The Cooking Creature -- A Call for Recovered Wisdom
In the Age of Enlightenment, James Boswell defined cooking as a distinctive mark of humanity. Humans, he argued, are "the cooking animal." While most living creatures eat, only human beings cook. Or, as writer Michael Pollan laments, humans used to cook.
Writing in the August 2, 2009 issue of The New York Times Magazine, Pollan has contributed an essay in which he documents the loss to human civilization, health, and happiness that accompanies the abandonment of cooking. In "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch," Pollan writes of the irony of our modern condition. We build homes with expensive kitchens, buy state-of-the-art culinary equipment, but seldom actually cook. Millions of Americans tune in to cooking shows and the interest in televised cooking is fed by an entire cable network (the Food Network). Meanwhile, as Pollan observes, interest in the Food Network and similar programming "has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking."
