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Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Hardcover – April 23, 2013

by Michael Pollan (Author)

1,747 customer reviews

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**Now a docu-series airing on Netflix on February 19, 2016, starring Pollan as he explores how cooking transforms food and shapes our world. Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney exectuve produces the four-part series based on Pollan's book, and each episode will focus on a different natural element: fire, water, air, and earth. **

“Important, possibly life-altering, reading for every living, breathing human being." --Boston Globe

In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer.

Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan’s effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse–trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius “fermentos” (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us.

The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2013: Who has untangled the nature of modern America’s relationship with food more effectively than Michael Pollan? After sharing the experience of growing his own food in Second Nature, he illuminated how our appetites drive the evolution of edible plants with The Botany of Desire. Then he pondered The Omnivore’s Dilemma, weighing our precarious food chain and popularizing the pleasures of eating local; In Defense of Food and Food Rules distilled his conclusions into a manifesto and a manual. With Cooked, he closes the seed-to-table loop with a passionate exploration of the satisfying transformation of grilling, braising, baking, and fermenting--and their primal roots. Learning to cook elevated humans from lone animals into increasingly intelligent, civilized groups, and though we spend scant time doing real cooking, we’ve become obsessed with watching people cook--a paradox that points to longing for a lost experience. Through his own experiences making and enjoying food with pit masters, chefs, bakers, and “fermentos,” he retraces our path to connection with real ingredients and health for people and planet. Whether you’re sympathetic or skeptical, you can’t help but appreciate Pollan’s genius for conveying the elemental appeal of making a meal. --Mari Malcolm

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Pollan’s newest treatise on how food reaches the world’s tables delves into the history of how humankind turns raw ingredients into palatable and nutritious food. To bring some sense of order to this vast subject, he resurrects classical categories of fire, water, air, and earth. Pollan visits pit masters to learn what constitutes authentic barbecue. An Italian-trained Iranian American teaches him the subtleties of proper cooking in pots, how to coax maximum flavor from humble vegetables, herbs, meats, and water. Baking trains Pollan to watch, listen, and feel the action of living yeasts in doughs. The harnessing of fungi and molds to ferment sauerkraut and beer and produce cheeses illuminates the fine and ever-shifting boundaries between tastiness and rot and how the human palate can be trained. Four recipes accompany the text, and an extensive bibliography offers much deeper exploration. Pollan’s peerless reputation as one of America’s most compelling expositors of food and human sustainability will boost demand. --Mark Knoblauch

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Product details

Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: Penguin Press; 1 edition (April 23, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594204217
ISBN-13: 978-1594204210
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 1,747 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #62,578 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #79 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Natural History
- #105 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Cooking Education & Reference > History
- #134 in Books > Science & Math > Agricultural Sciences > Food Science

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I highly recommend this book.

August 11, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

“I had a deeply unsettling moment when, after spending a couple years researching nutrition for my last book, In Defense of Food, I realized that the answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated question of what we should eat wasn’t so complicated after all, and in fact could be boiled down to just seven words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

This was the bottom line, and it was satisfying to have found it, a piece of hard ground deep down at the bottom of the swamp of nutrition science: seven words of plain English, no biochemistry degree required. But it was also somewhat alarming, because my publisher was expecting a few thousand words more than that. Fortunately for both of us, I realized that the story of how simple a question as what to eat had ever gotten so complicated was one worth telling, and that became the focus of that book.

The focus of this book is very different. It is much less about theory, history, and science than it is about our daily lives and practice. In this short, radically pared-down book, I unpack those seven words of advice into a comprehensive set of rules, or personal policies, designed to help you eat real food in moderation and, by doing so, substantially get off the Western diet. The rules are phrased in everyday language; I deliberately avoid the vocabulary of nutrition or biochemistry, though in most cases there is scientific research to back them up.”

~ Michael Pollan from Food Rules

Michael Pollan is the author of a number of New York Times best-selling books on nutrition (including In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma). He’s a longtime New York Times contributor and Professor of Journalism at Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

If you’re looking for a SUPER compact, witty look at the primary rules on how to eat well, this is it. I HIGHLY recommend you pick up a copy as I think it’s the page-for-page best guide on the basic fundamentals of nutrition.

It’s a fun, witty, concise guide to eating well featuring 64 food rules structured around Pollan’s seven words of wisdom:

Part 1 = Eat food.

Part 2 = Mostly plants.

Part 3 = Not too much.

