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Authors: Michael Pollan
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, “good to think,” for among all
the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas. Animal sacrifice has been a way to make
animal flesh “good to think”—to help people feel better about killing,
cooking, and eating animals, which has never been anything less than a momentous,
spiritually freighted, and deeply ambivalent occasion. That might explain why, whether
in Homer or Leviticus, the work of slaughter, butchery, and cooking all had to be
performedby a priest; these were all equally solemn operations.
Nowadays, we think of sacrifice as a primitive rite, and snicker at the underlying
rationalizations, but the cultures that practiced such rituals before eating were at
least acknowledging that something important was going on, something that demanded their
full attention. Just because we no longer pay that kind of attention when we eat meat
doesn’t mean that something momentous—in fact, a kind of sacrifice—hasn’t
taken place. You have to wonder, who is really the more “primitive”
character here? In our failure to attend to the processes that put meat on our plates,
we moderns eat more like the animals than the ancients did.
This points to something else ritual
sacrifice did for people: It drew sharp lines of distinction between humans and other
animals on the one side, and between humans and the gods on the other. Other animals
don’t clothe their killing or eating in ritual; nor do they cook their food over
fires they control. When people participate in a ritual sacrifice, they’re
situating themselves in the cosmos at a precise point halfway between the gods, whose
power over them they acknowledge by making the sacred offering, and the animals, over
whom the ceremonial killing demonstrates their own godlike powers. The recipe for the
ritual tells us exactly where we stand.
One way to approach cooking of any kind is as
a secular and somewhat faded version of the same operation, helping us to locate
ourselves in nature and deal with our ambivalence about eating other beings. Like fire
itself, which destroys what photosynthesis has created, all cooking begins with small or
large acts of destruction: killing, cutting, chopping, mashing. In that sense, a
sacrifice is at its very heart. But cooking also helps put Emerson’s
“graceful distance of miles”—ortime, or smoke, or
seasoning, or chopping, or sauce—between the eaters and the eaten, its various
transformations helping us to forget, or suppress, the violence of the underlying
transaction. At the same time, the wonderful refining alchemies of the kitchen
demonstrate how far we have come as a species, affirming that we have indeed lifted
ourselves out of nature red in tooth and claw, achieved a kind of transcendence. Cooking
sets us apart, helps us to mark and patrol the borders between ourselves and
nature’s other creatures—none of which can cook.
“My definition of Man is a
‘Cooking Animal,’” James Boswell wrote. “The beasts have memory,
judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree, but no
beast is a cook.” Boswell was not alone in regarding cooking as a faculty that
defines us as human. According to Lévi-Strauss, the distinction between “the
raw” and “the cooked” has served many cultures as the great trope for
the difference between animals and people. In
The Raw and the Cooked,
he wrote,
“Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it
and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes.”
Cooking transforms nature and, by doing so, elevates us above that state, making us
human.
If the human enterprise involves
transforming the raw of nature into the cooked of culture, the different techniques
we’ve devised for achieving this transformation each embody a different stance
toward both nature on the one side and culture on the other. After studying the foodways
of hundreds of peoples around the
the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas. Animal sacrifice has been a way to make
animal flesh “good to think”—to help people feel better about killing,
cooking, and eating animals, which has never been anything less than a momentous,
spiritually freighted, and deeply ambivalent occasion. That might explain why, whether
in Homer or Leviticus, the work of slaughter, butchery, and cooking all had to be
performedby a priest; these were all equally solemn operations.
Nowadays, we think of sacrifice as a primitive rite, and snicker at the underlying
rationalizations, but the cultures that practiced such rituals before eating were at
least acknowledging that something important was going on, something that demanded their
full attention. Just because we no longer pay that kind of attention when we eat meat
doesn’t mean that something momentous—in fact, a kind of sacrifice—hasn’t
taken place. You have to wonder, who is really the more “primitive”
character here? In our failure to attend to the processes that put meat on our plates,
we moderns eat more like the animals than the ancients did.
This points to something else ritual
sacrifice did for people: It drew sharp lines of distinction between humans and other
animals on the one side, and between humans and the gods on the other. Other animals
don’t clothe their killing or eating in ritual; nor do they cook their food over
fires they control. When people participate in a ritual sacrifice, they’re
situating themselves in the cosmos at a precise point halfway between the gods, whose
power over them they acknowledge by making the sacred offering, and the animals, over
whom the ceremonial killing demonstrates their own godlike powers. The recipe for the
ritual tells us exactly where we stand.
One way to approach cooking of any kind is as
a secular and somewhat faded version of the same operation, helping us to locate
ourselves in nature and deal with our ambivalence about eating other beings. Like fire
itself, which destroys what photosynthesis has created, all cooking begins with small or
large acts of destruction: killing, cutting, chopping, mashing. In that sense, a
sacrifice is at its very heart. But cooking also helps put Emerson’s
“graceful distance of miles”—ortime, or smoke, or
seasoning, or chopping, or sauce—between the eaters and the eaten, its various
transformations helping us to forget, or suppress, the violence of the underlying
transaction. At the same time, the wonderful refining alchemies of the kitchen
demonstrate how far we have come as a species, affirming that we have indeed lifted
ourselves out of nature red in tooth and claw, achieved a kind of transcendence. Cooking
sets us apart, helps us to mark and patrol the borders between ourselves and
nature’s other creatures—none of which can cook.
“My definition of Man is a
‘Cooking Animal,’” James Boswell wrote. “The beasts have memory,
judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree, but no
beast is a cook.” Boswell was not alone in regarding cooking as a faculty that
defines us as human. According to Lévi-Strauss, the distinction between “the
raw” and “the cooked” has served many cultures as the great trope for
the difference between animals and people. In
The Raw and the Cooked,
he wrote,
“Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it
and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes.”
Cooking transforms nature and, by doing so, elevates us above that state, making us
human.
If the human enterprise involves
transforming the raw of nature into the cooked of culture, the different techniques
we’ve devised for achieving this transformation each embody a different stance
toward both nature on the one side and culture on the other. After studying the foodways
of hundreds of peoples around the
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