Author Archives: DanaOFerrall

Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

Mother Jones

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“Fire,” the first episode of a new docuseries called Cooked, opens with sweeping shots of a barren landscape in western Australia, dotted with huge, roaring fires. At dusk, Aborigine families gather around the flames to roast bush turkeys and goannas—a large Australian lizard—beneath the glowing embers. A mother baptizes her toddler in the smoke as it rises.

The four-part docuseries that premiered on Friday is based on the New York Times best-selling book Cooked. Its author, science writer Michael Pollan, has built an empire writing books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Food Rules) that argue Americans should eat simple, home-cooked foods. Each episode in the Netflix series is inspired by the four elements used to transform raw ingredients into food—fire (barbeque), water (braising), air (bread making), and earth (fermentation). Each episode has a different director and follows the everyday cooks profiled in Pollan’s book, as well as the writer’s own culinary quests.

In “Fire” we meet Ed Mitchell, the pit master from North Carolina who grills hogs on the barbeque with techniques passed down from his great-grandfather, and we watch Pollan attempt to create a whole-hog cookout himself. Later, in the Earth episode, Noella Marcellino, a nun in Connecticut with a doctorate in microbiology, separates curds and whey in a large wooden barrel to make cheese.

Pollan’s prolific body of work asks readers to question what and how much they eat. (On an Inquiring Minds podcast in 2014, he argued that the Paleo diet is nowhere near how hunter-gatherers actually ate.)

But Cooked is different. Instead of evangelizing about which foods to eat, Pollan urges us to prepare our own.

“I’m hopeful that there will be a renaissance in cooking,” Pollan says in the series. “If we’re going to cook, it’s going to be because we decide we want to, that it is important enough to us, pleasurable enough to us, necessary enough to our health and our happiness.”

“Cooked” premiers on Netflix February 19. Photo courtesy of Netflix

Much of the information presented in the Cooked Netflix series won’t be new to foodies who follow Pollan’s work. It touches on the rise of industrialization and processed food, the beneficial gut microbes that thrive when we eat fermented food, and the importance of eating meat that came from ethically treated animals. However, even viewers obsessed with health food trends will be seduced by the series’ vibrant scenes, which provide a glimpse of how cultures around the world make—and break—their proverbial bread.

We’re told that the United States spends less time on cooking than any other nation in the world, and Pollan stresses that “time is the missing ingredient in our recipes and in our lives.” Yet the series doesn’t offer viewers detailed advice about how to increase how much they cook. Cooked offers only a few general tips, such as doing meal prep on Sundays.

Pollan got blowback for an essay he wrote in the New York Times in 2009 that suggested that Betty Friedman’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique got women out of the kitchen and was linked to the decline of home cooking. In Water, the episode that addresses the realities of processed foods and the restaurant industry, Pollan and director Caroline Suh said they were careful how they approached the issue.

“The collapse of cooking can be interpreted as a byproduct of feminism, but it’s a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting than that,” Pollan said in an interview. “Getting it right in the film took some time, but it was important to tell the story of the insinuation of industry into our kitchens, and show how the decline of cooking was a supply-driven phenomenon.”

Richard Bourdon makes his sourdough with three ingredients: wheat, water, and salt. Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Whether it’s men or women who wear the apron, the message of Cooked is clear—we should make home-cooked meals a habit, for our bodies and for our souls.

Jessica Prentice, author of Full Moon Feast and coiner of the term “locavore,” once wrote that if someone cannot drive we find it incomprehensible, yet if someone admits to not knowing how to cook, we see it as normal.

Cooked aims to get us back in the driver’s seat.

“Is there any practice less selfish,” Pollan asks in Cooked, “any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?”

The series premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16 and on Netflix on February 19.

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Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

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The Americans With Disabilities Act Is Turning 25. Watch the Dramatic Protest That Made It Happen.

