Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

by Michael Pollan

  Alcohol is probably the most social drug we humans have. It takes cooperation to produce it, and it is commonly consumed in the company of others. In ancient Sumerian depictions of beer drinking, groups of people are shown sipping from the same gourd through straws. (Early beers would have been covered with a thick layer of dead yeast, foam, and floating debris, so were commonly sipped through straws.) In most cultures, anthropologists tell us, drinking alcohol has been a social ritual, and, much like hunting large animals and cooking them over fires, the practice helped foster social cohesion.

  True, drunkenness can also lead to aggression and antisocial behavior, which is why drinking in many cultures is carefully regulated. But as paradoxical as this might sound, the very fact that alcohol inspired the need for such rules is another way in which it has contributed to our socialization.

  This paradox points to one of the challenges of generalizing about alcohol’s effect on us and our species: Almost anything you can say about it is true, and so is its opposite. This same molecule can make people violent or docile; amorous or indifferent; loquacious or silent; euphoric or depressed; stimulated or sedated; eloquent or idiotic.* Perhaps because it affects so many different neural pathways, alcohol is remarkably plastic in its effects, person to person, group to group, even culture to culture. As Griffith Edwards, the English author of Alcohol: The World’s Favorite Drug, puts it, “Cultures can differ profoundly in their modes of drunken comportment.” (A delicious phrase!)

  Edwards suggests that this plasticity could explain why alcohol is so widely accepted as a recreational drug: “Intoxication with this particular substance is remarkably susceptible to cultural prescriptions and proscriptions, all the way from Bolivia to Tahiti.” When you compare alcohol with other drugs—think of LSD or crack cocaine—it becomes clear that societies are better able to channel and regulate the response of individuals to alcohol, making the drug more socially useful and less threatening than some others.

  So a natural history of human sociality would have to take account of the influence of alcohol in all its complexity. As would, I believe, a natural history of religion. “Wherever we look in the ancient or modern world,” archaeologist Patrick McGovern has written, “we see that the principal way to communicate with the gods or the ancestors involves an alcoholic beverage, whether it is the wine of the Eucharist, the beer presented to the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi, the mead of the Vikings, or the elixir of an Amazonian or African tribe.” Alcohol has served religion as a proof of gods’ existence, a means of access to sacred realms, and a mode of observance, whether solemn (as in the Eucharist) or ecstatic (as in the worship of Dionysus or, in Judaism, the celebration of Purim). The decidedly peculiar belief that, behind or above or within the physical world available to our senses, there exists a second world of spirits, surely must owe at least a partial debt to the experience of intoxication. Even today, when we raise and clink glasses in a toast, what are we really doing if not invoking a supernatural power? That’s why a glass of water or milk just doesn’t do the trick.

  In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James placed alcohol at the very center of the religious experience. “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature,” he writes, which are “usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. 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.”

  James is being perhaps a bit too unambiguously sunny here about alcohol, playing down the drug’s potential for destructiveness. The ancient Greeks worshipped the wine god Dionysus, but always in the full knowledge of alcohol’s paradoxical nature, how the same drug could make angels of us or beasts, confer blessings or bring down a curse. Indeed, that paradox goes to the very heart of the cult of Dionysus.* Wine “enters the world as a miracle,” the classicist Walter Otto wrote in Dionysus, but the drunken worship of Dionysus devolves into a kind of madness that is itself paradoxical. For it holds within it at the same time (here he quotes Nietzsche) “the power to generate and the power to destroy.”

  Otto’s own sentences eventually fall under the Dionysian spell: “All earthly powers are united in the god: the generating, nourishing, intoxicating rapture; the life giving inexhaustibility; and the tearing pain, the deathly pallor, the speechless night of having been.” (You’ll recall that the Dionysian rapture ends badly, with the drunken revelers finally turning on the god to tear him limb from limb and then feast on his flesh.) “He is the mad ecstasy which hovers over every conception and birth and whose wildness is always ready to move on to destruction and death.”

  Have another?

  To drink the wine of Dionysus is to dissolve the clear sunlit distinctions of Apollonian sobriety, muddying the bright lines between destruction and creation, matter and spirit, life and death—in fact, smearing the very idea of distinction itself. Commanding “the powers of earth,” Dionysus’ gravitational force pulls us back down into the primal mud. And yet: It is precisely here in the mud that creation begins, breeding the beauty of flowers—forms!—out of the dead ground, new life from death’s rot.

