Americans spend more time watching televised cooking shows than actually cooking. “We’ve managed to turn cooking into a spectator sport,” said best-selling author Michael Pollan. Plus, wouldn’t you know, “the less we cook, the fatter we are.” While Pollan’s visit to Queens University Thursday night was thoroughly entertaining, such depressing truths sprinkled throughout made the food star’s talk pretty scary, too.
The way Pollan writes, food is history and culture, as well agriculture; cooking is therapeutic, a political act. If “the family dinner table is the nursery of democracy,” he said, grabbing fast food on the run really could be the decline of civilization we suspected all along. Pollan explores where what we put in our stomachs really comes from, something that would have been obvious 75 years ago, he said, but now results in such revelatory New York Times best-sellers as The Omnivore’s Dilemma,The Botany of Desire and Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.
After his description of a vast, industrialized potato farm with machines spewing toxic insecticides just so those fried spuds sprouting from bright cartons remain unblemished, you immediately vow to start digging out a patch of dirt or trolling farmers markets. “If you grow vegetables, you will cook them; you will feel guilty if you don’t,” he said – even though you might have to learn to use more than the microwave.
So it was a relief to hear Pollan bring the discussion close to home.
