Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
Page 47
JOHN BRADSHAW, In Defence of Dogs
CHRIS STRINGER, The Origin of Our Species
LILA AZAM ZANGANEH, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness
DAVID STEVENSON, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918
EVELYN JUERS, House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles
HENRY KISSINGER, On China
MICHIO KAKU, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
DAVID ABULAFIA, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
JOHN GRIBBIN, The Reason Why: The Miracle of Life on Earth
ANATOL LIEVEN, Pakistan: A Hard Country
WILLIAM D COHAN, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
JOSHUA FOER, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
SIMON BARON-COHEN, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty
MANNING MARABLE, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
DAVID DEUTSCH, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World
DAVID EDGERTON, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War
JOHN KASARDA AND GREG LINDSAY, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next
DAVID GILMOUR, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples
NIALL FERGUSON, Civilization: The West and the Rest
TIM FLANNERY, Here on Earth: A New Beginning
ROBERT BICKERS, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914
MARK MALLOCH-BROWN, The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Limits of Nations and the Pursuit of a New Politics
KING ABDULLAH OF JORDAN, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril
ELIZA GRISWOLD, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Faultline between Christianity and Islam
BRIAN GREENE, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, part of The Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2013
Copyright © Michael Pollan, 2013
A portion of Chapter Two first appeared under the title ‘Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch’ in The New York Times Magazine, 29 July 2009.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-97563-4
I. AYDEN, NORTH CAROLINA
* Though later, in Leviticus, rules governing grain sacrifices are spelled out in detail; the commentaries suggest such rituals allowed people who could not afford to sacrifice an animal to nevertheless make an acceptable offering.
* In Greek thought, which obsessively worries the distinctions between man and animal, “raw eater” (omophagos) is a cutting epithet, bearing connotations of savagery. Cyclops commits a double outrage against civilization when he eats Odysseus’ sailors without cooking them first.
II. CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
* Berna, Francesca, et al., “Microstratigraphic Evidence of In Situ Fire in the Acheulean Strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 No. 20 (May 15, 2012), E1215–20.
* Carmody, Rachel N., et al. “Energetic Consequences of Thermal and Nonthermal Food Processing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 No. 48 (November 2011): 19199–203.
† Ninety percent of a cooked egg is digested, whereas only 65 percent of a raw egg is; by the same token, the rarer the steak, or more al dente the pasta, the less of it will be absorbed. Dieters take note.
IV. RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA
* I’m not sure why he even brings up water—perhaps because it is the enemy of fire? Or because it’s a feminine principle and barbecue is a male domain?
* In 2011, Ed Mitchell left The Pit, in a split with Greg Hatem’s restaurant group described in the press as amicable. But Ed told me there had been battles over philosophy and economics and he could “no longer put Ed Mitchell’s face and reputation on something where I had no control.” Ed plans to open a new barbecue restaurant in Durham, North Carolina.
V. WILSON, NORTH CAROLINA
* The name itself is a mini-polemic about what barbecue is and is not. Since the word “barbecue” is reserved for pork, that need not be mentioned; however, the word may not be used to modify ribs or chicken, which, whatever else they are, are not barbecue. At least here in North Carolina east of Lexington.
* Much the same can be said of the Christian Eucharist, in which all communicants symbolically eat from the body and blood of Christ.
VII. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
* In the introduction, Bachelard helpfully warns us, “When our reader has finished reading this book he will in no way have increased his knowledge.”
II. STEP TWO: SAUTÉ ONIONS AND OTHER AROMATIC VEGETABLES
* Vol. 56 (2008): 512–16.
V. STEP FIVE: POUR THE BRAISING LIQUID OVER THE INGREDIENTS
* Marcella Hazan, the Italian cookbook writer, was on the same page: “Water is the phantom ingredient in much Italian cooking,” she wrote. “One of my students once protested, ‘When you add water, you add nothing!’ But that is precisely why we use it. Italian cooking is the art of giving expression to the undisguised flavors of its ingredients. In many circumstances, an overindulgence in stock, wine or other flavored liquids would tinge the complexion of a dish with an artificial glow.”
* MSG is a food additive synthesized by microbes from various natural materials. Glutamate also finds its way onto ingredient labels as “hydrolyzed vegetable protein,” “protein isolate,” “yeast extract,” and “autolyzed yeast.”
