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Into the kitchen

Michael Pollan turns his mind to home cooking, Indira Naidoo writes

The cleavers are furiously splattering fatty pig juices in all directions. It's a crisp autumn evening in Berkeley, California, 2010, and I'm sitting in Michael Pollan's front yard among his vegetable-beds, waiting with 50 other guests for his ''pig roasti''.

Pollan is the best-selling author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma, and now Cooked.

California might seem a long way to fly for a bit of pork, but this is no ordinary barbecue. It's a fund-raising dinner for Pollan's friend, Alice Waters, whose restaurant Chez Panisse is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

The heritage pig has been roasting in the Pollan family's fire-pit for 18 hours. Long and slow. This is delayed gratification. The crisp, flattened carcass has finally been lifted from the grill on to a table where Pollan begins chopping it into a fine mix of meat, fat, crackling, seasoning and vinegar. It's quite a performance. The meat is earthy and tender, and the caramelised crackling is indecently good. As Pollan says in his new book, there's something life-altering about pork crackling.

In Cooked, Pollan explores how we harness the four classical elements - fire, water, air and earth - to transform nature into things to eat and drink. For example, Pollan writes, the barbecue turns something you would never eat (dead pig) into something you can't wait to eat.

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To help him on his barbecue, braise, bake and brewing odyssey for this book, Pollan enlists the help of charismatic specialists - the pit-masters of North Carolina for whom barbecue is high theatre; the modest chef from Spain who smokes every dish on his menu including his butter; a Chez Panisse chef who teaches Pollan about braising or ''grandma'' cooking; the boutique beer brewers and the ''fermentos'' who use ancient pickling techniques to make sauerkraut and kimchi. One of the most memorable mentors must be Sister Noella, the Benedictine nun with a PhD in microbiology, who guides Pollan through creating raw milk cheese.

Pollan is the man who coined one of the most famous phrases in modern food philosophy: ''Eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants.'' And his writing has focused to date on gardening, nutrition and the food production system. His work is so significant that in 2010, Time magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Cooked is not a ''how to'' cookbook; it's a ''why to'' cookbook. There are only four recipes in the back pages (fortunately, one is for pork shoulder).

Cooked is Pollan's Pied-Piper call back into our kitchens. Corporations do most of our cooking for us and this, he says, is damaging our health, nutrition and family life. Pollan also argues that home cooking may be the single most important thing a person can do to reclaim the food system.

''Home cooking is one of the best predictors of a healthy diet,'' he says. ''People who cook their meals without even thinking eat healthier food. By its very nature, it will discourage you from making really junky food. You're not going to make French fries at home three times a day because it's too time-consuming.''

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Pollan rejects ''the marketing version'' of food, ''which is that it is simply entertainment and fuel''. ''It's so much deeper than that. It's an engagement with nature. It's an engagement with our bodies, it's an engagement with our families. I want people to fall in love with cooking again.''

Like the nimble-minded intellectual he is, Pollan is able to weave between kitchen, laboratory, pulpit and altar, drawing upon Greek mythology, poetry, anthropology, biochemistry and microbiology, to help build his argument that we can only understand our relationship with food if we can master the processes that create it.

After trying his hand at several ancient cooking processes, Pollan is particularly captivated by the art of bread-making. ''Baking is a respite from all the time we spend in front of screens,'' he says. ''There's something so sexual about handling dough and watching this transformation. There was something beautiful about the rhythm of those days when I would write for 45 minutes and then go downstairs and turn the dough, sniff it, taste it and see how billowy it was getting and then go back to work.''

He has a deep fascination with fermenting, and says this ''microcosmos'' is responsible for some of the most delicious foods he explored - from sauerkraut and kimchi to beer and raw milk cheeses. The 20th century war on bacteria - with its profligate use of antibiotics and routine sterilisation of food - has undermined the good work of microbes and our health by wrecking the ecology of our gut. Pollan says we need to regularly eat all kinds of fermented foods, not just popular yoghurt.

''I'm fascinated by the kinds of fermentation where we cook without any heat whatsoever,'' he says. ''These are the most miraculous transformations of all because here we have food being cooked by bacteria and fungi. What an amazing idea! What an incredible discovery that you could use this tropism towards rot, which is everywhere on us, in us, all over the environment and you could harness that destructive energy that is trying to break you and everything down, channel it in such a way that it leads to these incredible striking strong flavours and also makes food healthier and more nutritious than before you started. That's incredible.''

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Which brings us to the often-cited reason most of us don't cook any more: a lack of time. Pollan accepts that people need to re-evaluate their concept of time if home-cooking is to be revived. But he says cooking doesn't necessarily mean starting from scratch. ''It doesn't mean baking the bread that becomes your breadcrumbs.''

The survival of home-cooking, he says, will also have ramifications for farmers' markets and local production.

''When we don't cook, the farmer is only getting 8 per cent of the food dollar when you buy processed food. When you go to the farmers' market and buy ingredients that haven't been processed, the farmer captures more than 90 per cent of the food dollar. So revolutionising our agricultural system really relies on a culture of home cooking.''

>>Cooked - A Natural History of Transformation, by Michael Pollan (Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin, April 2013. $30.)

>>Indira Naidoo is a Sydney-based journalist.

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