B vitamins and minerals in beer, for example, helped compensate for the loss of meat from their diet. "
106 " Cooking food in pots also helped expand the human population, by allowing for earlier weaning of children (thereby increasing fertility) and a longer life span, since both the very young and the very old could now be fed soft foods and nutritious soups out of the pot, no teeth required. (So pots functioned as external mouths as well.) "
107 " there is a school of archaeological thought that contends that the reason humanity turned to agriculture was to secure a more reliable supply of alcohol, not food. "
108 " No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers, "
109 " Solomon Katz put forth the arresting theory that it was the human desire for a steady supply of alcohol, not food, that drove the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Beer, in other words, came before bread, and as soon as people got a taste of it, Katz reasoned, they would have wanted more than could be produced by gathering seeds or fruits or honey. "
110 " Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. "
111 " bacteria can swap genes and pieces of DNA among themselves, picking them up and dropping them almost as if they were tools. This capability is especially handy when a new toxin or food source appears in the environment. The microbiota can swiftly find precisely the right gene needed to fight it—or eat it. "
112 " In the end, women did succeed in getting men into the kitchen, just not their husbands. No, they’ve ended up instead with the men who run General Mills and Kraft, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. "
113 " antidotes to our abstraction. "
114 " If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise & kill a great many more of them. And indeed, this has become the rule with disastrous results for both the animals & the land... If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little as we possibly can. Something that the humble cook-pot allows us to do. "
115 " Yet, running just beneath the surface of food industry feminism was an implicit anti-feminist message. Then as now, ads for packaged foods are aimed almost exclusively at women and so reinforced the retrograde idea that responsibility for feeding the family fell to mom. The slick new products would help her do a job that was hers & hers alone. "
116 " Most recipes try to rush the process, promising to wrap things up & get the dish on the table in a couple of hours. These days recipes are steeped in the general sense of panic about time & so have tried to speed things up, the better to suit our busy lives. "
117 " This might not matter to much of anyone but a confirmed Slow Foodie, eager to save and sample endangered food traditions, except for one notable fact: Medical researchers are coming around to the startling conclusion that, in order to be healthy, people need more exposure to microbes, not less; and that one of the problems with the so-called Western diet—besides all the refined carbohydrates and fats and novel chemicals in it—is the absence from it of live-culture foods. "
118 " I could, like some of the meat we were cooking, relax into it, clear my mind of competing desires & give myself over to the work... This time became a kind of luxury. And that is precisely when I began to truly enjoy the work of cooking. "
119 " It was either a ritual sacrifice, or more nuts and berries for dinner. "
120 " Hand taste, however, involves something greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it—the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it. "