Michael Pollan Home Cooking

In our capitalist society there exists a constant struggle between the interests of big businesses and consumers, a war that sees some of its fiercest battles in the food industry. The “consequential question” that Michael Pollan raises of “to cook or not to cook” is very relevant to our efforts to maintain some degree of personal autonomy within modern society (Pollan 22). While by cooking our own food we can achieve some degree of independence from the nutrition-industrial complex, complete escape is next to impossible; however, our inevitable partial reliance on the food industry neither asserts a corporate monopoly over what we eat nor discounts the value of home cooking because of our fundamental connection to the transformative processes …show more content…
Even things like making homemade sourdough bread or growing a small vegetable garden, which are less intense than, say, milling your own wheat or raising and butchering livestock, take a considerable amount of time away from your day – an expense that is too great for a large number of us. Many people cannot even consider cooking dinner every night from scratch, much less sourcing quality ingredients or producing items like stock or sauces, because of overly crowded work schedules or the demands of single parenting, forcing them to rely on highly processed fast …show more content…
Growing vegetables or baking bread or brewing beer or growing vegetables on a small scale allows producers to pay close attention to quality and often results in tastier, healthier foods; however, this also causes locally grown food to be quite expensive compared to the industrially produced equivalents and therefore is only accessible to more affluent consumers – people would not otherwise be dependent on unhealthy processed foods. But while the exclusivity of high-quality ingredients does little to loosen big business’s grasp on society’s diet, it does not condemn the local food revolution as something that can never fully transcend class boundaries. Any effort to better connect with our ingredients takes power away from the nutrition-industrial complex and moves us closer to healthier food and more prosperous local economies, restoring the lost interdependence between cooks, farmers, and the community (Pollan