Why cooking matters

At a certain point in the late middle of my life I made the unexpectedbut happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions thatmost occupied me was in fact one and the same.Cook.Some of these questions were personal. For example, what was thesingle most important thing we could do as a family to improve ourhealth and general well-being? And then what would be a good wayto better connect to my teenage son? (As it turned out, this involvednot only ordinary cooking but also the specialized form of it knownas brewing.) Other questions were slightly more political in nature.For years I had been trying to determine (because I am often asked)what is the most important thing an ordinary person can do to helpreform the American food system, to make it healthier and more sustainable?Another related question is, how can people living in a highlyspecialized consumer economy reduce their sense of dependence andachieve a greater degree of self-suffi ciency? And then there were themore philosophical questions, the ones I’ve been chewing on since Ifi rst started writing books. How, in our everyday lives, can we acquirea deeper understanding of the natural world and our species’ peculiarrole in it? You can always go to the woods to confront such questions,but I discovered that even more interesting answers could be had simplyby going to the kitchen.I would not, as I said, ever have expected it. Cooking has alwaysbeen a part of my life, but more like the furniture than an objectof scrutiny, much less a passion. I counted myself lucky to have aparent—my mother—who loved to cook and almost every nightmade us a delicious meal. By the time I had a place of my own, Icould fi nd my way around a kitchen well enough, the result of nothingmore purposeful than all those hours spent hanging around thekitchen while my mother fi xed dinner. And though once I had myown place I cooked whenever I had the time, I seldom made time forcooking or gave it much consideration. My kitchen skills, such as theywere, were pretty much frozen in place by the time I turned thirty.Truth be told, my most successful dishes leaned heavily on the cookingof others, as when I drizzled my incredible sage-butter sauce overstore-bought ravioli. Every now and then I’d look at a cookbook orclip a recipe from the newspaper to add a new dish to my tiny repertoire,or I’d buy a new kitchen gadget, though most of these eventuallyended up in a closet.In retrospect, the mildness of my interest in cooking surprises me,since my interest in every other link of the food chain had been sokeen. I’ve been a gardener since I was eight, growing mostly vegetables,and I’ve always enjoyed being on farms and writing about agriculture.I’ve also written a fair amount about the opposite end of thefood chain—the eating end, I mean, and the implications of our eatingfor our health. But to the middle links of the food chain, wherethe stuff of nature gets transformed into the things we eat and drink,I hadn’t really given much thought.Until, that is, I began trying to unpack a curious paradox I hadnoticed while watching television, which was simply this: How is itthat at the precise historical moment when Americans were abandoningthe kitchen, handing over the preparation of most of our meals tothe food industry, we began spending so much of our time thinkingabout food and watching other people cook it on television? The lesscooking we were doing in our own lives, it seemed, the more thatfood and its vicarious preparation fascinated us.Our culture seems to be of at least two minds on this subject. Surveyresearch confi rms we’re cooking less and buying more preparedmeals every year. The amount of time spent preparing meals inAmerican households has fallen by half since the mid-sixties, when Iwas watching my mom fi x dinner, to a scant twenty-seven minutes aday. (Americans spend less time cooking than people in any other nation,but the general downward trend is global.) And yet at the sametime we’re talking about cooking more—and watching cooking, andreading about cooking, and going to restaurants designed so that wecan watch the work performed live. We live in an age when professionalcooks are household names, some of them as famous as athletesor movie stars. The very same activity that many people regard as aform of drudgery has somehow been elevated to a popular spectatorsport. When you consider that twenty-seven minutes is less time thanit takes to watch a single episode of Top Chef or The Next Food Network Star,you realize that there are now millions of people who spend moretime watching food being cooked on television than they spend actuallycooking it themselves. I don’t need to point out that the food youwatch being cooked on television is not food you get to eat.This is peculiar. After all, we’re not watching shows or readingbooks about sewing or darning socks or changing the oil in our car,three other domestic chores that we have been only too happy tooutsource—and then promptly drop from conscious awareness. Butcooking somehow feels different. The work, or the process, retains anemotional or psychological power we can’t quite shake, or don’t wantto. And in fact it was after a long bout of watching cooking programson television that I began to wonder if this activity I had always takenfor granted might be worth taking a little more seriously.I developed a few theories to explain what I came to think of as theCooking Paradox. The fi rst and most obvious is that watching otherpeople cook is not exactly a new behavior for us humans. Even when“everyone” still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched:men for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memoriesof watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimeslooked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in somethingtasty to eat. In ancient Greece, the word for “cook,” “butcher,” and“priest” was the same—mageiros—and the word shares an etymologicalroot with “magic.” I would