Cooked (2015) s01e01 Episode Script
Fire
1 [percussion music playing.]
[sighs.]
[both speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Nola Taylor in Martu Wangka.]
Watch out, the ashes might burn you.
[Kumpaya Girgiba in Martu Wangka.]
It's a big one.
[man speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Michael Pollan.]
Fire is a very powerful thing.
I think a lot of it goes back to the fact that this is a sign you're gonna get fed.
Because we are the species who cooks.
No other species cooks.
And when we learned to cook is when we became truly human.
[theme music playing.]
I'm Julia Child.
Welcome to The French Chef.
Watch out, your finger! [audience laughing.]
[yelling indistinctly.]
[Michael.]
This phenomenon of cooking shows has just grown and grown and grown.
I was really puzzling over this.
The less time we invest in cooking ourselves, the more time we seem to spend watching other people cook on television, food that we, of course, never get to eat.
You know, there are lots of things in modern life we no longer do for ourselves, that we've outsourced to corporations, and we don't watch TV about it.
But cooking is different.
There's something that draws us to that hearth.
And I think some of it has to do with the fact that we all have powerful memories of being cooked for by our moms, by our dads, by our grandparents.
That act of generosity and love, I think, is still in there for most of us, and is very, um, powerful.
It goes really deep.
[indistinct chatter.]
[man.]
I doubt that, uh, tonight's guest needs much introduction.
He's the author of seven best-selling award-winning books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and most recently, Cooked.
In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.
From right here in Berkeley, please join me in welcoming Michael Pollan.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I have to say, I I didn't ever expect to write a book on cooking.
It wasn't part of my, uh, life goals.
But it ended up being kind of a journey to the soul to the heart of cooking.
The book was divided into four parts, each of which corresponds to one of the great transformations that we call cooking.
They happen to correspond to the four classical elements, fire, water, air and earth.
Weirdly enough, one of the biggest boons of cooking is it relieves us from the work of chewing chewing a lot.
Think about trying to digest raw fibrous vegetables or or tubers.
They need to be chewed and chewed and chewed.
When you look at primates who still eat raw food, they spend half their waking hours in the act of chewing.
It's no wonder they don't get anything done.
[chuckles.]
[Richard Wrangham.]
I studied chimpanzees for many years.
I would go out and spend some days trying to just survive on the chimpanzee fruits.
Uh, the fruits and and the leaves, as well.
And the short story is, it's totally impossible.
[Michael laughs.]
[Michael.]
To find out more about the origins of cooking, I went to this primatologist at Harvard named Richard Wrangham.
Wrangham developed this ingenious theory that it was cooking that led to our becoming human.
[Michael.]
What you're essentially saying, is that cooking is in our nature, it's baked into our biology at this point.
[Richard.]
Yeah, the astonishing thing is that cooking for us is natural.
- Yeah.
- And eating raw is unnatural.
- Unnatural, yeah.
- Yeah.
[Richard.]
The cooking hypothesis is that humans are unlike every other animal, because we are biologically adapted to eating our food cooked.
[Michael.]
even making it possible to survive.
Look at it.
You know, you can see just what a different kind of body shape we got dealing with here.
I mean, this adult male gorilla - is not that different in height from us.
- Yeah.
[Richard.]
But the rib cage and the pelvis is very big, because they are housing a very capacious gut.
The face of the gorilla is relatively protruding.
It's got a long tooth row.
If we are thinking about human evolution, then we can look at the mouth and the jaws and the teeth and ask exactly when they became relatively small.
And the answer is, with Homo erectus.
Homo erectus is the ape that has become human, the species that signals our departure from an ape ancestry into the modern human type of anatomy.
We have small mouths.
We have small teeth.
We have weak muscles for chewing.
We have a small jaw.
Most important, beginning with Homo erectus, we get this increase in brain size that goes on accelerating right up to almost the present day.
The brain is a very hungry organ.
It needs a tremendous amount of energy.
Between increasing the proportion of the food that is actually digested and allowing you to digest it with much less physical work, cooking gives you more energy.
Homo erectus is the species that is somehow adapted to eating relatively soft food.
- And cooking-- - So less chewing required, - and less rigorous chewing required.
- Yes.
If you are thinking about human evolution, you're thinking about hunters and gatherers, then cooking is absolutely vital, because, uh, on a raw diet, we have no evidence that anybody actually can survive in the wild.
Humans are really poorly adapted.
If we lost our ability to have fire, we would all die.
[indistinct.]
The idea, therefore, is that Homo erectus, as the first human, evolved when an ape learned to cook.
[Michael.]
Picture a forest fire and stepping into it after the flames have died down, and there's some dead animals around, and they probably tasted better than raw meat.
The basic idea was, I was going to do kind of a deep-dive into cooking and learn how to do it.
I started with fire, 'cause that's where cooking begins.
Shall we - commence with the tin foil operation? - Yes.
[Jack Hitt.]
Okay, all right.
That's good.
We're building an oven, basically, a kind of, you know, simple oven.
But But I've found that you kind of want a slightly crummy oven.
'Cause if you have some leaks in it, then the air will sort of burble around in there before it gets out.
Turns out, the crummy cheap oven - It's the way to go.
- is the way to go.
- [Michael.]
Gentle.
- Yeah.
[Jack.]
Yeah, that's good.
Let me just A little bit closer.
There you go.
That's good.
- This looks pretty, uh, crazy.
- Yeah.
[Michael laughs.]
The redneck spaceship.
[both laugh.]
[Michael.]
You know, we still get very hungry whenever we see food cooked over a fire.
There's something very primal about it.
But we've lost touch, I think, with how that food got to our plate.
The fact is, it is killing and cooking meat over fire that made us who we are, that made us human.
And to see people whose appreciation of that is undiminished is kind of thrilling.
[Michael.]
One of the things people around the world use their weekends for is to go to church and to worship.
The Martu people are no different in that sense.
Though they generally spend much of their week living in modern houses and eating food from modern kitchens, on weekends they go out to the country to reconnect to their land and their traditions, which revolve around the primacy of fire.
They burn the land to revive it and make hunting easier.
They cook their catch in the most elemental way possible, and they even celebrate the spirit of the flame with a baptism by fire.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
Now, you'll be smoked.
[baby crying.]
You all right.
Good one, good one.
[women speaking Martu Wangka.]
[baby wailing.]
[Nola speaking English.]
We always smoke the little baby when they're born to be, um, healthy and to stop them from crying.
It's like healing.
Fire always, for us, is special.
It's important for the young one to learn the way the old people have carried on.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
Let me talk a bit about fire.
This is how we learnt.
Burn the country to create a burnt area and hunt there after the fire.
We hunt game from the country.
[Curtis Taylor speaking English.]
It's really important, the storytelling around a campfire 'cause it kind of reminds us that a lot of story about fire and how all the ancestral heroes used it, stole it, made the land and people better.
These lessons from the Dreamtime teach us about the dangers of fire, but also the beauty of fire.
After we burn, we go out hunting for kangaroos and bush turkey.
A lot of animals scavenge around that area after the burn.
In the old days, hunting took a lot of work, with spears and boomerangs and fire.
But now we got a an air rifle, .
22, it's easier.
[Michael.]
I think anyone who eats meat needs to go hunting once, to see how they feel about it.
If you hunt, you're gonna you're gonna treat that meat with respect.
[gunshot.]
[Curtis.]
Yeah, good shot, good shot, good shot.
[gunshot.]
[sighs.]
[grunting.]
[Michael.]
It's thrilling to bring in the big game, and it's high prestige, and it's high risk, but the relation of risk and reward is very different for men, I think, than for women.
[Curtis and man conversing indistinctly.]
Among the Martu, the men go out with guns and they hunt bush turkey and kangaroos, you know, the high prestige foods that are hard to get.
And often, they come home empty-handed.
Meanwhile, the women, using just nothing more than a steel spike, hunt the goanna, which is the real staple of the diet.
[both speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Kumpaya.]
We will have a look at another burrow.
Over this way maybe.
Have a look.
Must be there in the spinifex.
[Nola.]
Where is its burrow? [Kumpaya.]
Over here, to the west.
- Where is it? - Over there is the burrow and the burrow's head is here.
Big one! [Nola speaking English.]
It's coming out There, now! [Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
I got its head.
[Nola.]
Wait, wait.
[Kumpaya.]
Slowly.
[Nola.]
Move your hand slowly, Mum.
