Fire and Knowledge

The human desire for sweetness surpasses even our desire for intoxification.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 103

I think that there’s some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don’t have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television — we’ve turned cooking into a spectator sport. We’re terrified to play tackle football too when we watch how it’s played on TV — we’d get killed. But cooking’s a whole lot easier than it appears on Iron Chef.

We cook every night here. My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table. [But] when you create this image of people as being hurried, and harried, and of course you need TV dinners, that kind of sinks in. They kind of flatter us by telling us we’re too busy and that we have such rushed lives, but in the end we find time for what matters. In just the last 10 years we’ve found, what, two or three hours a day to deal with the internet? It’s a matter of priority, it’s not really about ability. Some people are very intimidated about cooking and I think that’s a shame, and I think we have to help people get over that by teaching them how to cook, teaching kids how to cook in school.

–Michael Pollan in “A Conversation with Michael Pollan,” Grist Magazine.

Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or forgetting.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 84

The quest to eradicate pests with DDT and similar poisons has been a colossal failure. Each year more than 2 million tons of pesticides are used in the United States alone. Americans use 20 times more pesticides today than they did in 1945, even though the newest pesticides are up to 100 times more toxic. And yet the fraction of crops lost to insects has risen from 7 percent to 13 percent—thanks in large part to the resistance insects have evolved.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 202

A book caught my eye while I was browsing the cooking section at the library: The Best Bread Ever by Charles Van Over. Normally I don’t look at books with such claims, but bread happens to be a weakness of mine. I scanned the book and, of all things, the author was advocating the use of a food processor instead of hand kneading. If this was the best bread ever, why isn’t everyone using it? And who is this guy, anyway?

He’s a genius. I know because I tried his bread. I can confidently say that the basic recipe and techniques in this book helped me create the best bread I’ve ever tasted at home – in the first try. I baked a few baguettes. The crust was golden brown and crisp. The inside was moist and soft. It tasted delicious. I ate too much.

Surely, you say, there must be lots of sugar or oil or butter. That’s what I figured too. The truth is, this is the simplest bread recipe I’ve ever seen. It contains flour, yeast, sea salt, and water. That’s it. No sugar, corn syrup, oil, eggs, butter, or shortening.

What’s the secret? He does everything so different that it is probably a combination. Mixing in the food processor is different, but since I didn’t do that, it can’t be the key. (It sure makes things easier, though.) He lets the dough rise at room temperature instead of in a warm place. There is no kneading. The bread is folded in a very specific way. But the main difference, I think, is a hot oven.

I usually preheat the oven for 5 minutes or so — until the “pre-heated” light comes on. The problem is, when the door opens to put the food in, the oven cools about 75 degrees. So Van Over says to preheat the oven at 475 degrees… for an hour. I did it for about 45 minutes which seemed long enough. I also cooked it on a baking stone that was in there during the pre-heat. And a pan of water creates steam to make the crackling crust.

A hot oven combined with high quality organic ingredients and a little technique gave me the best bread I’ve ever baked. If you like bread, be sure to take a look at this book!

(The basic recipe I used is also available online.)

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1990s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold … have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, for lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 18-19

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 18

There are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of “unhealthy” foods, and lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are. We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 3