watch, rapt, when my mother conjuredher most magical dishes, like the tightly wrapped packages offried chicken Kiev that, when cut open with a sharp knife, liberated apool of melted butter and an aromatic gust of herbs. But watching aneveryday pan of eggs get scrambled was nearly as riveting a spectacle,as the slimy yellow goop suddenly leapt into the form of savory goldnuggets. Even the most ordinary dish follows a satisfying arc of transformation,magically becoming something more than the sum of itsordinary parts. And in almost every dish, you can fi nd, besides theculinary ingredients, the ingredients of a story: a beginning, a middle,and an end.Then there are the cooks themselves, the heroes who drive theseittle dramas of transformation. Even as it vanishes from our dailylives, we’re drawn to the rhythms and textures of the work cooksdo, which seems so much more direct and satisfying than the moreabstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs these days.Cooks get to put their hands on real stuff, not just keyboards andscreens but fundamental things like plants and animals and fungi.They get to work with the primal elements, too, fi re and water, earthand air, using them—mastering them!—to perform their tasty alchemies.How many of us still do the kind of work that engages us in adialogue with the material world that concludes—assuming thechicken Kiev doesn’t prematurely leak or the souffl é doesn’t collapse—with such a gratifying and delicious sense of closure?So maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on television andread about cooking in books is that there are things about cookingwe really miss. We might not feel we have the time or energy (or theknowledge) to do it ourselves every day, but we’re not prepared to seeit disappear from our lives altogether. If cooking is, as the anthropologiststell us, a defi ning human activity—the act with which culturebegins, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss—then maybe we shouldn’tbe surprised that watching its processes unfold would strike deepemotional chords.The idea that cooking is a defi ning human activity is not a new one.In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that “no beast is acook,” called Homo sapiens “the cooking animal.” (Though he mighthave reconsidered that defi nition had he been able to gaze upon thefrozen-food cases at Walmart.) Fifty years later, in The Physiology of Taste,the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed thatcooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fi re, 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 thatmany of the world’s cultures entertained a similar view, regardingcooking as the symbolic activity that “establishes the difference betweenanimals and people.”For Lévi-Strauss, cooking was a metaphor for the human transformationof raw nature into cooked culture. But in the years sincethe publication of The Raw and the Cooked, other anthropologists havebegun to take quite literally the idea that the invention of cookingmight hold the evolutionary key to our humanness. A few years ago,a Harvard anthropologist and primatologist named Richard Wranghampublished a fascinating book called Catching Fire, in which he arguedthat it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors—andnot tool making or meat eating or language—that set us apart fromthe apes and made us human. According to the “cooking hypothesis,”the advent of cooked food altered the course of human evolution. Byproviding our forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digestdiet, it allowed our brains to grow bigger (brains being notoriousenergy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takesmuch more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why otherprimates our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts andspend many more of their waking hours chewing—as much as sixhours a day.Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestionand performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources ofenergy. Also, since cooking detoxifi es many potential sources of food,the new technology cracked open a treasure-trove of calories unavailableto other animals. Freed from the necessity of spending our daysgathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing)it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolicresources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practiceof eating together at an appointed time and place. This was somethingnew under the sun, for the forager of raw food would havelikely 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 andwherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact,sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.“Around that fi re,” Wrangham writes, “we became tamer.”Cooking thus transformed us, and not only by making us moresociable and civil. Once cooking allowed us to expand our cognitivecapacity at the expense of our digestive capacity, there was no goingback: Our big brains and tiny guts now depended on a diet of cookedfood. (Raw-foodists take note.) What this means is that cooking isnow obligatory—it is, as it were, baked in to our biology. What WinstonChurchill once said of architecture—“First we shape our buildings,and then they shape us”—might also be said of cooking. First wecooked our food, and then our food cooked us.If cooking is as central to human identity, biology, and culture asWrangham suggests, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking inour time would have serious consequences for modern life, and so ithas. Are they all bad? Not at all. The outsourcing of much of the workof cooking to corporations has relieved women of what has traditionallybeen their exclusive responsibility for feeding the family, makingit easier for them to work outside the home and have careers. It hasheaded off many of the confl icts and domestic arguments that such alarge shift in gender roles and family dynamics was bound to spark.It has relieved all sorts of other