Michael Pollan: "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation" | Talks at Google

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KAREN MAY: I'm Karen May.
I lead people development here at Google,
and have the honor today, as you enjoy delicious food,
of introducing Michael Pollan to all of you.
Michael-- he doesn't know this yet,
but his work has changed my household.
Because we say to each other, "Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly grains.
Mostly plants."
So we use our food rules quite regularly.
And I think, for many of us, Michael's work
directly and indirectly has changed our households
for the better.
One of Michael's rules that many of you
know-- since you're here, I'll assume you know--
is to not eat food that your grandmother wouldn't recognize
as food.
And I understand that's been revised
to great- great- grandmother, depending on how old you are.
You have to continue to revise that every 20 years or so.
And based on when refined sugar was introduced.
But we do, also in my household, tease each other--
would your grandmother recognize that?
Put that down!
Grandma wouldn't recognize that.
So I think you've made-- you've raised consciousness
around the world, in a way that I don't know if you know
the full extent of the personal impact.
But it's quite lovely.
And I'm pleased-- this is not Michael's first time here,
but pleased to welcome him back to our talks
at Google series, multi-year series, and to have you here.
Michael's work, as many of you know well,
the body of work preceding the current book, "Cooked,"
really takes us through kind of a look at industrialized food,
if you will.
And Michael tackles agribusiness, and throws
devastating criticism at processed food.
And I sort of see you, as I experience your work,
as one part writer, one part historian, and one part
social activist.
There's probably another part, nutritionist, and then
another part, sort of curious learner in there
as well, if I put my development hat on.
But all of that comes together to create
a very accessible body of work that's
both thought-provoking and behavior-changing.
So, in this current book, "Cooked," Michael sort
of tackles, literally, the art of cooking and helps us
see cooking not only as from kind
of a social-historical perspective,
but also about what happens as you bring ingredients together,
and the impact on society, on environment,
on families, as well as the impact
on general kind of social connectivity.
So I think we take something as potentially
simple and unidimensional as heating food in fire,
and turning it into something that
infuses the social fabric in which we live.
So it's very exciting.
I am very fortunate to be loved by two great cooks, my mother
and my husband.
I am very fortunate.
And in reading "Cooked," I developed
a deeper understanding of some of their passion,
and where that might come from, as well as
appreciation for the gift that they give to me.
So, on behalf of the Googlers here and watching us virtually,
welcome to Google and thank you.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Thank you, Karen.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I think this is my fourth visit.
And the last time I was here it was
because there had been a program to give out
copies of "Food Rules."
I don't know if any of you were--
there's a lucky recipient.
And I see it's had an impact.
You all look very svelte and healthy.
So it works.
Very glad to see that.
And I'm also glad to see people eating at an event about food,
despite the sign as we entered that said,
No Eating In This Room.
But, honored in the breach.
What I'd like to do is first try to tell you
a little bit about this project I've
been on for the last couple years, which was mastering--
that's a strong word-- the art of cooking,
and the transformations that we call cooking.
But first I want to start by putting it
in the context of other books of mine,
and of the journey that I've been
on since I started coming here, really.
And that is, following the food chain.
I mean, that's the story of my work over the last dozen or so
years, has been trying to figure out where our food comes from
and where it goes.
And I started this journey, really,
with "Omnivore's Dilemma."
And that was an attempt to trace four different kinds of meals
back to their source on the farm.
And what we eat connects us to the land.
It's our most profound connection to nature,
is our eating.
Although most of us are not aware of it
as such because we're now so disconnected
from the source of our food.
And we live at the end of a very long and intricate food
chain that's largely opaque.
And so in that book, I tried to follow the food back
to the land, and see how it was created out
of soil and chemicals and fossil fuel and sunlight,
depending on what kind of food it was.
And then after I did that book, people just were asking me,
you talked about every dimension of food except health.
And what I really want to know is,
what are the links between diet and health.
What I eat and what happens to me.
And so I plunged into another project, equally exotic to me.
And I should tell you, whatever expertise I have,
I've acquired as a journalist.
Not with any-- I have no academic training in food
studies or nutrition or biochemistry or all the things
I should have taken in college.
I was an English major.
And so I delved into nutrition, and looked at, what do we know,
and more importantly, what don't we
know about the links between what we eat
and our odds of chronic disease, our likelihood of getting
obese, all these kind of things.
It's remarkable how much we don't know about nutrition.
And so I was looking at these two ends of the food chain, one
after the other.
The earth end, and the body end.
And I hadn't really paid much attention
to the middle of the food chain.
Which is to say, the area where the stuff coming off
of the farms gets transformed into the meals we eat,
and how it gets transformed, and who does the transformation.
And I was picking up clues along the way,
though, looking at the earth and looking
at the body, that those transformations were actually
really important, and that they were driving changes
going on at both ends of the food chain.
So let me explain.
So the industrialization of our agriculture,
the rise of these giant monocultures
of corn and soybeans all over the Midwest,
the rise of animal factories, where we put tens of thousands
of the same species in tightly controlled situations
and feed them these diets that maximize their growth,
and these pharmaceuticals that also maximize
their growth, that was very much driven
or underwritten by the fact that we were no longer cooking.
And that we were outsourcing our cooking to large corporations.
And when you let McDonald's and Burger King and Olive Garden
and all the companies making the processed
food in the supermarket do your cooking,
they shop in a very particular way.
They want to buy from the biggest possible suppliers
of the most consistent, cheapest food.
And so that the monocultures of corn and soy
are very much driven by fast food diets.
