I have found that I really struggle with picking a Netflix Original to watch every week. I don’t want to watch something and write about something that I ended up not liking. I can admit I am a little picky. This week I watched a documentary. I expected a full length movie, but this in particular documentary was a series that essentially broke the documentary into separate parts. The parts stress why cooking so important for the human race and how to get back to the original cooking. The documentary I chose was Cooked.
Cooked is a documentary based off of a corresponding book written by Michael Pollan. His book and the docu-series are broken up into the four elements and how those affect the way people cook and eat. Therefore, this docu-series is only four episodes long. Fire. Water. Air. Earth. These elements continually play a role in how we cook, eat, and ultimately live our lives. I think this series is a kind of wake up call for how our cooking industry has shaped our world, and how we are straying from the original path.
Michael Pollan fully embraced learning about how to better his cooking when he was researching for this book. He completely immersed himself. I think that is what makes this documentary so satisfying to watch. He is truly passionate about teaching people where their food comes from and how that has changed over our lifetimes. Each element impacts the way we eat and cook significantly. People don’t realize just how much. Each episode goes in depth in that specific element. To me that puts this docu-series one step above the rest.
Fire. This episode goes into the details of how a culture still uses their old customs of fire to attract and kill food for their people. The Martu are a group of aboriginal people from Western Australia. They live in the modern world but, travel back to their homeland to hunt like their ancestors did. With Fire. They burn vegetation, which attracts animals to those barren lands. It shows exactly how important fire has always been to humans finding food. This episode also goes into the theory of humanary evolution. It goes into our closest ape relative and shows the difference in their jaws, which are distinctly similar to ours, and the jaws of other apes. It tells you the theory of why fire is so important to our cooking and why we can’t eat the same foods as the apes.
Water. In this episode Pollan goes into pot cooking in India, and processed food. He also learns how to cook stews, and other foods in pots. He examines how water plays the part in processed foods, and why there is an increase in the rise of processed foods. Contrary to the first episode though, Pollan points out that cooking with water is a relatively new concept compared to cooking with fire. He also talks about patience. You have to wait for the water to start softening some of the foods we can eat today, that we couldn’t earlier in history. This topic leads into the talk of processed food. It all leads back to the time people allot to cooking and how processed foods are faster. He then brings in a specialist in the history of processed foods.
Air. Everything we do is affected by air. In this specific episode Pollan goes indepth into bread as a staple food. Bread is simply a mixture of flour and water, along with some fermentation. Yet, people could live almost entirely off of bread. Just not the way we think of bread now. Pollan goes into the details of how bread has originated and changed within the last 60 years. This leads the topic of discussion to the fact that people all over the world are reporting an intolerance to gluten, a protein found in wheat and other grains. They tie this all back into food processing. They talk about how if we maybe went back to the basics of cooking, with basic foods, we might not be seeing this rise in intolerance.
Earth. Obviously, we all know that the earth plays a major role in eating and cooking. This episode is all about fermentation. Fermentation is everywhere. Cheese, chocolate, kimchi. All of these things have to ferment before they become what we truly think of them as. Fermentation plays a major role in all foods. Foods like chocolate and cheese wouldn’t be what they are without fermentation. Fermentation used to be the way to preserve foods to eat during the winter.
Pollan analyzes cooking and eating in society, then and now. I probably would not have thought about all of the things Pollan brings attention to, if I hadn’t watched this docu-series. I think the specifics of his analysis and his strive to learn and understand how we have evolved from then to now. Another admirable aspect for me is that in the first episode, the camera is not steady and always straight. This shows that they are truly there, that they weren’t worried about how the tapes would look. They only wanted to get to the core of what they were discussing, and wanting to teach. I have admiration for that because while a smooth shot looks nice, an authentic shot looks and makes the audience feel like they are actually there. I enjoyed watching this docu-series and would definitely recommend it to others wanting to learn.
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