Mother Jones

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Twenty-five years ago this weekend, the Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into law, officially outlawing discrimination against disabled people in employment, transportation, public accommodation, communications, and government services. The law was a long time coming: Activists had fought for decades against unequal access to jobs and exclusion from public schools. But the ADA might never have gotten to President George H.W. Bush’s desk were it not for a group of activists in wheelchairs who took matters into their own hands earlier that year.

On March 12, 1990, hundreds of people with disabilities gathered at the foot of the Capitol building in Washington to protest the bill’s slow movement through Congress. Dozens left behind their wheelchairs, got down on their hands and knees, and began pulling themselves slowly up the 83 steps toward the building’s west entrance, as if daring the politicians inside to continue ignoring all the barriers they faced. Among the climbers was Jennifer Keelan, an eight-year-old from Denver with cerebral palsy. “I’ll take all night if I have to!” she yelled while dragging herself higher and higher.

Here’s some footage of the protest, via PBS’s Independent Lens:

The Capitol Crawl, as it became known, made national headlines and pushed lawmakers to pass the ADA into law. When Bush finally signed the landmark bill, it was seen as one of the country’s most comprehensive pieces of civil rights legislation to date. But it was not a total cure-all, according to Susan Parish, a professor of disability policy at Brandeis University. The Supreme Court later watered it down, she says, in a series of decisions that created a narrow definition of disability.

In 2008, lawmakers passed amendments to strengthen the ADA, but Parish says people with disabilities have still struggled to gain equal access to employment, in part because employers are expected to comply with the law but do not have to follow reporting requirements. “I feel that the country needs a full-scale affirmative action program for people with disabilities,” she said in a recent interview.

President Obama issued an executive order in 2010 requiring the federal government to hire more people with disabilities. In a speech earlier this week, he said the West Wing receptionist, Leah Katz-Hernandez, is the first deaf American to hold her position. But despite some progress since 1990, he acknowledged, “We’ve still got to do more to make sure that people with disabilities are paid fairly for their labor, to make sure they are safe in their homes and their communities…I don’t have to tell you this fight is not over.”

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The Americans With Disabilities Act Is Turning 25. Watch the Dramatic Protest That Made It Happen.

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Resentment and Outrage Are All That Matter in Europe Now

Mother Jones

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Larry Summers thinks it will be a catastrophe if Greece repudiates its debt and “financially separates from Europe.” Greece will become a failed state; Europe will face a refugee crisis; and both Europe and the IMF will face huge defaults on their loans. Oh, this might not cause financial contagion throughout all of Europe, but then again, that’s what everyone said about Long-Term Capital Management, subprime mortgages, and the fall of Lehman Brothers. And look what happened there.

So what does Summers think should happen? Here’s his prescription:

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras needs to do what is necessary to make reaching an agreement politically feasible for his fellow Europeans….He needs to be clear that he will accept further value-added tax and pension reforms to achieve primary surplus targets this year and next, but that he expects a clear recognition that if Greece does its part, debt will be written off on a large scale.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European authorities must do what is necessary to make policy adjustments politically tenable in Greece. That means acknowledging that the vast majority of the financial support given to Greece has gone to pay back banks rather than to support the Greek budget. They must agree on debt relief and recognize the degree of adjustment in Greek spending that has taken place: with nearly 30 percent of government workers laid off. It also means announcing their intention to accelerate economic growth throughout Europe.

In case that wasn’t clear, here’s a translation: the leaders of Europe are idiots. Everyone with a room temperature IQ has known for years that something like this is the deal that needs to be made. It’s been discussed endlessly in meeting rooms, op-eds, scholarly papers, and conferences. Not only is it not a secret—or rocket science—it’s been the obvious solution forever. But Europe vs. Greece is now like the Hatfields vs. the McCoys. Nobody cares anymore how it started, whose fault any of it was, or what the catastrophic results of continued obstinacy will be. They don’t even care much about inflicting pain on their own people as long they also inflict pain on the other side.

They are idiots. Not stupid, mind you, but idiots all the same. They know what needs to be done. They’re just too committed to their own resentment and outrage to do it.

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Resentment and Outrage Are All That Matter in Europe Now

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