That's what corn and soy is-- it's
the building blocks of the fast food diet.
The corn becomes the high fructose corn syrup,
and the soy becomes the oil in which the fast food is fried.
And I realized this when I was studying,
I was looking at potatoes, of all things,
and I went to a potato farm, which
was this amazing landscape in Idaho.
It was 50,000 acres divided into these vast crop circles,
each one 156 acres with a sweep second hand irrigation pivot
that was putting out the water or the fertilizer
or the chemicals.
And they were using one chemical in particular-- it really
stuck with me-- called Monitor, that was such a toxic pesticide
that the farmers wouldn't go out into their fields for like five
days after they spread it, because it
was such a neurotoxin.
And they explained-- I said, why do you
have to use this chemical?
And they said, well, because we're
growing Russet Burbanks, which is the only kind McDonald's
will buy, and all the other-- and Frito-Lay,
and all the other companies.
And it's a hard potato to grow.
And I said, why do they like that one?
And they said, oh, it's the longest potato.
So when we get our McDonald's french fries,
we love that red envelope with the bouquet
of long French fries coming out of it.
And the only way you can get that
is with the Russet Burbank.
Problem is, Russet Burbanks are susceptible to something called
net necrosis, those little brown lines you very occasionally
will see in a potato, or brown dots.
Totally cosmetic defect.
No problem eating that at all.
But McDonald's will not tolerate it.
So the way you deal with net necrosis
is Monitor, which is this horrible toxin.
And I was thinking, God, so we're
kind of complicit in this landscape I'm looking at.
And indeed it is driven by the fact
that we are letting McDonald's cook
our French fries in a certain way.
So that's one side, and that's one example of how
the collapse of cooking in America
is driving the industrialization of our agriculture.
And Eric Schlosser told the story really
well in "Fast Food Nation," the links between the fast food
industry and the new ways of raising
chickens and hogs and corn and soy.
On the other end, though, when I was looking at the body,
this was even more curious.
I realized that the collapse of cooking
there was taking a huge toll on our health.
And although we couldn't tell ourselves
with real certainty that saturated
fat is the evil nutrient we should avoid if we don't want
to get fatter, get heart disease.
Or sugar is the really bad nutrient we should avoid.
And we're totally still pretty confused
about nutrients, good and bad.
What we did know was that home-cooked food is--
people who eat a home-cooked diet are much healthier than
people who don't.
And that the best predictor of a healthy diet, regardless
of your income, was whether it was cooked at home.
And there's a very interesting study I came across that showed
that poor women who cook have healthier diets than rich women
who don't.
So it even undoes the usual class bias
toward the poorer you are, the worse your diet is.
If you're cooking, you can undo that.
So both of these clues were telling me,
I really had to deal with this middle link of the food chain.
Why aren't we cooking?
What is cooking?
And why were we willing to let it go
from so many of our lives?
So that's what kind of got me started.
There was also, though, a paradox I was noticing.
And I started out by looking at this, well
whatever happened to cooking in America?
And I wrote a long essay about that for the New York Times
Magazine, that ended up in the book in another form.
But there was this really curious paradox,
which was as rates of home cooking were declining,
from more than an hour per person
per day in 1965, to 27 minutes now,
with four minutes for cleaning up.
Which, I know, what kind of cleaning up
can you do in four minutes?
And it's kind of suggesting that cooking is not too ambitious,
that you're crumpling a pizza box,
or throwing out some takeout containers.
And indeed, if you ask the marketing experts,
will you define cooking for me?
Is it cooking from scratch?
Oh no, we can't even measure scratch cooking.
That's too small.
It's the combination of any two ingredients
qualifies as cooking.
So I said, so bottled salad dressing
over pre-washed greens?
Cooking.
Slice of meat between two pieces of bread?
Cooking.
And in fact, the sandwich is the most popular meal in America,
both for lunch and dinner today.
And so we were cooking less time,
and cooking less in what most of us really think is cooking.
But at the same time we were cooking less,
we were obsessing about cooking as a culture.
And we were watching cooking shows on TV.
And we have magazines devoted to chefs
who have become cultural heroes.
And this struck me is this interesting anomaly,
in that what it suggests-- OK, we're
spending 27 minutes cooking.
How long is the average cooking show on TV?
It's 30 minutes, or 60 minutes.
So that meant there were tens of millions
of Americans who were spending more time watching
other people cook on television than were actually
cooking themselves.
And I don't need to tell you that you
can't eat the food you see getting cooked on television.
You can't even smell it.
And yet, we were doing it.
And so I wanted to understand what that was about.
Because if you think about our lives, there's plenty of stuff
we've outsourced to corporations, right?
I mean, we don't change the oil on our car anymore, right?
We don't work on our cars anymore.
We can't.
We can't figure them out anymore.
We don't sew our own clothing or darn socks.
And there are many things we've let go, we've outsourced,
and we have not looked back.
No problem.
Don't miss that.
And I don't watch TV about changing the oil in my car,
or darning socks.
There are no shows about that stuff.
I mean, I'm sure you could find them
if you dig deep enough into the cable channels.
But in general, they're not popular.
So why is cooking different?
I think it's a real clue to us that cooking
has a certain importance-- an emotional importance
and I would argue, even genetic importance to our species.
And I want to try to convince you
that cooking is central to our identity as humans, that
to do it is an agricultural act.
To paraphrase Wendell Berry, who said, "Eating
is an agricultural act," I would say cooking is even more so.
It is a political act, and it is a therapeutic act.
And how I came to this was by learning how to do it.
I mean, I essentially apprenticed myself
to masters of the four transformations
that I think we can break cooking down into, each
of which represents a technology.
