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Michael Pollan, one of our greatest thinkers on the subject of eating, didn't plan on writing about food. "I kind of backed into it," he says. More than a decade ago, he became curious about our dependency on fast food and the correlation between chronic disease, diet and nutrition "I began to get very interested in why we weren't cooking as much anymore, and how that was affecting our health and the health of the land," Pollan says. Pursuing that initial interest, he's explored the many branches of food studies—including culture, history, biology, and industry—in four New York Times-best-selling books, starting with The Omnivore's Dilemma in 2006. His most recent book, 2013's Cooked, has been adapted into a Netflix documentary miniseries and is available now. Broken into four parts—Fire, Water, Air, and Earth—the series allows Pollan to elegantly demonstrate how the act of cooking connects to globalization, feminism, war, the environment, and our own origins as a species. In the show's first five minutes, Pollan sums it up with one mind-blowing theory: "We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human."
Cooked will inspire even the most time-stressed, culinarily-inept person to get back into the kitchen thanks to Pollan's compelling arguments for knowing what the hell you're eating. "We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain," Pollan says. "Food comes to us ready-made in packages that obscure as much information as they reveal. We're disconnected from the processes of making these things."
Most PopularBut what, exactly, has deterred us from cooking—something humans have been doing since, well, becoming human? Part of it is time. Most of us think we aren't able to dedicate part of our day to making meals. It's also perception. Restaurants and cooking shows have tricked us into thinking a meal is "something really hard to do, something that's really elaborate, something that's best left to professionals," Pollan says. "I actually think those cooking shows are very discouraging and they make cooking look daunting." But it's also ingrained into our food industry. Our demand for fast, easy, meals has taken hold of our culture since the 1960s. And now that we're in an election year, there are questions about the food industry we need to be asking the next potential leader of the free world.
When President Obama first took office in 2008, Pollan wrote him an open letter in The New York Times stating, "among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food." Over the course of two terms, Pollan admits that Obama hasn't come through on all of his promises related to the food industry, but our next president could be worse.
"Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important," Pollan says. He points to the soda sales that have dropped and credits that statistic, in part, to the first lady.
But what about the two frontrunners of this year's presidential election? "Hillary Clinton is not strongly identified with reforming the industrial food system," Pollan says. "The Clintons were involved with Walmart and Tyson in Arkansas. Though as a senator, Hillary was pretty good at reaching out to the small farmers in Upstate New York." Then there's Donald Trump. "You know, nobody has asked him about his eating. A lot of carrots maybe. [Laughs] So I don't know where he would be on food policy, and I'd be very interested to get him to answer a few questions on that. Frankly, if he were perfect on food issues, I still wouldn't vote for him" Pollan says.
It's early in this election season, and there's still plenty of time to pose these questions to the presidential hopefuls. "The most important question is whether they are willing to create a national food policy that will reconcile our agricultural policy with our health and environmental objectives," Pollan says. "Right now our agricultural policies are working in cross-purposes: we are subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and we're paying billions of dollars to deal with the effects of that corn syrup. It's absolutely irrational and insane."
But, one simple move anyone can make, and one we as a species have been doing for many thousands of years: Cook more. If you're not sure how, just go on the Internet: "YouTube is full of brilliant instructional videos for anything you'd want to master," Pollan says. "So I'm hoping it's not too late to reverse the tide."