[Kumpaya speaking Martu Wangka.]
Ow! [Nola in English.]
All right.
You got to twist this one here.
- [Kumpaya.]
Yeah.
- Like And this one.
And this side.
[man.]
That way they can't claw you? Yeah.
- This side.
- [Kumpaya.]
Turn it now.
[Nola speaking Martu Wangka.]
You might take him back to home.
Take a picture.
[both chuckle.]
[Curtis.]
Most of our people have medication that they have to eat every day, but when they go out hunting, they throw that away and, uh, the country makes them feel better.
Just being out there, and just being out in the [speaks Martu Wangka.]
[speaking English.]
in the homeland.
Like, Kumpaya, she looks a bit frail.
But when's she's out in the country and hunting, it makes her feel better.
[indistinct chatter.]
[in Martu Wangka.]
This goanna is full of shit! [Nola laughing.]
[Curtis speaking English.]
In preparation of the animal being cooked, we throw it over the fire, burn the sinew and then we bury it inside a hole just beside the fire and cover it with coals.
That's a law, you know, and our custom.
We don't bring any animals back that is uncooked.
It's been like that for many thousands of years.
We bring back cooked food and share it around with families.
[Nola sighs.]
[indistinct conversation.]
It's got more taste in it when you put it on the fire.
You can't roast a goanna, you know, in an oven.
[man chuckling.]
It's funny taste, but smoking, it's got a smoked smell on it.
You get it out from the fire, it tastes nice.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
Put more wood on the fire.
[Michael.]
You know, behind every electric outlet, even behind every microwave oven, there is somewhere a fire burning, probably of fossil fuel, but it's hidden from us.
Here we see it.
It's just right in front of us.
Because the Martu are a people who, until recently, owed their very survival to open fire.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
We didn't know about non-Martu people's fire.
We had our fire.
Everywhere we burn.
[Michael.]
In 1963, the Australians were about to rain fire down on the Martu in the form of missile tests.
But thankfully, somebody checked out the target area and found that there was a group of native Australians living on it, who'd been living entirely off the land for tens of thousands of years.
After this first contact with the Martu, the white Australians herded them into missions and boarding schools.
And it's only been in the last dozen years or so that they've gotten the right to return to their lands.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
We went away from this land, but came back and are still living here.
- [dog barking.]
- [phone ringing.]
[Michael.]
The Martu, like lots of traditional cultures, has one foot in our world and our diet and one foot in a traditional world.
[phone continues ringing.]
They haven't gone all the way into cities, into the Western diet.
[Nola speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Michael.]
There was an interesting experiment done in Australia back in the '80s, where a group of aborigines who were living in the city were overweight, pre-diabetic or diabetic, high blood pressure, many markers for heart disease.
This nutritionist persuaded them to go back to the bush, to their former way of eating.
And within six weeks, they lost, on average, like, 15 pounds.
Blood pressure, blood sugars, all went back into the normal range, merely by changing their diet.
[indistinct chatter.]
[children chattering.]
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
We kept our fire close to us.
We made fires by rubbing two sticks against each other.
We weren't diabetic back then.
We never had any sugar.
We had bush sweets, not sugar.
Sugar made us weak.
We grew up on bush meat.
We learnt how to cook our food with fire and eat.
[baby cries.]
[Michael.]
We have this whole association of cooking as being woman's work and low prestige, but anthropologists will tell you that in many cultures, men are tied to killing.
Part of the killing is the cooking.
Henry Fielding, the English novelist, referred to The Odyssey as "Homer's book about eating.
" In The Odyssey, these great heroes, the most prestigious people in this community, are out there, butchering and cooking and serving, and it's not beneath Achilles' station to actually be cooking.
This doesn't diminish his prestige at all, because it's just ritually so important.
- [indistinct conversation.]
- [baby babbling.]
[Michael.]
Cooking with fire, it's this great reaffirmation of of our our very special place in the cosmos.
As humans, we are halfway between the gods and the animals.
The animals can't cook, um, and the gods love sacrifice.
The man who wields the fire is sending that sacrifice up to the gods in the form of smoke, and declaring his elevation above the animals who don't know how to cook, who don't know how to please the gods.
Fire is the medium that allows us to tell that story.
I think this is not yet meat.
This is like a dead animal.
Um, this doesn't This isn't appetizing.
I mean, you take some imagination to You know, right? To look ahead and see, you know, bacon ham.
I think we should all deal with the fact that when you're eating meat, you're eating a dead animal, and it is it's consequential.
And I think it's something we should all, kind of, deal with it at some point, don't you? Yeah, and I think also if you You know, if you eat meat like this, you'll find that you probably end up eating less meat, because you find out how good really good meat is.
- Should I hold the legs? - Yeah, just yeah.
[Michael.]
God, he's like a perfect fit.
[Jack.]
All right? So, wood.
Put some over here.
[Jack.]
Yeah.
[Michael.]
We don't want it directly under the flesh.
What's the closest thing to, kind of, primordial fire-cooking that we have? In America, it's barbecue.
Southern barbecue.
I think that barbecue is kind of what's left of that idea of the ritual cooking of meat.
This idea that the man in front of the fire is the leader of the community and dispensing the good things to the group exists around the barbecue.
The part of the South where this cooking is the most, uh, unreconstructed turns out to be in Eastern North Carolina, where you still have people cooking whole animals over wood fires.
I went looking for a a great pitmaster, and I found him in a man named Ed Mitchell.
[stammers.]
You put your hand over the stove, what you think she's at? About 300? 250? - [John.]
Yeah, 350, 375.
- That's good.
[Michael.]
What sets Ed apart? One, he's an African American, and a lot of pitmasters in the South are not.
That's cool, man.
I like that.
[Michael.]
Another thing is that he cares about where the pigs come from.
He really cares about the farmers and the animals.
My man.
[grunts.]
Oh, it's showtime.
Can you bring that fluid? You don't really have to film this part if you don't need to.
[chuckles.]
I'm cheating right now, 'cause I'm trying to get the fire going fast.
I wanna get it good.
Good and hot, baby! Gettin' it thumpin'.
You got a knife? Yeah.
Oh, the pig is fine.
[Ed.]
Muscles.
Ryan.
Need a little help, son.
Y'know, he has youth on his side, so We give him a good little send-off salute.
[sighs.]
[grunts.]
Now we put him to bed.
See, starting out right.
See, she's already puffin'.
When I was cooking with Ed, every time at this moment, - before he covered it - [Jack.]
Mmm-hmm.
he'd give the thing a nice little pat on the butt.
[Jack chuckles.]
It's how His way of thanking the pig.
Okay, ready? [Michael grunting.]
Okay.
[Jack.]
So, that's coming in tight here.
All right, now, how's it looking? Oh, the smoke is looking great.
[Michael.]
The male desire to complicate simple things is very much on display around the barbecue pit.
- [Jack.]
Is it working? - [both laugh.]
- [Jack clears throat.]
Oh, there you go.
- Oh, there we go.
- [Jack.]
Something happened.
- It was asleep.
[Michael.]
You know, it's a guy thing.
It's always been a guy thing.
And I love barbecuing.
I love the whole lore of the barbecue and the lore of the pitmaster, but there is so much bullshit involved.
I'm surprised it's not hotter.
[Jack.]
Sometimes the logs will go out and then they just sit there.
Then they're just, like, taking up space.
[Michael.]
It's the easiest kind of cooking, you know.
Meat, fire, you're done.
And yet men dress it up with incredible amount of of ritual and care.
[Jack.]
Okay, what's that one say, down there? - Can you see that one? - It's, uh - One ninety-seven.
- Yeah, so that's dropping.
That's funny.
I thought it was 202.
- [Michael.]
That's alarming.
- Yeah, well Cheers, guys.
Hey, man, only 23 more hours.
- [all laugh.]
- [man.]
Settle in.
[Ed.]
Oh, yeah.
- Time for a cold one, John.
- That's right.
[Michael.]
I was amazed what Ed was willing to entrust me with, as a novice pitmaster.
[Ed.]
Don't waste my time if you're not really serious about learning some stuff.
But Mike was, uh He was right in there, man.
He was really good.
[Michael.]
We had a lot of time together while the pigs were grilling, and I-- I asked him, "What was the role of barbecue in your family?" It's sort of like, um For me, it's sort of like a rite of passage.
It was taught to me by my grandfather and my father.
It was taught to them by their parents.
