Home cooking is extremely important for health and it can change your life. This is the message Michael Pollan gives in the above lecture as he is presents the book Cooked: A natural history of transformation launched earlier this year.
We have linked to this video in our weekly reads but felt that the message was so important that it would be good to summarise it for people who might not have 20 minutes to watch it.
He speaks about fast food companies and notes that when you let fast food companies cook your food, you end up with vast monocultures of soya, corn and animals. The reason for this is that fast food companies and food processors push to drive the costs down relentlessly by forcing economies of scale and efficiency.
Pollan gives the experience of Mcdonalds and their french fries. He says that they use a potato which is unusually long and difficult to grow. If it has blemishes they will not buy it. This forces farmers to use pesticides. Pollen says that the pesticide that is used is so toxic that farmers will not venture into the fields for five days after they spray the potatoes. Later, when they harvest the potatoes, these have to be put in atmosphere-controlled sheds the size of a football stadium for six weeks before they become edible.
The American journalist and author said that what mattered most about healthy eating was not nutrients (whether good or bad) but rather the fact that it was cooked by a human being and not a corporation. He said corporations use vast amount of salt, fat and sugar. “Layered properly these ingredients are incredibly addictive. But corporations do not talk about addiction but rather about craveability and snackability.”
Pollan says that research in the US shows that even poor women who cook have healthier diets than wealthy women who don’t. “This is a really important fact,” he says.
He says home cooking has been in decline since 1960s. And it is no coincidence that as rates of home cooking decline, rates of obesity goes up.
Pollan notes that corporations using marketing have brainwashed people into thinking that cooking is drudgery. “We are daunted about cooking. The marketing messages implicitly tell us that we are too busy to cook and too important. You are depicted as a loser if you have time to cook. This is how marketing works. You create an anxiety and then sell a solution.”
He says that fast food has made what was eaten occasionally a daily habit. The chips which the fast food chains make are done extremely well. “This is a case of a classic food which is a pain to make. If you make it yourself, you need to wash the potatoes, peel them, slice them, fry them in a lot of oil, splatter the stove top and then get rid of the oil in the pot. The result is wonderful but its a pain. Because it is difficult to make, you might eat it once every six weeks or two months because it is too much work. Instead you end up eating them once or twice a day. The same goes with labour intensive foods such as desserts”
Pollan quotes a food marketing consultant who says that cooking in the next generation will be regarded as quaintly as quilt-making in ours. But despite the fact that he works with corporations he told Pollan that to get rid of obesity and type 2 diabetes you should eat anything you want but just cook it yourself. There is real wisdom in this.