Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (4 page)

Even in the case of the seemingly most
impractical cooking adventures, I learned things of an unexpectedly practical value.
After you’ve tried your hand at brewing or pickling or slow roasting a whole hog,
everyday home cooking becomes much less daunting, and in certain ways easier. My own
backyard barbecuing has been informed and improved by my hours hanging around the
barbecue pit. Working with bread dough has taught me how to trust my hands and my senses
in the kitchen, and to have enough confidence in their reporting to free me from the
bonds of recipe and measuring cup. And having spent time in the bakeries of artisans as
well as in a Wonder Bread factory, my appreciation for a good loaf of bread has grown
much more keen. Same for a wedge of cheese or bottle of beer: What had always been just
products, good or bad, now reveal themselves as so much more than that—as achievements,
as expressions, as relationships. By itself, this added increment of eating and drinking
pleasure would have been enough to justify all the so-called work.

But perhaps the most important thing I
learned by doing this work is how cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and
ecological relationships: with plants and animals, with the soil, with farmers, with the
microbes both inside and outside our bodies, and, of course, with the people our cooking
nourishes and delights. Above all else, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking
connects.

Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or
extreme—situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on
one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and
culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture
are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the
kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably
absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space
for daydreaming and reflection. One of the things I reflected on is the whole question
of taking on what in our time has become, strictly speaking, optional, even unnecessary
work, work for which I am not particularly gifted or qualified, and at which I may never
get very good. This is, in the modern world, the unspoken question 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
wise use of my time. Not long ago, I read an Op Ed piece in
The
Wall Street Journal
about the restaurant industry, written by the couple that
publishes the Zagat restaurant guides, which took exactly this line. Rather than coming
home after work to cook, the Zagats suggested, “people would be better off staying
an extra hour in the office doing what they 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,
has given us many of the blessings of civilization. It is what allows me to make a
living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow my food, sew my clothes, and
supply the energy that lights and heats my house. I can probably earn more in an hour of
writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is
undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. 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 of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all
the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of
citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists
of one kind or another—our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical
profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or
the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the
politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of
anything for ourselves—anything, that is, except the work we do “to make a
living.” For everything else, we feel like 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 sympathetic someone to visit your elderly parents if you can’t spare
the time to do it yourself.) It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a
professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our
problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the
corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us.

One problem with the division of labor in
our complex economy is 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 filth of the coal-fired power plant
that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to
pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I
could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on
our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.

Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is
that it offers a powerful corrective to this way of being in the world—a corrective that
is still available to all of us. To butcher a pork shoulder is to be
forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct
groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a
keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to
my kitchen. In my hands its flesh feels a little less like the product of industry than
of nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow the greens I’m
serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem to grow back almost as fast as I
can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’s abundance, the everyday miracle by
which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat.

Handling these plants and animals, taking
back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the
salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the
supermarket and the “home-meal replacement” have succeeded in obscuring, yet
of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of
responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one’s
pronouncements.

Especially one’s pronouncements about
“the environment,” which suddenly begins to seem a little less “out
there” and a lot closer to home. For what is the environmental crisis if not a
crisis of the way we live? The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of
countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents
nearly three-quarters of the U.S. economy) and the rest of them made by others in the
name of our needs and desires. If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of
character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970s, then sooner or later it will
have to be addressed at that level—at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and
minds.

As soon as you start down this path of
thinking, the quotidian space of the kitchen appears in a startling new light. It begins
to matter more than we ever imagined. The unspoken reason why political
reformers from Vladimir Lenin to Betty Friedan sought to get women out of the kitchen
was that nothing of importance—nothing worthy of their talents and intelligence and
convictions—took place there. The only worthy arenas for consequential action were the
workplace and the public square. But this was before the environmental crisis had come
into view, and before the industrialization of our eating created a crisis in our
health. Changing the world will always require action and participation in the public
realm, but in our time that will no longer be sufficient. We’ll have to change the
way we live, too. What that means is that the sites of our everyday engagement with
nature—our kitchens, gardens, houses, cars—matter to the fate of the world 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.
Cooking means different things at different times to different people; seldom is it an
all-or-nothing proposition. Yet even to cook a few more nights a week than you already
do, or to devote a Sunday to making a few meals for the week, or perhaps to try every
now and again to make something you only ever expected to buy—even these modest acts
will constitute a kind of a vote. A vote for what, exactly? Well, in a world where so
few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest
against specialization—against the total rationalization of life. Against the
infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for
the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our
independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet
another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well:
Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while
we’re at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only
legitimate form of leisure is consumption. 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. Not
completely, not all the time, but I have found that even to shift the ratio between
these two identities a few degrees toward the side of production yields deep and
unexpected satisfactions.
Cooked
is an invitation to alter, however slightly,
the ratio between production and consumption in your life. The regular exercise of these
simple skills for producing some of the necessities of life increases self-reliance and
freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations. Not just our money but
our power flows toward them whenever we cannot supply any of our everyday needs and
desires ourselves. And it begins to flow back toward us, and our community, as soon as
we decide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves. This has been an early
lesson of the rising movement to rebuild local food economies, a movement that
ultimately depends for its success on our willingness to put more thought and effort
into feeding ourselves. Not every day, not every meal—but more often than we do,
whenever we 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
people we feed. If this is not “making a living,” I don’t know what
is. In the calculus of economics, doing so may not always be the most efficient use of
an amateur cook’s time, but in the calculus of human emotion, it is beautiful even
so. For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less
wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

So let’s begin.

At the beginning, with fire.

The divine scent of wood smoke and roasting
pig finds you as soon as you make the turn onto South Lee Street, the main artery
threading this faded little town, even though the GPS says its source is still half a
mile away. For a Wednesday afternoon in May, an impressive number of adults—some white,
more black—are doing front-porch duty along Lee Street, sipping amber liquids that might
be tea. Why Ayden has faded so is not hard to guess. The town is an hour off the
interstate, on the way to not much of anywhere. The national chains set out their big
boxes a dozen miles to the north, in Greenville, draining the economic life from
Ayden’s downtown, much of which stands shuttered. Ayden once supported three
barbecue joints; now there is one, though its fame has spread far enough to lure a few
hungry travelers off the interstate every day. The agriculture that used to nourish the
town’s economy has suffered both the decline of tobacco (only the occasional
emerald acre of it survives amid the paler fields of corn) and the rise of
CAFOs—“Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.”
The coastal
plain of North Carolina is one of the sacrifice zones that Big Hog has consecrated to
industrial pork production, a business that shrinks the number of farmers in a region
even as it massively expands the population of pigs. Long before I registered the
pheromone of barbecue, occasional passages of less winning animal odors assailed my
nostrils as I navigated the gray roads leading into Ayden.