pressures in the household, includinglonger workdays and overscheduled children, and saved us time thatwe can now invest in other pursuits. It has also allowed us to diversifyour diets substantially, making it possible even for people with nocooking skills and little money to enjoy a whole different cuisineevery night of the week. All that’s required is a microwave.These are no small benefi ts. Yet they have come at a cost that weare just now beginning to reckon. Industrial cooking has taken a substantialtoll on our health and well-being. Corporations cook verydifferently from people do (which is why we usually call what theydo “food processing” instead of cooking). They tend to use muchmore sugar, fat, and salt than people cooking for people do; they alsodeploy novel chemical ingredients seldom found in pantries in orderto make their food last longer and look fresher than it really is. So itwill come as no surprise that the decline in home cooking closelytracks the rise in obesity and all the chronic diseases linked to diet.The rise of fast food and the decline in home cooking have alsoundermined the institution of the shared meal, by encouraging us toeat different things and to eat them on the run and often alone. Surveyresearchers tell us we’re spending more time engaged in “secondaryeating,” as this more or less constant grazing on packaged foodsis now called, and less time engaged in “primary eating”—a ratherdepressing 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 acquirethe habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigatingdifferences, arguing without offending. What have been called the“cultural contradictions of capitalism”—its tendency to underminethe stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display todayat the modern American dinner table, along with all the brightly coloredpackages 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 framedit: that is, home cooking from scratch versus fast food prepared bycorporations. Most of us occupy a place somewhere between thosebright poles, a spot that is constantly shifting with the day of theweek, the occasion, and our mood. Depending on the night, we mightcook 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 variousand very useful shortcuts that an industrial food economy offers:the package of spinach in the freezer, the can of wild salmon in thepantry, the box of store-bought ravioli from down the street or halfwayaround the world. What constitutes “cooking” takes place along aspectrum, as indeed it has for at least a century, when packaged foodsfi rst entered the kitchen and the defi nition of “scratch cooking” beganto drift. (Thereby allowing me to regard my packaged ravioli withsage-butter sauce as a culinary achievement.) Most of us over thecourse of a week fi nd ourselves all over that spectrum. What is new,however, is the great number of people now spending most nights atthe far end of it, relying for the preponderance of their meals on anindustry willing to do everything for them save the heating and the eating.“We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods,” a food-marketingconsultant told me, “and now we’re going to have a hundred years ofpackaged meals.”This is a problem—for the health of our bodies, our families, ourcommunities, and our land, but also for our sense of how our eatingconnects us to the world. Our growing distance from any direct,physical engagement with the processes by which the raw stuff ofnature gets transformed into a cooked meal is changing our understandingof what food is. Indeed, the idea that food has any connectionto nature or human work or imagination is hard to credit whenit arrives in a neat package, fully formed. Food becomes just anothercommodity, an abstraction. And as soon as that happens we becomeeasy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the realthing—what I call edible foodlike substances. We end up trying tonourish ourselves on images.Now, for a man to criticize these developments will perhaps ranklesome readers. To certain ears, whenever a man talks about the importanceof cooking, it sounds like he wants to turn back the clock, andreturn 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 genderor member of the family; men and children both need to be inthe kitchen, too, and not just for reasons of fairness or equity butbecause they have so much to gain by being there., In fact, one of thebiggest reasons corporations were able to insinuate themselves intothis part of our lives is because home cooking had for so long beendenigrated as “women’s work” and therefore not important enoughfor men and boys to learn to do.Though it’s hard to say which came fi rst: Was home cooking denigratedbecause the work was mostly done by women, or did womenget stuck doing most of the cooking because our culture denigratedthe work? The gender politics of cooking, which I explore at somelength in part II, are nothing if not complicated, and probably alwayshave been. Since ancient times, a few special types of cooking haveenjoyed considerable prestige: Homer’s warriors barbecued their ownjoints of meat at no cost to their heroic status or masculinity. And eversince, it has been socially acceptable for men to cook in public andprofessionally—for money. (Though it is only recently that professionalchefs have enjoyed the status of artists.) But for most of historymost of humanity’s food has been cooked by women working out ofpublic view and without public recognition. Except for the rare ceremonialoccasions over which men presided—the religious sacrifi ce,the July 4 barbecue, the four-star restaurant—cooking has traditionallybeen women’s work, part and parcel of homemaking and childcare, and therefore undeserving of serious—i.e., male—attention.But there may be another reason cooking has not received itsproper due. In a recent book called The Taste for Civilization, Janet A.Flammang, a feminist scholar and political scientist who has arguedeloquently for the social and political importance of “food work,”suggests the problem may have something to do with food itself,which by its very nature falls on the wrong side—the feminine side—of the mind-body dualism in Western culture.“Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell, andtaste,” she points out, “which rank lower on the hierarchy of sensesthan sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise toknowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food isassociated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilizedmen have sought to overcome with knowledge and reason.”Very much to their loss.II.The premise of this book is that cooking—defi ned broadly enoughto take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have devisedfor transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealingthings for us to eat and drink—is one of the most interesting andworthwhile things we humans do. This is not something I fully appreciatedbefore I set out to learn how to cook. But after three yearsspent working under a succession of gifted teachers to master four ofthe key transformations we call cooking—grilling with fi re, cookingwith liquid, baking bread, and fermenting all sorts of things—I cameaway with a very different body of knowledge from the one I wentlooking for. Yes, by the end of my education I got pretty good at makinga few things—I’m especially proud of my bread and some of mybraises. But I also learned things about the natural world (and ourimplication in it) that I don’t think I could have learned in any otherway. I learned far more than I ever expected to about the nature ofwork, the meaning of health, about tradition and ritual, self-relianceand community, the rhythms of everyday life, and the supreme satisfactionof producing something I previously could only have imaginedconsuming, doing it outside of the cash economy for no otherreason but love.This book is the story of my education in the kitchen—but also inthe bakery, the dairy, the brewery, and the restaurant kitchen, someof the places where much of our culture’s cooking now takes place.Cooked is divided into four parts, one for each of the great transformationsof nature into culture we call cooking. Each of these, I wassurprised and pleased to discover, corresponds to, and depends upon,one of the classical elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.Why this should be so I am not entirely sure. But for thousands ofyears and in many different cultures, these elements have been regardedas the four irreducible, indestructible ingredients that make upthe natural world. Certainly they still loom large in our imagination.The fact that modern science has dismissed the classical elements,reducing them to still more elemental substances and forces—waterto molecules of hydrogen and oxygen; fi re to a process of rapid oxidation,etc.—hasn’t really changed our lived experience of nature or theway we imagine it. Science may have replaced the big four with aperiodic table of 118 elements, and then reduced each of those to evertinierparticles, but our senses and our dreams have yet to get thenews.To learn to cook is to put yourself on intimate terms with the lawsof physics and chemistry, as well as the facts of biology and microbiology.Yet, beginning with fi re, I found that the older, prescientifi celements fi gure largely—hugely, in fact—in apprehending the maintransformations that comprise cooking, each in its own way. Eachelement proposes a different set of techniques for transforming nature,but also a different stance toward the world, a different kind ofwork, and a different mood.Fire being the fi rst element (in cooking anyway), I began my educationwith it, exploring the most basic and earliest kind of cookery:meat, on the grill. My quest to learn the art of cooking with fi retook me a long way from my backyard grill, to the barbecue pits andpit masters of eastern North Carolina, where cooking meat still meansa whole pig roasted very slowly over a smoldering wood fi re. It washere, training under an accomplished and fl amboyant pit master, thatI got acquainted with cooking’s primary colors—animal, wood, fi re,time—and found a clearly marked path deep into the prehistory ofcooking: what fi rst drove our protohuman ancestors to gather aroundthe cook fi re, and how that experience transformed them. Killing andcooking a large animal has never been anything but an emotionallyfreighted and spiritually charged endeavor. Rituals of sacrifi ce haveattended this sort of cooking from the beginning, and I found theirechoes reverberating even today, in twenty-fi rst-century barbecue.Then as now, the mood in fi re cooking is heroic, masculine, theatrical,boastful, unironic, and faintly (sometimes not so faintly) ridiculous.It is in fact everything that cooking with water, the subject ofpart II, is not. Historically, cooking with water comes after cookingwith fi re, since it awaited the invention of pots to cook in, an artifactof human culture only about ten thousand years old. Now cookingmoves indoors, into the domestic realm, and in this chapter I delveinto everyday home cookery, its techniques and satisfactions as wellas its discontents. Befi tting its subject, this section takes the shape of asingle long recipe, unfolding step by step the age-old techniques thatgrandmothers developed for teasing delicious food from the mostordinary of ingredients: some aromatic plants, a little fat, a few scrapsof meat, a long afternoon around the house. Here, too, I apprenticedmyself to a fl amboyant professional character, but she and I did mostof our cooking at home in my kitchen, and often as a family—homeand family being very much the subject of this section.Part III takes up the element of air, which is all that distinguishesan exuberantly leavened loaf of bread from a sad gruel of pulverizedgrain. By fi guring out how to coax air into our food, we elevate it andourselves, transcending, and vastly improving, what nature gives usin a handful of grass seed. The story of Western