Interview with Michael Pollan: You Are What You Cook

Home cooking is a declaration of independence, says Michael Pollan. I met the writer, food activist, and journalism professor in his Berkeley garden (ripe with beans, herbs and – of course – kale) to talk about the power of big food, the cost of convenience food and the ease of cooking. He is sipping coffee from a paper cup, which he reheated in the microwave.

For the German version, click here

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Mr. Pollan, with your latest book Cooked you're trying to lure people back to the stove. Why should we venture back to the kitchen more often again?

Because the most important thing about your diet is not the nutrients in it – good or bad – but who is doing the cooking. At home, we usually cook with less salt, sugar, fat and artificial ingredients than the fast-food chains and the makers of a lot of convenience food. We know that people who eat home-cooked food eat healthier diets.

You want us to wrestle back control over our nutrition from the food industry?

That’s the goal. All my work since I started writing about the food chain is based on the premise that the food chain is in trouble and those of us who eat from it are in trouble. There is an enormous problem of public health and of environmental health. The way we are eating is making us sick and is making the planet sick.

Convenience food is often simply the cheapest alternative.

It is not as cheap as it seems, especially not, when each member of the family picks a different meal from the freezer section in the super market. Instead, if you cook several days in a row, in such a way that one meal rolls into the next and each meal feeds each other, it’s extremely economical. You can make chicken one day and then the next day you have leftovers for the basis of a soup. So the more you cook, the more you save by cooking. The other thing to start to do, and this helps you with time, is to cook a lot of one dish. One could make a frittata with a lot of vegetables that one has sitting around the fridge, dice them up, sauté them with olive oil or butter and then scramble some eggs. Take a dozen eggs if you have a big family. 20 minutes and you have a beautiful meal.

Many people claim not to have time to cook without processed food. And not all of it is unhealthy.

I’m not saying that people should cook without processed or convenience food. I rely on processed food all the time. I cook a lot with canned tomatoes or chickpeas and we eat frozen vegetables like spinach daily. This type of processed food with one or two ingredients is a boon to mankind.

What type of processed food do you find problematic?

Ultra-processed foods, stuff with many ingredients, many of which consumers don’t even recognize. Whole main courses cooked by industry? No. Such processed food is expensive, wasteful, and unnecessary. Many of them contain too much sugar, salt, and fat. The production and consumption of this type of food has increased dramatically over the last ten, twenty years. They have replaced entire meals. Industrial foods have contributed significantly to obesity in the U.S. We think of food as stuff that we shove into our mouth three and more times a day with no sense of its implications for the world or for our bodies or our family. 

Can you directly influence behavior with your books?

They can make people think and reevaluate things. One of my previous books, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” created a lot of conscious eaters. People who either decided to stop eating meat because they didn't like what they learned about meat production, but also many people who started eating meat because they found that there was a kind of agriculture they wanted to support. My deepest premise is that armed with the right information people will make more intelligent choices.

Michael Pollan is a best-selling writer, UC Berkeley journalism professor, and one of the most prominent voices in food today. He has been writing about the problems of industrial agriculture and food production and about local food production and sustainability for 25 years. He has written four New York Times bestsellers: “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual“ (2010); “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (2008); “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (2006) and “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World” (2001). In his latest book “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation” he explores the four elements — fire, water, air, and earth — which humans for centuries have used to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Since 1987, he has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.Pollan was named to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2009 he was named by Newsweek as one of the top 10 “New Thought Leaders.”
Pollan was born in 1995 and grew up on Long Island. He has three sisters. His oldest sister Tracy Pollan is an actress and is married to Michael J. Fox. Pollan earned his B.A. in English at Bennington College in Vermont, spent a year studying literature at Oxford. In 1981 he received a master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, the artist Judith Belzer, and their son Isaac.

Photo: Alia Malley

For “Cooked” you learned how to brew beer, ferment cheese and vegetables, and bake bread. All quite slow and difficult techniques that people who are pressed for time might hardly use. 

“Cooked” is not a book of 20-minute recipes for stressed-out working people. Like all my books it delves deep into something we think we know, something very familiar, and shows you how it came to be and why it matters. It explains how cooking techniques evolved over centuries and what roles they play. I’m hoping to show readers that cooking is a deeply rewarding and economical way to spend a little of our leisure time.

But what’s to prevent me from preparing unhealthy junk food in my own kitchen?

If you cook, you most certainly eat much less junk food. I love French fries. But who wants to cook them at home? They are a pain to make, and not just because you have to clean up the mess in the kitchen afterwards. But if the fast-food chain cooks them for us, we’ll easily eat French fries three times a day which is obviously unhealthy. That alone is a reason why home cooking is less problematic in terms of health. We definitely have to bring back home economics, and not just for girls. And we need public health ad campaigns promoting home cooking as one of the best things you can do for your family’s health and well-being. 

Why do especially Americans consume so many meals that are prepared by large companies?

The way you make money in the food industry is by processing food. It's very hard to make money selling simple, whole foods. The industry has been trying for 100 years to take over our cooking and to make money. And with the rise of fast food beginning in the 1960s and 1970s many of us were persuaded to outsource our cooking to companies. The market is telling us constantly that anything you can outsource, you should outsource. That's the ideology of consumer capitalism: Do your one thing, in my case writing books, take the money you earn with that and consume everything else. It's debilitating in a way because then you only know how to do one thing and you can't take care of yourself. But there is something incredibly satisfying and empowering to be able to take care of yourself, growing a little bit of food, fix your car or your clothes. It exercises the muscle of self-reliance, which in modern society is atrophying.

But everybody is free to opt for or against processed food…

The industry offered us something that was hard to say "no" to and it markets it very effectively in that we are very busy. And we are busier in America than in many other places in the world. We work longer days, we work a longer workweek, and we don't have as much vacation as for example people in Germany. One of the real differences is that our labor movement fought for money, and much of the European labor movement fought for time. That was just a trade-off we made, consistent with our character, I think, but we are paying the price. We don’t have time for cooking.

How difficult can it be to cook a plate of pasta?

You can teach people to cook reasonably well in a couple of hours. But many people are afraid and insecure about it and they may not know anybody who could show them. And people watch cooking on television which is incredibly popular and looks terrifying and really difficult. Cooking is treated like a competitive sport, like work best left to professionals. I don't think that encourages people to get into the kitchen. It’s the cooking paradox: Millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking.

Many people earn a lot more with a few hours of work than they would save by preparing meals at home for a week.

Wendell Berry, the writer and farmer, famously said: Eating is an agricultural act. I would add: Cooking is an agricultural act too. And I really think it is a political act too. When you decide that you're going to keep the corporations a little bit at a distance in your kitchen, you're voting for a different way of organizing your life: less dependent, less consumerist. You have an opportunity to bring your values as a citizen into your consumer decisions which is very hard to do at the fast-food restaurant and in the supermarket.

Cooking becomes, in a way, an act of resistance?

That's kind of the secret message of "Cooked". I talk about food but it could be about any kind of production, any kind of work that we could at least partially do ourselves again.

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(This interview was conducted in May 2013 for publication in German media.)