A lot of these, uh, techniques was, uh, brought over with the slaves when they came over on the slave ships.
My great-great-grandfather was a slave.
On the plantations, whenever they have a big shindig, they would always go get the oldest slave and, uh, he would do most of the cooking, and they called him a pit boy.
Now, I'm using some of the stuff that were used hundreds of years ago by someone who mastered the art of pit cooking.
And here it is.
We come from a long line of cooks.
Each and every one of us is part of a lineal descendant of folks who cooked.
There's been a strong evolutionary trend towards that.
That's part of the reasons that humans like fire but it's also part of why we like the flavors of cooked food.
[sizzling.]
Fire itself is an interesting phenomenon.
We think that wood, for example, burns.
But, technically, wood isn't really doing most of the burning.
When you heat wood up, it volatilizes a variety of compounds in the wood.
And it's those compounds, as a gas, that actually burn.
Smoked food comes from the incomplete combustion of wood gases, and many of those are what we associate with the smell of wood smoke.
The flavors that we tend to prefer in smoked meat, uh, come from hardwoods.
Each of these woods will have a very different, uh, combination of compounds in them.
Some of the same flavor compounds that make their way into the fruit are also present in the wood.
If you split fresh cherry wood and smell the core wood, it actually smells like cherries.
We're drawn to, um, certain foods by co-evolution, fruit, in particular.
And meat, cooked in certain ways kind of piggybacks on that [stammering.]
and picks up some of the same chemical compounds that we're hardwired to like.
[meat sizzling.]
[Nathan.]
The Maillard reaction's actually a family of several hundred chemical reactions that occur when you mix amino acids, which are in protein, and sugars in the presence of heat.
[Michael.]
About three or four thousand new chemical compounds are created when you cook meat.
Um, so it has more complexity.
And more complexity usually means more flavor.
[Nathan.]
When you grill, most of the energy is actually coming from infrared radiation.
It's coming from the light, the glowing red coals.
And the flavor that you get comes from fat in the meat melting, dripping down, and then catching fire on the coals.
That suite of flavor molecules gives us both the aroma and the flavor.
In the Southern United States, barbecue means you smoke the meat over a hardwood smoke, all or in part, for a long period of time.
And all of the flavor comes from that hardwood.
When you do Southern barbecue, sometimes people will also use some briquettes.
And there's great controversy, "Is that okay?" I-- I think the controversy is silly, because the flavor is all coming from the wood.
So when Ed Mitchell or someone else uh, uses a mixture of wood and briquettes, he's using the briquettes as fuel to maintain his heat.
He's still using wood for the flavor.
[Ed.]
Wipe her down and put more coals on her.
[Ryan.]
Let me see.
[John.]
Check her out, Ryan.
[Ryan.]
So, we wipe her down, so you can really see what it looks like.
Then you can kind of gauge, uh, how far it has to go.
[John.]
So are we gonna flip her? [Ryan.]
Yeah, go on and flip her.
.
[Ryan.]
Yeah.
[John.]
Oh, yeah.
[John.]
Yeah, there we go.
[Ed.]
Ah.
[Ed.]
Oh, yeah, she's getting there.
[Ryan.]
Give her a sprinkle.
[Ed.]
Yeah.
[Ryan.]
Throw a little vinegar sauce on it.
[tapping cleaver.]
- [Ryan.]
Get what I'm sayin'? - [John chuckles.]
[John.]
He's pullin' the ribs off.
[Ryan.]
Oh, yeah, man.
[John.]
Oh, yeah, I gotta look.
[Ed.]
Mmm.
Good pig.
Damn good pig.
[pig snorts.]
[Ryan.]
If I can get an animal that has been raised more in a natural setting, I'm starting off on the right foot.
All right, guys.
[Eliza.]
They're pretty ingenious.
I mean, when they're born, their eyes are open, they can run around, they know who Mama is, they know how to eat, they understand scents and smells and bonding.
There's no other animal that I know of that has that much brain going full-steam when they're born.
Thank you.
Do I have a favorite? This is Clover right here.
Hey, Clover.
She's moving slow, she's breathing hard, but she has a lot of pep in her step for an old pig.
You can tell, I mean, she's she's maybe having a litter a year.
Her old skin [chuckles softly.]
Reminds me a lot of my grandmother, who wore a bikini until she was 85.
[laughs.]
You're displaying yourself.
I have spent my life finding, receiving injured animals.
Once I decided that I could raise animals, which I've been saving my whole life, to be food, I really wanted, even more for them to have the best life that they could, uh and be themselves.
[pigs squealing.]
[Michael.]
When I was 15 or 16, my father got the absolutely crazy idea that I would like to have a pet pig.
And I'd always liked pigs, but I was never interested in a real pig.
But he brought one home one day.
This pig was adorable.
It came in a shoebox, and I had to feed it with a bottle.
And it was my father's idea to call it Kosher.
We were spending the summer on Martha's Vineyard, and I fed Kosher, and fed Kosher, and fed Kosher.
Pigs really do eat like pigs.
At the end of the summer, Kosher weighed probably 200 pounds, and we were going back to 89th and Park Avenue, and I didn't know what to do.
I had to get rid of this pig.
As it turned out, James Taylor, the singer, owned another pig on the island.
[James Taylor singing.]
Oh, life's good friends Are hard to find And one of mine is dead [Michael.]
And I realized, maybe he would pig-sit for the winter.
Things I should have said to her I'll say to you instead Oh, Mona Oh, Mona We put Kosher in the pen with Mona.
You got too big to keep And too damned old to eat Kosher was significantly smaller than Mona.
And, um, it was so fast.
Mona starts chasing Kosher in circles, over and over and over again and Kosher is screaming.
[stammers.]
It's just an instance of, uh a couple of city boys not really knowing what they were doing with these two animals.
Then we go off in the woods and I hammer together a very rough pen, and by the time we get back, Kosher is lying there, dead, um, and probably had been literally frightened to death and had a heart attack.
Mona Little Mona So much of you to love Little bit too much of you To take care of So long - So that's the story of Kosher the pig.
- [man.]
And then, I mean, uh - [laughing.]
This is not going in the-- - We did not eat Kosher.
[both laughing.]
I know what you're thinking.
No.
It was a pet.
[Eliza.]
I really like rare breeds.
Almost everything I raise on this farm has some rare breed component that I am, sort of, stewarding.
[pig squeals.]
Rare breeds people, a lot of them don't want to eat them, don't want to kill them.
But you can create something that is appreciated by so many other people, and you can do it on a much, uh, larger scale, and actually feed your village, like I try to do here, uh, by having an end game for them.
- [indistinct chatter.]
- [bell dings.]
[Michael.]
We call it pork.
We don't call it pig.
We call it beef, not cow.
So there's a distancing that we're always trying to do.
If it comes to you turned into a chicken nugget, you can completely lose sight of the fact that there was a chicken at the beginning of that process.
And to my mind, the dark side of Southern barbecue now is that it's all based on commodity pork.
[pigs snorting and squealing.]
These are hogs raised in confinement in really brutal conditions.
They never go outdoors, the sows live in narrow crates, and they're just impregnated litter after litter after litter.
They still have a desire to suck, and they will do that on each other's tails and they'll get infected.
So the farmers cut the tails off.
I've been in these buildings, and they're a vision of hell.
They really are.
We've hidden meat and our transaction with animals behind the high walls of these abattoirs and feedlots.
We don't have to deal with the karmic costs.
Most of the meat eating we do, I have a lot of trouble justifying.
But I have visited enough farms where I have seen animals living the kinds of lives they should live and that they have what farmers like to say, "One bad day.
" And that kind of agriculture is something I can support, and I want to support.
I also think there are ecological reasons to justify meat-eating.
The most sustainable agriculture involves animals and plants together.
Plants are feeding the animals, the animals are producing waste that's feeding the plants, and you have a complete nutrient loop.
If the whole world were to go vegetarian, I don't necessarily think it would be a good thing.
[Eliza.]
At the end, I give 'em something to lie down on and smell, and it smells like them and, you know, just little tiny things.
[pig squealing.]
I think they try to do better and better in the other situations.
It's just a lot.
It's a lot for an animal to deal with.
I let animals go to become food every week of my life, and sometimes I'm surprised that I do that, but I think people operate all different ways due to their experiences.
But in general, I feel like farming is uh, a nice way, livestock farming, especially, to, um live in the present savor the past and be excited about the future.
