Author Spotlight: Michael Pollan

I was browsing through the Netflix video library a few years ago when I chanced upon a PBS documentary called The Botany of Desire, based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. The documentary was exquisite, and it left me hungry for more. When I bought myself a copy of the book, I couldn’t put it down. Pollan is a gifted essayist: he weaves seamlessly between a rare sort of novel investigative journalism and deep philosophical speculation. His research and writing are driven by a genuine curiosity, which shines through his prose and infects his readers with a similar enthusiasm.

Lately, I’ve become much more familiar with Pollan’s work, and I’d like to recommend a few of his books to my fellow foodies.  These books build on one another, following Pollan’s discovery of the natural world—the source from which we humans obtain all sustenance—from his first experiences in the garden to his grand-scale examination of the trip that our nourishment makes from the sun to our dinner plate.

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Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (1991)

“What I’m making here is a middle ground between nature and culture, a place that is at once of nature and unapologetically set against it; what I’m making is a garden.” –Michael Pollan

In Pollan’s first book, he explores the way in which we interact with the natural landscape within the frame of several stories about his personal gardening experiences. He wavers between Naturalist perspectives which value the wild, unaltered landscape over the artificial environment that we create in the garden and more humanized views of our relationship with our environment, chronicling his battles with the woodchucks, weeds, and insects that seek to disturb the sanctity of his garden.

He infuses his narratives not only with practical advice and instruction on gardening, but also with his philosophical reflections on the morality of human intervention upon nature’s designs. He seeks to straddle the border between the forces of nature and the forces of humanity, attempting to create a space in which we can manipulate our environment and reap its rewards without disturbing the balance of life in the natural world. The book is a fun read, brimming with colorful anecdotes and interesting observations about the practice of gardening. I highly recommend this book to any horticulturist interested in solidifying their bond with the plants they grow and the land they grow them on.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001)

“We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests.” –Michael Pollan

Eventually Pollan makes his way back to the garden as he conducts a more expansive examination of the symbiotic relationship between mankind and specific domesticated plants. He conducts an in-depth exploration into the natural history of four different plants which are cultivated by humans across the globe, describing the natural history and domestication of each plant and offering insight into how they make themselves valuable to us by fulfilling different human desires: apples by satisfying our desire for sweetness, tulips by satisfying our desire for beauty, marijuana by satisfying our desire for intoxication, and potatoes by satisfying our desire for power.

In this book, Pollan once again returns to study the complex balance between nature and humanity. He finds evidence that the domestication of several plants has, in reality, been a process of coevolution between those plants and mankind. He explains that some plants, under domestic pressures, can expedite the process of natural selection and reproduction due to their ability to stimulate and feed our most basic human desires. With this in mind, he reexamines his views on the balance of power in the garden, attempting to determine the extent to which our decisions to cultivate certain crops are due to our own conscious decisions and the extent to which we are subject to the unconscious will of those plants.  

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006)

“Daily our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds”—Michael Polan

In Pollan’s most recent book, he continues his research on agriculture, tracing the foods that we find at the grocery store to their origins in the industrial agribusiness, in small organic farms, and in the wild. He criticizes Americans for our lack of concern about the nature of the food we consume and, at the same time, for our overwhelming concern about the health risks of simple foods such as bread, both of which behaviors he attributes to our lack of culinary traditions and our subscription to the dietary advice of trendy nutritionists and industrial food processors. Pollan does Americans a favor by ripping a hole in the curtain which obscures the process of manufacturing food from those who eat it.

Pollan actively takes part in the three main processes through which the nutrients in the soil are reprocessed into the steak and potatoes on our plates: industrial food manufacturing, small-scale organic farming, and hunting and foraging and offers rare insight into how the use of each of them defines our relationship with the natural world, and therefore defines us. He expresses dismay at the way the American agribusiness pushes nature past its limits and attempts to defy its laws, reminding us that as predators at the top of the food chain, what we eat affects what every other creature eats and therefore has a profound effect on the order of the world we inhabit.

As always with his work, Pollan’s scrupulous attention to detail makes The Omnivore’s Dilemma vastly informative while his outlandish sense of humor and engaging storytelling keeps the pages turning.