VI. STEP SIX: SIMMER, BELOW THE BOIL, FOR A LONG TIME
* Though for married women who don’t have jobs the amount of time spent cooking is greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.<
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* Arlie Russell Hochschild, Second Shift (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).
* From the study: On an average day during 2006–8, Americans age 15 and older spent 78 minutes in secondary eating and drinking, that is, while doing something else considered to be the primary activity. Secondary eating and drinking was reported as occurring in all 400-plus detailed activities, except sleeping and primary eating and drinking. The two most popular activities that accompanied secondary eating or drinking were watching television and engaging in paid work. Travel related to work or travel related to shopping was also a frequent activity that accompanied secondary eating and drinking. (How Much Time Do Americans Spend on Food?, EIB-86, November 2011.) http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib-economic-information-bulletin/eib86.aspx.
* Cutler, David M., et al., “Why Have Americans Become More Obese?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17 No. 3 (2003): 93–118.
* Haines, P. S., et al., “Eating Patterns and Energy and Nutrient Intakes of US Women,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 92 No. 6 (1992): 698–704, 707.
† Chia-Yu Chen, Rosalind, et al., “Cooking Frequency May Enhance Survival in Taiwanese Elderly,” Public Health Nutrition 15 (July 2012): 1142–49.
I. A GREAT WHITE LOAF
* Hammes, Walter P., et al., “Microbial Ecology of Cereal Fermentations,” Trends in Food Science & Technology 16 No. 1-3 (2005): 4–11.
* Sugihara, T. F., et al., “Microorganisms of the San Francisco Sour Dough Bread Process I. Yeasts Responsible for the Leavening Action,” Applied Microbiology 21 No. 3 (1971): 456–8. Kline, L., et al., “Microorganisms of the San Francisco Sour Dough Bread Process II. Isolation and Characterization of the Undescribed Bacterial Species Responsible for the Souring Activity,” Applied Microbiology 21 No. 3 (1971): 459–65.
† Candida milleri is sometimes also referred to as Saccharomyces exiguous.
* I would learn later that the dough at Tartine is even wetter than what the published recipe calls for; in the book Robertson reduced the amount of water by 10 percent or so, fearing that home bakers confronting a dough too wet to knead would “freak out.”
* What gluten offered human wheat eaters is obvious enough, but what, if anything, did it offer the plant? I’ve put this question to several wheat breeders and botanists, and the consensus answer seems to be: nothing special. All seeds store proteins for the future use of the new plant by locking up amino acids in stable chains called polymers. The default storage protein in most grasses is globulin, over which gliadin and glutenin offer no advantages—except, that is, for the one tremendous advantage of happening to gratify the desires of an animal as well traveled and influential as Homo sapiens.
† In his book 1493, Charles Mann suggests that the first bread wheat was planted in the New World in Mexico, after Cortés found three kernels in a bag of rice sent from Spain. He ordered the seeds planted in a plot by a chapel in Mexico City. Two of them took and, according to a sixteenth-century account, “little by little there was boundless wheat”—much to the delight of the clergy, who needed bread to properly celebrate mass.
* Milton has a beautiful passage in Paradise Lost in which he describes humankind’s inexorable progress toward ever more ethereal types of nourishment, culminating in the bread of Christ:
So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flow’r
Spirits odorous breathes: flow’rs and their fruit.
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed,
To vital spirits aspire …
Time may come when men
With angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare;
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit. …
II. THINKING LIKE A SEED
* John Marchant, Bryan Reuben, and Joan Alcock, Bread: A Slice of History (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2009).
* The epidemiologists correct for the fact that, today, people who eat more whole grains also tend to be more affluent and better educated and more health conscious in general.
* Jacobs, David R., and Lyn M. Steffen, “Nutrients, Foods, and Dietary Patterns as Exposures in Research: A Framework for Food Synergy,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78 suppl. (2003): 508S–13S.
* Many products that call themselves “whole grain” turn out to have white flour as their first (and therefore biggest) ingredient. A product may use the Whole Grain Council stamp even if it contains as much as 49 percent white flour. A bread, like Wonder Bread’s Soft 100% Whole Wheat is not 100 percent whole wheat—only the part of it that is wheat is, and much of it consists of other ingredients. The idea of whole grain is evidently much more appealing to industry than the reality.