When I ask Eliza what pigs I'm getting, I ask what breeds I'm getting and try and sort of figure out how we're gonna break 'em down according to that.
We do whole-animal butchery.
I used to work on these farms.
Ultimately, this is how the animal comes to the farmer.
And what we're doing is committing to buying the whole animal.
Our, kind of, mission here at the shop is two-fold.
One is to get people excited about this other way of farming, this other style of food.
The other part is to make people feel comfortable in their own kitchen.
I think too many people get stressed out, think they need to be a rock star chef, and, uh, and then they What they wind up doing is eating out.
You know, I always tell people, "Take that same money and spend that at a butcher shop or a farmers' market or anywhere else and I guarantee you, you're gonna get a whole lot more meals, you're gonna get a lot healthier food, and you're just gonna get better food.
" [John.]
That last time you got them livers from that pig [Ed.]
Yeah? [John.]
How'd you cook them up that night? [Ed.]
I fried 'em, baby.
[John.]
You sliced 'em up, and [Ed.]
Yeah.
[John.]
Real thin and you went and fried 'em in a cast-iron skillet? - That's right.
- What do you eat a pig's liver with? Rice and gaby.
Gaby? Go ahead and I ain't never heard of that now.
[Ed.]
That's the roux from the from your flour.
[John.]
From the flour Oh, yeah.
- After you fry it, you-- - Yeah.
Okay, and then you make a pan gravy out of it.
- Yeah, a pan gaby.
- Gaby? - Yeah.
- I never heard it called "gaby" before.
Yeah, I understand.
So you do it using French techniques, you don't even know it.
- Yeah.
- [John chuckling.]
And my grandpa would say, "Ain't the gaby good?" [both laughing.]
[John.]
"Ain't the gaby" But, oh, boy, that gives you a whole lot of good eating right there, man.
Nothing goes to waste.
- [John.]
From the rooter to the tooter.
- From the rooter to the tooter.
That's what makes it so good.
[John.]
It's still only 4:30.
[Ed chewing.]
That'll settle any argument.
Guarantee it.
[chuckling.]
Then you go in there, and you look, and [Michael.]
Barbecue crosses race in the South in very interesting ways, even in the days before integration.
Barbecue was very closely tied to the tobacco harvest.
When you were bringing in the tobacco, it was a very intense time on the farm and everybody worked, white and black, because it had to be done quickly when the leaves were perfect.
And then you needed to dry them as quickly as you could, so you built a big fire.
So, it only made sense that where you had all those coals, and you had so many people around, and it was a 24-hour process, that, um, you would do a pig.
And Ed said it was the only time, um, at that point, in the life of the South, where blacks and whites sat down together and ate.
[Ed.]
Only two things I've seen to bring people together in such a way was, uh, barbecuing, and, of course, my experience in going to Vietnam.
We all would be, uh crouched together, you know, for fear of a rocket, mortar or something coming in, and didn't make any difference, man.
You watch my back and I watch yours, you know.
People are at their best when, um I guess, when they realize that they are they really are connected.
And that is what barbecue does.
All animosity or any grudgements you might've had, arguments, just Everything just sort of mellows right out, you know.
Because it's, uh It's just a relaxing time.
[sizzling.]
[John.]
Y'all hear that bubblin'? [Ryan.]
Almost sounds like running water.
[John.]
Yeah, sounds like a brook.
A stream.
[Ed.]
I guess I was about 14 or 15, and And once we got the pig on, um then we'd start the male rituals, singin' some songs, and and tellin' lies and jokes, and We started passing around the moonshine.
My uncles and my grandfather and other relatives, you know, they they enjoyed themselves but I was too young to indulge.
In the wee, wee hours of the morning, you know, sleep began to take over.
And uh, these guys just dozed off and went to sleep.
You got to have somebody stoking the fires all the time.
See I took it upon myself, because I wanted to be a big boy.
I started tending the fires myself.
And so, uh, my father Grandfather ran over there and he lifted up the lid and looked at it.
It was a beautiful, caramel golden-brown pig, perfectly cooked.
And so he says, "Who cooked this pig?" You know, and started looking around at everybody, and everybody was still sort of dazed and said, "Well, you know" [muttering.]
And they they didn't do it, and so he looked at me.
He says Called me Roy.
He says, "Did you cook this pig?" I says I was afraid to say yes [chuckles.]
because I didn't have any business doing it, but then again, I said, "Yes.
" He said, "Come here.
" And so I really thought I was gonna get get really blown out but he got the moonshine jug and poured a little bit in a glass and gave it to me.
And I had my first drink of moonshine.
He said, "If you big enough to cook a pig," you know, "You big enough to take a little drink with us.
" And that was so I thought I was on heaven at that time.
[laughs.]
[shovel clanging.]
Oh, this is nice.
[Jack.]
Okay, bring it.
We'll go in, and Yeah, that's good.
Okay.
[Jack sighs.]
[Kumpaya speaking Martu Wangka.]
We made our own fire, just like this one here.
When the wood burns, we add more.
We cooked until the morning.
No sleep, keep the fire going.
When it rained, we kept the fire going.
[Curtis grunts.]
[Kumpaya.]
The next day, we start preparing and get it out of the fire ready to eat.
[Michael.]
Traditions survive because, you know, they're adaptive.
They're the result of a kind of cultural selection, like natural selection.
They survive because they help keep people healthy and happy.
And to to throw them overboard, wholesale, is very often to lose things that are critical to our well-being.
The meal is this incredible human institution, and there's a lot going on at a meal, especially with meat, this very precious food.
How can you share? [baby crying.]
[man speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Michael.]
When you let corporations cook for you, all this is hidden from view.
And one of the most important things we can do around our food culture is is reconnect to its sources.
It doesn't mean turning back the clock and and living as hunter-gatherers again.
It means looking at traditions for what they still have to offer.
[indistinct chatter.]
[Michael.]
Outsourcing has its values, and it certainly makes life easier, but it renders us all into passive consumers.
And, I don't know about you, but to me, that's my least proud identity.
I prefer my identity as a maker of things, as a producer, as a provider, and not just a consumer.
Mmm.
It's gonna be good.
And cooking allows you to do that.
[man.]
All we need is someone to eat.
Come on in.
That's the oven.
[woman 1.]
Wait, that's it? [woman 2.]
That's the spaceship.
[Michael.]
Hey, how are you? And we can, uh, unveil, I guess.
[John.]
Good to go.
Set it right here.
[Michael.]
Here we go.
[John.]
All right, all done.
I gotta convert you guys.
[indistinct chatter.]
[Michael.]
Mmm.
We'll have some tastes in a minute.
[Jack.]
Yeah, in a minute.
[all laughing.]
There's one person, who claims she was a vegetarian, but she's experimenting with meat tonight.
[laughs.]
I wanna give you a special piece, here.
[Jack stammers.]
We should sign a waiver or something.
[Michael.]
This may be a turning point in her life.
[chopping.]
- [woman.]
She nods.
- [all laughing.]
Whoa.
That is really, really good.
That's way more delicious than I thought.
[all laughing.]
Wow! [John.]
How's that skin? I hear it crunchin'.
[Ed.]
Take it home, baby.
[John.]
Mmm.
[Michael.]
That's Eastern North Carolina style.
[Ed.]
Let the old man have it for a minute.
[Michael.]
There are elements of of traditional ways of eating that we've lost, we've given up.
We've given up a certain amount of pleasure around food.
We've given up a set of skills for how you can take elements of the local landscape and fire and make beautiful meals.
I want to resist that.
I think that's something worth fighting against.
[indistinct chatter.]
- [Michael.]
So, dinner is served.
- [all exclaim.]
Enjoy! [indistinct chatter.]
[dog panting.]
Cucumber and strawberries are under there.
[John.]
Ed, you want a plate? Thank you, sir.
[woman 1.]
Well, this is some damn good barbecue.
- So, thank you very much.
- [woman 2 chuckles.]
Mmm-hmm.
[Michael.]
One of the stories of progress is the disappearance of fire from our lives.
But civilization really begins around that cook fire.
And even now, fire does draw us together.
[indistinct chatter.]
[James Taylor singing.]
Oh, Mona Mona Darling, you can close your eyes I've got a twelve-gauge surprise Waiting for you Since the day That she passed away Everything's just the same Everywhere I go Somebody mentions her name Sometimes it's easiest To tell the friend a lie They don't understand The way I feel Oh, Mona Little Mona So much of you to love Little bit too much of you To take care of So long [sighs.]