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Of all of Pollan’s works, I find these three books the most compelling because of the similar theme they share: the reconciliation of man’s relationship with the rest of the natural world.  For some time, when confronted with the madness of the natural world I’ve been reminded of the words of prodigious screenwriter and narrator Werner Herzog, who said, “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

I’ve tried to accept nature’s chaos, but somehow my own human nature compels me to try and shape the world around me. Perhaps from now on I’ll remind myself of Pollan’s philosophy and attempt to ride the boundary between nature’s designs and human logic, not quite submitting the rule of Mother Nature and not quite twisting her arm.

There is truly profound wisdom in Pollan’s meditations on the character of humanity and of nature. Amongst today’s food writers, he offers a refreshing change in perspective by asking not only the how the food we eat influences us personally, but also how we interact with all of the organisms in our natural environment to obtain the nutrition that fuels our existence. 

I hope that you'll all find his work as illuminating as I have. Happy reading!

Burnt Ends

Though I was born in Phoenix and I learned to walk during a snowy winter day in Pittsburgh, my first and fondest memories take place in my parent’s first house in San Antonio, Texas.

Texans are notorious for our assertion that our state has the first and final word when it comes to barbeque. And I’ll challenge anyone who’s tried a 12-hour Texan Mesquite pit smoked brisket to deny it: the barbeque capital of the U.S. has been declared, and it’s not in Kansas City anymore.

Don’t worry, I’m not writing to boast the quality of Texas barbeque, nor will I compile a list of all my favorite barbeque joints in the state. (I’ll save those rants for a later time.) I just mean to express the importance that the art of slow-cooking meat over a smoldering pile of wood holds for me. I love barbeque. The pounds upon pounds of charred meat that I’ve ingested over the years have left me with my own little smoke ring beneath my skin.

There are several good barbeque joints littered around San Antonio, but most true carniphiles agree that the best barbeque in town can be found at the local Rudy’s. I fondly remember when I was a child, accompanying my dad on his bi-weekly pilgrimages to this barbeque Mecca. I’d sit outside and watch the pit-master tend to the fire, pulling one log at a time from the never-ending pile of mesquite and placing them strategically onto the white-hot beds of ash. The two glowing fires were the heart of the entire operation. The smoke from the fires vented into four huge chest-style barbeque pits.

Every cut of meat on the menu, from gigantic briskets to whole chickens, was lowered into one of the pits to be smoked for several hours before the restaurant opened. The meat would stay in the pits for an indeterminate amount of time, until one-by-one each cut was pulled out of the smoker and carved-to-order for droves of hungry customers. The food would progressively grow tenderer throughout the day and by the time my dad and I would stop by (in the few hours before closing time), the meat would be at its prime. You could shake the rib-meat right off the bone. The turkey breast had soaked up the flavors of the smoke and the dry-rub like a sponge, until the taste of the bird itself was almost unrecognizable. But paramount to everything else at Rudy’s was the beef brisket.

 The Full Spread

Source: Jonathan Pillow

It was unlike any cut of meat I’d encountered before.  Thin cut slices of tender, unctuous beef that melted at the slightest touch. Of course, I know now that the preparation of a beef brisket, a large cut that sits just outside of the cow’s ribs, is a slow and delicate process.

Generally, the most sought-after cuts of beef can be found in the cattle’s midsection (just above the ribs) and in its loins. The tenderest cuts, such as the rib-eye and the tenderloin, are found nearest the center of the cattle, where the muscles endure the least amount of stress, and then the meat becomes gradually tougher and more muscular as you reach the cattle’s lower quarters, which support the cattle’s movement.

Beef Primal Cuts

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The brisket is the outermost portion of the cow’s chest and it is made up of muscles which are responsible for supporting a very large amount of the cow’s movement, so the cut contains very tough muscle tissue (including the pectorals) as well as lots of fat and connective tissues, which makes it very difficult to cook with. As it is one of the most difficult cuts of beef to make edible, the brisket is one of the most inexpensive cuts, per pound. The fat and connective tissues must be slowly rendered into a gelatinous film. The process of preparing brisket requires artful patience, as the brisket should be cooked “low and slow” over indirect heat to avoid drying out the lean part of the brisket while giving the fatty tissues plenty of time to break down. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you that brisket must either be cooked in a stew or barbequed to make it tender. In Texas, we do the latter.

