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A Martu woman in Western Australia is hunting: she takes a burning wad of dry grass and sets fire to the brush to expose lizard burrows, pounding the smoking earth with a large stick when she finds one. She thrusts her hand down the hole. “It’s a big one,” she says, as she pulls up a large wriggler and whacks him on the ground, before chucking him on a fire for dinner. And just like that, Cooked pulls you in.
This new Netflix four-parter is the latest outing from docu-whizz Alex Gibney – who recently made a stink in the Scientology world with his expose Going Clear – in collaboration with the author Michael Pollan. It’s an overly earnest but hard-hitting investigative attempt to answer two questions: how did cooking become optional, and what did we lose in the process?
Episode one starts with Pollan describing the cast-iron casserole dish he remembers his mother dishing out beef stews from throughout his childhood. Suddenly, we cut to a beeping microwave, the LED display flashing “Enjoy your meal” as a black plastic tray sits ready on the turntable.
Today, it’s no longer a given that if we want to eat we must cook, he observes – and yet the less time we do spend cooking, the more we seem to devote to watching other people doing it on TV. Of course, the reason we don’t always cook is that, as the freezer section of supermarkets the world over demonstrate, we don’t have to.
From an ad for one of the earliest ever ready meals – “Now mum can finally learn what’s going on in the outside world!” – to a Nestlé rep in India talking about fortified ingredients and consumers not willing to compromise on taste, while he stands before the world’s most appetite-suppressing array of instant noodles, it’s a chilling look at the worldwide food processing industry and its vested interest in keeping people out of the kitchen. For the industry, we’re told, “people cooking their own food is an obstacle”.
And yet, no matter the remove, the appeal of cooking endures. From India, where those Nestlé kitchens jostle with tiffin tin distributors and community kitchens preparing food for the poor who simply can’t afford to cook, to a microbiologist nun in Bethlehem, Connecticut who raises cattle and makes trad French cheese, Pollan and Gibney explore the various ways we feed ourselves, and how we learned to do it. Episode two takes them to the deep south, where dungareed pitmaster Ed Mitchell talks about BBQ as a rite of passage passed down from generation to generation, going all the way back to the oldest slave on the plantation being the one to cook at any shindig. “Good pig,” he says, chewing on a bone of the beast he’s just turned over. “Damn good pig.”
In the same way that his books weave intellectual inquiry with personal experience, Pollan takes these encounters back to his own kitchen. There’s an excellent sequence where he talks about the pet pig, Kosher, his dad got him as a kid on Martha’s Vineyard and how James Taylor also had a pig, Mona, on the island. Taylor sings a song about Mona. Mona frightens Kosher to death. Kosher never got eaten. But many other things are: Pollan does a slow-roast over a pit in his own back yard, then serves up slices of pie with whipped cream to his gathered guests.
Cooked may sound worthy, but in the hands of these heavyweights it becomes a sumptuous ode to slow cooking – and a call to get back to the joy of simply preparing food for the people you love.
Cooked premieres on 16 February at Berlin Film Festival and is on Netflix globally from 19 February