civilization is prettymuch the story of bread, which is arguably the fi rst important “foodprocessing” technology. (The counterargument comes from the brewersof beer, who may have gotten there fi rst.) This section, whichtakes place in several different bakeries across the country (includinga Wonder Bread plant), follows two personal quests: to bake a perfect,maximally airy and wholesome loaf of bread, and to pinpoint theprecise historical moment that cooking took its fatefully wrong turn:when civilization began processing food in such a way as to make itless nutritious rather than more.Different as they are, these fi rst three modes of cooking all dependon heat. Not so the fourth. Like the earth itself, the various arts offermentation rely instead on biology to transform organic matter fromone state to a more interesting and nutritious other state. Here I encounteredthe most amazing alchemies of all: strong, allusive fl avorsand powerful intoxicants created for us by fungi and bacteria—manyof them the denizens of the soil—as they go about their invisible workof creative destruction. This section falls into three chapters, coveringthe fermentation of vegetables (into sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles of allkinds); milk (into cheese); and alcohol (into mead and beer). Alongthe way, a succession of “fermentos” tutored me in the techniques ofartfully managing rot, the folly of the modern war against bacteria,the erotics of disgust, and the somewhat upside-down notion that,while we were fermenting alcohol, alcohol has been fermenting us.I have been fortunate in both the talent and the generosity of theteachers who agreed to take me in—the cooks, bakers, brewers, picklers,and cheese makers who shared their time and techniques andrecipes. This cast of characters turned out to be a lot more masculinethan I would have expected, and a reader might conclude that I haveindulged in some unfortunate typecasting. But as soon as I opted toapprentice myself to professional rather than amateur cooks—in thehopes of acquiring the most rigorous training I could get—it wasprobably inevitable that certain stereotypes would be reinforced. Itturns out that barbecue pit masters are almost exclusively men, asare brewers and bakers (except for pastry chefs), and a remarkablenumber of cheese makers are women. In learning to cook traditionalpot dishes, I chose to work with a female chef, and if by doing so Iunderscored the cliché that home cooking is woman’s work, that wassort of the idea: I wanted to delve into that very question. We canhope that all the gender stereotypes surrounding food and cookingwill soon be thrown up for grabs, but to assume that has already happenedwould be to kid ourselves.Taken as a whole, this is a “how-to” book, but of a very particularkind. Each section circles around a single elemental recipe—for barbecue,for a braise, for bread, and for a small handful of fermenteditems—and by the end of it, you should be well enough equipped tomake it. (The recipes are spelled out more concisely in the appendix,in case you do want to try any of them.) Though all the cooking Idescribe can be done in a home kitchen, only a portion of the bookdeals directly with the kind of work most people regard as “homecooking.” Several of the recipes here are for things most readers willprobably never make themselves—beer, for example, or cheese, oreven bread. Though I hope that they will. Because I discovered therewas much to learn from attempting, even if only just once, thesemore ambitious and time-consuming forms of cookery, knowledgethat might not at fi rst seem terribly useful but in fact changes everythingabout one’s relationship to food and what is possible in thekitchen. Let me try to explain.At bottom cooking is not a single process but, rather, comprises asmall set of technologies, some of the most important humans haveyet devised. They changed us fi rst as a species, and then at the level ofthe group, the family, and the individual. These technologies rangefrom the controlled used of fi re to the manipulation of specifi c microorganismsto transform grain into bread or alcohol all the way to themicrowave oven—the last major innovation. So cooking is really acontinuum of processes, from simple to complex, and Cooked is, amongother things, a natural and social history of these transformations,both the ones that are still part of our everyday lives and the onesthat are not. Today, we’re apt to think of making cheese or brewingbeer as “extreme” forms of cookery, only because so few of us haveever attempted them, but of course at one time all these transformationstook place in the household and everyone had at least a rudimentaryknowledge of how to perform them. Nowadays, only a smallhandful of cooking’s technologies seem within the reach of our competence.This represents not only a loss of knowledge, but a loss of akind of power, too. And it is entirely possible that, within anothergeneration, cooking a meal from scratch will seem as exotic andambitious—as “extreme”—as most of us today regard brewing beeror baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crock of sauerkraut.When that happens—when we no longer have any direct personalknowledge of how these wonderful creations are made—food willhave become completely abstracted from its various contexts: fromthe labor of human hands, from the natural world of plants and animals,from imagination and culture and community. Indeed, food isalready well on its way into that ether of abstraction, toward becomingmere fuel or pure image. So how might we begin to bring it backto earth?My wager in Cooked is that the best way to recover the reality offood, to return it to its proper place in ours lives, is by attempting tomaster the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.The good news is that this is still within our reach, no matter howlimited our skills in the kitchen. My own apprenticeship necessitateda journey far beyond my own kitchen (and comfort zone), to someof