Cooked - First Season

Watch out, the ashes might burn you.

It's a big one.

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.

I'm Julia Child.

Welcome to The French Chef.

Watch out, your finger!

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.

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.

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.

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.

What you're essentially saying, is that cooking is in our nature,

it's baked into our biology at this point.

Yeah, the astonishing thing is that cooking for us is natural.

-Yeah. -And eating raw is unnatural.

-Unnatural, yeah. -Yeah.

The cooking hypothesis is that humans are unlike every other animal,

because we are biologically adapted to eating our food cooked.

...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.

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.

The idea, therefore, is that Homo erectus, as the first human,

evolved when an ape learned to cook.

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.

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.

- Gentle. - Yeah.

Yeah, that's good. Let me just... A little bit closer.

There you go. That's good.

-This looks pretty, uh, crazy. -Yeah.

The redneck spaceship.

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.

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.

Now, you'll be smoked.

You all right. Good one, good one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, good shot, good shot, good shot.

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.

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.

We will have a look at another burrow.

Over this way maybe. Have a look.

Must be there in the spinifex.

Where is its burrow?

Over here, to the west.

-Where is it? -Over there is the burrow

and the burrow's head is here.

Big one!

It's coming out... There, now!