Read Online Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan - Free Book Online Page B

world, Lévi-Strauss (who apparently never saw a
dualism he didn’t like) distinguished two basic methods for turning the stuff of
nature into something that is not only more tasty and digestible but more human (i.e.,
good to think) as well: cooking directly over a fire and cooking in a pot with
liquid.
    To barbecue or to braise? To roast or to
boil? That, apparently, isthe question, and much—about who we think we
are—depends on the answer. Compared with cooking over a fire, braising or stewing
implies a more civilized approach to the transformation of nature. The braise or boil,
since it cooks meat all the way through, achieves a more complete transcendence of the
animal, and perhaps the animal in us, than does grilling over a fire, which leaves its
object partly or entirely intact, and often leaves a trace of blood—a visible reminder,
in other words, that this is a formerly living creature we’re feasting on. This
lingering hint of savagery isn’t necessarily a strike against fire cooking,
however. To the contrary, some believe a bloody slab of beefsteak augments the power of
the eater. “Whoever partakes of it,” Roland Barthes wrote in
Mythologies
, “assimilates a bull-like strength.” By comparison,
the braise or stew—and particularly the braise or stew of meat that’s been cut
into geometric cubes and rendered tender by long hours in the pot—represents a deeper
sublimation, or forgetting, of the brutal reality of this particular transaction among
species.
    Certainly this kind of forgetting has its
advantages, especially in everyday life, where cooking in pots is the norm. Who wants to
be confronted with existential questions of life and death and human identity on a daily
basis? And yet there are times when that is exactly what we’re looking for, when
we
want
to be reminded, if only a little, of what’s really going on just
beneath the thin crust of civilization. This is, perhaps, the same impulse that compels
some people to endure the discomforts of sleeping out in the woods, or to go to the
unnecessary lengths of hunting their own meat or growing their own tomatoes. All these
activities are forms of adult play that also serve as ceremonial acts of remembering—who
we are, where we came from, how nature works. (And, perhaps, of a time when men were
still indispensable.) Cooking meat over a fire—whether a few steaks thrown on the
backyard barbecue or, more spectacularly, a whole animalroasted all
night over a wood fire—is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually
performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men. And what, exactly, does
such cooking commemorate? No doubt many things, including male power (for isn’t
the triumph of the hunt at least implied?) and ritual sacrifice (for this is
cooking-as-performance, exerting the kind of gravitational force that draws people out
of the house to watch). But I suspect that, as much as anything else, grilling meat over
a fire today commemorates the transformative power of cooking itself, which never
appears so bright or explicit as when wood and fire and flesh are brought together under
that aromatic empire of smoke.

II.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
    “Homo sapiens is the only animal that …”
    How many flattering clauses have
philosophers tacked on to that cherished construction, only to watch them eventually
crumble? One by one, the faculties on which we thought we could stake the flag of our
specialness science has shown belong to other animals as well. Suffering? Reason?
Language? Counting? Laughter? Self-consciousness? All have been proposed as human
monopolies, and all have fallen before science’s deepening understanding of the
animal brain and behavior. James Boswell’s nomination of cooking as the defining
human ability seems more durable than most, though perhaps aneven
sturdier candidate would be this: “Humans are the only species that feels
compelled to identify faculties that it alone possesses.”
    But