I'm cooked! Michael Pollan's newest book "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation" is so subtly full of metaphors and subversion that my head is still spinning. He put forth three ideas using four methods of cooking. Barbecue, braising, bread baking, and fermentation. He makes the perfect argument for his ideas, get in the kitchen and learning about food, that we are co-evolving with the microscopic organisms around us, and connecting socially with family and friends to share meals is a process worth rekindling.

Mary and I participate with a local CSA (Affinity Farms). It is such a rich and rewarding experience. Here is picture of an early box (week 4). Mostly greens, some turnips and green garlic. It filled our fridge and we will "suffer" and "struggle" to plan our weeks meals around the bounty. Having Russell and Kelly farm for us is a way that we can stay "intellectual incompetent" in the area of the details of gardening. Our lifestyle and living location makes it hard to have a garden. Something I sadly admit I have never had. Mary used to do the whole gardening/canning/food storage thing when she lived in Pennsylvania.

There is a lack of understanding of how our food is prepared. I'm not sure I understand all the implications. This "lack of understanding" is prevalent in many areas of live, technology, our health, interlay of the environment and our activities, the material world we live in. But food, we have be hood-winked in a group think through advertising that "they", the industrial food machine, can produce food better, safer, and more convenient than we can. Their motive, profits, not health and social well being. This is pervasive type of "intellectual incompetence" we have all fallen for in one way or another. Michael Pollan's book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is in a way a subversive text, rallying us to overthrow the industrial food machine and take back cooking. Little by little, slowly, where it makes sense.

What the food industry can not produce is the feeling of satisfaction you get from preparing a meal from raw or near raw ingredients and sharing it together with family and friends. Learning new skills in the area of food give confidence to learn new skills in the other area where corporations have tried to influence us into being asleep sheep.

Cooking is a subversive act. You agree?