the farther reaches of cookery, in the hopes of confronting the essentialfacts of the matter, and discovering exactly what it is aboutthese transformations that helped make us who we are. But perhapsmy happiest discovery was that the wonders of cooking, even its mostambitious manifestations, rely on a magic that remains accessible toall of us, at home.I should add that the journey has been great fun, probably themost fun I’ve ever had while still ostensibly “working.” What is moregratifying, after all, than discovering you can actually make somethingdelicious (or intoxicating) that you simply assumed you’d alwayshave to buy in the marketplace? Or fi nding yourself in thatsweet spot where the frontier between work and play disappears ina cloud of bread fl our or fragrant steam rising from a boiling kettleof wort?Even in the case of the seemingly most impractical cooking adventures,I learned things of an unexpectedly practical value. After you’vetried your hand at brewing or pickling or slow roasting a whole hog,everyday home cooking becomes much less daunting, and in certainways easier. My own backyard barbecuing has been informed andimproved by my hours hanging around the barbecue pit. Workingwith bread dough has taught me how to trust my hands and my sensesin the kitchen, and to have enough confi dence in their reporting tofree me from the bonds of recipe and measuring cup. And havingspent time in the bakeries of artisans as well as in a Wonder Breadfactory, my appreciation for a good loaf of bread has grown muchmore keen. Same for a wedge of cheese or bottle of beer: What hadalways been just products, good or bad, now reveal themselves as somuch more than that—as achievements, as expressions, as relationships.By itself, this added increment of eating and drinking pleasurewould have been enough to justify all the so-called work.But perhaps the most important thing I learned by doing this workis how cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and ecologicalrelationships: with plants and animals, with the soil, with farmers,with the microbes both inside and outside our bodies, and, ofcourse, with the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Above allelse, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking connects.Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us inthe world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one sideand the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely betweennature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation.Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And inthe process, I discovered, so is the cook.\III.As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that,much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbingwithout being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty ofmental space for daydreaming and refl ection. One of the things I reflected on is the whole question of taking on what in our time hasbecome, strictly speaking, optional, even unnecessary work, work forwhich I am not particularly gifted or qualifi ed, and at which I maynever get very good. This is, in the modern world, the unspokenquestion that hovers over all our cooking: Why bother?By any purely rational calculation, even everyday home cooking(much less baking bread or fermenting kimchi) is probably not a wiseuse of my time. Not long ago, I read an Op Ed piece in The Wall StreetJournal about the restaurant industry, written by the couple that publishesthe Zagat restaurant guides, which took exactly this line. Ratherthan coming home after work to cook, the Zagats suggested, “peoplewould be better off staying an extra hour in the offi ce doing whatthey do well, and letting bargain restaurants do what they do best.”Here in a nutshell is the classic argument for the division of labor,which, as Adam Smith and countless others have pointed out, hasgiven us many of the blessings of civilization. It is what allows me tomake a living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow myfood, sew my clothes, and supply the energy that lights and heats myhouse. I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teachingthan I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization isundeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is alsodebilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and,eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers ofone thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the restof the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporaryrole of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desireswe delegate to specialists of one kind or another—our meals to thefood industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment toHollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drugcompany, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action tothe politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hardto imagine doing much of anything for ourselves—anything, that is,except the work we do “to make a living.” For everything else, we feellike we’ve lost the skills, or that there’s someone who can do it better.(I recently heard about an agency that will dispatch a sympatheticsomeone to visit your elderly parents if you can’t spare the time to doit yourself.) It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone buta professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needsor solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, muchto the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do allthis work for us.One problem with the division of labor in our complex economyis how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility,between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences.Specialization makes it easy to forget about the fi lth of the coal-fi redpower plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreakinglabor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or themisery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon.Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on ourbehalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers apowerful corrective to this way of being in the world—a correctivethat is still available to all of us. To butcher a pork shoulder is to beforcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, madeup of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart fromfeeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story ofthe hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen.In my hands its fl esh feels a little less like the product of industry thanof nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow thegreens I’m serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem togrow back almost as fast as I can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’sabundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light areturned into delicious things to eat.Handling these plants and animals, taking back the productionand the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutaryeffect of making visible again many of the lines of connectionthat the supermarket and the “home-meal replacement” have succeededin obscuring, yet of course never actually eliminated. To do sois to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the veryleast, a little less glib in one’s pronouncements.Especially one’s pronouncements about “the environment,” whichsuddenly begins to seem a little less “out there” and a lot closer tohome. For what is the environmental crisis if not a crisis of the waywe live? The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum totalof countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumerspending represents nearly three-quarters of the U.S. economy)and the rest of them made by others in the name of our needs anddesires. If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character,as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970s, then sooner or laterit will have to be addressed at that level—at home, as it were. In ouryards and kitchens and minds.As soon as you start down this path of thinking, the quotidianspace of the kitchen appears in a startling new light. It begins to mattermore than we ever imagined. The unspoken reason why politicalreformers from Vladimir Lenin to Betty Friedan sought to get womenout of the kitchen was that nothing of importance—nothing worthyof their talents and intelligence and convictions—took place there.The only worthy arenas for consequential action were the workplaceand the public square. But this was before the environmental crisishad come into view, and before the industrialization of our eatingcreated a crisis in our health. Changing the world will always requireaction and participation in the public realm, but in our time that willno longer be suffi cient. We’ll have to change the way we live, too.What that means is that the sites of our everyday engagement withnature—our kitchens, gardens, houses, cars—matter to the fate of theworld in a way they never have before.To cook or not to cook thus becomes a consequential question.Though I realize that is putting the matter a bit too bluntly. Cookingmeans different things at different times to different people; seldomis it an all-or-nothing proposition. Yet even to cook a few more nightsa week than you already do, or to devote a Sunday to making a fewmeals for the week, or perhaps to try every now and again to makesomething you only ever expected to buy—even these modest actswill constitute a kind of a vote. A vote for what, exactly? Well, in aworld where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to chooseto do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against the totalrationalization of life. Against the infi ltration of commercial interestsinto every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, todevote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independencefrom the corporations seeking to organize our every waking momentinto yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, ournonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitatingnotion that, at least while we’re at home, production is workbest done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure isconsumption. This dependence marketers call “freedom.”Cooking has the power to transform more than plants and animals:It transforms us, too, from mere consumers into producers. Notcompletely, not all the time, but I have found that even to shift theratio between these two identities a few degrees toward the side ofproduction yields deep and unexpected satisfactions. Cooked is an invitationto alter, however slightly, the ratio between production andconsumption in your life. The regular exercise of these simple skillsfor producing some of the necessities of life increases self-relianceand freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations.Not just our money but our power fl ows toward them whenever wecannot supply any of our everyday needs and desires ourselves. Andit begins to fl ow back toward us, and our community, as soon as wedecide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves. This hasbeen an early lesson of the rising movement to rebuild local foodeconomies, a movement that ultimately depends for its success on ourwillingness to put more thought and effort into feeding ourselves.Not every day, not every meal—but more often than we do, wheneverwe can.Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity, so rare in modern life,to work directly in our own support, and in the support of the peoplewe feed. If this is not “making a living,” I don’t know what is. In thecalculus of economics, doing so may not always be the most effi cientuse of an amateur cook’s time, but in the calculus of human emotion,it is beautiful even so. For is there any practice less selfi sh, any laborless alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something deliciousand nourishing for people you love?So let’s begin.