Cooking. What is It?
We are bombarded with information about how to cook and with exhortations to cook. But what is cooking?
It’s a question that I have considered from time to time over a life in a kitchen. And it’s taken on a greater urgency in the last few years as I have struggled to give shape to a world history of food.
The proposal I find most congenial both as a cook and as a historian is this. Cooking is the whole series of operations used by humans to turn raw materials, mainly animal carcasses and harvested plants, into food, that is, into something edible, digestible and nutritious. Those operations (which I’ll talk about in the next post) include heating but are not confined to heating.
Now I’m quite aware that this is a good bit broader than the dictionary definition of cooking as heating.
And it’s also a good bit broader than that accepted by most food scholars. In 1964, Claude Levi-Strauss argued that cooking understood as heating that symbolized the difference between humans and animals. In 2009, Richard Wrangham responded that it is cooking understood as heating that unleashed the biological changes that make us human. In between Harold McGee in the first edition of On Food and Cooking, defined cooking as the transfer of energy from a heat source to food (although in the rest of his text he explored much more than just heating).
Is cooking restricted to the use of heat?
Other scholars, by contrast, prefer broader definitions so I’m not alone in thinking that the restriction of cooking to heating is too narrow. Indeed Massimo Montanari, the distinguished Italian food historian, defines it as “everything that has to do with food: modes of preparation, modalities of consumption, rituals of conviviality.”
I’d be more inclined to limit to modes of preparation. This is in line with other authors. In recent books, Michael Pollan includes fermentation and Bea Wilson gives prominence to cutting and to grinding. Earlier Michael Symons decried the exclusive concentration on heating as a “stunted” view of cooking (90), preferring instead, as I do to include all methods of food preparation.
Or does it include other processes such as grinding the flour for the bread?
Like Symons and others, I don’t worry one bit about going beyond cooking as heating. Rather I see it as crucial to the debate and refinement of basic concepts that is crucial in an any area of inquiry. Scholars do not rest content with dictionary definitions, but try to go beyond those to some kind of more general, theoretical understanding that also accords with our experience of the world.
In the life sciences and the social sciences (among which I count history), this often requires some historical perspective because the phenomenon being defined is itself changing. Although we can perceive a historical continuum, democracy in modern America is a far cry from democracy in Ancient Greece, for example. Cooking in the Paleolithic was very different from cooking in modern kitchens.
So the challenge to the historian is to explore how and why cooking changed and the consequences of those changes. Wrangham, for example, may well be right that cooking as heating was crucially important in the changes in energy availability for early humans. But cooking went on changing after the introduction of fire and heating and we need to know what were the important changes in later periods.
To move to another point, defining cooking as food preparation makes cooking and food twin concepts.
Food for humans is something that has been cooked. Humans do not sink their teeth into carcasses, they don’t chew on prickly ears of wheat, they don’t eat raw potatoes.
(Of course, there are exceptions. We read of live raw shrimp dancing in the mouth. I remember reading a story about World War II that opened with a prisoner eating a raw potato. We pick certain fruits growing in the wild.
Yet even raw foodists do a good bit to prepare food, including chopping, grinding, combining and mixing, and gentle heating. As the Harvard anthropologist, Richard Wrangham has recently pointed out, all human societies depend on cooked food. None subsists on raw food.
And the “raw” things we eat have had careful preparation, sashimi, raspberries, oysters, and lettuce among them.)
Conversely, human food is something that has been cooked. This raises the possibility that we may want to reconsider the popular use of the word “food” to include not only the edible, digestible, nutritious things we put in our mouths but also their raw materials.
Thus when we talk about farmers growing food or about food policy as synonymous with farm policy we are talking about raw materials, not about what we put in our mouths.
(It’s worth noting that clothing does not suffer from this ambiguity. We do not talk about farmers growing clothing, because we acknowledge that a whole series of steps post harvest or slaughter are necessary before skin, or cocoons of silk, or bolls of cotton, or fleeces, become shoes or scarves or shirts or sweaters).
No surprise. I’d be inclined to treat farming as the production of the raw materials for food, not as producing food.
Any thoughts on these proposals would be most welcome. Meanwhile I have more short essays categorizing the processes that comprise cooking, the transformations that cooking produces, the question of processed food, and the consequences of this analysis for what is natural food.
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Claude Levi-Strauss, tr. from the French by J. and D. Weightman, The Raw and the Cooked (1970 for 1964).
Jack Goody. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1982). Overview of the various theoretical approaches to food and cooking in the 1970s, followed by a wide-ranging examination of the social consequences of cooking. Includes a discussion of the industrial kitchen.
Harold McGee. On Food and Cooking (Scribner, 2004, previous edition, 1984). Classic treatment of the diversity of food preparation particularly in the home and restaurant kitchens.
Michael Symons. A History of Cooks and Cooking (University of Illinois Press, 2000). Originally published as The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks (Viking, 1998). Lots of interesting insights in this series of essays.
Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009). The title is precise. Wrangham argues that the use of fire made us human, that human food is cooked food.
Finally, two books on cooking that appeared after I had submitted the manuscript.
Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin, 2013). How Pollan learned to cook, including fermenting.
Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (Basic, 2012) Essays on topics such as cutting and grinding, mainly in the context of domestic cooking.
Very thoughtful and thought-provoking article, Rachel. One thought that it provokes in me is regarding your statement, “We do not talk about farmers growing clothing, because we acknowledge that a whole series of steps post harvest or slaughter are necessary before skin, or cocoons of silk, or bolls of cotton, or fleeces, become shoes or scarves or shirts or sweaters.”
Quite a few years ago, I spent nearly two months with friends in France. One day, we drove south from their home in near Grenoble to Aix-en-Provence and Arles. We passed acres and acres of planted fields. I, who knew nothing about that area of France, asked, “What are they growing?” She answered, “Wine.”
In subsequent visits to France, friends and acquaintances have always pointed out the wine fields.
What I wonder is whether this is unique to the growing of grapes for wine, or whether the usage of the end product for describing what’s in the field spills over into other areas. Your comments would lead me to believe that that is not the case.
Thanks Cristina. I have two related responses. First, it seems to me that food is unusual in being associated with the agricultural (or mined) product. For example, moving from clothing to housing, we don’t say of foresters in the US, “oh they are growing houses.” Or of transport, We don’t say of iron range miners in the Duluth area, “oh, they are mining cars/washing machines etc.”
Second, I think in Latin (and perhaps Greek and perhaps elsewhere) cultivation can be regarded as an extension of cooking. Cultivated plants are bred to be softer, more digestible, sweeter, etc. And if ever a plant were the product of human intervention, it is the modern grape.
Does this make any sense?
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