Draft one
Steve Rife
Eng 110 H2
Prof Miller
The Journey into Food
Food is the center of many activities and holidays. Can you remember a time when you celebrated Christmas or thanksgiving without food? The article “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” by Michael Pollan is about how society’s views have changed from those back fifty, sixty years ago. Back then cooking a meal from scratch was the normal and only thing to do. Now you can go to the grocery store and buy and frozen pizza and pop it into the oven instead of actually having to make the dough and the sauce before you cook it. The article explains how now most people look at cooking a home cooked meal from scratch a special occasion. Pollan talks about Julia Child who is a chef on the TV show “The French Chef”. Her show was set up in a familiar setting a home kitchen. When she cooked a meal she would do it from meal prep to the finish product. The sound of the pots and pans smashing together made Pollen feel like it was less of him watching TV and it felt more like being in the kitchen himself. Now the shows like Hells Kitchen are both for entertainment as well as cooking rather only focusing on the cooking as with Childs show.
Pollan talks about a French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s claimed that cooking made us who we are. Meaning that it separates us humans from other animals. “It was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors, not tool making or language or meat eating that made us human. By providing our primates forebears with a more energy dense and easy to digest diet, cooked food altered the course of human evolution, allowing our brains to grow bigger and our guts to shrink.” (Pollan 17). Cooking our food makes it easier to chew it and it unlocks more nutrients when the food is cooked. That gave us more time to focus on other things. Cooking food not only gives people a meal but it gives an excuse to get together with family and friends. Which brings out an endless amount of activates centered around food.
Pollan explains how cooking a homemade meal is drastically falling in popularity among people. the only aspect of cooking that is actually rising is outdoor grilling. “Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture.” (Pollan 17). Outdoor grilling is a great excuse to get people together to eat a meal. Everyone loves a barbeque with the Smokey savory smell to that it adds to your cooking.
Draft 2
The Journey into Food
Food is the center of many activities and holidays. Can you remember a time when you celebrated Christmas or thanksgiving without food? The article “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” by Michael Pollan is about how society’s views have changed from those back fifty, sixty years ago. Back then cooking a meal from scratch was the normal and only thing to do. Now you can go to the grocery store and buy and frozen pizza and pop it into the oven instead of actually having to make the dough and the sauce before you cook it. The article explains how now, most people look at cooking a home cooked meal from scratch as a special occasion. Pollan talks about Julia Child who is a chef on the TV show “The French Chef”. Her show was set up in a familiar setting, a home kitchen. When she cooked a meal she would start from meal prep to the finish product. The sound of the pots and pans smashing together made Pollen feel like it was less of him watching TV and more like being in the kitchen himself. Now shows like Hells Kitchen are both for entertainment as well as cooking rather only focusing on the cooking as with Childs show.
Pollan brings up a French gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s claimed that cooking makes us who we are. Meaning that cooking our meals instead of eating everything raw separates us humans from other animals. “It was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors, not tool making or language or meat eating that made us human. By providing our primates forebears with a more energy dense and easy to digest diet, cooked food altered the course of human evolution, allowing our brains to grow bigger and our guts to shrink.” (Pollan 17). Cooking our food makes it easier to chew it and it unlocks more nutrients when the food is cooked. That gave us more time to focus on other things. Cooking food not only gives people a meal but it gives an excuse to get together with family and friends. Preparing and cooking a meal creates an endless amount of activates centered around food.
Pollan explains how cooking a homemade meal is drastically falling in popularity among people. The only aspect of cooking that is actually rising is outdoor grilling. “Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture.” (Pollan 17). Outdoor grilling is a great excuse to get people together to eat a meal. Everyone loves a barbeque with the Smokey savory smell to that it adds to your cooking.
Grace Frohock wrote an article called “The Saturday Morning Treat” it talks about her favorite meal. Her favorite meal is chocolate chip pancakes that her dad makes for her every Saturday morning. She enjoys when her entire family gets together on a Sunday morning to have breakfast together. As I was reading this essay I saw a little pattern going. “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” talks about how nowadays it seems like people need an occasion or something a little more than an ordinary day to get together and eat a meal together. For Grace and her family this time is every Saturday morning for them. “I think I am the only one who has not gotten sick of chocolate chip pancakes, but I find importance in sticking to tradition.” Grace talks about how this is tradition for her family which for them makes every Saturday morning an occasion. This is not just a time for her and her family to spend time and eat together, they take the time to catch up on how their weeks have gone. She says that everyone in her family is very busy so they take about two hours every Sunday morning sharing stories and tackling problems any of them may have. For Grace chocolate chip pancakes are more than just a food they symbolize family.
Another fellow class mate Eric Langland shared his favorite food and the value her gets from that dish in an article her wrote called. “Homemade Mac and Cheese”. Throughout this essay he talks about food and the imported relationships we build around food. Whenever he thinks about this dish he gets memories of his family and sharing the dish with them at holidays and special occasions. These are times that he looks forward to, its not everyday that his whole family gets together and eats a well prepared meal together. This touches upon another pattern I saw that Pollan brought up. Fifty sixty years ago people were making home cooked meals everyday because that was the normal thing to do. When you asked someone about dinner back then they would think of sitting around they table eating a home cooked meal with the family. Now there are so many different options for food. You can go get fast food, you can heat up a frozen dinner or order out. The first thought that comes to people minds today might not be sitting around a table with the whole family. People seem like they need a special occasion to prepare and cook a home cooked meal, instead of that being the normal nightly routine.
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