Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2 page)

Then there are the cooks themselves, the
heroes who drive these
little dramas of transformation. Even as it
vanishes from our daily lives, we’re drawn to the rhythms and textures of the work
cooks do, which seems so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and
formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs these days. Cooks get to put their hands
on real stuff, not just keyboards and screens but fundamental things like plants and
animals and fungi. They get to work with the primal elements, too, fire and water, earth
and air, using them—mastering them!—to perform their tasty alchemies. How many of us
still do the kind of work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world that
concludes—assuming the chicken Kiev doesn’t prematurely leak or the soufflé
doesn’t collapse—with such a gratifying and delicious sense of closure?

So maybe the reason we like to watch cooking
on television and read about cooking in books is that there are things about cooking we
really miss. We might not feel we have the time or energy (or the knowledge) to do it
ourselves every day, but we’re not prepared to see it disappear from our lives
altogether. If cooking is, as the anthropologists tell us, a defining human activity—the
act with which culture begins, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss—then maybe we
shouldn’t be surprised that watching its processes unfold would strike deep
emotional chords.

The idea that cooking is a defining human
activity is not a new one. In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that
“no beast is a cook,” called
Homo sapiens
“the cooking
animal.” (Though he might have reconsidered that definition had he been able to
gaze upon the frozen-food cases at Walmart.) Fifty years later, in
The Physiology of
Taste,
the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed that cooking
made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had
“done the
most to advance the cause of civilization.” More recently, Lévi-Strauss, writing
in
The Raw and the Cooked
in 1964, reported that many of the world’s
cultures entertained a similar view, regarding cooking as the symbolic activity that
“establishes the difference between animals and people.”

For Lévi-Strauss, cooking was a metaphor for
the human transformation of raw nature into cooked culture. But in the years since the
publication of
The Raw and the Cooked
, other anthropologists have begun to take
quite literally the idea that the invention of cooking might hold the evolutionary key
to our humanness. A few years ago, a Harvard anthropologist and primatologist named
Richard Wrangham published a fascinating book called
Catching Fire
, in which he
argued that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors—and not tool making
or meat eating or language—that set us apart from the apes and made us human. According
to the “cooking hypothesis,” the advent of cooked food altered the course of
human evolution. By providing our forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest
diet, it allowed our brains to grow bigger (brains being notorious energy guzzlers) and
our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and
digest, which is why other primates our size carry around substantially larger digestive
tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing—as much as six hours a day.

Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of
chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources
of energy. Also, since cooking detoxifies many potential sources of food, the new
technology cracked open a treasure trove of calories unavailable to other animals. Freed
from the necessity of spending our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then
chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic
resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the
occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was
something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself
on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the
industrial eaters we’ve more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating
by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye
contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.
“Around that fire,” Wrangham writes, “we became tamer.”

Cooking thus transformed us, and not only by
making us more sociable and civil. Once cooking allowed us to expand our cognitive
capacity at the expense of our digestive capacity, there was no going back: Our big
brains and tiny guts now depended on a diet of cooked food. (Raw-foodists take note.)
What this means is that cooking is now obligatory—it is, as it were, baked into our
biology. What Winston Churchill once said of architecture—“First we shape our
buildings, and then they shape us”—might also be said of cooking. First we cooked
our food, and then our food cooked us.

If cooking is as central to human identity,
biology, and culture as Wrangham suggests, it stands to reason that the decline of
cooking in our time would have serious consequences for modern life, and so it has. Are
they all bad? Not at all. The outsourcing of much of the work of cooking to corporations
has relieved women of what has traditionally been their exclusive responsibility for
feeding the family, making it easier for them to work outside the home and have careers.
It has headed off many of the conflicts and domestic arguments that such a large shift
in gender roles and family dynamics was bound to spark. It has relieved all sorts of
other pressures in the household, including
longer workdays and
overscheduled children, and saved us time that we can now invest in other pursuits. It
has also allowed us to diversify our diets substantially, making it possible even for
people with no cooking skills and little money to enjoy a whole different cuisine every
night of the week. All that’s required is a microwave.

