Reflections on "Cooked" by Michael Pollan
Mind blown!
This is what happens when I read Michael Pollan's books. I'm agog at the complexity and absurdity of food politics. And how far gone we've gone from what we SHOULD be eating.
Guys, it's just logic that because our diet has changed drastically in the last 100 years that diseases like diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart attacks, obesity have jumped in that time. How could it not? Our bodies were not made to handle the food products we're stuffing into it.
This last week I've been listening to his latest, "Cooked," in the car and I'm again totally blown away. Here are my new food obsessions and a few cool tidbits I found fascinating from the book.
Hello live culture foods!! With the onslaught of antibiotics -- in medicine and being sprayed on our foods and injected into our livestock, we're killing all the good bacteria that live in our guts. And it's those little bugs in our tummy that keep us healthy. Especially our kiddos. I make fresh-homemade yogurt, but fermented veggies have so many more highly-valuable cultures that are soo beneficial. So, I ordered a book about pickling and canning. Sounds pretty easy-peasy. But taste? More on that later.
I'm really starting to think about bread and baking our own. The research about white-flour politics and how modern mills cleaved off anything nutritional from conventional wheat was shocking. What is in our bread?! This makes me think about all the food I could make myself -- more healthfully -- instead of buying. I'll put that in another post.
And isn't if funny that as a culture, we now spend way less time cooking than in any point in history BUT we spend a lot of time watching other people cook? There seems to be, as a whole, little confidence in our own ability to cook. And even less desire to spend time in the kitchen. Funny.
Overall, I really appreciate the way Pollan writes. He's not a scientist, he's a journalist, so the huge packages of information are easy to digest and understand. He's done is homework and this book especially is full of quotes from experts in a range of fields. Plus, his own experience trying to bake bread or ferment beer, etc., gave context to my own desires to try to do something new.
Seriously, read it.
This is what happens when I read Michael Pollan's books. I'm agog at the complexity and absurdity of food politics. And how far gone we've gone from what we SHOULD be eating.
This last week I've been listening to his latest, "Cooked," in the car and I'm again totally blown away. Here are my new food obsessions and a few cool tidbits I found fascinating from the book.
Hello live culture foods!! With the onslaught of antibiotics -- in medicine and being sprayed on our foods and injected into our livestock, we're killing all the good bacteria that live in our guts. And it's those little bugs in our tummy that keep us healthy. Especially our kiddos. I make fresh-homemade yogurt, but fermented veggies have so many more highly-valuable cultures that are soo beneficial. So, I ordered a book about pickling and canning. Sounds pretty easy-peasy. But taste? More on that later.
I'm really starting to think about bread and baking our own. The research about white-flour politics and how modern mills cleaved off anything nutritional from conventional wheat was shocking. What is in our bread?! This makes me think about all the food I could make myself -- more healthfully -- instead of buying. I'll put that in another post.
And isn't if funny that as a culture, we now spend way less time cooking than in any point in history BUT we spend a lot of time watching other people cook? There seems to be, as a whole, little confidence in our own ability to cook. And even less desire to spend time in the kitchen. Funny.
Overall, I really appreciate the way Pollan writes. He's not a scientist, he's a journalist, so the huge packages of information are easy to digest and understand. He's done is homework and this book especially is full of quotes from experts in a range of fields. Plus, his own experience trying to bake bread or ferment beer, etc., gave context to my own desires to try to do something new.
Seriously, read it.
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