Food: The Portal of Connection With the Community, Family, and Yourself

Food is wildly important to all people; literally food is vital because organisms need energy to live, but Netflix's Cooked, a documentary focused on the intersection of food and culture, explores the fundamentals of food: fire, water, air, and earth in an effort to remind people to get back to basics and enjoy time together.
In the first episode, best-selling author Michal Pollan rediscovers fire. Through the super interesting history of aboriginal hunters in Australia that used fire as their primary hunting tool and a more modern, yet classic, style of fire-based cooking, southern barbecue, he explains why cooking on raw fire is essential.
throughout the whole episode, Pollan argues that the community aspect of food is lost in modern times. He begins by stating that everyone has good memories of someone they love cooking them food and from that have an appreciation for it, yet nowadays the respect and appreciation is lost because there are less home-cooked meals. I think that's very true in that knowing somebody spent hours upon hours cooking a meal for you is an obvious act of kindness that is kind of rare, at least for me. Because so much of today's diet is fast food, or just restaurants in general, it's really easy to take food for granted. Perhaps because it isn't made by somebody you know, or perhaps it's not even "good" food, the fact of the matter is that people just don't care as much.
In reality, there is so much we can learn from cooking food. even mores, understanding where the food comes from and the history behind the meals. In the aborigine culture, the men hunt for dangerous game, kangaroo and bush meat, while the women primarily start the fires and use big metal poles to find burrows if a certain type of lizard, which constitutes for the majority of the diet. The act of hunting for the food that they need actually brings them a whole new level of appreciation for the animals and their meal. Additionally, Pollan worked side by side with a North Carolinian pit master named Ed Mitchell who learned his skills from his father, grandfather, and so on. In his case, barbecuing is a way to keep his ancestors alive and reconnect with them, which is a really cool way of looking at cooking.
Not that everyone needs to go out and hunt for their every meal or barbecue every night and reminisce on the good ol' days, but there are for sure some things that could be improved upon to shift back to meal time being family time. The message here is that cooking meals together and sitting down to appreciate the hard work that everyone's put in for that meal is really important and Cooked did a great job outlining the tradition in that idea.