  “Just like fermentation,” I scribble madly in the margins of my Otto. The Greeks had no scientific understanding of the process—that would await Louis Pasteur and the discovery of the responsible microbes—but it seems to me they deeply understood fermentation just the same. They had crushed grapes and watched great urns of blackish must begin to seethe and breathe and come to life, under the influence of a transformational power they ascribed to Dionysus. And they had felt what that same force did to their minds and bodies when they drank its creation, the way the liquid seemed to ferment them: shifting the mind’s attention from the physical to the spiritual, italicizing everyday experience, proposing fresh ways of seeing the most familiar things—new metaphors. The Dionysian magic of fermentation was at once a property of nature and of the human soul, and one could unlock the other.

  “Nature overpowering mind” is how Nietzsche described Dionysian intoxication, but for him, as for the Greeks, intoxication is no mere trifle or indulgence. Rather, it is the wellspring of a certain kind of creativity. Which brings me to the third natural history in which S. cerevisiae will surely loom large: the natural history of poetry.

  That alcohol can inspire metaphor is something the poets themselves have been trying to tell us for centuries. “No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers,” as Horace wrote two thousand years ago. So why don’t we take the poets at their word on this? Perhaps because, as the heirs of Descartes, we’re troubled by the idea that a molecule manufactured by a single-celled yeast could have anything to do with something as exalted as human consciousness and art. Matter should stay put over here; spirit over there.

  “For art to exist,” Nietzsche wrote, “for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” One could argue that he’s speaking metaphorically here, that intoxication is a mental state that doesn’t necessarily depend on a molecule. Let’s grant that there are other, non-chemical ways to achieve an altered state of consciousness.* But, then, why is it we always use that particular metaphor—intoxication—to describe it? Probably because it is the model for the state of altered consciousness, or one of them. (Dreams would be another.) And because the fastest, most direct route to altered consciousness is an intoxicant, the most widely available one for most of human history being the molecule manufactured by S. cerevisiae.

  The poet, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaks “not with intellect alone, but with
the intellect inebriated with nectar.” Put another way, new perceptions and metaphors arise when the spirit of Dionysus breaks Apollo’s tight grip on the rational mind. “As the traveller who has lost his way throws the reins on his horse’s neck and trusts to the instincts of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.” Reins are useful, even necessary—like poetic meter—but the poet doesn’t get very far without the animal instinct. “If in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature. … This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration.” To the poet endeavoring to trope the prose of everyday life, a molecule like ethyl alcohol offers a powerful tool.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a hero of the young Emerson’s with a notorious drug habit, described a mental operation he called “secondary imagination” that he believed was the wellspring of a certain type of poetic creation. Secondary imagination, Coleridge wrote, is the faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” This notion of imaginatively transforming the givens of ordinary perception through a process of mental distortion is an idea that would go on to shape Romanticism in all the arts, from abstract painting to improvisational jazz. Can Coleridge’s transforming imagination really be understood without reference to the experience of intoxication?* Whether by means of a flowering plant or a microbe invisible to the naked eye, letting nature overpower us is a way to break down stale perspectives and open up fresh ones, or so the poets have always believed. We may not be able to tally it with any precision, but can there be much doubt that the poetic imagination owes a sizable debt to this yeast?

  All this talk of intoxication was getting me in the mood to sample one of my home brews. But my Irish ale was still fermenting in the basement, and when I checked its gravity (10.18) I knew it needed a few more days before it would be ready. (Heroic patience is a critical component of successful brewing.) What I did have on hand and ready to drink was my jug of wild mead. The week before, I had restarted its fermentation, in the hopes of diminishing its sweetness and elevating its alcohol. Champagne yeast is a strain of S. cerevisiae selected over the years for its exceptional vigor, alcohol tolerance, and prodigious output of carbon dioxide—important in making champagne. Kel had warned me to put the mead in a heavy swing-top or champagne bottle, since the yeast was liable to blow the cap off an ordinary beer bottle.

  I had already had one explosion in my basement. In the middle of the second night of the Irish ale’s fermentation, I was awakened by an extremely loud clap. I didn’t think much of it—this is a city that percolates at night with all sorts of obscure sounds, not to mention the occasional earthquake. But when I went down to the basement to check on the carboy the next morning, it had literally blown its top. The airlock was gone; the clap I’d heard must have been the report of it hitting the ceiling. A cascade of oatmeal-colored foam was erupting in slow motion from the neck of the bottle, and the white ceiling directly above had been splattered by rude blotches of brown wort. I made a mental note to tell my parents how very little has changed.

  It had been two weeks since I pitched my low-proof wild mead with the killer yeast. There was no way to tell if anything was happening in the bottles, since the fermentation was now taking place in a sealed environment—no bubbles to watch squeezing their way through an airlock. But I figured whatever was going to happen had happened by now, so I chilled a bottle of the mead, and popped open the swing top. The bottle gave a satisfying pop! and emitted a tiny puff of cold steam before the mead began to bubble over its lip. When I poured the mead into a wineglass, I could tell immediately that the champagne yeast had done its job: The mead had become several degrees paler in color and considerably livelier. Measuring the final gravity, I calculated the alcohol was up over 13 percent.