I'm excited to share some of favorite Big Ideas:

1. Nutrition: 2 Facts - Everyone agrees on.
2. Rule #1: Eat Food - Not edible foodlike substances.
3. Low-Fat - Made us fat.
4. Will Your Food Rot? - Good test.
5. 66% - 80% - Not too much.

Let’s have fun optimizing our food rules as we eat food... not too much... mostly plants!

More goodness— including PhilosophersNotes on 300+ books in our *OPTIMIZE* membership program. Find out more at brianjohnson . me.

43 people found this helpful

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May 31, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

If you follow only half of what Micheal says to do in this book, you will live a healthy lifestyle. I lost 83 pounds after following his advice,I went from 268 to 183 in 7 months, got off all medication and my blood work was perfect.

96 people found this helpful

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Great layout and words of wisdom that is easy to remember

October 2, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This was a short novel but I enjoyed all the little bits of information that was inside. The book’s sole purpose is to give you some guidelines for eating.

The links between diet and health according to this novel is that individuals who eat a Western diet (lots of processed food, food with added sugar and fat, and lots of refined grains) will suffer from Western diseases such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardio diseases. That totally makes sense to me but I didn’t know it was known as a Western diet. The second link is that if you eat a traditional diet (a lot of different varieties here) you will not suffer from these diseases. Which basically means, no one diet is perfect but as humans we have adapted to different diets to make them work for us. The Western diet, as it stands now, is the diet which makes everyone ill. Inside this novel, there are 64 rules to live by to eat a healthy diet. These rules are explained further with a brief explanation, if needed.

Some of these rules I had heard about before but about half of them were new to me. There are three parts to the novel: What to eat? What kinds of food should I eat? And How should I eat? Each of these parts have different rules to follow. I liked that these rules are, for the most part, something I could memorize on my own and therefore, I could recall when need be. There is the rule about not eating food that you cannot say, rule about eating a variety of colors, and a rule about eating at a table, these are a few of the rules I already knew.
Here are a few of the rules that I really enjoyed:
Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
So, cellulose, thiamine mononitrate is not something I would have on hand, therefore this product should not be in my house.
Avoid food products that contain more than 5 ingredients.
Wow, that would eliminate a lot of the processed foods I have on hand.
Avoid food products that contain ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
Again cellulose, thiamine mononitrate are out and I need to start thinking simple.
Cook food that has only been cooked by humans.
Again, lots of preservatives, added sugar, and other interesting items are added which we don’t need.
Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.
This one is a killer. I have literally cut down on the number of French fries I eat as I think this rule says it all. I’m not physically making French fries out of potatoes every time I want them, it’s too time consuming and too much work. The novel says there is nothing wrong with sweets, soda and other sweet snacks as long as you prepare them yourself. If I had to prepare potato chips, snack crackers, or cookies as much as I consume them, my consumption would really go down.
Spend as much time enjoying your meal as it took to prepare it.
Amen!

I think this book has a lot to offer, things you might know and things that you should know. I like the short and sweet aspect of the novel, it’s not a wordy or a complex read, the author gives his readers just the facts in an easy way to think about them and how to apply them to their own lives. I’m ready to jump on board and I know it will take some time, strength and willpower to incorporate these rules but I know the benefits will be worth it.

11 people found this helpful

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Yes, Yes, Yes—Reading Cooked Is Worth Your Time and Money

April 20, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

I have been a fan of Michael Pollan's ever since I read Botany of Desire. At the time, I thought he'd never top that book but as his curiosity and passion about food, our food delivery systems, and the fundamental importance of what we eat has increased, he has just gotten better and better.

If you are already a Michael Pollan fan, you appreciate his meticulous attention to detail in his research and his lucid prose. I swear, this guy could take the most complicated subject on the planet and make it accessible to his readers. In Cooked, I think he has reached a new peak in his powers of synthesis and observation.

Cooked is divided into four parts, analogous to the four elements described by the ancient Greeks: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. Of these, it was the section on Earth (fermentation) that really made me sit up and take notice. He brings up so many important points about how our Western diet fails us every day, making our lifespans shorter and our health more precarious.

In its way, Cooked is as important a book about health and nutrition as Diet for a Small Planet was when it first appeared in the 1970s. This book will make you think, give you tools to improve your health, and explain how cooking a meal from scratch in your own kitchen becomes an act of rebellion.

So worth your time and the purchase price.

9 people found this helpful

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