At the end of the brisket you’ll find a big fat cap, which is usually left on the brisket during barbequing to keep the meat from becoming dry. Most restaurants (Rudy’s included) trim the edges of the brisket before serving it, and throw the majority of that fat straight into the trashcan. And why wouldn’t they? Who would want to bite into a giant slice of gristle? Well… this guy would.

One day during a summer-time Rudy’s adventure, my friend Andrew surprised me when he asked the man behind the counter for burnt ends. My mystification increased when the carver went to the pit and pulled out a new untrimmed brisket, from which he cut and wrapped up the gooey, charred bits of fat for us (the parts that they normally throw in the trash), free of charge. I was extremely skeptical of Drew’s desire to eat those pieces of the brisket which the carvers casually chop off and throw into the garbage all day long. But I was always an adventurous eater, and when he offered the burnt ends to me, I picked the blackest, fattiest piece of brisket, applied a dash of salt, and took the bite of barbeque that would forever change the way I’d think about eating.

This was what they considered trash? This culinary delight? This strange, succulent, charred, decadent little morsel of absolute flavor—Garbage?  Preposterous! Blasphemy!  I would that my own mouth was that Rudy’s garbage can so I could end the travesty of this delicacy going un-savored daily.

Allow me to explain. When you submerge a full brisket into a smoker for ten+ hours (wrapped loosely in tin foil with a little bit of water as the catalyst to encourage all those collagen-based connective tissues and layers of fat to render completely), the result is that the fat absorbs so much smoke as it renders that by the time it’s done the char has penetrated so deeply that the burnt ends are transformed into big pieces of pink, crispy, smoky fat fused to unctuous bits of rendered, sinful, succulent goodness. And people have the audacity to throw it away without any consideration. Many will pass on an offering of burnt ends based on looks alone, saying that it’s too oily. When Jeffery Steingarten, on a momentous bluefin tuna fishing trip, realized that none of his ship-mates could stomach the parts of the tuna which he considered a delicacy, he expresses a similar sentiment: “…but the fattiest part of the belly, five pounds of priceless kama, two thick triangles joined along one edge, is—strap yourself in for this one—thrown in the trash! They used to toss it to the dogs that prowl by the marina, but the wooden deck got stained by the fat—defaced by o-toro!” (Steingarten, 2002)  But as people say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Unctuous Burnt Ends

Source: Jonathan Pillow

To this day I ask for the burnt ends every time I order brisket, and I’m met with a different reaction each time. Usually I’m served with a sneer or a look of distaste, but occasionally the guy behind the counter gives me a knowing smile and a nod as he proceeds to slice the layers of blackened fat. Either way, I smile to myself when I see the rich gastronomic delicacy laid in front of me, proud that I’ve found the hidden treasure within the feast at hand.

It seems to me that every time we dine, there is always some hidden delight present at the table. It may come in the form of a memorable conversation or an unforgettable flavor, a profound observation or a delectable little scrap of food, but it’s usually there. It’s up to us to pay close attention to the epic events that take place as we take part in the primordial ritual of feeding, and it’s up to us to decide which morsels we’ll set aside to savor and which ones we’ll leave to be cleared with the table.

Food is Comfort

I’m on my way to my parent’s house bearing gifts.  Pecans, marshmallows, flour, and cream of mushroom soup: ingredients for the next day’s feast. The nagging bite of the cold air on my neck serves as an intermittent reminder that it’s December, which is generally my least favorite month of the year.

When contrasted with the scorching San Antonio weather that I’ve learned to embrace—adventurous summers that teem with potential,—the chill makes this season seem hollow and unforgiving, the bitter wind howling at my back like the accumulation of this year’s forgotten ambitions. Winter is my season of repentance. It’s a time for me to excavate and examine all of the year’s partially buried skeletons in an attempt to detect some applicable lesson among the waste. As it does every year, my ruthless internal interrogation has left me tired and sullen while failing to produce an answer, any answer, that might provide me with some remote sense of optimism for the year to come.

But as I step through the door and I absorb the aroma of sweet potatoes and molasses, a familiar comfort washes over me, and suddenly I not only feel at ease, but even a bit giddy with excitement for the potential that this new year may bring. I walk to the kitchen, where I find my mother elbow deep in a not-so-enthusiastic looking turkey as she prepares for Christmas dinner.