And I want to quickly run you through what those four
technologies are, in order.
But before I do, this paradox probably owes to the fact
that we all still have very powerful memories
of being cooked for, of being in the kitchen with our parents,
probably our mothers, and that incredible process of watching
her conduct these transformations,
at the end of which is this profound gift from parent
to child, of something you love to eat, a favorite food.
I mean, I can remember the foods that my mother would
make for me on my birthday, or things
that-- the dish during the course of the week that
was just-- I loved.
And so it goes kind of deep in our lives, I think.
And we remember those smells.
We remember that transaction of love.
And so that's part of it.
But it turns out it goes even deeper.
And when I said that it's kind of hard-wired into us,
I meant that quite literally.
What we've learned in recent anthropology
is that the transformation in our evolution
that separated us from the apes and led
to the growth of our brains and the shrinking of our jaws
and our gut, which happens about 1.8 million years ago,
when we become-- even before we were human.
Before we're Homo sapiens-- when we're Homo erectus.
That dramatic transformation has kind
of mystified archaeologists and anthropologists
for a long time.
What would cause such a profound change?
And for a while they thought maybe it was meat-eating.
But meat-eating can't really explain it,
because eating raw meat, in fact,
you need a giant jaw to chew it.
It's really hard to chew, and you
need a big gut to digest it, because it's
really hard to digest.
What it really is, it appears, is the discovery
of cooking with fire.
And when we figured out this amazing trick,
this critical technology, these amazing changes happened.
And the reason is that when you cook food,
essentially you externalize much of the work
and the energy needed for digestion.
So that instead of your body having to do it all--
and we burn a lot of calories digesting, or we used to-- it
takes place, the partial breakdown of the proteins
and the carbohydrates and the fats.
And it becomes detoxified, and it becomes easier to chew.
It's a huge deal.
And it really gives us this tremendous evolutionary edge,
because it also gives us access to foods other animals can't
eat like tubers, most of which are toxic unless you cook them.
Cassava, potatoes.
You eat raw potatoes, you can have solanine poisoning.
But we found when you cook them, you could eat them.
And so we had this new stash of calories
that other animals didn't have.
So it gave us a big edge.
But this energetic-- this boom of energy
we got from cooking food appears to be
what underwrites the growth of our brains.
Our brains are tremendous energy guzzlers.
They take up about 2% of your body weight,
but they use 20% of the energy you take in.
So it's expensive to maintain a brain.
And you can't do it without cooked food.
So you raw foodists, take note.
Now, raw food, you ask.
OK, well, there are people who eat raw food.
And some people try to do raw food exclusively.
But most of them don't do very well.
And half of the women on raw food diets stop menstruating.
They're not getting enough energy.
And anyone who does do raw food is highly blender-dependent.
I mean, if you know any people who cook raw food,
they'd be literally dead without a blender,
because that's doing all that chewing
and that work of digestion.
So I would say that actually qualifies
as a primitive form of cooking.
So we need cooked food.
It's now hardwired into us.
We're dependent on it.
We're obligate cooks.
Now, the other thing, though, that fire
gave us is it freed up a lot of time.
Before we cooked with fire, we spent a very large portion
of our day chewing.
And if you look at apes that are our size, similar
weight and size, they spend half of their waking hours
in the act of chewing.
Six hours a day, chewing.
It's no wonder they don't get a lot done.
You can't have a culture if you're spending half your time
chewing.
You can't have art.
You can't have software.
There's all sorts of things-- well,
you probably could have software.
So it was a great boon to us.
And the last thing cooking gave us,
and why I think it is so important socially,
is that when you start cooking with fire,
you start eating in a different way.
Cooking gave us not just the stuff,
but the occasion, the meal.
And here's how.
If you're cooking over a fire, remember
this is pre matches and lighters.
Keeping the fire going is a tremendous undertaking,
and requires a lot of cooperation.
So you need someone to kind of tend the fire,
while someone else is hunting or preparing the food.
And it becomes cooperative in a way
that hunting and gathering never had to be.
In hunting and gathering, you could eat food
wherever you found it.
You might bringing some home for your family, or you might not.
But as soon as you cook, you need cooperation.
And you also need to learn how to share.
Because if you're cooking this big beautiful chunk of kudu,
or whatever this animal is that you get,
you have to restrain yourselves from eating it
before it's ready.
And if you don't have rules surrounding your meal,
you will find the biggest, strongest, hungriest,
greediest animal will get the food, and you won't.
So with meat-eating around fires becomes the rudiments
of civilization.
A lot of civilization is about restraining your instincts,
learning rules of social engagement.
And many, many things happen around that fire,
including probably language.
And this rulemaking, though, is that we're
going to divide it this way, and you get this piece
and I get this piece.
This is the beginning of civilization.
So cooking give us a lot.
And as we cook less, we're losing a lot.
Our brains are not getting smaller,
but our guts are getting larger.
And we're not eating around the table
as much, as we fail to cook.
So cooking is really important to us as a species.
And there are costs to outsourcing it.
Now we're still getting cooked food, obviously.
McDonald's and the cafeteria here,
everyone will give you cooked food.
And the problem is that when we allow
large corporations to cook-- and actually, we
call it processed food when corporations do it,
cooking when humans do it-- when we allow corporations to cook
for us, in general, and there are exceptions,
they don't cook very well.
They tend to use the cheapest possible raw ingredients,
and to use the most salt, fat, and sugar
to make that food acceptable.
We love salt, fat, and sugar.
We evolved to-- we have buttons that you can push very easily.