[sighs.]
[both speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Nola Taylor in Martu Wangka.]
Watch out, the ashes might burn you.
[Kumpaya Girgiba in Martu Wangka.]
It's a big one.
[man speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Michael Pollan.]
Fire is a very powerful thing.
I think a lot of it goes back to the fact that this is a sign you're gonna get fed.
Because we are the species who cooks.
No other species cooks.
And when we learned to cook is when we became truly human.
[theme music playing.]
I'm Julia Child.
Welcome to The French Chef.
Watch out, your finger! [audience laughing.]
[yelling indistinctly.]
[Michael.]
This phenomenon of cooking shows has just grown and grown and grown.
I was really puzzling over this.
The less time we invest in cooking ourselves, the more time we seem to spend watching other people cook on television, food that we, of course, never get to eat.
You know, there are lots of things in modern life we no longer do for ourselves, that we've outsourced to corporations, and we don't watch TV about it.
But cooking is different.
There's something that draws us to that hearth.
And I think some of it has to do with the fact that we all have powerful memories of being cooked for by our moms, by our dads, by our grandparents.
That act of generosity and love, I think, is still in there for most of us, and is very, um, powerful.
It goes really deep.
[indistinct chatter.]
[man.]
I doubt that, uh, tonight's guest needs much introduction.
He's the author of seven best-selling award-winning books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and most recently, Cooked.
In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.
From right here in Berkeley, please join me in welcoming Michael Pollan.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I have to say, I I didn't ever expect to write a book on cooking.
It wasn't part of my, uh, life goals.
But it ended up being kind of a journey to the soul to the heart of cooking.
The book was divided into four parts, each of which corresponds to one of the great transformations that we call cooking.
They happen to correspond to the four classical elements, fire, water, air and earth.
Weirdly enough, one of the biggest boons of cooking is it relieves us from the work of chewing chewing a lot.
Think about trying to digest raw fibrous vegetables or or tubers.
They need to be chewed and chewed and chewed.
When you look at primates who still eat raw food, they spend half their waking hours in the act of chewing.
It's no wonder they don't get anything done.
[chuckles.]
[Richard Wrangham.]
I studied chimpanzees for many years.
I would go out and spend some days trying to just survive on the chimpanzee fruits.
Uh, the fruits and and the leaves, as well.
And the short story is, it's totally impossible.
[Michael laughs.]
[Michael.]
To find out more about the origins of cooking, I went to this primatologist at Harvard named Richard Wrangham.
Wrangham developed this ingenious theory that it was cooking that led to our becoming human.
[Michael.]
What you're essentially saying, is that cooking is in our nature, it's baked into our biology at this point.
[Richard.]
Yeah, the astonishing thing is that cooking for us is natural.
- Yeah.
- And eating raw is unnatural.
- Unnatural, yeah.
- Yeah.
[Richard.]
The cooking hypothesis is that humans are unlike every other animal, because we are biologically adapted to eating our food cooked.
[Michael.]
even making it possible to survive.
Look at it.
You know, you can see just what a different kind of body shape we got dealing with here.
I mean, this adult male gorilla - is not that different in height from us.
- Yeah.
[Richard.]
But the rib cage and the pelvis is very big, because they are housing a very capacious gut.
The face of the gorilla is relatively protruding.
It's got a long tooth row.
If we are thinking about human evolution, then we can look at the mouth and the jaws and the teeth and ask exactly when they became relatively small.
And the answer is, with Homo erectus.
Homo erectus is the ape that has become human, the species that signals our departure from an ape ancestry into the modern human type of anatomy.
We have small mouths.
We have small teeth.
We have weak muscles for chewing.
We have a small jaw.
Most important, beginning with Homo erectus, we get this increase in brain size that goes on accelerating right up to almost the present day.
The brain is a very hungry organ.
It needs a tremendous amount of energy.
Between increasing the proportion of the food that is actually digested and allowing you to digest it with much less physical work, cooking gives you more energy.
Homo erectus is the species that is somehow adapted to eating relatively soft food.
- And cooking-- - So less chewing required, - and less rigorous chewing required.
- Yes.
If you are thinking about human evolution, you're thinking about hunters and gatherers, then cooking is absolutely vital, because, uh, on a raw diet, we have no evidence that anybody actually can survive in the wild.
Humans are really poorly adapted.
If we lost our ability to have fire, we would all die.
[indistinct.]
The idea, therefore, is that Homo erectus, as the first human, evolved when an ape learned to cook.
[Michael.]
Picture a forest fire and stepping into it after the flames have died down, and there's some dead animals around, and they probably tasted better than raw meat.
The basic idea was, I was going to do kind of a deep-dive into cooking and learn how to do it.
I started with fire, 'cause that's where cooking begins.
Shall we - commence with the tin foil operation? - Yes.
[Jack Hitt.]
Okay, all right.
That's good.
We're building an oven, basically, a kind of, you know, simple oven.
But But I've found that you kind of want a slightly crummy oven.
'Cause if you have some leaks in it, then the air will sort of burble around in there before it gets out.
Turns out, the crummy cheap oven - It's the way to go.
- is the way to go.
- [Michael.]
Gentle.
- Yeah.
[Jack.]
Yeah, that's good.
Let me just A little bit closer.
There you go.
That's good.
- This looks pretty, uh, crazy.
- Yeah.
[Michael laughs.]
The redneck spaceship.
[both laugh.]
[Michael.]
You know, we still get very hungry whenever we see food cooked over a fire.
There's something very primal about it.
But we've lost touch, I think, with how that food got to our plate.
The fact is, it is killing and cooking meat over fire that made us who we are, that made us human.
And to see people whose appreciation of that is undiminished is kind of thrilling.
[Michael.]
One of the things people around the world use their weekends for is to go to church and to worship.
The Martu people are no different in that sense.
Though they generally spend much of their week living in modern houses and eating food from modern kitchens, on weekends they go out to the country to reconnect to their land and their traditions, which revolve around the primacy of fire.
They burn the land to revive it and make hunting easier.
They cook their catch in the most elemental way possible, and they even celebrate the spirit of the flame with a baptism by fire.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
Now, you'll be smoked.
[baby crying.]
You all right.
Good one, good one.
[women speaking Martu Wangka.]
[baby wailing.]
[Nola speaking English.]
We always smoke the little baby when they're born to be, um, healthy and to stop them from crying.
It's like healing.
Fire always, for us, is special.
It's important for the young one to learn the way the old people have carried on.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
Let me talk a bit about fire.
This is how we learnt.
Burn the country to create a burnt area and hunt there after the fire.
We hunt game from the country.
[Curtis Taylor speaking English.]
It's really important, the storytelling around a campfire 'cause it kind of reminds us that a lot of story about fire and how all the ancestral heroes used it, stole it, made the land and people better.
These lessons from the Dreamtime teach us about the dangers of fire, but also the beauty of fire.
After we burn, we go out hunting for kangaroos and bush turkey.
A lot of animals scavenge around that area after the burn.
In the old days, hunting took a lot of work, with spears and boomerangs and fire.
But now we got a an air rifle, .
22, it's easier.
[Michael.]
I think anyone who eats meat needs to go hunting once, to see how they feel about it.
If you hunt, you're gonna you're gonna treat that meat with respect.
[gunshot.]
[Curtis.]
Yeah, good shot, good shot, good shot.
[gunshot.]
[sighs.]
[grunting.]
[Michael.]
It's thrilling to bring in the big game, and it's high prestige, and it's high risk, but the relation of risk and reward is very different for men, I think, than for women.
[Curtis and man conversing indistinctly.]
Among the Martu, the men go out with guns and they hunt bush turkey and kangaroos, you know, the high prestige foods that are hard to get.
And often, they come home empty-handed.
Meanwhile, the women, using just nothing more than a steel spike, hunt the goanna, which is the real staple of the diet.
[both speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Kumpaya.]
We will have a look at another burrow.
Over this way maybe.
Have a look.
Must be there in the spinifex.
[Nola.]
Where is its burrow? [Kumpaya.]
Over here, to the west.
- Where is it? - Over there is the burrow and the burrow's head is here.
Big one! [Nola speaking English.]
It's coming out There, now! [Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
I got its head.
[Nola.]
Wait, wait.
[Kumpaya.]
Slowly.
[Nola.]
Move your hand slowly, Mum.
[Kumpaya speaking Martu Wangka.]
Ow! [Nola in English.]
All right.
