Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Read online

  Here in a nutshell is the classic argument for the division of labor, which, as Adam Smith and countless others have pointed out, has given us many of the blessings of civilization. It is what allows me to make a living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow my food, sew my clothes, and supply the energy that lights and heats my house. I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

  Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another—our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves—anything, that is, except the work we do “to make a living.” For everything else, we feel like we’ve lost the skills, or that there’s someone who can do it better. (I recently heard about an agency that will dispatch a sympathetic someone to visit your elderly parents if you can’t spare the time to do it yourself.) It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us.

  One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.

  Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective to this way of being in the world—a corrective that is still available to all of us. To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen. In my hands its flesh feels a little less like the product of industry than of nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow the greens I’m serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem to grow back almost as fast as I can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’s abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat.

  Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the supermarket and the “home-meal replacement” have succeeded in obscuring, yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one’s pronouncements.

  Especially one’s pronouncements about “the environment,” which suddenly begins to seem a little less “out there” and a lot closer to home. For what is the environmental crisis if not a crisis of the way we live? The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents nearly three-quarters of the U.S. economy) and the rest of them made by others in the name of our needs and desires. If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970s, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level—at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.

  As soon as you start down this path of thinking, the quotidian space of the kitchen appears in a startling new light. It begins to matter more than we ever imagined. The unspoken reason why political reformers from Vladimir Lenin to Betty Friedan sought to get women out of the kitchen was that nothing of importance—nothing worthy of their talents and intelligence and convictions—took place there. The only worthy arenas for consequential action were the workplace and the public square. But this was before the environmental crisis had come into view, and before the industrialization of our eating created a crisis in our health. Changing the world will always require action and participation in the public realm, but in our time that will no longer be sufficient. We’ll have to change the way we live, too. What that means is that the sites of our everyday engagement with nature—our kitchens, gardens, houses, cars—matter to the fate of the world in a way they never have before.

  To cook or not to cook thus becomes a consequential question. Though I realize that is putting the matter a bit too bluntly. Cooking means different things at different times to different people; seldom is it an all-or-nothing proposition. Yet even to cook a few more nights a week than you already do, or to devote a Sunday to making a few meals for the week, or perhaps to try every now and again to make something you only ever expected to buy—even these modest acts will constitute a kind of a vote. A vote for what, exactly? Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we’re at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call “freedom.”

  Cooking has the power to transform more than plants and animals: It transforms us, too, from mere consumers into producers. Not completely, not all the time, but I have found that even to shift the ratio between these two identities a few degrees toward the side of production yields deep and unexpected satisfactions. Cooked is an invitation to alter, however slightly, the ratio between production and consumption in your life. The regular exercise of these simple skills for producing some of the necessities of life increases self-reliance and freedom while reducing our dependence on distant corporations. Not just our money but our power flows toward them whenever we cannot supply any of our everyday needs and desires ourselves. And it begins to flow back toward us, and our community, as soon as we decide to take some responsibility for feeding ourselves. This has been an early lesson of the rising movement to rebuild local food economies, a movement that ultimately depends for its success on our willingness to put more thought and effort into feeding ourselves. Not every day, not every meal—but more often than we do, whenever we can.

  Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to work directly in our own support, and in the support of the people we feed. If this is not “making a living,” I don’t know what is. In the calculus of economics, doing so may not always be the most efficient use of an amateur cook’s time, but in the calculus of human emotion, it is beautiful even so. For is there any practice less sel
fish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

  So let’s begin.

  At the beginning, with fire.

  Part I

  FIRE

  CREATURES OF THE FLAME

  “Roasting is both nothing at all and absolutely everything.”

  —Marquis de Cussy, L’Art Culinaire

  “Once men indulged in wicked cannibal habits, and numerous other vices; when a man of better genius arose, who first sacrificed [animal] victims, and did roast their flesh. And, as the meat surpassed the flesh of man, they then ate man no longer. …”

  —Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists

  “This art of mine is an empire of smoke.”

  —Demetrius, The Areopagite

  I.

  Ayden, North Carolina

  The divine scent of wood smoke and roasting pig finds you as soon as you make the turn onto South Lee Street, the main artery threading this faded little town, even though the GPS says its source is still half a mile away. For a Wednesday afternoon in May, an impressive number of adults—some white, more black—are doing front-porch duty along Lee Street, sipping amber liquids that might be tea. Why Ayden has faded so is not hard to guess. The town is an hour off the interstate, on the way to not much of anywhere. The national chains set out their big boxes a dozen miles to the north, in Greenville, draining the economic life from Ayden’s downtown, much of which stands shuttered. Ayden once supported three barbecue joints; now there is one, though its fame has spread far enough to lure a few hungry travelers off the interstate every day. The agriculture that used to nourish the town’s economy has suffered both the decline of tobacco (only the occasional emerald acre of it survives amid the paler fields of corn) and the rise of CAFOs—“Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.” The coastal plain of North Carolina is one of the sacrifice zones that Big Hog has consecrated to industrial pork production, a business that shrinks the number of farmers in a region even as it massively expands the population of pigs. Long before I registered the pheromone of barbecue, occasional passages of less winning animal odors assailed my nostrils as I navigated the gray roads leading into Ayden.

