Cooked - Fire

I'll be honest, I never connect the Last Supper, the Genesis story, or the Holy Eucharist with barbecue until reading this book over the summer. I guess that is just another example of my further disconnect from food?

Why cook?
1. Improve health and wellbeing.
2. Connect with significant others.
3. Help reform the industrial food system.
4. Achieve greater self-sufficiency.
5. Acquire deeper understanding of natural world and your role in it.

I'll be honest again, I've usually thought of cooking as a means to an end, not as a means unto itself. The lost art of cooking (microwaving not withstanding), as defined in our readings, has resulted in the loss of culture, or at least our ability to explain our culture, as evident by our last discussion. Cooking is a defining human activity - "the act with which culture begins" - and we have outsourced this defining act to "others," which, it seems, has resulted (in part) in our homogenized definition of American culture.

At its most basic form, the cook fire throws its long shadow over all other forms of culinary advances. Fire cooking is an "emotionally freighted and spiritually charged endeavor," involving the rituals of sacrifice, heroics, theater, and most often, masculinity (pg. 13).

How fascinating is it that we live in the epicenter (or at least, one of the epicenters) of what it means to cook with fire - western barbecue country. The history of whole hog barbecue is the history of gender politics, race relations, spirituality, and Southern living. Pollan works in references to Greek mythology, Freud, Cain & Abel, Noah, CAFOs, slave trade, cooking hypothesis, maillard reaction, caramelization, kosher rules, and of course, CRACKLING!

Why cook? Why fire? Why not?