We need those nutrients.
The problem is, in nature, they're pretty rare.
In modern industrial economy, they're really
cheap and easy to add, and everybody loves them.
And when you layer them together,
you get food that's irresistible,
that stimulates cravings.
And that's why the industry, the food processing industry,
works with them so much.
And they're just very cheap to add to a food.
So that's one problem, that you're not
going to get high quality ingredients
and it's going to have too much salt, fat, and sugar.
Another problem, though, which is a little more subtle,
is that corporations are very good at cooking
certain things, like French fries.
Classic example.
There's something about home cooking that basically gives
you a nudge in the direction of simple foods, simply prepared.
Any of you made French fries before?
It's a pain.
I mean, they're wonderful, but you have to, like,
peel the potato-- wash the potato, peel the potato,
cut the potato, heat up this big thing of fat,
and then spatter your whole kitchen.
It's a mess.
And then you have to get rid of all that fat.
And you're not going to do it more than once a month,
if you're an ambitious cook.
You're just not going to fry.
But McDonald's, or anyone, or Ore-Ida,
can make really good French fries
so cheaply that they become ubiquitous.
And so you end up eating this special occasion food,
that I think of it, because I love French fries.
Many Americans eat it twice a day.
So when you outsource cooking to corporations,
they're going to make those labor-intensive, highly
desirable cookies and cakes, too, which are also a pain.
And so you don't make them that often.
So what I'm saying, there's something
built into the nature of home cooking
that tends to keep you onto the healthier foods
than you can have.
And it's the ubiquity of these labor-intensive foods that
gets a lot of people into trouble.
So that's another reason.
And a food marketing expert I talked to, this guy in Chicago
named Harry Balzer, we were talking about--
and he works for the processed food industry.
And I was saying, well, what are we
going to do about this obesity, this problem?
And he said, well, I've got the diet for America.
You want to know how to control weight in this country?
And I'm, like, taking out my notebook, what
is he going to tell me, the secret from deep
within the heart of the processed food industry.
He says, eat anything you want, as long
as you cook it yourself.
If you could actually do that, any problems around food
would disappear.
Because you wouldn't have French fries that often.
You wouldn't have dessert every night.
And you would eat a healthy diet without counting calories,
without looking at any ingredient labels.
It would take care of itself.
But that's easier said than done.
So I kind of took the Harry Balzer challenge,
and went out and tried to learn how to cook.
And as I said, I divided cooking into these four transformations
or technologies.
And they happened to correspond to the classical elements.
There is cooking with fire, water,
which is cooking in pots, with liquid.
And then there's air, which is cooking--
which is baking, bread, which is putting air into our food,
which is very significant.
And then fermentation-- earth.
Cooking with microbes, the microbes
that live in soil-- many of them do.
And most kinds of cooking, you could
put into one of those transformations or another.
And I want to quickly run through what
I learned about each one.
And they're all interesting in their are different ways,
and in each case I found a master to teach me.
In the case of fire cooking, I wanted
to find the most unreconstructed cooking,
the most like that primitive scene that I described,
with the people around the fire.
And that turned out to be eastern North Carolina
barbecue.
And I specify eastern, because if you go to western North
Carolina, they do it differently.
But eastern North Carolina barbecue
is whole hog, wood fire, time.
That's the recipe.
A lot of time-- 20 hours, maybe.
And it's just so simple, but dressed up
with lots of pretension, and lots of self-dramatizing men
telling you how hard it is.
But it's really simple, believe me.
I've done it since.
And I mean, guys know that barbecue
is all about taking something very simple
and making it look like a big deal.
And that's probably been going on for a very long time
in human history.
And one of things that struck me learning about barbecue--
and I explore the science of it, like, why is cooked meat
taste so much better than raw meat?
And there are these amazing chemical reactions
that take place-- the Maillard reaction and caramelization
that create, like, 30,000 new compounds that are elusive,
that taste like other things, that just kind of complicate
the food in a really interesting way,
making it more metaphorical, even,
and less literal in ways that humans always like doing that
to everything-- to language, and to food too.
But the thing that struck me is that it's
so rule-bound, even now.
Cooking the meat outdoors is really rule-bound.
And the barbecue pit masters have-- they're, like,
more rule-obsessed than any rabbi
I've ever met about eating meat.
And so I'll say, so what do you think of the barbecue
in over in western North Carolina?
And they're like, well, those are pork shoulders with sauce.
And that's good, but it's not barbecue.
And I said, what about what they do in South Carolina?
Well, they do a mustard-based sauce and they're eating ribs,
and that's not barbecue.
And so it's like it's not kosher.
Over and over again, it was like Kashrut
for goys going on all over the South.
So I was very struck by that.
And there had been this long tradition
that the priest and the butcher and the chef, all
through classical history, Greek history, was the same person.
{Megaros}.
One word for those three functions.
That's how important it was, and how ceremonial it was.
And cooking meat is still very ceremonial, and it's very male,
and it happens in a very theatrical manner.
So that was the first science of cooking, the first technology.
The second big breakthrough, you have to leap forward way
from 1.8 million years ago to just 10,000 years ago.
And that is when we begin cooking in pots.
It awaited pots.
We needed to develop the technology
to create clay-fired pots that could withstand a fire,
and that you could boil water in.
This seems really simple, but it's actually
a profound development.
It's hard to imagine agriculture getting off
the ground without this technology.
Because a lot about agriculture is,
is eating seeds, right-- grain.
And it's very hard to eat grain unless you've softened it
in water, and you turn it into a porridge or cooked rice
or whatever you're doing.
