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Has Michael Pollan become the Anne Hathaway of food writing? With the publication of each book, including his most recent, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan grows ever more polarizing. Talk to well-meaning foodies, and they will most likely name the author’s 2006 The Omnivore’s Dilemma as one of their favorites.
Case in point: at Thursday night’s “Maryville Talks Books” conversation with Pollan and Don Marsh, host of NPR’s “St. Louis on the Air,” a physician prefaced his question for Pollan by claiming that the book changed his life and how he talks to his patients about food. Pollan—looking fit and hip in skinny jeans, striped socks, and a khaki sport coat—didn’t bat an eye or blush because by now such ingenuous effusiveness from his fans must be old hat.
While it’s true that The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed the way many think about industrial agriculture, fast food, and even Whole Foods, his later works, In Defense of Food and Food Rules, piqued the ire of some who have grown tired of the journalist telling them what they should and shouldn’t eat. Perhaps the negative criticism is nothing more than natural backlash for someone who has become wildly successful; or, perhaps something else is happening in the world of food studies—a shifting of the canon, if you will.
Experts like Pollan, Alice Waters, and even Marion Nestle, Mark Ruhlman, and Mark Bittman represent the “old guard,” about whom the labels “food police,” “elitist,” and “sanctimonious” crop up more than occasionally. Writing from a place of privilege—whether racial, gendered, socioeconomic, or a combination of the three—this group, made up of journalists, an academic, and chefs, represents only a small portion of the larger population interested in and writing about food.
“Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” That’s the title of an article that ran on Salon.com the week before Pollan’s Cooked was published. Perfect timing especially since the article is excerpted from Emily Matchar’s Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, published a week after Pollan’s book. Since I haven’t gotten my hands yet on Matchar’s book, it’s unclear if the provocative title was a Salon editor’s or Matchar’s invention.
Regardless, she raises a number of criticisms of Pollan in the excerpt centered around the idea that his call to return to the old ways of cooking means that he wants women back in the kitchen, oppressed. In her essay, Matchar attempts to shock the reader with the following quote, attributing it to Pollan only after she’s caught one’s attention: “’[The appreciation of cooking was] a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.’” Matchar goes on to argue that Pollan both dismisses Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique and scolds women for letting corporations do the cooking.
Now, it’s important to share here that no citations or hyperlinks were provided in the Salon excerpt—a questionable oversight on the editors’ part—so I tracked down Pollan’s original article, ”Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” published in the New York Times Magazine, in 2009. After reading Pollan’s article in which he examines the conundrum surrounding the fact that while so many people devote hours a day to watching others cook, they spend almost no time cooking themselves, it’s clear that Matchar manipulates quotes to suit her agenda.
At the same time, Matchar makes a number of salient points like this one about gender politics in the kitchen: “Yet today everyone is meant to have a deep and abiding appreciation and fascination with pure, wholesome, delicious, seasonal, regional food. The expectation that cooking should be fulfilling for everyone is insidious, especially for women.” Those—but especially women—who have ever felt guilty about buying processed food for convenience sake or find themselves in a fast food drive-thru lane will identify with Matchar’s quote.
I didn’t read Cooked until after I read Matchar’s article, so my sexism radar was up (and keener than usual). That Matchar’s book was published only a week after Pollan’s means it’s unlikely she read his new tome, rendering any appearance that her criticisms are of the new book moot. In fact, Pollan devotes a fair amount of space early in Cooked to gender and cooking—a topic he also addressed early in his conversation with Don Marsh. In that conversation, he said, “Feminism ignited an important and fraught conversation about the division of labor, and the food industry saw this as an opportunity,” thus indicting large corporations, not male food writers.
One can’t help but feel that Pollan—and really anyone who writes about gender and cooking—is caught between a nostalgic rock and a hard place: to call for a return to home-cooked meals superficially may appear to be a call for women to do all of the work, thus quashing the conversation before it even begins. In Cooked, Pollan anticipates that very problem, when he writes, “But by now it should be possible to make a case for the importance of cooking without defending the traditional division of domestic labor. Indeed, the argument will probably get nowhere unless it challenges the traditional arrangements of domesticity—and assumes a prominent role for men in the kitchen, as well as children.” That’s a sentiment with which Emily Matchar would surely agree.
