Read Online Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Pollan
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CAFO—one not too far from here, in fact—and it was a place I won’t soon
forget: a deep circle of porcine hell the stench and shrieking squeals of which I can
still vividly recall.
I suppose it is a testament to the Joneses,
and all the signifiers of an earlier time they have so lovingly preserved, that I was
able to suppress these thoughts and images long enough to enjoy my barbecue sandwich. We
moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry. But there
it is, the question I wanted verymuch to avoid since I’d first
learned that the Skylight Inn was serving commodity pork: How authentic could
“authentic barbecue” really be if the object of its tender ministrations was
now this re-engineered and brutalized animal—the modern creation of science, industry,
and inhumanity? Had the Skylight Inn’s elaborate fetish of tradition—the wood
fires burning through the night, the smoldering coals so carefully arranged in the pits,
the old-timey pitman tending to the pigs—become a cover for something very different,
the moral and aesthetic equivalent of barbecue sauce?
The Joneses didn’t think there was
much to be done about the modern pig, and in this they fall very much into the
mainstream of modern barbecue men: By now, “commodity pork” is the rule in
Southern barbecue, and people old enough to remember something better, people like Jeff
Jones, are few and far between. Sure, there are still a handful of farmers in North
Carolina raising hogs outdoors the old-fashioned way, and, as I would discover, their
meat was superior in every respect (yield of lard included). But there was just no way a
restaurant could afford that kind of pork and still charge $2.75 for a barbecue
sandwich. Today, that most democratic sandwich is underwritten by the most brutal kind
of agriculture.
But I guess that, with enough smoke, time,
and maybe a little barbecue sauce, you can redeem any kind of pork, or at least seem to,
because that sandwich did taste awfully good. One way to think about cooking, or the
cooking of meat anyway, is that it is always doing something like this: effecting a
transformation, psychological and chemical, that helps us (or at least most of us) enjoy
something we might otherwise not be able to stomach, whether literally or figuratively.
Cooking puts several kinds of distance between the brutal factsof the
matter (
dead animal for dinner
) and the dining-room table set with crisp linens
and polished silver. In this, CAFO meat may be just an extreme instance of the general
case, which has never been pretty. “You have just dined,” Ralph Waldo
Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
The problem is not a new one, and we flatter
ourselves if we think we’re the first people to feel moral or spiritual qualms
about killing animals for our supper. The ancient and widespread practice of ritual
animal sacrifice suggests that such qualms have assailed humans for a very, very long
time. Before drawing knife against throat, the Greek priests would sprinkle water on the
sacrificial animal’s brow, causing it to shake its head in a gesture they chose to
interpret as a sign of assent. Indeed, viewed in the coldest light, many of the elements
of ritual sacrifice begin to look like a set of convenient rationalizations for doing
something we feel uneasy about, but need or want to do anyway. The ritual lets us tell
ourselves that we kill animals not for our dining pleasure but because God demands it;
that we cook their meat over a fire not to make it tastier but because the rising smoke
conveys the offering to the heavens; and that we eat the prime cuts not because
they’re the most succulent, but because the smoke is all the gods really want.
Alone among the animals, we humans insist
that our food be not only “good to eat”—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but
also, in the words of
forget: a deep circle of porcine hell the stench and shrieking squeals of which I can
still vividly recall.
I suppose it is a testament to the Joneses,
and all the signifiers of an earlier time they have so lovingly preserved, that I was
able to suppress these thoughts and images long enough to enjoy my barbecue sandwich. We
moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry. But there
it is, the question I wanted verymuch to avoid since I’d first
learned that the Skylight Inn was serving commodity pork: How authentic could
“authentic barbecue” really be if the object of its tender ministrations was
now this re-engineered and brutalized animal—the modern creation of science, industry,
and inhumanity? Had the Skylight Inn’s elaborate fetish of tradition—the wood
fires burning through the night, the smoldering coals so carefully arranged in the pits,
the old-timey pitman tending to the pigs—become a cover for something very different,
the moral and aesthetic equivalent of barbecue sauce?
The Joneses didn’t think there was
much to be done about the modern pig, and in this they fall very much into the
mainstream of modern barbecue men: By now, “commodity pork” is the rule in
Southern barbecue, and people old enough to remember something better, people like Jeff
Jones, are few and far between. Sure, there are still a handful of farmers in North
Carolina raising hogs outdoors the old-fashioned way, and, as I would discover, their
meat was superior in every respect (yield of lard included). But there was just no way a
restaurant could afford that kind of pork and still charge $2.75 for a barbecue
sandwich. Today, that most democratic sandwich is underwritten by the most brutal kind
of agriculture.
But I guess that, with enough smoke, time,
and maybe a little barbecue sauce, you can redeem any kind of pork, or at least seem to,
because that sandwich did taste awfully good. One way to think about cooking, or the
cooking of meat anyway, is that it is always doing something like this: effecting a
transformation, psychological and chemical, that helps us (or at least most of us) enjoy
something we might otherwise not be able to stomach, whether literally or figuratively.
Cooking puts several kinds of distance between the brutal factsof the
matter (
dead animal for dinner
) and the dining-room table set with crisp linens
and polished silver. In this, CAFO meat may be just an extreme instance of the general
case, which has never been pretty. “You have just dined,” Ralph Waldo
Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
The problem is not a new one, and we flatter
ourselves if we think we’re the first people to feel moral or spiritual qualms
about killing animals for our supper. The ancient and widespread practice of ritual
animal sacrifice suggests that such qualms have assailed humans for a very, very long
time. Before drawing knife against throat, the Greek priests would sprinkle water on the
sacrificial animal’s brow, causing it to shake its head in a gesture they chose to
interpret as a sign of assent. Indeed, viewed in the coldest light, many of the elements
of ritual sacrifice begin to look like a set of convenient rationalizations for doing
something we feel uneasy about, but need or want to do anyway. The ritual lets us tell
ourselves that we kill animals not for our dining pleasure but because God demands it;
that we cook their meat over a fire not to make it tastier but because the rising smoke
conveys the offering to the heavens; and that we eat the prime cuts not because
they’re the most succulent, but because the smoke is all the gods really want.
Alone among the animals, we humans insist
that our food be not only “good to eat”—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but
also, in the words of
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