She keeps her mother’s personal recipe book sitting open on the counter, as she always does when recreating the most applauded dishes from my grandma’s table.  But she rarely even steals a glance at the words on the pages, as countless years of helping her mom in the kitchen have left each recipe deep-rooted in her mind. When she does stop and turn her focus upon my grandmother’s recipes—her mother’s instructions, her eyes don’t roam the pages as if in pursuit of some missing ingredient. She gazes at the words with a joyful knowingness, as though she’s witnessing her mother’s spirit emanating from the book and throughout the kitchen.

 Like my mother, I too sense my grandma’s presence when her food is at the table. I lost my grandmother when I was 11, and although my perception of her may be blurred and incomplete, I know for certain that she was a practical woman. The sock monkeys and lace angels that she crafted now serve as beloved mementos, but it’s the scratch-made food which she dutifully served us three or four times a day that will forever define my memory of her. Thus, when I catch a whiff of one of those nostalgic dishes, I feel the earth tremble as I’m momentarily transported back to my grandparent’s humble house in their story-book neighborhood in Arlington, Texas, where the gardens grew easily and the neighbors would encourage us to take home all of the free-fallen pecans that we could carry.

 As I greet my mother, I pick up the antique recipe book, curious of what to expect at Christmas dinner.  It’s one of those ancient “fill-in-your-own-recipes” cookbooks, and it’s nearly filled to the last page with my grandmother’s cursive writing. The black plastic binding is brittle and cracked in some places, and the stiff, yellowed pages are begging to be laid to rest.

While I’m thumbing through the book for the umpteenth time, each page seems to speak to me in its own distinct voice. Each recipe tells me its own favorite story. Stories of love, frustration, celebration, and mourning. These recipes have been present at countless parties and family meals; they’ve been witness to myriad personal conversations.  Within each page of ingredients and instructions there lie a thousand pages of unwritten history.

The recipes offer more to me than just directions for producing great food. I find a sort of guidance in my grandmother’s words. She found immeasurable pleasure in providing nourishment for her family. And although I’ve always remembered her as a stern woman—one who showed her affection sparsely—when I see the scrupulous detail she includes in her recipes and the numerous footnotes strewn throughout the pages I understand that each vegetable she planted, raised, harvested, and cooked for us was in itself her own private declaration of love for her family. Thinking of it now, I’m reminded of the words of M.F.K. Fisher, who wrote, “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and intermingled that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”

This feeling, I think, is the truest manifestation of “comfort food”. Occasionally, when somebody pours all of their love and care into a recipe that’s made especially for you, it’s difficult not to imagine that person’s warmth and hospitality each and every subsequent time you encounter that same dish.

I’m still examining the neat, flowing handwriting when I notice a small green thumbprint on the margins of one of my personal favorites:

Pan-Fried Spinach w/ Bacon

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             6-8   ounces fresh spinach, roughly chopped

2 ½  tablespoons of salted butter

¼      cup of olive oil

1      garlic clove, chopped

3      bacon slices, quartered

Cook the bacon in a frying pan on low heat until slightly brown. Add butter and oil gradually and stir until melted. Next add the garlic and sauté on medium heat until it’s slightly brown around the edges. Add spinach and mix it until covered in oil. (^Sprinkle lightly with salt) Cover and cook on low for about 5 minutes. (^Season lightly with pepper) Finally, shake the spinach in a colander until you have your desired amount of oil remaining. Serve immediately.

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 I haven’t had the dish since my grandmother passed. I fondly remember a sunny day during late summer.

I’m in the shared garden plot across the street from my grandmother’s house on Nancy Circle, a pair of garden shears in my eager hands as I anticipate the thrill of harvesting the vegetables for tonight’s dinner.

“Here,” she says, “Why don’t you cut the spinach? Now make sure you pick all the largest leaves, not just the prettiest ones. They may look a little beat up now, but they’ll still cook all the same.” I know better than to question her judgment. I’ve never been disappointed with her spinach before. Besides, I was just grateful to be included in the preparation of one of Grandma’s astounding meals.

I put down the book with a renewed sense of purpose. I tell my mom that I’d be making a rather unorthodox dish to add to our Christmas dinner, but one that I felt was appropriate. So I grab my coat and make my way to the store, no longer feeling so adverse to the elements. I was warmed by the knowledge that this Christmas, I’d be cooking the food that I love, from the people I love, for the people I love.