Hanover
A glut of television programs, recipe books and products show that we’re more obsessed than ever before with the act of cooking, and yet, at the same time, we’re much less likely than our parents and grandparents to fire up the oven.
Over just the past 50 years, Pollan said, the average amount of time a person spends cooking or preparing his or her own food has shrunk to 27 minutes, down from an hour, per day.
Pollan said the shift comes with severe consequences for our health and the environment, because when it comes to diet, most people overlook a broad choice that probably has the biggest consequence on our health.
“It’s not what you’re eating,” said Pollan, thin, wise and professorial in his glasses, tweed jacket and skinny jeans. “It’s who’s doing the cooking. Is it human beings, or is it an industrial corporation?”
Monday was Food Day, a national initiative to change America’s diets and food policies, and Pollan was delivering the keynote address in a larger celebration of the slow food movement by Dartmouth; his remarks were followed by a signing of his latest book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, in the lobby.
Pollan didn’t set out to be a slow food guru. Writing a book about cooking, he said, “was never in my life plan.”
“It grew out of this journey I have been on for almost 15 years, following the food chain that puts food on our tables,” Pollan said.
A Long Island native whose career began as a journalist, Pollan’s focus on food began in 1998 when, while researching genetically modified foods for a gardening column, he began wondering where all the food on our plates comes from. His books have included In Defense of Food, in which he sums up the entirety of his gastronomic advice in a single, seven-word statement: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Pollan was joined on the stage by Dartmouth environmental studies professor Anne Kapuscinski, who sits on the Plate of the Union, a national advisory board endorsed by Pollan that seeks to relate food issues to the 2016 election season.
“Here in the Upper Valley … farmers take seriously the agricultural methods, put them into practice and grow them,” said Kapuscinski, who praised the region’s thriving network of community-supported agriculture and farmers markets.
People cooking their own food, she suggested, could be another step toward an independent local food network.
“This could be a way to grow that movement,” she said.
The idyllic small farms that pepper the Upper Valley create a pleasing, but deceptive view of modern farming practices, Pollan said.
In 1998, he headed to Idaho to see where the majority of the country’s genetically modified potatoes come from. There, he said, “I was stunned the first time I was on an industrial-scale farm.”
Pollan spoke of massive agricultural operations that process millions of animals and plants to serve, in large part, the specific needs of the fast food industry. For example, just four meatpackers control 85 percent of the beef produced in the country, he said.
“They reinvented the chicken to give us the chicken nugget,” he said. “Our willingness to let the food industry prepare our food for us is leading to our health problems.”
Pollan said those who cook at home are healthier, and weigh less, than those who eat out. The reason is simple, he said.
“Corporations cook differently than people do. They use the cheapest possible raw ingredients, the most consistent ones that they have,” he said. “To disguise the fact that the raw ingredients are so bad, they use lots of salt, fat and sugar.”
Many of those who came to hear Pollan speak were longtime fans, both of him and of cooking.
Greg Manne, a Hanover resident who works at Dartmouth, said he eats out once or twice a week, but that he cooks the rest of his meals himself.
Even as he waited in line to have a copy of Pollan’s book signed, he had rice sitting in a rice cooker at home.
“My mom made me learn how to cook when I was 10,” he said, adding that she had encouraged him to visit and watch his uncles at their jobs in restaurants. “I’m not good with my hands. I can’t play music. But I am a good cook.”
Dartmouth freshmen Shawn Gayner and Hilda Friday, who were waiting to have their books signed by Pollan, said they’re trying to cook more often.
For Gayner, a 26-year-old Idaho native, it comes a little more easily, with most of her meals coming as a result of her time in the kitchen.
For Friday, who lives on campus, kitchen time is a little more difficult to access.
“I do like to cook,” she said. She said that she had recently joined the Dartmouth Outing Club, and hoped to hone her own cooking skills during their group dinners.
Pollan said everyone can benefit by pushing back against a food industry that is too eager to do our cooking for us.
“One of the ways that capitalism grows is, it finds things to do that we used to do ourselves and it convinces us that it can do it better,” he said. “We gain something really powerful when we take it back.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.