So toasting grain, these little things over fires,
you can't get a skewer on them.
It doesn't really work.
So it's no accident that cooking with water
comes up at the exact same time that agriculture begins.
And they're probably closely allied,
and there's probably a chicken and egg phenomenon going on.
But when you can do this now, you
can do all sorts of new things.
You can combine vegetables with meat, for example.
You can eat parts of animals that
are very tough, because you can break it down slowly.
You can braise it and stew it.
And what I learned to do was braising and stewing
in this chapter.
Working with a young Chapanese chef in Berkeley.
And you begin to have cuisines.
Cooking meat over fire, if you close your eyes
you couldn't tell if you were in Brazil, or North
Carolina-- leaving the sauce aside-- or Europe, or China.
It's meat over fire.
But as soon as you cook in pots, and you
can mix these vegetables with it,
you get these aromatic vegetables
like onions and garlic, or onions and pepper,
these different combinations of vegetables
that really mark a food as part of a culture.
So if it has a mirepoix base, that's French cooking.
That's onions and celery and-- I always
forget-- carrots, thank you very much.
And then there's the Asian mirepoix.
There are these flavor principles
that you really can't establish until you're
cooking in pots with liquid.
And the other cool thing about it is there's no waste anymore.
It's a very economical way to cook,
because when you're cooking meat over fire
you have the dripping fat, which is all
very nutritious, actually.
And you're losing all those calories.
But in a pot, you get everything.
You save it all, and you get the amazing dividend
that is a sauce.
You can't have sauce before you have these pots.
So it does a lot for cuisine.
It also does a lot, interestingly enough,
for the human lifespan.
Once upon a time, when you only had meat cooked over fires,
you couldn't wean a baby until they had some teeth
and could eat it, or you would have to chew it for them.
But now, you can make these soft soups and porridges
that allow you to wean babies earlier,
which is a great boon to society,
because you can increase population and have babies
spaced more closely together.
And then on the other end of the lifespan,
you can keep old people alive longer.
Because previously, when you lost your teeth,
you were kind of screwed.
But now, you have these foods, these
gruels that you can keep people alive even without teeth.
So the pot actually expands human lifespan,
and so it's a very important technology.
Now let me leap ahead.
I'm going to go quickly, because I really
do want to hear your questions.
And we can talk about this, or anything else
you want to talk about.
Bread.
One of my favorite technologies of all.
Bread is discovered in Egypt, it is
thought, about 6,000 years ago.
How?
Well, probably what happened is somebody
made one of those porridges that I was describing.
It was some grass seed, and ground, and then added water,
and lost track of it.
Didn't eat it.
And it just sat off in a corner.
And some yeast and bacteria got into it,
and somebody looked at it one day and says,
wow, that's bubbling, and it's gotten big.
It's twice as big as it was before,
which is kind of amazing.
Wow, I just got more food by leaving it alone?
And then they thought, hey, let's put it in the oven
and see what happens.
And even more miraculous, it doubled again in size.
And so you can see why bread became this miracle that's
part of the Eucharist, the Catholic communion.
Because it does seem to come from nothing, or very little.
And it becomes quite big.
And what's happened, of course, is
it's air is the additional food.
Or "food."
But we've added air to the food.
And the significance of this was driven home to me
by a food scientist I interviewed for the book, a guy
at Davis named Bruce German, who said
if I gave you a bag of flour, even whole wheat
flour, and water, you could live on that for a little while,
but not very long.
You would eventually die.
But, if you took that water and flour and turned it into bread,
you could live indefinitely.
So what's going on?
Why is that such an important transformation
from dough, essentially, he's saying, to bread?
Well, he explained what's happening.
When you have that starter culture, that sourdough-- which
is a culture of both yeast, fungi, and bacteria--
when you introduce them to that wet mass of flour and water,
they start digesting the polysaccharides,
the long-chain proteins and carbohydrates.
And the microbes create these enzymes
that break down those long chains.
The reason they're in long chains
is that the seed-- remember we're
talking about eating seeds here--
that the seed has everything needed
for the next generation of plants.
It's an amazing pantry of nutrients.
It's got it all.
Fat, protein, carbohydrate, minerals, vitamins,
antioxidants, it's all there.
But it's locked up tight, because the plant doesn't
want to give it away to animals.
It wants to keep it intact for the developing, the germinating
seedling.
But what the microbes that we introduced do
is they break down those-- they break into the pantry
and break it down into much more digestible forms,
into short-chain carbohydrates or sugars,
and proteins that become amino acids.
So that's the first transformation,
is during that fermentation.
And then the second transformation
comes when you bake it.
Now you know from your elementary physics
that if you have boiling water or something like that,
it can't really get hotter than the boiling point, at which
point it turns into steam.
But if you enclose it in the crust of a bread,
you create a pressure cooker in which all those little air
pockets inside get really hot and steamy.
And steam can get much hotter than the boiling point.
And you can drive it up to 300, 400, 500 degrees.
And what that extreme heat does is thoroughly
cook the carbohydrates so that they become very digestible,
and much more sweet and delicious.
So this is a profound technology,
for taking a mush of grass seeds and turning it into a food
that you can live on, unless you're gluten-intolerant.
But people weren't that gluten-intolerant back then.
We can talk about that later.
And so, very profound technology.
And I worked with-- if some of you, I'm sure,
live in San Francisco-- Chad Robertson, who bakes at Tartine
and makes what I think is the best bread in the whole world.
And I spent a lot of time learning from him how to bake,
and when I was making my starter,
I didn't know whether it was OK to ask a famous baker to take
some of their starter or not, and I
thought it wasn't a cool question.