You got to twist this one here.
- [Kumpaya.]
Yeah.
- Like And this one.
And this side.
[man.]
That way they can't claw you? Yeah.
- This side.
- [Kumpaya.]
Turn it now.
[Nola speaking Martu Wangka.]
You might take him back to home.
Take a picture.
[both chuckle.]
[Curtis.]
Most of our people have medication that they have to eat every day, but when they go out hunting, they throw that away and, uh, the country makes them feel better.
Just being out there, and just being out in the [speaks Martu Wangka.]
[speaking English.]
in the homeland.
Like, Kumpaya, she looks a bit frail.
But when's she's out in the country and hunting, it makes her feel better.
[indistinct chatter.]
[in Martu Wangka.]
This goanna is full of shit! [Nola laughing.]
[Curtis speaking English.]
In preparation of the animal being cooked, we throw it over the fire, burn the sinew and then we bury it inside a hole just beside the fire and cover it with coals.
That's a law, you know, and our custom.
We don't bring any animals back that is uncooked.
It's been like that for many thousands of years.
We bring back cooked food and share it around with families.
[Nola sighs.]
[indistinct conversation.]
It's got more taste in it when you put it on the fire.
You can't roast a goanna, you know, in an oven.
[man chuckling.]
It's funny taste, but smoking, it's got a smoked smell on it.
You get it out from the fire, it tastes nice.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
Put more wood on the fire.
[Michael.]
You know, behind every electric outlet, even behind every microwave oven, there is somewhere a fire burning, probably of fossil fuel, but it's hidden from us.
Here we see it.
It's just right in front of us.
Because the Martu are a people who, until recently, owed their very survival to open fire.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
We didn't know about non-Martu people's fire.
We had our fire.
Everywhere we burn.
[Michael.]
In 1963, the Australians were about to rain fire down on the Martu in the form of missile tests.
But thankfully, somebody checked out the target area and found that there was a group of native Australians living on it, who'd been living entirely off the land for tens of thousands of years.
After this first contact with the Martu, the white Australians herded them into missions and boarding schools.
And it's only been in the last dozen years or so that they've gotten the right to return to their lands.
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
We went away from this land, but came back and are still living here.
- [dog barking.]
- [phone ringing.]
[Michael.]
The Martu, like lots of traditional cultures, has one foot in our world and our diet and one foot in a traditional world.
[phone continues ringing.]
They haven't gone all the way into cities, into the Western diet.
[Nola speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Michael.]
There was an interesting experiment done in Australia back in the '80s, where a group of aborigines who were living in the city were overweight, pre-diabetic or diabetic, high blood pressure, many markers for heart disease.
This nutritionist persuaded them to go back to the bush, to their former way of eating.
And within six weeks, they lost, on average, like, 15 pounds.
Blood pressure, blood sugars, all went back into the normal range, merely by changing their diet.
[indistinct chatter.]
[children chattering.]
[Kumpaya in Martu Wangka.]
We kept our fire close to us.
We made fires by rubbing two sticks against each other.
We weren't diabetic back then.
We never had any sugar.
We had bush sweets, not sugar.
Sugar made us weak.
We grew up on bush meat.
We learnt how to cook our food with fire and eat.
[baby cries.]
[Michael.]
We have this whole association of cooking as being woman's work and low prestige, but anthropologists will tell you that in many cultures, men are tied to killing.
Part of the killing is the cooking.
Henry Fielding, the English novelist, referred to The Odyssey as "Homer's book about eating.
" In The Odyssey, these great heroes, the most prestigious people in this community, are out there, butchering and cooking and serving, and it's not beneath Achilles' station to actually be cooking.
This doesn't diminish his prestige at all, because it's just ritually so important.
- [indistinct conversation.]
- [baby babbling.]
[Michael.]
Cooking with fire, it's this great reaffirmation of of our our very special place in the cosmos.
As humans, we are halfway between the gods and the animals.
The animals can't cook, um, and the gods love sacrifice.
The man who wields the fire is sending that sacrifice up to the gods in the form of smoke, and declaring his elevation above the animals who don't know how to cook, who don't know how to please the gods.
Fire is the medium that allows us to tell that story.
I think this is not yet meat.
This is like a dead animal.
Um, this doesn't This isn't appetizing.
I mean, you take some imagination to You know, right? To look ahead and see, you know, bacon ham.
I think we should all deal with the fact that when you're eating meat, you're eating a dead animal, and it is it's consequential.
And I think it's something we should all, kind of, deal with it at some point, don't you? Yeah, and I think also if you You know, if you eat meat like this, you'll find that you probably end up eating less meat, because you find out how good really good meat is.
- Should I hold the legs? - Yeah, just yeah.
[Michael.]
God, he's like a perfect fit.
[Jack.]
All right? So, wood.
Put some over here.
[Jack.]
Yeah.
[Michael.]
We don't want it directly under the flesh.
What's the closest thing to, kind of, primordial fire-cooking that we have? In America, it's barbecue.
Southern barbecue.
I think that barbecue is kind of what's left of that idea of the ritual cooking of meat.
This idea that the man in front of the fire is the leader of the community and dispensing the good things to the group exists around the barbecue.
The part of the South where this cooking is the most, uh, unreconstructed turns out to be in Eastern North Carolina, where you still have people cooking whole animals over wood fires.
I went looking for a a great pitmaster, and I found him in a man named Ed Mitchell.
[stammers.]
You put your hand over the stove, what you think she's at? About 300? 250? - [John.]
Yeah, 350, 375.
- That's good.
[Michael.]
What sets Ed apart? One, he's an African American, and a lot of pitmasters in the South are not.
That's cool, man.
I like that.
[Michael.]
Another thing is that he cares about where the pigs come from.
He really cares about the farmers and the animals.
My man.
[grunts.]
Oh, it's showtime.
Can you bring that fluid? You don't really have to film this part if you don't need to.
[chuckles.]
I'm cheating right now, 'cause I'm trying to get the fire going fast.
I wanna get it good.
Good and hot, baby! Gettin' it thumpin'.
You got a knife? Yeah.
Oh, the pig is fine.
[Ed.]
Muscles.
Ryan.
Need a little help, son.
Y'know, he has youth on his side, so We give him a good little send-off salute.
[sighs.]
[grunts.]
Now we put him to bed.
See, starting out right.
See, she's already puffin'.
When I was cooking with Ed, every time at this moment, - before he covered it - [Jack.]
Mmm-hmm.
he'd give the thing a nice little pat on the butt.
[Jack chuckles.]
It's how His way of thanking the pig.
Okay, ready? [Michael grunting.]
Okay.
[Jack.]
So, that's coming in tight here.
All right, now, how's it looking? Oh, the smoke is looking great.
[Michael.]
The male desire to complicate simple things is very much on display around the barbecue pit.
- [Jack.]
Is it working? - [both laugh.]
- [Jack clears throat.]
Oh, there you go.
- Oh, there we go.
- [Jack.]
Something happened.
- It was asleep.
[Michael.]
You know, it's a guy thing.
It's always been a guy thing.
And I love barbecuing.
I love the whole lore of the barbecue and the lore of the pitmaster, but there is so much bullshit involved.
I'm surprised it's not hotter.
[Jack.]
Sometimes the logs will go out and then they just sit there.
Then they're just, like, taking up space.
[Michael.]
It's the easiest kind of cooking, you know.
Meat, fire, you're done.
And yet men dress it up with incredible amount of of ritual and care.
[Jack.]
Okay, what's that one say, down there? - Can you see that one? - It's, uh - One ninety-seven.
- Yeah, so that's dropping.
That's funny.
I thought it was 202.
- [Michael.]
That's alarming.
- Yeah, well Cheers, guys.
Hey, man, only 23 more hours.
- [all laugh.]
- [man.]
Settle in.
[Ed.]
Oh, yeah.
- Time for a cold one, John.
- That's right.
[Michael.]
I was amazed what Ed was willing to entrust me with, as a novice pitmaster.
[Ed.]
Don't waste my time if you're not really serious about learning some stuff.
But Mike was, uh He was right in there, man.
He was really good.
[Michael.]
We had a lot of time together while the pigs were grilling, and I-- I asked him, "What was the role of barbecue in your family?" It's sort of like, um For me, it's sort of like a rite of passage.
It was taught to me by my grandfather and my father.
It was taught to them by their parents.
A lot of these, uh, techniques was, uh, brought over with the slaves when they came over on the slave ships.