  My destination this sparkling May afternoon is the Skylight Inn, Ayden’s lone surviving barbecue restaurant, and even without the perfume of oak and hickory, the place would have been impossible to miss. The Skylight Inn is housed in a cheerfully ridiculous building. A low-slung octagon of brick is crowned with a silver mansard roof that is itself crowned with a replica of the Capitol Rotunda. High above the dome flaps an American flag. The proportions of this ramshackle wedding cake strongly suggest that no architect was involved in its conception, but that, more likely, the design process involved some strong drink and a napkin. The silvery dome went up in 1984, a few years after National Geographic declared the Skylight Inn “the barbecue capital of the world.” (There is no skylight, which is odd for what is otherwise such a literal building.) A billboard towers over the parking lot, highlighting one of the restaurant’s numerous mottos (“If it’s not cooked with wood it’s not Bar-B-Q”) and a drawing of the late Pete Jones, the Skylight Inn’s founding father. Jones fired up its pits for the first time in 1947. But the sign will have you know that the family’s roots in barbecue go back much further than that: “Upholding a family tradition since 1830.” Family legend has it that an ancestor by the name of Skilton Dennis launched the very first barbecue enterprise in North Carolina, and possibly the world, in 1830, when he began selling pit-cooked pork and flat cornbread from a covered wagon not too far from here. Whenever Samuel Jones—Pete’s grandson and one of three Jones men now safeguarding the family tradition—speaks of these giants of barbecue, he refers to them, unironically, as “our forefathers.”

  I know this much (and much more) about the Skylight Inn before even setting foot on the premises because I have read the oral histories and watched the documentaries. These days there is little about Southern barbecue that hasn’t been meticulously documented and fulsomely celebrated; for a sleepy vernacular cooking tradition, barbecue has woken up and become notably self-aware. No self-respecting Southern pit master (and self-respect is something most of them have, in bulk) lacks for a sack of sound bites as homespun and well worn as a politician’s. He finds plenty of occasions to deploy them, too, whether to visiting journalists or in barbecue competitions or at academic conferences organized by the Southern Foodways Alliance.

  What I was chasing here in North Carolina was not a sound bite but a taste, one I’d never experienced before, and also an idea. The idea goes something like this: If fire is the first and most fundamental form of cookery—of the handful of ways humans have devised for transforming the stuff of nature into the stuff of our sustenance and pleasure—then, for an American at least, whole-hog barbecue over a wood fire represents the purest, most unreconstructed expression of that form. By learning what I could about how that work is performed, and how it fits into a community and a culture, I was hoping to learn something about the deeper meaning of this curious, uniquely human activity called cooking. Along the way, I hoped to get a little better at cooking with fire myself. By now, cooking has become so thickly crusted with pretension and gadgetry and marketing hype that the effort to reduce it to its most basic elements, to drive it into a corner and see it plainly, seemed like a good way to take hold of it again. I had reason to believe the Skylight’s pit room might offer one such corner.

  I know, the quest for authenticity is a fraught and often dubious enterprise, and nowhere more so than in the American South in this time of acute gastronomical self-awareness. When I asked a friend, a chef in Chapel Hill, where she liked to go for barbecue, I could almost hear the sigh in her e-mail: “Driving around NC, I always think that I am about to run into that perfect time-capsule bbq restaurant, but it hasn’t happened yet.” My friend hadn’t yet made it out to Ayden, however, so I allowed myself to hope.

  If I wanted to solve for the powerful, primordial equation of pig–plus–wood-smoke–plus–time, the pit behind the Skylight Inn certainly sounded like a place I needed to check out. The Joneses were “barbecue fundamentalists,” in the words of one barbecue historian (yes, barbecue now has historians), refusing for several generations to tinker with the basic equation: They cook, exclusively and slowly, whole hogs over “live” oak and hickory coals. They disdain charcoal as a modern-day declension and sauce as “a cover-up for bad cooking.” To judge from the captivating smells emanating from their chimneys, the Joneses’ fidelity to tradition has served them and their customers well. It has also justified the heroic effort required to defend their “dying art” against the various forces attempting to kill it: the scrutiny of the health department and the fraying patience of the fire department, the convenience of natural gas and stainless steel, the scarcity of firewood, the ubiquity of fast food, and the desire on the part of the pitman for a decent night’s sleep, one undisturbed by dreams of conflagration. Or actual sirens. For I had heard that the Skylight Inn’s cookhouse has endured more or less regular fires, and in fact has burned to the ground on more than one occasion. The first thing anyone who cooks with live fire will tell you is that it all comes down to one word—“control.” But it turns out that that is considerably harder to achieve than you might think, even in the twenty-first century.

  The control of fire is so ancient and represents such a momentous turn in human history that it has engendered a great many myths and theories to explain how it might have come to pass. Some of these are just plain crazy, and not only the ancient ones, either. Take Sigmund Freud’s theory, for example. In a footnote to Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud t
races the control of fire to the fateful moment when man—and by “man” in this case he really means man—first overcame the urge to extinguish whatever fires he chanced upon by peeing on them. For countless millennia this urge apparently proved irresistible, much to the detriment of civilization, the rise of which awaited its repression. Perhaps because putting out fires with one’s stream of urine is something women can’t do very well, the activity served as an important form of male competition, one that Freud suggests (no surprise here) was homoerotic in character. Cooking with fire remains very much a competitive male preserve, and those of us who do it should probably count ourselves lucky Freud isn’t around to offer his analysis of exactly what it is we’re up to.

  The course of human history shifted on the fateful day when it dawned on some fellow possessed of an unusual degree of self-control that he didn’t have to pee on the fire, and could instead preserve the flames and put them to some good use: keeping himself warm, say, or cooking his dinner. Freud believed this advance, like so much else of value in civilization, owed to the unique human ability to govern, or repress, the inner drives and urges before which other animals are powerless. (Not that we have many reports of animals putting out fires with their urine.) For him, the control of self is the precondition for the control of fire and, in turn, for the civilization that that discovery made possible. “This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct.”