But I made a point of shaking his hands every time I saw him
and not washing my hands, and then adding it to my starter.
So I ended up with a Tartine-ish starter
that's very lively, until I went on book tour.
And I neglected it for two months and it died.
So I need to see Chad over lunch very soon
and shake his hand, yeah.
So that was air.
And then the last section I want to talk about
is, for me, what was probably the most fascinating.
And that was this method of cooking
without the use of any heat whatsoever,
purely through the action of microbes.
What an amazing thing that these microbes can give us everything
from wine to cheese to sauerkraut and kimchi
and pickles, to chocolate, which is a fermented food.
I don't know if you realize that.
And coffee, which must be fermented before you
can grind the beans.
It's an amazing thing that we can use bacteria in this way.
It began as a food preservation strategy.
Before refrigeration, how would you
preserve the harvest to get through the winter,
until you had another harvest?
Well, you did it by fermenting food.
And it's still going on.
I was in China recently, and they'll
take a bunch of cabbages and they'll throw them in a pit
and cover it was soil.
And the lactobacillus will go to work.
They're already on the leaves of cabbages, and everything else.
They're on you.
And just like they're waiting to ferment you when you die,
they are waiting to ferment cabbages when they die.
And so they start breaking down the vegetable matter,
releasing lactic acid, which of course is a great preservative,
and makes them more nutritious.
So I grew up in a very microbe-phobic family,
like most of us did in recent years.
And my mother was terrified of bacteria.
And if she dropped a can of green beans on the ground
and it got a dent, she we sure it had contracted botulism
and we had to throw it out.
And so we had lots of hand-washing
and all the normal things.
But I met this generation, this subculture
of what I call "fermentos"-- people kind of obsessed
with fermentation.
And they're all around us now.
And they're a very interesting subculture.
They go a little further than I do.
I mean, they'll eat roadkill and high-meat,
and they love bacteria.
And they're trying to renegotiate
the terms of our relationship with these microbes.
And I think in that, they're really on to something.
They're very casual about hygiene.
You'll ask them for a recipe and I'll say, well,
shouldn't I wash that crock first, or that cabbage?
No, don't wash it, because it has the good bacteria on it.
And it turns out though, they're on to something.
I mean, we're learning that our war on bacteria,
even though it has helped conquer several diseases,
has also led to various problems.
And it is probably our lack of contact
with bacteria as children that is leading
to these high rates of allergy and asthma
and autoimmune disease.
That's the hygiene hypothesis.
But we're also learning more recently
that the ecosystem of microbes that
live in your large intestine-- I mean they're all over you,
but especially there-- are very important to your health.
And that-- I don't know if you know this, but you are only 10%
human.
90% of the cells that you are, that are on your body
and in your body, those belong to microbes.
You're a super organism.
And our health is, in significant ways,
mediated by the health of that ecosystem.
And we have in our antibiotic culture, literally
antibiotic culture, we've been killing off
a lot of those microbes.
We have not been ingesting them in our diet,
with the result that our biodiversity internally
is dramatically lower than it is in people probably 50
years ago, and we know in hunter-gatherer populations
that have these wild, wildly diverse and very healthy
microbiomes.
So the fermentos are really on to something.
And I look in the book at the biology of this,
what we're learning about the microbiome
and how it affects our health.
And that was fascinating to me.
It's leading to a revolution in medicine
that we will all feel very soon, although we
don't have to wait for it.
I mean, eating more fermented food
is what a lot of these doctors will
tell you is a good thing to do.
I'm talking about sauerkraut and pickles
and all that live culture food.
But as important as fermentation is biologically,
it's very important culturally too, and this kind of surprised
me.
A great many cultures have a fermented food
they love that other people think is kind of disgusting.
And they're polarizing foods.
I'm thinking of stinky cheeses and kimchi and sauerkraut.
And if you go to China, they love
something called stinky tofu.
I don't know if any of you have ever had it.
It's well-named.
It's essentially tofu that's been marinated
in rotten vegetables, just black slime of rotten vegetables,
usually outdoors.
And then maybe if you're lucky, fried after that.
It actually-- if you can get it past your nose,
it doesn't taste that bad.
They love it.
And yet they think a cheese, even
kind of a not so stinky cheese, a cheddar or something,
is the most disgusting food imaginable.
They will not-- they can't believe we like cheese.
And they say-- and it's oily and the taste stays in your mouth,
whereas stinky tofu, it's so clean and the taste disappears.
Although, what kind of praise is that for a food,
that the taste quickly disappears?
I will also point out that they eat stinky tofu exclusively
outdoors.
So anyway, cultures have this.
And the Koreans are very proud of their kimchi.
And when I went to Korea, I went to Korea
to learn how to make kimchi.
And I went to the kimchi museum, in Seoul.
I went to one on the south side of the river.
There's another one on the north side of the river.
And there are a total of six kimchi museums in Korea.
And when I was there, I asked the docent a question.
I saw all these groups of kindergartners
with their little uniforms and yellow backpacks trooping
through, learning how kimchi is made-- the urns, the spice
mixes, and everything.
I said, why do you bring kindergartners
to a kimchi museum?
And this woman said, because children are not
born liking kimchi.
OK.
It is, by definition, it is the definition of an acquired
taste.
And these fermented foods are all acquired tastes.
And they're one of the ways-- culture's very much
about drawing lines, right?
And they're one of the ways that we define ourselves
against other cultures.