  The mead was almost completely dry and exuberantly effervescent. It actually tasted a little like champagne, though it was obviously something very different: There were strong hints of honey, as well as figs and sweet spices and something I hadn’t noticed before, the unmistakable scent of flowers. It was not only unusual but really good. And it was strong. By the time I got down to the bottom of the glass, where a pale powdery remnant of champagne yeast had collected, I could feel the warm, suffusing glow of alcohol wash over me. There’s really nothing quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking all you want, but you will never get it back.

  Nothing has really changed, you’re the same guy sitting at the same kitchen table, and yet everything feels just a little different: Several degrees less literal. Leavened. And whether or not this angle of mental refreshment offers anything of genuine value, anything worth saving for the consideration of more ordinary hours, it does seem to open up, however briefly, a slightly less earthbound and more generous perspective on life.

  I found myself turning that Coleridge quote over in my mind, thinking about imagination as a kind of mental algorithm that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” Okay, it seemed completely obvious that Coleridge had to be talking about getting high. But what was less obvious, and what now struck me with some force, was the correspondence between Coleridge’s notion of the imagination and (can you see it coming?) the process of fermentation. For what is fermentation but a biological faculty for doing the same thing: transforming the ordinary stuff of nature by “dissolving, diffusing, and dissipating” whatever is given, as the necessary prelude to creating something new? Fermentation is the secondary imagination of nature.

  Hey, I told you I’d been drinking. Yet even now, in a more sober hour, I wonder if there might not be something here, a metaphor worth stretching and bending to see what it can do for us. Try this: In the same way that yeasts break down a substrate of simple plant sugars to create something infinitely more powerful—more complex and richly allusive—so Coleridge’s secondary imagination breaks down the substrate of ordinary experience or consciousness in order to create something that is likewise less literal and more metaphorical: the strong wine of poetry where before there was only the ordinary juice of prose. And yet these two phenomena are not just analogies, existing in parallel. No, they cross, literally, since alcohol figures in both: as the final product of biological fermentation, and as a primary catalyst of imaginative fermentation. As yeast goes to work on sugars to produce alcohol, alcohol goes to work on ordinary consciousness. It ferments us. (So says the drunk: I’m pickled.) To produce … what? Well, all sorts of things, most of them stupid and mistaken and forgettable, but every now and again that alcohol-inspired mental ferment will throw off the bubble of a useful idea or metaphor.

  I like to think of the one in the last paragraph as exhibit A.

  Afterword

  Hand Taste

  I.

  Two weeks later, on another Sunday morning, the carboy and I made the trip back to Shane’s house so he and I could bottle our ten gallons of Humboldt Spingo. Shane had gone so far as to find a Victorian English beer label on the Internet, and then used some graphics software to swap out the letters for the original brewer’s name with those of our home brew, a pixel at a time.

  As we carefully siphoned the fresh beer into bottles and capped them, I couldn’t help but wonder about the sanity of the whole project. Two grown men with a great many other, more pressing things to do had blown a big hole in two weekends to make something they could just as easily have bought for a few dollars. (It’s not like you can’t buy excellent “craft” beer these days, even in the supermarket.) So why had we gone to the considerable trouble of making something that in all likelihood wo
uld never surpass the commercial product?

  To justify brewing your own beer—or baking your own bread, or fermenting your own sauerkraut or yogurt—on purely practical grounds is not easy. To save money? Maybe in the case of the bread, and surely in the case of everyday home cooking, but brewing beer requires an investment in equipment it would take an awful lot of drinking to recoup. So why do we do it? Just to see if we can, is one answer, I suppose, though that doesn’t take you much past your first acceptable batch. If you do get that far, however, there does come the deeper satisfaction of finding yourself in a position to give a very personal kind of gift—the bottle of home brew (or jar of pickles, or loaf of bread) being a convenient and concrete expression of the generosity that is behind every act of cooking.

  There is, too, the pleasure of learning how a certain everyday something gets made, a process that seldom turns out to be as simple as you imagined, or as complicated. True, I could have read all about brewing, or taken a tour of a brewery and watched the process. Yet there is a deeper kind of learning that can only be had by doing the work yourself, acquainting all your senses with the ins and outs and how-tos and wherefores of an intricate making. What you end up with is a first-person, physical kind of knowledge that is the precise opposite of abstract or academic. I think of it as embodied knowledge, as when your nose or your fingertips can tell you that the dough needs another turn or is ready to be baked. Knowing how to bake bread or brew beer with your own two hands is to more deeply appreciate a really good beer or loaf of bread—the sheer wonder of it!—when you’re lucky enough to come across one. You won’t take it for granted, and you won’t stand for the synthetic.