Peter's Corner: A Visit With Michael Pollan

Peter Reinhart, our Pizza Quest host, baking instructor and baker extraordinaire, shares a recent blog post about his visit with author Michael Pollan.

[Recently], author Michael Pollan came to Charlotte to speak at a local university. Most of you already know who Michael Pollan is, but in case you don't, he is the author of a number of bestselling books on food and culture, including The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is arguably the most influential book on our relationship with food since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. He has a new book out called Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, a book that I think every serious food lover should own and read, especially the many pizza freaks who follow us here on our "journey of self-discovery through pizza" and who intuitively grasp the notion of cooking as a transformational act. 

Regardless of which Pollan books you've read or not read, his message is clear (and I'm not referring to his now classic "Food Rule": Eat food, not too much, mostly plants, which makes for a great sound bite as well as good guidance). No, his deeper message, I believe, has to do with connectivity and consciousness. His books help us connect with the whole lineage of sources – from seed, to soil, to farmer, miller, merchant, consumer and cook – that transform things of the earth into things of nourishment and joy.

He reveals our inevitable complicity in the taking of life for the sake of our own, and also the priestly (or, if you prefer, the shamanistic) dimension inherent within each of us to effect the transformation of raw ingredients into something totally other.

In fact, what I love about this new book is spelled out in its subtitle, A Natural History of Transformation. It is the power to change one thing into something else, whether through skill, talent, training, artisanship, or simply through seeing and knowing – knowing that everything exists on many levels and is never only what we think it is. Because, when you think about it, transformation isn't only about changing something from one thing into something else, but in the ability to see that the "something else" was there all along, hidden behind the veil of the thing we think we see.

Now, Michael Pollan didn't say all that I just wrote above, but he writes about things that make me think of things like this. When I say, as I have in many of my own books, that the mission of the baker is "to evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain," it touches on this notion of connectivity as an act of transformation.

In Cooked, Pollan shows how, throughout human history, we have learned to harness fire, water, air and earth into tools that allow us to transform (perhaps "evoke" or "reveal" are just as accurate here), the full potential of an ingredient, whether it be animal, vegetable, fruit or grain, into something tasty, and also digestible and nourishing, and even more important, something other than what we thought it was while revealing what it actually could be. – Peter

Condensed from Peter's original blog post on Pizza Quest.