And I'm convinced-- I couldn't write
about this, because the research isn't there--
but that these foods actually change our bodily odors in ways
that make us either very comfortable or very
uncomfortable.
So anyway, fermented foods are really
interesting on many different levels.
And I learned how to make cheese.
I worked with a wonderful nun who's
a cheesemaker and a microbiologist.
And she actually believes-- she makes
this beautiful cheese in Connecticut.
And she makes it in a wooden barrel,
which is the most-- you know, it drives the health
department crazy, because you can't
sterilize a wooden barrel.
And in fact, the recipe for this traditional French cheese
she makes specifies, don't sterilize the wooden barrel.
Just rinse it out.
Because they're really good bacteria
that live in the little crevices.
And in fact, she proved to the health authorities, when
they tried to shut her down or make her use stainless steel,
like every other cheesemaker in America,
she got two vats of raw milk from her cows,
right in the abbey.
And she introduced e. coli into both vats,
and waited a couple hours.
And at the end of three or four hours,
the stainless steel vat was so teeming with e.coli
that it was toxic.
You couldn't-- that would be condemned, that milk.
And the milk in the wooden barrel,
it had vanishingly small levels of e. coli.
And what had happened?
The lactobacillus that lived in the wooden barrel
started-- they call it lactobacillus--
eating the lactose, their favorite food,
breaking it down into lactic acid which killed the e. coli.
So you see, these people have been practicing
a kind of folk microbiology for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And she's mastered that.
And the health department went away after this demonstration.
And she really believes the cheese is so wonderful
that it belongs in the Eucharist,
along with those other two fermented foods, wine
and bread.
And she thinks cheese is a better reminder of the body
than bread is, because it rots and reminds us of mortality.
And it's like, it's a heretical idea,
but it's kind of beautiful also.
So, a lot of the cooking I did is not
things you're going to do every day.
It's really extreme cooking, making cheese or kimchi--
although kimchi is really easy to make-- and sauerkraut
and baking bread.
But I found that doing this, even every now
and then, is an incredibly satisfying process.
When we learn how to do something for ourselves that
is not what we do at work, it's really empowering.
So many of us, we live in such a specialized culture.
And we've gotten really good at the one thing that we do
and selling to the market.
And we've outsourced everything else
in our lives-- our entertainment,
our exercise to some extent, our food certainly.
And there's something wonderful about that.
It makes this economy go around.
But there's something debilitating about it too,
and something infantilizing.
The fact that we're so dependent on fossil fuel, which is really
what allows us to do all this outsourcing,
and so dependent on other people,
that it feels really good when you do something,
you learn a new skill that actually
is in support of your body.
And so few of us have these anymore.
And I found there was-- it was a very satisfying way
to spend time, to learn how to bake bread.
And learning to diversify your talents,
learning how to take care of yourself to a greater extent,
I really think, is a precondition
for the kinds of political changes we need in this world.
I just don't think we're going to tackle things like climate
change until people can imagine living in a different way.
And if you're highly specialized,
you can't imagine living in a different way--
without that car, without that fossil fuel,
without that restaurant to cook your meals.
But as soon as you realize, oh, I could do this,
suddenly you're open to change.
And so that's why I said it's a political act.
Take back control of your diet, take back
control of some part of your life
that you've been letting other people do for yourself.
Not every day, even just occasionally.
I think you'll find it feels empowering and really good.
So I'm going to leave it there.
We have a microphone here if anybody has questions.
I'm happy to talk about cooking, gluten intolerance.
And I forgot to mention there is one animal that
does cook, at least one animal.
If you include fermentation under the definition
of cooking, squirrels cook.
Any animal that buries their food is not just hiding it.
They're starting that earth-driven process
of breakdown, to make that seed, that acorn healthier.
So we're not quite the only animal who cooks.
AUDIENCE: Back to the microbes.
I think it's great that you've sort of helped
get a lot people excited about what is clearly becoming
a pretty big deal scientifically,
understanding the microbiota and how much it
affects all our health.
I have a two year old daughter, so I'm
very keen to make sure she's exposed to enough
of the right microbes, but my wife probably also,
intelligently, is worried about exposing her
to too many of the wrong microbes.
So I'm just curious, have you figured out,
for people who are sort of enlightened about this stuff,
but still-- we're in a world where the bugs are
kind of hostile, and there aren't
a lot of things that are-- the good bugs [INAUDIBLE] it's
hard to get raw milk, et cetera.
Are there good practical ways to get access
to more bugs in your diet without being
too off the reservation?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.
Well, I mean, eating whatever fermented foods
that your daughter likes.
If she likes yogurt, great.
Kids tend not to like sauerkraut and kimchi.
I mean, they're strongly flavored foods.
But try it.
But the other thing is not just in the diet,
but in the lifestyle.
There's a lot of research showing
that kids who grow up on farms, especially ones who
eat raw milk, drink raw milk, but are exposed to animals,
have much lower rates of autoimmune disease.
So raw milk is a complicated one, and a risky one.
And I don't simply recommend it, unless you're
very confident of the farmer who's selling it to you.
But taking your kid to farms, having pets-- even having pets
has been correlated with lower rates of autoimmune disease.
So those exposures while she's that age-- her immune system
is being trained right now.
And exposure to bacteria during that training is a good thing.
Hand washing is still advised, actually,
because of-- that's how many germs are conveyed among kids.
And not that that's a bad thing, but it's inconvenient
if your kid is sick a lot.
You're probably building her immune system
every time she gets an infection.
So, exposure to animals, really good,
any kind of food that has live bacteria is really good.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Sure.
AUDIENCE: I've read, I guess, all four of your food books.
