on cooking

Most of you know that I love to cook. I've recently been reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (oddly enough as research for a theology paper), and I wanted to share with you a long quote from this simply marvelous little book. Enjoy!

"As cook in your kitchen you enjoy an omniscience about your food that no amount of supermarket study or label reading could hope to match. Having retaken control of the meal from the food scientists and processors, you know exactly what is and is not in it: there are no questions about high-fructose corn syrup, or ethoxylated digliycerides, or partially hydrogenated soy oil, for the simple reason that you didn't ethoxylate or partially hydrogenate anything, nor did you add any additives. (Unless, that is, you're the kind of cook who starts with can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, in which case all bets are off.) To reclaim this much control over one's food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing; indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts."

I'll cheat and give you his rules of thumb: "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too much." Breathtakingly simple, and profoundly wonderful. All the best things usually are. Into the subversion!

UPDATE on 9.6.08 - I planted some plants. I think they are growing. Of course - the goal would be to eat them, or rather, eat what they produce. I give myself a 53% chance of it working ...