Status Updates From Cooked: A Natural History o...

Nowadays we think of sacrifice as a primitive rite, but such cultures practicing them at least acknowledged that something important was happening in eating animals, something demanded their full attention. Just because we moderns pay less attention doesn’t mean something momentous hasn’t happened. In our failure to attend to the process involved in eating meat, you have to wonder who are the more primitive ones!

Animal sacrifice has been a way to make animal flesh “good to think” (not just ‘good to eat’)- to help people feel better about killing, cooking & eating animals, which has never been anything less than a spiritually freighted and deeply ambivalent occasion. Like fire itself all cooking begins with some act of destruction: killing, cutting, chopping, mashing. In that sense, a sacrifice is at its very heart.

To cook even a bit more than you already do, or perhaps try & make something you only ever expected to buy- will constitute a kind of vote. A vote against the disconnection of specialization, against the total rationalization of life, against the infiltration of corporate interests seeking to organize our every waking moment.
Cooking gives us the rare opportunity to work directly in our own support- & those we feed.

Cooking- of whatever kind, every day or extreme- situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work; and in the process so is the cook.

Richard Wrangham’s “Cooking Hypothesis”: cooking was the key that facilitated human cultural evolution.
Cooking allows much of the work of chewing & digestion to be performed outside the body using outside sources of energy, feeding a larger brain &
freeing up time/energy for other activities (creating culture). Heat cooking also created a meal time (v. Solo grazing), which encouraged sharing & group sociality.

"it helps to be able to think like a grass seed and, at the same time, like the community of yeasts and bacteria living in your sourdough culture. control you can just forget about: there are too many interests and variables in play."
the "air" part always makes me feel so doomed about ever eating or baking truly nutritious bread but then Pollan brings it back fr