And one thing I don't remember you writing about
is a currently popular, or maybe faddish trend in food,
and that is molecular gastronomy.
Or as Nathan Myhrvold calls it, Modernist cuisine.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: It certainly violates your grandmother
recognizing it.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, not always, because--
AUDIENCE: But at same time, it doesn't
seem to have any of the bad things that
led you to suggest that rule.
So what do you think?
MICHAEL POLLAN: I did look into molecular gastronomy.
And in fact, Nathan served me a beautiful lunch up
at his mad scientist lab in Seattle, as part of it.
And I was very interested in it, and that kind of food
is interesting and artistically engaging,
but I don't think it's central.
I don't think it's going to change
the way we eat any time soon.
And so I think it was a little too rarefied for me to explore.
I was really, in this book, trying
to get back to the fundamentals, the basics of cooking.
And he's on the frontier of cooking.
Which is interesting, but I don't
know that we're all going to be doing sous-vide and using some
of the techniques he's using, even though it produces
interesting food.
I was trying very much not to write a foodie book.
This is not a foodies' book.
I hate that term.
I think our food culture gets a little bit
decadent at various points, in the way we're eating sometimes.
And so we really wanted to concentrate
on familiar foods that are available to everybody at home.
Even though intellectually I find
what he's doing fascinating.
There may be some applications at some point
of what he's doing.
And if we can figure out a way to use
the techniques of the food scientist
to make food more nutritious, I think that would be great.
It's striking how little of that work has succeeded so far.
That, in general, and I tell the story in the book,
in the bread chapter, processing food for thousands of years
consistently made it healthier.
Coming up with fermentation, cooking in pots, breadmaking.
At a certain point, we started processing food
to make it less healthy, to make it have a longer shelf
life, mostly.
And it happens when we go from whole wheat, stone-ground flour
to white flour.
And so that's kind of an interesting story.
And it may be Nathan is at the beginning of a move
toward figuring out how to again use technology
to make food more healthy again.
But not much has happened in that area yet.
AUDIENCE: If I can make just one final comment on this,
you can now get a really good immersion
circulator for only $200.
I think in 10 or 15 years, sous-vide cooking
is going to be like a blender or food processor.
MICHAEL POLLAN: It may be.
I'd be curious.
The last big addition has been the microwave, which
is an interesting technology and it's really good for, like,
heating up your cup of tea.
It's not really good for cooking.
And I don't think it's very good for family life,
because you do one thing at a time.
So I look forward to the new gadget
that we'll put in our kitchens that will actually
make cooking easier, and make the food more nutritious.
And that might be it.
AUDIENCE: So I come from a family of traditional rice
farmers in southern India.
And when I was growing up, 90% of everything
I would eat with my grandparents came from the land around them.
They grew it themselves.
A couple generations later, many of us, including me,
have chosen to pursue other things
like develop software and chew food for six hours
a day, in an ape like fashion, and outsourcing our food
production to other people, and cooking to Google.
But no one I know around this area actually
says, I want to be an alfalfa farmer or a wheat farmer.
Everyone wants to pursue other careers.
And I wonder in 50 years from now,
will anybody be available to grow this fundamental thing
that hedge fund managers and software engineers
still need for their survival.
Who will be there?
Who will grow the food?
MICHAEL POLLAN: I think that's a great question.
Well, I actually said at dinner the other night
with the 125th employee of your corporation, who
is now a farmer.
His farm is supported by his Google stock.
[LAUGHTER] But he's doing really interesting, good farming
somewhere in Marin.
And in fact, I've met a succession
of people who work in your industry who
have gotten the bug.
I mean, one of the encouraging things going on right
now is, for the first time since we've been keeping track,
the number of farmers in America is ticking up.
It's been going down consistently
since we had-- since we measured it, since 1900, say.
And there is a generation of young people
who's very engaged by the work of farming, which
is really important because you point
to the big problem with industrial agriculture.
It doesn't require a lot a labor.
We basically traded labor on the farm
for chemicals and machines.
And we're paying the cost of that.
It's very hard to grow good quality, nutritious,
chemically-free food without more people on the land.
And we will need many more people on the land
if we really want to eat sustainably.
But there's also growing food in your own home,
which is not trivial.
I mean, during the World War II, about 40%
of the fresh produce in America was
being grown by individuals in their gardens.
There's no reason we couldn't do that again
even while developing software.
So I think the challenge, though,
is going to be in places like India,
that-- there are many people who want to stay on the land,
there are many people who don't want to stay on the land--
that the option of staying on the land is preserved.
Because that's in danger in many places.
I mean, there is a vision of industrializing, developing
world agriculture on offer right now, that
threatens to flood the cities and lead
to a kind of agriculture that will be very hard to sustain
because it's so fossil fuel-dependent.
So we do live in a specialized economy.
We need people to grow our food.
The best thing we can do as people writing books,
or developing software is, pay them a living wage.
Make it attractive.
One of my food rules is pay more, eat less.
Good food, sustainable food, does cost more.
And those of us who can afford to support those farmers
need to do it.
We need to make it a very attractive way of life,
so that we will draw more people into doing it.
And we will pay farmers for doing
something, as you recognized, is so dependent.
No matter what we're doing, we still need food.
And food still comes from the earth.
And to ignore that connection and lose track of it, I think,
is a tragedy.
So it begins with supporting farmers
who are doing good work.
Thanks for your good question.
AUDIENCE: Well, I was going to ask a final question,
but we've run out of time.
So everybody join me in thanking Michael
for coming back to Google.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Thank you very much.
Thank you.