My great-great-grandfather was a slave.
On the plantations, whenever they have a big shindig, they would always go get the oldest slave and, uh, he would do most of the cooking, and they called him a pit boy.
Now, I'm using some of the stuff that were used hundreds of years ago by someone who mastered the art of pit cooking.
And here it is.
We come from a long line of cooks.
Each and every one of us is part of a lineal descendant of folks who cooked.
There's been a strong evolutionary trend towards that.
That's part of the reasons that humans like fire but it's also part of why we like the flavors of cooked food.
[sizzling.]
Fire itself is an interesting phenomenon.
We think that wood, for example, burns.
But, technically, wood isn't really doing most of the burning.
When you heat wood up, it volatilizes a variety of compounds in the wood.
And it's those compounds, as a gas, that actually burn.
Smoked food comes from the incomplete combustion of wood gases, and many of those are what we associate with the smell of wood smoke.
The flavors that we tend to prefer in smoked meat, uh, come from hardwoods.
Each of these woods will have a very different, uh, combination of compounds in them.
Some of the same flavor compounds that make their way into the fruit are also present in the wood.
If you split fresh cherry wood and smell the core wood, it actually smells like cherries.
We're drawn to, um, certain foods by co-evolution, fruit, in particular.
And meat, cooked in certain ways kind of piggybacks on that [stammering.]
and picks up some of the same chemical compounds that we're hardwired to like.
[meat sizzling.]
[Nathan.]
The Maillard reaction's actually a family of several hundred chemical reactions that occur when you mix amino acids, which are in protein, and sugars in the presence of heat.
[Michael.]
About three or four thousand new chemical compounds are created when you cook meat.
Um, so it has more complexity.
And more complexity usually means more flavor.
[Nathan.]
When you grill, most of the energy is actually coming from infrared radiation.
It's coming from the light, the glowing red coals.
And the flavor that you get comes from fat in the meat melting, dripping down, and then catching fire on the coals.
That suite of flavor molecules gives us both the aroma and the flavor.
In the Southern United States, barbecue means you smoke the meat over a hardwood smoke, all or in part, for a long period of time.
And all of the flavor comes from that hardwood.
When you do Southern barbecue, sometimes people will also use some briquettes.
And there's great controversy, "Is that okay?" I-- I think the controversy is silly, because the flavor is all coming from the wood.
So when Ed Mitchell or someone else uh, uses a mixture of wood and briquettes, he's using the briquettes as fuel to maintain his heat.
He's still using wood for the flavor.
[Ed.]
Wipe her down and put more coals on her.
[Ryan.]
Let me see.
[John.]
Check her out, Ryan.
[Ryan.]
So, we wipe her down, so you can really see what it looks like.
Then you can kind of gauge, uh, how far it has to go.
[John.]
So are we gonna flip her? [Ryan.]
Yeah, go on and flip her.
.
[Ryan.]
Yeah.
[John.]
Oh, yeah.
[John.]
Yeah, there we go.
[Ed.]
Ah.
[Ed.]
Oh, yeah, she's getting there.
[Ryan.]
Give her a sprinkle.
[Ed.]
Yeah.
[Ryan.]
Throw a little vinegar sauce on it.
[tapping cleaver.]
- [Ryan.]
Get what I'm sayin'? - [John chuckles.]
[John.]
He's pullin' the ribs off.
[Ryan.]
Oh, yeah, man.
[John.]
Oh, yeah, I gotta look.
[Ed.]
Mmm.
Good pig.
Damn good pig.
[pig snorts.]
[Ryan.]
If I can get an animal that has been raised more in a natural setting, I'm starting off on the right foot.
All right, guys.
[Eliza.]
They're pretty ingenious.
I mean, when they're born, their eyes are open, they can run around, they know who Mama is, they know how to eat, they understand scents and smells and bonding.
There's no other animal that I know of that has that much brain going full-steam when they're born.
Thank you.
Do I have a favorite? This is Clover right here.
Hey, Clover.
She's moving slow, she's breathing hard, but she has a lot of pep in her step for an old pig.
You can tell, I mean, she's she's maybe having a litter a year.
Her old skin [chuckles softly.]
Reminds me a lot of my grandmother, who wore a bikini until she was 85.
[laughs.]
You're displaying yourself.
I have spent my life finding, receiving injured animals.
Once I decided that I could raise animals, which I've been saving my whole life, to be food, I really wanted, even more for them to have the best life that they could, uh and be themselves.
[pigs squealing.]
[Michael.]
When I was 15 or 16, my father got the absolutely crazy idea that I would like to have a pet pig.
And I'd always liked pigs, but I was never interested in a real pig.
But he brought one home one day.
This pig was adorable.
It came in a shoebox, and I had to feed it with a bottle.
And it was my father's idea to call it Kosher.
We were spending the summer on Martha's Vineyard, and I fed Kosher, and fed Kosher, and fed Kosher.
Pigs really do eat like pigs.
At the end of the summer, Kosher weighed probably 200 pounds, and we were going back to 89th and Park Avenue, and I didn't know what to do.
I had to get rid of this pig.
As it turned out, James Taylor, the singer, owned another pig on the island.
[James Taylor singing.]
Oh, life's good friends Are hard to find And one of mine is dead [Michael.]
And I realized, maybe he would pig-sit for the winter.
Things I should have said to her I'll say to you instead Oh, Mona Oh, Mona We put Kosher in the pen with Mona.
You got too big to keep And too damned old to eat Kosher was significantly smaller than Mona.
And, um, it was so fast.
Mona starts chasing Kosher in circles, over and over and over again and Kosher is screaming.
[stammers.]
It's just an instance of, uh a couple of city boys not really knowing what they were doing with these two animals.
Then we go off in the woods and I hammer together a very rough pen, and by the time we get back, Kosher is lying there, dead, um, and probably had been literally frightened to death and had a heart attack.
Mona Little Mona So much of you to love Little bit too much of you To take care of So long - So that's the story of Kosher the pig.
- [man.]
And then, I mean, uh - [laughing.]
This is not going in the-- - We did not eat Kosher.
[both laughing.]
I know what you're thinking.
No.
It was a pet.
[Eliza.]
I really like rare breeds.
Almost everything I raise on this farm has some rare breed component that I am, sort of, stewarding.
[pig squeals.]
Rare breeds people, a lot of them don't want to eat them, don't want to kill them.
But you can create something that is appreciated by so many other people, and you can do it on a much, uh, larger scale, and actually feed your village, like I try to do here, uh, by having an end game for them.
- [indistinct chatter.]
- [bell dings.]
[Michael.]
We call it pork.
We don't call it pig.
We call it beef, not cow.
So there's a distancing that we're always trying to do.
If it comes to you turned into a chicken nugget, you can completely lose sight of the fact that there was a chicken at the beginning of that process.
And to my mind, the dark side of Southern barbecue now is that it's all based on commodity pork.
[pigs snorting and squealing.]
These are hogs raised in confinement in really brutal conditions.
They never go outdoors, the sows live in narrow crates, and they're just impregnated litter after litter after litter.
They still have a desire to suck, and they will do that on each other's tails and they'll get infected.
So the farmers cut the tails off.
I've been in these buildings, and they're a vision of hell.
They really are.
We've hidden meat and our transaction with animals behind the high walls of these abattoirs and feedlots.
We don't have to deal with the karmic costs.
Most of the meat eating we do, I have a lot of trouble justifying.
But I have visited enough farms where I have seen animals living the kinds of lives they should live and that they have what farmers like to say, "One bad day.
" And that kind of agriculture is something I can support, and I want to support.
I also think there are ecological reasons to justify meat-eating.
The most sustainable agriculture involves animals and plants together.
Plants are feeding the animals, the animals are producing waste that's feeding the plants, and you have a complete nutrient loop.
If the whole world were to go vegetarian, I don't necessarily think it would be a good thing.
[Eliza.]
At the end, I give 'em something to lie down on and smell, and it smells like them and, you know, just little tiny things.
[pig squealing.]
I think they try to do better and better in the other situations.
It's just a lot.
It's a lot for an animal to deal with.
I let animals go to become food every week of my life, and sometimes I'm surprised that I do that, but I think people operate all different ways due to their experiences.
But in general, I feel like farming is uh, a nice way, livestock farming, especially, to, um live in the present savor the past and be excited about the future.
When I ask Eliza what pigs I'm getting, I ask what breeds I'm getting and try and sort of figure out how we're gonna break 'em down according to that.
