With The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) Pollan came in from the garden to include the kitchen, while admitting to a lack of practical experience. Food choices and preparation became central to his pulpit, and his ministry attracted a much larger audience, surely not converts, but people predisposed to ‘real’ food and suspicious of industrial and fast food. He examined three different food chains: industrial production, organic production, and the modern possibilities of hunting and gathering, in which he included home gardening. The ‘perfect’ meal that closes the book is as much his own education as support for his arguments against an industrial food chain. There is a useful bibliography, and although I found the meal the least attractive argument in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (too personal, too self-congratulatory), the book is a tremendous journalistic achievement.

In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008) came next, a book that gave us rules to eat by and the now oft-quoted mantra, ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.’ It is an ‘eater’s manifesto’, an argument for a version of an Epicurean, well-lived, modest life. The less we know about what we eat, the more we are seduced into believing the ever-contradictory research into nutrition and the claims of industrial food. Obesity, the scourge of America, is addressed more fully here than in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I think it his best book,despite my healthy allergy to manifestos and idealism.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is something of a departure for Pollan. His subject is as far removed (although a logical progression, or regression, depending on why you read him) from his initial interest in plants, then plants as food, then the industrialisation of agriculture, then the rise of nutritionism, as he is likely to go. The bulk of the text is devoted to Pollan’s hands-on experience learning from skilled cooks in each of these transformative processes, and he concludes with a closely detailed recipe for each of the different cooking elements: fire (barbecuing), water (braising), air (bread) and earth (fermentation).

The only book by an Australian to be listed in the extensive bibliography is Michael Symons’s The Pudding That Took a Thousand Cooks (1998, and reissued in 2000 by the University of Illinois as A History of Cooks and Cooking). But Pollan subscribes to a different view of cooking from Symons. Pollan takes from Richard Wrangham, whose work on human evolutionary biology produced the idea that cooking made us human, that ‘pre-digestion’ via cooking enabled Homo sapiens to develop better brains. He takes the idea of transformation from the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who proposed the now well-known idea of the raw and the cooked, the transformation of nature into culture.

Symons has a radically different notion of cooking. He sees it as essentially ‘distributional’. Cooks ‘do much more than heat food’, he writes; he sees the knife as more central than fire. His is a theory of sharing:

Cooks measure appropriate and healthy serves. Moreover, before food can be shared, it must be produced, and so cooks summon it up. By sharing food, cooks enable the division of labour. At base, cooks take care of human survival. They arrange the next meal. With fingers in every pie, cooks forge cooperative networks, everyone pitching in. Finding the division of food and its labour at the heart of economic activity, accords decisive importance to distribution over human history. Civilization is a culinary creation.

Despite its new slant (an explanation of the chemical reactions (and the knowledge and skills) that transform the raw into the cooked, the text has no sense of urgency and feels, in part, like an indulgence on Pollan’s part. Indeed, it reads as though he has simply had to come up with more (a trip to Korea to watch one woman make kimchi when there is a large Korean population in America) in order to publish more. If you are familiar with many of the books cited in its bibliography, Cooked becomes a very second-hand and very personal report. If you arenot, I recommend many of them as much meatier primary sources, especially the great Wendell Berry, to whom the book is dedicated.

Pollan insists on continuing to write about ‘real’ food. His focus has become more personal but his audience has surely moved on. Our concerns are now directed towards climate change, food security, and health issues connected to diet such as diabetes and obesity. Given his credentials as an engaging writer, and good researcher, why has he retreated rather than branched out?

Cooked has come under fire from feminists, farmers, and those who consider Pollan an élitist hobbyist who espouses ‘wholesome food’ that only the affluent can afford. The feminists take him to task for wanting to return women to the kitchen when they have benefited so much from labour-saving devices and prepared food. The farmers damn him for damning their industrial production. Two farmers from Missouri wrote:

[Our family dinner table] this weekend included sweet corn grown ‘industrially’ on our farm, tomatoes from the most fungus resistant hybrid varieties we could find … and a hamburger from a local rancher’s herd … We’ll continue to help produce large quantities of reasonably priced food that satisfies the wants and needs of a large number of people; that’s the actual crime we in the food industry have committed.

An article in the Atlantic (July/August 2013) by David H. Freedman, ‘How Junk Food Can End Obesity’, criticises Pollan and ‘affluent wholesome-food advocates ’ for damning fast-food when companies like McDonald’s feed so many so cheaply and are working to make their food more healthy.It is a good bait but short on credibility. While Cooked is disappointing, Pollan continues to make points that are not answered by his critics. Knowledge of the provenance of our food and of how to prepare it – the very act of involvement – is deeply satisfying, and those who make fun of people who care about provenance, cookery, flavour, and texture lose points when they report that a new Premium McWrap ‘tasted pretty good’. The McWrap included chicken, ‘spring mix’, and a ranch dressing ‘amped up with rice vinegar’. At $US3.99 one wonders how the chickens were grown.

A recent issue of The Guardian Weekly included a report on the death of twenty-three school children in a village in Bihar. They were poisoned by their school lunches. There have been many other cases of adulteration and severe illness. The school meals scheme had promised 8–10 grams of protein and 300 calories for each vulnerable child in one of India’s poorest states. Recently, First Bite, a food program on Radio National,included a report on what has been called Second Bite: the redistribution to the needy of thousands of kilos of food deemed unsaleable on supermarket shelves and otherwise bound for landfill.

Michael Pollan made beer, bread, and a long-braised dish, and barbecued a suckling pig. Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It is just that Pollan seems to have become the hobbyist he is accused of being by his detractors.