* In so-called baker’s math, every ingredient in a recipe is expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour, which is always expressed as 100 percent. Thus 104 percent hydration means that the dough contains slightly more water by weight than flour—a lot.
* Not that these terms are ironclad guarantees: “Stone milled” is not a government-backed claim, and whole grain, if it’s not stone milled, may or may not contain the germ.
FERMENT I. VEGETABLE
* I first encountered the term in a fascinating article on the debate over raw-milk cheeses by MIT anthropologist Heather Paxson: “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology 23 No. 1 (2008): 15–47.
* Lactobacillus is a genus of common bacteria that convert sugars—including lactose—into lactic acid. A “lactofermentation” is fermentation conducted primarily by this type of bacteria.
* There are no rules here, but I more or less tried to honor the classic “flavor principles”: an Asian mix of ginger, garlic, coriander, and star anise for the turnips and beets; Indian spices like turmeric, cinnamon, and cardamom for the cauliflower and carrots; garlic, dill, and peppercorns for the cucumbers and green tomatoes.
* Though you can inoculate it if you want to: Some old-school pickling recipes call for adding some whey to the brine, a liquid teeming with lactobacilli; I tried it once, adding a spoonful of the clear liquid from the top of a yogurt container, and it did seem to speed the process. But what’s the rush?
* Biologists use the term “microbiota” to refer to a community of microbes, and “microbiome” to refer to the collective genome of those microbes.
* Robinson, Courtney J., et al., “From Structure to Function.”
* This is equally true for the somewhat different bacterial communities found in other locations on the body—the mouth, the skin, the nasal passages, and the vagina. In the vagina, for example, dozens of species of Lactobacillus ferment glycogen, a sugar secreted by the vaginal lining. The lactic acid produced by these bacteria helps maintain a pH low enough to protect the vagina against pathogens.
* Hehemann, Jan-Henrik, et al., “Transfer of Carbohydrate-Active Enzymes from Marine Bacteria to Japanese Gut Microbiota,” Nature 464 (2010): 908–12.
* Margulis theorized that both photosynthesis and cellular metabolism in animals began when bacteria took up residence in the evolutionary ancestors of plant and animal cells, contributing their metabolic expertise; eventually these invaders became the chloroplasts in plant cells and the mitochondria in the cells of animals.
* Turnbaugh, Peter J., et al.,
“An Obesity-Associated Gut Microbiome with Increased Capacity for Energy Harvest,” Nature 444 (2006): 1027–31; Turnbaugh, P. J., et al., “A Core Gut Microbiome in Obese and Lean Twins,” Nature 457 (2009): 480–84; Turnbaugh, Peter J., et al., “The Human Microbiome Project,” Nature 449 (2007): 804–10.
† This particular probiotic is found in some kinds of yogurt. (Bravo, J. A., et al., “Ingestion of Lactobacillus Strain Regulates Emotional Behavior and Central GABA Receptor Expression in a Mouse via the Vagus Nerve,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 No. 38 [2011]: 16050–55).
* It has long been recognized that people with autism and schizophrenia often suffer from gastrointestinal disorders, and some recent work suggests there may be anomalies in their microflora. It’s important to remember that correlation is not causation, and if there is causation, we don’t know which way it goes. But evidence is accumulating that certain microbes in our bodies can affect our behavior and do so for their own purposes. Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in more than one billion people worldwide, has been shown to inspire neurotic self-destructive behavior in rats. The protozoa’s reproductive cycle depends on infecting cats, which it does by getting them to eat the rats and mice in whose brains the parasite commonly resides. When the parasite infects a rat or mouse, it increases dopamine levels in its host, inspiring it to wander around recklessly in a way more likely to attract the attention of cats; the mice and rats also become attracted to the smell of cat urine, an odor that, under normal circumstances, causes them to flee or freeze. “Fatal feline attraction” is the name for this phenomenon. In people, the presence of Toxoplasma gondii has been linked to schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, poor attention and reaction times, and a greater likelihood of car accidents. (House, Patrick K., et al., “Predator Cat Odors Activate Sexual Arousal Pathways in Brains of Toxoplasma gondii-Infected Rats,” PLoS ONE 6 No. 8 (August 2011): e23277 and Benson, Alicia, et al., “Gut Commensal Bacteria Direct a Protective Immune Response Against the Human Pathogen Toxoplasma Gondii,” Cell Host & Microbe 6 No. 2 [2009]: 187–96.)