We do whole-animal butchery.
I used to work on these farms.
Ultimately, this is how the animal comes to the farmer.
And what we're doing is committing to buying the whole animal.
Our, kind of, mission here at the shop is two-fold.
One is to get people excited about this other way of farming, this other style of food.
The other part is to make people feel comfortable in their own kitchen.
I think too many people get stressed out, think they need to be a rock star chef, and, uh, and then they What they wind up doing is eating out.
You know, I always tell people, "Take that same money and spend that at a butcher shop or a farmers' market or anywhere else and I guarantee you, you're gonna get a whole lot more meals, you're gonna get a lot healthier food, and you're just gonna get better food.
" [John.]
That last time you got them livers from that pig [Ed.]
Yeah? [John.]
How'd you cook them up that night? [Ed.]
I fried 'em, baby.
[John.]
You sliced 'em up, and [Ed.]
Yeah.
[John.]
Real thin and you went and fried 'em in a cast-iron skillet? - That's right.
- What do you eat a pig's liver with? Rice and gaby.
Gaby? Go ahead and I ain't never heard of that now.
[Ed.]
That's the roux from the from your flour.
[John.]
From the flour Oh, yeah.
- After you fry it, you-- - Yeah.
Okay, and then you make a pan gravy out of it.
- Yeah, a pan gaby.
- Gaby? - Yeah.
- I never heard it called "gaby" before.
Yeah, I understand.
So you do it using French techniques, you don't even know it.
- Yeah.
- [John chuckling.]
And my grandpa would say, "Ain't the gaby good?" [both laughing.]
[John.]
"Ain't the gaby" But, oh, boy, that gives you a whole lot of good eating right there, man.
Nothing goes to waste.
- [John.]
From the rooter to the tooter.
- From the rooter to the tooter.
That's what makes it so good.
[John.]
It's still only 4:30.
[Ed chewing.]
That'll settle any argument.
Guarantee it.
[chuckling.]
Then you go in there, and you look, and [Michael.]
Barbecue crosses race in the South in very interesting ways, even in the days before integration.
Barbecue was very closely tied to the tobacco harvest.
When you were bringing in the tobacco, it was a very intense time on the farm and everybody worked, white and black, because it had to be done quickly when the leaves were perfect.
And then you needed to dry them as quickly as you could, so you built a big fire.
So, it only made sense that where you had all those coals, and you had so many people around, and it was a 24-hour process, that, um, you would do a pig.
And Ed said it was the only time, um, at that point, in the life of the South, where blacks and whites sat down together and ate.
[Ed.]
Only two things I've seen to bring people together in such a way was, uh, barbecuing, and, of course, my experience in going to Vietnam.
We all would be, uh crouched together, you know, for fear of a rocket, mortar or something coming in, and didn't make any difference, man.
You watch my back and I watch yours, you know.
People are at their best when, um I guess, when they realize that they are they really are connected.
And that is what barbecue does.
All animosity or any grudgements you might've had, arguments, just Everything just sort of mellows right out, you know.
Because it's, uh It's just a relaxing time.
[sizzling.]
[John.]
Y'all hear that bubblin'? [Ryan.]
Almost sounds like running water.
[John.]
Yeah, sounds like a brook.
A stream.
[Ed.]
I guess I was about 14 or 15, and And once we got the pig on, um then we'd start the male rituals, singin' some songs, and and tellin' lies and jokes, and We started passing around the moonshine.
My uncles and my grandfather and other relatives, you know, they they enjoyed themselves but I was too young to indulge.
In the wee, wee hours of the morning, you know, sleep began to take over.
And uh, these guys just dozed off and went to sleep.
You got to have somebody stoking the fires all the time.
See I took it upon myself, because I wanted to be a big boy.
I started tending the fires myself.
And so, uh, my father Grandfather ran over there and he lifted up the lid and looked at it.
It was a beautiful, caramel golden-brown pig, perfectly cooked.
And so he says, "Who cooked this pig?" You know, and started looking around at everybody, and everybody was still sort of dazed and said, "Well, you know" [muttering.]
And they they didn't do it, and so he looked at me.
He says Called me Roy.
He says, "Did you cook this pig?" I says I was afraid to say yes [chuckles.]
because I didn't have any business doing it, but then again, I said, "Yes.
" He said, "Come here.
" And so I really thought I was gonna get get really blown out but he got the moonshine jug and poured a little bit in a glass and gave it to me.
And I had my first drink of moonshine.
He said, "If you big enough to cook a pig," you know, "You big enough to take a little drink with us.
" And that was so I thought I was on heaven at that time.
[laughs.]
[shovel clanging.]
Oh, this is nice.
[Jack.]
Okay, bring it.
We'll go in, and Yeah, that's good.
Okay.
[Jack sighs.]
[Kumpaya speaking Martu Wangka.]
We made our own fire, just like this one here.
When the wood burns, we add more.
We cooked until the morning.
No sleep, keep the fire going.
When it rained, we kept the fire going.
[Curtis grunts.]
[Kumpaya.]
The next day, we start preparing and get it out of the fire ready to eat.
[Michael.]
Traditions survive because, you know, they're adaptive.
They're the result of a kind of cultural selection, like natural selection.
They survive because they help keep people healthy and happy.
And to to throw them overboard, wholesale, is very often to lose things that are critical to our well-being.
The meal is this incredible human institution, and there's a lot going on at a meal, especially with meat, this very precious food.
How can you share? [baby crying.]
[man speaking Martu Wangka.]
[Michael.]
When you let corporations cook for you, all this is hidden from view.
And one of the most important things we can do around our food culture is is reconnect to its sources.
It doesn't mean turning back the clock and and living as hunter-gatherers again.
It means looking at traditions for what they still have to offer.
[indistinct chatter.]
[Michael.]
Outsourcing has its values, and it certainly makes life easier, but it renders us all into passive consumers.
And, I don't know about you, but to me, that's my least proud identity.
I prefer my identity as a maker of things, as a producer, as a provider, and not just a consumer.
Mmm.
It's gonna be good.
And cooking allows you to do that.
[man.]
All we need is someone to eat.
Come on in.
That's the oven.
[woman 1.]
Wait, that's it? [woman 2.]
That's the spaceship.
[Michael.]
Hey, how are you? And we can, uh, unveil, I guess.
[John.]
Good to go.
Set it right here.
[Michael.]
Here we go.
[John.]
All right, all done.
I gotta convert you guys.
[indistinct chatter.]
[Michael.]
Mmm.
We'll have some tastes in a minute.
[Jack.]
Yeah, in a minute.
[all laughing.]
There's one person, who claims she was a vegetarian, but she's experimenting with meat tonight.
[laughs.]
I wanna give you a special piece, here.
[Jack stammers.]
We should sign a waiver or something.
[Michael.]
This may be a turning point in her life.
[chopping.]
- [woman.]
She nods.
- [all laughing.]
Whoa.
That is really, really good.
That's way more delicious than I thought.
[all laughing.]
Wow! [John.]
How's that skin? I hear it crunchin'.
[Ed.]
Take it home, baby.
[John.]
Mmm.
[Michael.]
That's Eastern North Carolina style.
[Ed.]
Let the old man have it for a minute.
[Michael.]
There are elements of of traditional ways of eating that we've lost, we've given up.
We've given up a certain amount of pleasure around food.
We've given up a set of skills for how you can take elements of the local landscape and fire and make beautiful meals.
I want to resist that.
I think that's something worth fighting against.
[indistinct chatter.]
- [Michael.]
So, dinner is served.
- [all exclaim.]
Enjoy! [indistinct chatter.]
[dog panting.]
Cucumber and strawberries are under there.
[John.]
Ed, you want a plate? Thank you, sir.
[woman 1.]
Well, this is some damn good barbecue.
- So, thank you very much.
- [woman 2 chuckles.]
Mmm-hmm.
[Michael.]
One of the stories of progress is the disappearance of fire from our lives.
But civilization really begins around that cook fire.
And even now, fire does draw us together.
[indistinct chatter.]
[James Taylor singing.]
Oh, Mona Mona Darling, you can close your eyes I've got a twelve-gauge surprise Waiting for you Since the day That she passed away Everything's just the same Everywhere I go Somebody mentions her name Sometimes it's easiest To tell the friend a lie They don't understand The way I feel Oh, Mona Little Mona So much of you to love Little bit too much of you To take care of So long [sighs.]