Pre-Order your Yellowbelly for this Friday night!
3 attempts to perform 15 bodyweight overhead squats
This is part of your yearly benchmark series. Log your score!
Michael Pollan has a new documentary series out called “Cooked”. It’s a 4 part series with each episode focusing on one of the natural elements (fire, earth, water, and air) and how they’re used in cooking.
It’s very informative and it presents ideas that may go against some of your beliefs. For instance, there is a piece on gluten that explains how gluten today is not at all what it used to be and suggest that maybe the real bad guy is the processing involved with gluten and not the gluten itself. Whether you agree or not, it’s always healthy and educational to acknowledge other perspectives.
Overall, the idea seems to be to reconnect us with the lost art of cooking and to develop a more meaningful connection with the food and techniques involved in cooking them to restore balance and nourishment into our lives.
Have you read the book or watched the series? Post your thoughts to comments!
I listened to Cooked in audiobook form (Pollan narrates it himself) and it was great. I think there is something to the idea that it may be something other than just the gluten that is messing with our guts. Need to get that sourdough started and test it out.
I was watching the fire one last night! My favorite takeaways were when the Evolutionary Biologist explained that once chimpanzees began cooking food, that’s when humans began to evolve. Also, when you hunt your own food, you have a greater respect for the meat as you’re cooking and eating it.
I personally don’t hunt my own food, but my absolute favorite thing is cooking and baking from scratch. When you make everything the way it’s intended to be made, there is a respect for the food you’ve just created. I steered away from sugar/grain/dairy for a long time, but once I created my own sourdough starter and ended up with some insanely delicious sourdough bread, I haven’t looked back. As long as I continue to skip out on processed sugars, I can walk past a mirror without looking away 🙂
I forgot to comment on this yesterday! Mystery and I read Cooked a few years back when it came out and it really has affected how we appreciate food and how we consume it. There’s a part in the book about trying to cook a microwave dinner for his 4 person family and how it took just as long to have all the meals heated as it would to make something from scratch – and not only that, but they couldn’t enjoy the meals at the same time because the microwave is only so big. I think about that a lot when I don’t want to cook and rather just get take-out or something: it will take just as long, there’s the added effort of driving to eat lower quality food, and basically the same amount of dishes to clean up.
Too much to be said about the stuff Pollan covers, but I totally endorse the views on bacteria and natural fermentation. There’s so little known about the exact interaction our gut flora plays on our lives, but you’ll see articles pop up now and again that show how bacteria can alter mood, weight, and physical strength. 90% of the cells in our body are bacteria, which blows my mind. So antibiotics are not good. We tried raw fermenting a bunch of veggies after this read (just using water and veggies and waiting until bacteria out-compete each other until you’re left with strong bacteria swimming in a jar of sour vegetables – sounds good right?). That experiment totally stunk up our house and was overall disgusting, but it worked – we’re trying again this fall with less garlic… But it’s so fun to experiment around and develop all new relationships with food – we also are currently feeding our first sourdough starter (named Genevieve) – who knows how it will turn out, but it’s fun to try.