Gotham Diary:
Fermentation
12 June 2013
There is something about Michael Pollan’s writing that puts me off — his regular-guy pose, which may, for all I know, be perfectly sincere. It’s canny, and it sells books, I’m sure, but I’m the one reader in a thousand who has no use for regular guys, not in books anyway. I don’t think that masculinity (or femininity) is anything to be proud of; on the contrary, it’s a predicament that active, educated imaginations struggle to overcome. Writing about food and cooking, Pollan seems anxious at times to establish his he-man credentials. I know that I’m overly sensitive to this vernacular pheromone, and perhaps somewhat unnaturally repelled by it. But it made reading Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation occasionally uncongenial. I very nearly didn’t make it past the book’s opening section on barbecue.
Which would have been a terrible shame, because Cooked is full of wisdom about food, and it bristles with a fine critique of the business that has spoiled our supply. Was it happy coincidence that put Cooked and The Unwinding in front of me at the same time? I felt that George Packer’s book opened things in Michael Pollan’s that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I should have missed, for example, the importance of being on good terms with organized money that is the moral of barbecue master Ed Mitchell’s story. When Mitchell spoke out against industrial hog farming, his affairs were subjected to what he calls “organized turbulence,” and he lost his business. Organized money’s conservative shills would say that he ought to have paid his taxes. But his ordeal sounds a lot like that of Dean Price, another visionary with a less-than-stellar aptitude for bean counting, in The Unwinding. And I wouldn’t have been equipped to grasp organized money’s responsibility for the degradation of our foodstuffs, a matter about which Pollan is never quite explicit. Having explained the importance of live-culture foods to intestinal ecology, Pollan complains,
And yet these latter-day methods of food preservation and processing have pushed most live-culture foods out of our diet. Yogurt is the exception that proves the rule, which is that very few of our foods any longer contain living bacteria or fungi. Vegetables are far more likely to be canned or frozen (or eaten fresh) than pickled. Meats are cured with chemicals rather than microbes and salt. Bread is still leavened with yeast, but seldom with a wild culture. Even the sauerkraut and kimchi are now pasteurized and vacuum packed — their cultures killed off long before the jar hits the supermarket shelf. These days most pickles are no longer truly pickled: They’re soured with pasteurized vinegar, no lactobacilli involved. Open virtually any modern recipe book for putting up or pickling food and you will be hard pressed to find a recipe for lactofermentation. What once was pickling has been reduced to marinating in vinegar. And though it’s true that vinegar is itself the product of fermentation, it is frequently pasteurized, a finished, lifeless product, and far too acidic to support most live cultures.
The modern food industry has a problem with bacteria, which it works assiduously to expunge from everything it sells, except for the yogurt. Wild fermentation is probably a little too wild for the supermarket, which has become yet another sterile battlefield in the war on bacteria. Worries about food safety are very real, of course, which is why it’s probably easier for industry to stand staunchly behind Pasteur than to try to tell a more nuanced story about good and bad bugs in your food. With the result that live-culture foods, which used to make up a large part of the human diet, have been relegated to the handful of artisanal producers and do-it-yourselfers…
What makes it easy for industry to stand behind Pasteur is the persistence of government regulations that were formulated in a climate of horrified hostility to all microbes, long before it was known how vital many bacteria are to healthy digestion. It is not in the interest of organized money (big businesses lobbying in Congress and rewarding compliant legislators) to repeal these antiquated constrictions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss divided foodstuffs into the raw, the cooked, and the rotten, but “rotten,” as Pollan shows, is a term used only to dismiss the fermentations of others. Our own fermentations — our cheeses, our wines, our pickles — were mysteries until Pasteur’s discoveries, and few associated them with death and decay. But now we know better — Pollan shows how the making of a St-Nectaire cheese depends on waves of microbial advance and collapse — and we also know that kimchi and natto, however off-putting to the provincial Westerner, are but slight variations on foods that we prize. We also know that ninety percent of the cells in our bodies belong to non-human microbes, many of which defend us from pathogens such as E coli. The idea that all germs are bad germs is not only nonsense but wildly unhealthy. It seems almost certain that the autoimmune diseases that plague me took root in an environment, internal as well as external, that was simply too clean — too lifeless.
Everything that we thought we knew about food, in short, is wrong — fatally incomplete. Literally fatal: the link between the “Western diet,” high in sugar and low in bacteria, and the chronic diseases that afflict us, from cancer to hypertension, has been established. What we knew about food was incomplete in other ways, too, and perhaps the most interesting thing about Cooked is how it transforms the idea of cooking itself. More than any other writer, Pollan suggests the possibility a truly nourishing cuisine, one in which the drudgery of a designated expert is replaced by a sociable praxis in which the entire family participates. In the course of the book — Cooked is basically an extended version of a certain kind of blog entry, in which experiences are pursued so that they can be written about — Pollan teaches himself how to roast meat over wood coals, how to stew cheap cuts of meat (he is a little bit too in love with the term “braise” to excuse his failure to point out that it is the French for “ember” — another form of coal), how to create bread from flour, water, salt and the yeast that’s wild in his own home, and how to ferment vegetables (sauerkraut) and malt (beer). Aside from cheese, Pollan learns how to do all of these things in his own kitchen. Some of them become part of his everyday life, while others are reserved for special occasions. But Pollan never becomes a “food person” — he never ceases to be a professional writer.
Pollan works with many artisans who devote their lives to the craft of producing food of the highest (healthiest) quality, but aside from the journalistic business of describing personalities and processes, his interest in his subject is that of a householder, someone with a day job that is not centered in the kitchen. In the old days, householders had servants to provide them with delicious meals, but servants are extinct. When they began to disappear, commercial manufacturers sold “convenience” to homemakers, almost all of them women without other jobs, who had been taught to regard cooking as a matter of following miscellaneous recipes, and not as the command of a handful of techniques that would make it possible to construct wholesome meals from meats and vegetables on hand. No wonder the second-wave feminists repudiated this deracinated chore! In the course of my lifetime, certainly, I’ve watched a swelling movement pursue the holistic understanding of cooking that was easily acquired in the harsh conditions of long-ago life, while incorporating everything that is good about modern technology. (This would include the “science” of cooking: everyone now knows who Harold McGee is.)
Today’s householder has to be a cook on the side, which is to say a habitual cook. We must eat every day, and it is better to eat well and economically as long as we’re at it. Michael Pollan makes it clear that the only viable way for all but the wealthiest to do so is to cook at home. Instead of teaching our children how to make cookies, we need to teach them how to cook, and if Pollan’s experience with his teenaged son is any indication, this teaching can be compelling. Its subject, after all, is life itself.