Part four of Michael Pollan's "Cooked" is entitled "Earth." Rather than being about soil and growth in that manner, it was about microbes and fermentation. Within this section, Pollan focuses on three main ferments - plant, animal, and alcohol (although alcohol comes from plant matter). Fermentation has always been present; it was the original preservative. Humans aren't the only to attempt to manage the microbes which ferment Earth's beautiful products; many animals seek ferments - largely for their nutrient, 'shelf life', and their flavor. Even when it comes to alcohol, there are a great many animals (humans included) who desire and seek it. Personally, I enjoyed the anecdote about elephants and their methods of finding large enough quantities of alcohol - even if it meant "busting into buildings suspected of housing a still or stash of booze" - in India (374).
One statement that didn't come to a surprise, but i still had never thought of it was the fact that humans contain an immense amount of bacterium and other microorganisms. Most of our cells and DNA don't belong to us, but to them. We house a "community of several hundred co-evolved and interdependent species" (323). That brings in perspective. I live in a community of other people which also live in a community of other species, all while having communities of microorganisms living inside all of us and in most things.
- "We have changed the human diet in such a way that it no longer feeds the whole super-organism, as it were, only our human selves. We're eating for one, when we need to be eating for, oh, a few trillion." (333)
Just a thought...If we can't reduce our foods to the summation of their constituent parts, then couldn't the same be said about us?
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