Michael Pollan: How Cooking Transforms Our Lives

Cooking is a transformative act according to popular writer and activist Michael Pollan. He's been exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world for decades. Pollan's most recent book, "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation" looks at how we turn simple ingredients into so much more.

He spoke to WFDD's Bethany Chafin from Berkeley.

Interview Highlights:

On the difference between "taste" and "flavor" and how cooking is a sensory experience:

So much of our sense of taste or flavor is cultural, is learned. There are five basic tastes, possibly six, some even say seven. But they're really basic, hardwired. And some are attractive, and some are repellent, and so we're born loving sweetness and saltiness, and we're born disliking sour and bitter, because those are tied often to rot, and to things you should avoid. So, from being this pure biological system, we layer on these aspects of culture. Fermented foods are a great example. No kid likes fermented food off the bat. They're weird, they are rot[ten] in a way, and we have an instinct telling us to avoid rotten food. But, if you're a Korean, eventually you learn to love the taste of kimchi, because at a certain point it represents your childhood or your home or this sense of place...the fact that food for us is culture, as much as it is biology, really sets us apart from the animals and opens food up to this whole other set of meanings.

If cooking makes us human, defines us, how do we begin to remedy the issue of food insecurity?

The fact is, the culinary arts, cooking skills, are a very important ingredient in food security. Because if you know how to cook, you're much less likely to go hungry, because you will know what to do with even unpromising scraps of meat, with the cheapest possible vegetables, you'll be able to make something interesting. But we also have problems too [because] food insecurity is complicated. Sometimes people have access to calories, but calories are not what food is about, and calories will keep you alive, but they won't keep you healthy. And so you have a situation where it becomes rational to eat badly because the incentives are set up that way. They don't have to be that way. We could have a system of agricultural support that made the playing field a little more level between the healthy calories and the unhealthy calories. But right now, that's not what we have. And that's a tremendous contributor to food insecurity. 

On fermentation and the world of invisible microbes. Is this the next scientific frontier?

If you want to know the next issue that's really going to be on our radar when it comes to both food and agriculture, it is the microbiome. This colony of microbes that live mostly in your large intestines, and play an enormous role in, not just your digestion but your mood, your health, your immune system. You know we always thought that a good diet was about feeding us, our bodies, but it turns out that's only about ten percent of the cells that you're carrying around. There's another 90 percent that are other species, many, many other species of microbes. Keeping them healthy, designing a diet that they like, may turn out to be just as important for health. This is not reflected in our nutritional guidelines, this is not yet part of the nutritional conversation, but it will become so when we understand it better.

The WFDD Book Club has been reading "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation" this quarter. We'll meet on Saturday, July 16th, at Scuppernong Books at 2 and 4 p.m. to discuss. Pollan will also be coming to Greensboro in September as part of the Guilford College Bryan Series.