Pollan’s Unpalatable Recipe for Cooked

[This version is an extended version from what appears in print]

In his book Cooked, A Natural History of Transformation, author Michael Pollan sets out “to pinpoint the precise historical moment that cooking took its  fatefully wrong turn: when civilization began processing food in such a way as to  make it less nutritious rather than more,” and as anticipated in In Defense of Food, “the sharpest and clearest line would be the advent of pure white flour …” Cooked is an anti-science, anti-modern polemic and a rehash of arguments Pollan put forth in his “eater’s manifesto,” though in a more enjoyable narrative form.

Pollan’s attack on “modern,” “Western” or “reductionist” science begins in the  introduction. “Science may have replaced the big four [elements: fire, water, air, earth] with a periodic table of 118 elements, … but our senses and our dreams have yet to get the news.” For Pollan, “food scientists” are nameless and faceless, locked away in corporations, intent on “simulating real food.”

Pollan contends that “[c]orporations cook very differently from how people do …” “They tend to use much more sugar, fat and salt than people cooking for people.” Ironically, copious amounts of salt and fat find their way into Pollan’s  barbeque, “the mixture that really made the dish extraordinary: a tidy, brittle, irreducible packet of salt, fat and wood smoke.” “They … didn’t want to wait for us to serve it.” “[W]e were in a position to give them what they craved …”

Pollan apparently doesn’t see any irony in his use of dashi, a solution of monosodium glutamate (MSG) prepared by soaking kombu, “one of the richest sources of glutamate in nature … it wears a cloak of white salt that is basically monosodium glutamate” and the food scientists’ use of hydrolyzed vegetable protein, “an ingredient-label euphemism for monosodium glutamate (MSG) —basically a cheap way to boost the perception of umami.” Nor in his quest to “bake a better loaf of whole grain bread” (i.e., one more aesthetically like white bread), when he “sifted the chunkiest bran out of the flour” and added it back to his loaf, since “[e]very last bit of whole grain was somewhere in this triumphant voluminous loaf.”

“Cooking sets us apart, helps us to mark and patrol the borders between ourselves and nature’s other creatures …” But we went too far. Unlike the noble savage, modern man began “processing” food. Among the worst evils of food scientists Pollan writes, “[t]hey have always assumed they understood biology well enough to improve on the ‘unsophisticated foods of Nature,’ by taking them apart and then putting them back together again.” Separation and recombination. It sounds a lot like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “secondary imagination,” the faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” that Pollan links with “the necessary prelude to creating something new.”

Though “Earth” is perhaps the most original section of the book and the one most reliant on modern scientific information, Pollan’s discussion of fermentation, the  hygiene hypothesis and the human microbiome lacks any real depth of  understanding. Pollan relates the story of Sister Noëlla and her raw milk cheese.  It seems that the “cheese nun” made two batches, one in her wooden barrel that  harbored her cheese culture and one in a stainless steel vat, each inoculated with E coli. Pollan says, “[t]hat what happened next was, at least to a Pasteurian, utterly baffling: The cheese that had been started in the sterile vat had high levels of E. Coli, and the cheese made in the wooden barrel had next to none.” [Emphasis added.] I don't know who these confused Pasteurians are, but any respectable food scientist would not have been baffled. Of course milk inoculated with a sufficient “starter culture” could be expected to inhibit the E coli. What is more troubling here is that “next to none” can still be lethal (e.g., <10 for E. coli O157:H7).

Pollan claims the “hygiene hypothesis” is now widely accepted, perhaps so, but it is still far from understood. He reduces a complex idea to “children need to be exposed to more bacteria, not fewer.” He describes, without irony, that “[m]ead and beer and wine were safer to drink than water, since the alcohol in these drinks (and the fact that they were boiled) killed off any pathogens in the water.” What I’ve italicized in the preceding sentence could be used as a definition of pasteurization, a process Pollan roundly criticizes. He goes on to say, “[t]o read him [food scientist Keith Steinkraus] is also to worry about the survival of this biocultural diversity [the microbiota], since the industrialization of the world's food strongly favors both homogenization and sterilization.” I can only assume that Pollan has not read Keith Steinkraus's book Industrialization of Indigenous Fermented Foods, Revised and Expanded.

--- PAGE BREAK ---

On one point Pollan and I agree, “[i]f we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little of them as we possibly can ...” Pollan would likely class “krab” among the “foodlike substances” that food scientists concoct. Artificial crabmeat is made from less desirable species of whitefish, and its industrial production has significantly reduced the waste of by-catch. For environmentally-conscious consumers, “krab” may be the more sustainable, greener choice. Prior to 1970, cheesemakers dumped their whey into streams and rivers. With the introduction of the Clean Water Act of 1972, food scientists began recovering the solids from the whey. Originally incorporated into animal feed, they became food ingredients as technology for separation and purification of the milk sugar and proteins improved. Food technologists now incorporate edible whey and high-quality whey proteins in numerous products.

In the last two paragraphs of Cooked, we find out that food scientists go about their work devoid of … love. “Tongue taste is the kind of easy, accessible flavor that any food scientist or manufacturer can reliably produce in order to make food appealing …,” Pollan quotes Hyeon Hee as saying [emphasis mine]. “Hand taste, however, involves something greater than mere flavor … Hand taste cannot be faked.” And “[w]hat hand taste is, [Pollan] understood all at once, is the taste of love.”

Pollan asks, “[f]or what has modern food science given us that can compare [to fermentation]?” Anthropologists recently concluded that European settlers of the Jamestown Colony cannibalized “Jane,” a 14-year-old English girl, in an attempt to survive “the starving time.” “The extensive chop marks on the bones and their location among other food waste led anthropologists to conclude that Jane’s facial muscles, tongue, and brain were eaten by the starving colonists …” Why should this be? The colonists had roasting (fire), braising (water), baking (air), and fermentation (earth). What they didn’t have was canning, freezing, packaging, etc., that is, the modern food system.

Science is still a nascent human activity. It has provided rich explanations for many of life’s quandaries but it still has a way to go to deal with the complexity of food and the food system. In The Curious Cook, author Harold McGee concludes that “add-a-vegetable optimism is built on shaky foundations …” and that “cooking is in some ways still a primitive craft, and that we might benefit from a greater awareness of and control over its chemical consequences.” In Waste, Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, author Tristram Stuart suggests we “[f]und research and development in food technology to extract maximum value from food by-products and co-products” so as to reduce waste. We need more and better food science, not less.

To the extent that the criticism of our profession is accurate, especially that we do what we do merely for profit, food scientists and technologists must take stock. To the extent that the criticism is in error, we must engage in the discourse, otherwise we leave the field open to those who have little understanding of and perhaps less respect for the contributions science has made to our quality of life.

Gregory R. Ziegler, Ph.D., a Professional Member of IFT, is Professor of Food Science,
Penn State University ([email protected]).