Pollan has been criticized for widening both the gender and class gaps in food studies, and, at least according to academic and fellow food studies writer Julie Guthman, of plagiarism. In “Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I Am Fed up with Michael Pollan at al.,” published in 2007 in the journal Agriculture and Human Values, Guthman asserts that Pollan “displays a marked weakness at acknowledging sources,” and “while he must be commended for bringing arguments from agrarian theory to a wider audience, he does so at the expense of codes of scholarly conduct that sets a poor example to our students.” It’s true that some of his works, including Cooked, are not as carefully cited as one would hope, but Pollan and others would argue—whether rightly or wrongly—that that’s one of the differences between journalism and academia, and it’s the professor’s responsibility to point out such a difference to his or her students.
Guthman (right) again takes aim at Pollan in the January/February 2008 article “The Food Police,” originally published in the food journal Gastronomica. In the article—a preview of her recently published book, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism—Guthman calls Pollan, Nestle, and Jane Goodall “morally superior” in their directives about how to stay slim and healthy. According to Guthman, Pollan et al. make it seem that thin people have “heightened powers” compared to their overweight counterparts, ending her article with this thought:
I worry that Michael Pollan reinforces this privileged and apolitical idea [that one
can change the world “one meal at a time” without attention to policy] that
reinforces the belief that some people—thin people—clearly must have seen the
light that the rest are blind to. Pollan is a damn good writer and a smart man,
which makes The Omnivore’s Dilemma a compelling read. But I can’t stomach
where it leads. In a funny way, it makes me crave corn-based Cheetos.
Guthman’s not the only one who’s vowed to turn to junk food after reading what she perceives to be Pollan’s superior tone. What she praises in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, however, holds true for Cooked, particularly because the author returns to the 4-part structure in the new book that served him so well in Dilemma.
Organized around the four elements—fire (BBQ-ing), water (braising), air (baking), and earth (fermenting)—Pollan examines how to cook food as he apprentices himself to masters of each process. Mixing various writing modes like profile, history, and “how-to-think-about-it” (rather than “how-to,” as he explained in conversation with Marsh), Pollan includes a little bit of everything about food and culture along the way in an entertaining and informative way. The most interesting section is “Earth,” in which he writes about the relatively new science of gut bacteria (a related article will be published this week in the Times, according to the author), underscoring Mary Roach’s claim in Gulp. that in the future we will focus as much if not more on what’s already in our bodies as what we put into them
What is perhaps the best part of Cooked is the way Pollan slips in commentary on important issues attendant to food. In the fire/BBQ section, for example, he wonders just how authentic BBQ is when commodity hogs are used, reminding the reader of the horrors of CAFO’s he wrote about in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the water/braise section, he examines gender politics in the kitchen; in air/baking, he returns to the dangers of processed foods, a topic that permeates much of his previous works; and in the earth/fermentation section, he reveals the countercultural revolution attached to “fermentos” like Sandor Katz, writing about a form of cooking so self-contained and off the grid—fermented foods need only the right microbes to transform—external energy (wood, gas, electricity) is unnecessary.
Throughout all four cooking transformations, Pollan makes clear that a great deal of time is needed whether one is roasting a whole hog over a fire, braising a lamb for stew, preparing a loaf of bread for baking, or waiting for microbes to work their magic on cabbage for sauerkraut. Those who find themselves too busy to cook dinner, and without the means and geography to procure the kinds of ingredients Pollan uses, may become annoyed with his accounts of leisurely Sunday afternoons spent in his Berkeley home chopping onions for a braise or kneading dough between stints of writing at the computer. Fair enough.
And, yet, Pollan’s description of how fermentation works vis-à-vis his own experiments with kimchi provides a perfect metaphor for how the food studies canon may be shifting to allow voices like Matchar’s into the conversation: if your kimchi smells rotten thanks to certain microbes, wait a while for competing microbes to succeed the old guard, which will often result in an end product that’s not only digestible, but more palatable to your individual taste.