These are no small benefits. Yet they have
come at a cost that we are just now beginning to reckon. Industrial cooking has taken a
substantial toll on our health and well-being. Corporations cook very differently from
how people do (which is why we usually call what they do “food processing”
instead of cooking). They tend to use much more sugar, fat, and salt than people cooking
for people do; they also deploy novel chemical ingredients seldom found in pantries in
order to make their food last longer and look fresher than it really is. So it will come
as no surprise that the decline in home cooking closely tracks the rise in obesity and
all the chronic diseases linked to diet.

The rise of fast food and the decline in
home cooking have also undermined the institution of the shared meal, by encouraging us
to eat different things and to eat them on the run and often alone. Survey researchers
tell us we’re spending more time engaged in “secondary eating,” as
this more or less constant grazing on packaged foods is now called, and less time
engaged in “primary eating”—a rather depressing term for the once-venerable
institution known as the meal.

The shared meal is no small thing. It is a
foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation
and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating
differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the “cultural
contradictions of capitalism”—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social
forms it depends on—are on vivid display today at the modern American dinner table,
along with all the brightly colored packages that the food industry has managed to plant
there.

These are, I know, large claims to make for
the centrality of
cooking (and not cooking) in our lives, and a caveat
or two are in order. For most of us today, the choice is not nearly as blunt as
I’ve framed it: that is, home cooking from scratch versus fast food prepared by
corporations. Most of us occupy a place somewhere between those bright poles, a spot
that is constantly shifting with the day of the week, the occasion, and our mood.
Depending on the night, we might cook a meal from scratch, or we might go out or order
in, or we might “sort of” cook. This last option involves availing ourselves
of the various and very useful shortcuts that an industrial food economy offers: the
package of spinach in the freezer, the can of wild salmon in the pantry, the box of
store-bought ravioli from down the street or halfway around the world. What constitutes
“cooking” takes place along a spectrum, as indeed it has for at least a
century, when packaged foods first entered the kitchen and the definition of
“scratch cooking” began to drift. (Thereby allowing me to regard my packaged
ravioli with sage-butter sauce as a culinary achievement.) Most of us over the course of
a week find ourselves all over that spectrum. What is new, however, is the great number
of people now spending most nights at the far end of it, relying for the preponderance
of their meals on an industry willing to do
every
thing for them save the
heating and the eating. “We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods,”
a food-marketing consultant told me, “and now we’re going to have a hundred
years of packaged meals.”

This is a problem—for the health of our
bodies, our families, our communities, and our land, but also for our sense of how our
eating connects us to the world. Our growing distance from any direct, physical
engagement with the processes by which the raw stuff of nature gets transformed into a
cooked meal is changing our understanding of what food is. Indeed, the idea that food
has
any
connection to nature or human work or imagination is hard to credit
when it arrives in a neat package, fully formed. Food becomes just another
commodity, an abstraction. And as soon as that happens we become easy
prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real thing—what I call edible
foodlike substances. We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.

Now, for a man to criticize these
developments will perhaps rankle some readers. To certain ears, whenever a man talks
about the importance of cooking, it sounds like he wants to turn back the clock, and
return women to the kitchen. But that’s not at all what I have in mind. I’ve
come to think cooking is too important to be left to any one gender or member of the
family; men and children both need to be in the kitchen, too, and not just for reasons
of fairness or equity but because they have so much to gain by being there. In fact, one
of the biggest reasons corporations were able to insinuate themselves into this part of
our lives is because home cooking had for so long been denigrated as
“women’s work” and therefore not important enough for men and boys to
learn to do.

Though it’s hard to say which came
first: Was home cooking denigrated because the work was mostly done by women, or did
women get stuck doing most of the cooking because our culture denigrated the work? The
gender politics of cooking, which I explore at some length in part II, are nothing if
not complicated, and probably always have been. Since ancient times, a few special types
of cooking have enjoyed considerable prestige: Homer’s warriors barbecued their
own joints of meat at no cost to their heroic status or masculinity. And ever since, it
has been socially acceptable for men to cook in public and professionally—for money.
(Though it is only recently that professional chefs have enjoyed the status of artists.)
But for most of history most of humanity’s food has been cooked by women working
out of
public view and without public recognition. Except for the rare
ceremonial occasions over which men presided—the religious sacrifice, the July 4
barbecue, the four-star restaurant—cooking has traditionally been women’s work,
part and parcel of homemaking and child care, and therefore undeserving of serious—i.e.,
male—attention.