The [micro-] Company We Keep: Michael Pollan's Book Signing Event in El Cerrito

Local Bay Area author Michael Pollan gave an entertaining talk before a book-signing event at Barnes and Noble in El Cerrito Plaza, Wednesday night. The event was for Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, his latest book on the sustainable diet lifestyle. The Cooked event at B&N was the most recent of the several local Pollan appearances since the book became available last month in April.   

Cooked author Pollan is very popular in the Bay Area, most notably through his previous books that express the informed citizen’s dilemma when confronting our nation’s dependence on the industrialized farming practices that promote an unnatural and unsustainable biologic monoculture. Pollan’s most influential book is certainly his 2006 work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The men, women, and children in attendance to hear Pollan speak at the event in El Cerrito represented a range of ages and overflowed the space provided by the B&N bookstore.  

Fermentation and the micro-organisms responsible for a natural human food system were the main topics presented by Pollan for this event. Pollan mentioned that his book Cooked  was not as much about cooking itself as it was about the need to feed the micro-organisms in our own bodies that maintain our health. Pollan started off his talk by pointing out that only about 10% of the cells in our bodies are human cells. The other 90% of cells in our body belong to the micro-organisms that inhabit us.  

In addition to his new book, Pollan was eager to comment on his recently published article in the New York Times Magazine, “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs.” This article extends his topic to focus on the necessity of micro-biology in the human diet despite our cultural germaphobia.  Pollan’s message is that the food we consume  actually feeds the micro-organisms in our gut, and these organisms have a range of dietary preferences. This concept reflects the necessity for humans to consume a broad range of food types. Humans are necessarily omnivores.  When we eat a restricted diet, we create a monoculture in our gut --feeding only one or two types of organisms, and thereby risk our health. Another other observation made by Pollan was about the use of antibiotics. In humans, antibiotics kill off helpful digestive micro-organisms in addition to bacteria.  

Pollan spoke a bit about his research that brought him in contact with local fermentation enthusiasts--“Fermentos,” he called them. He mentioned specifically Cultured, a shop in Berkeley that ferments and sells organic vegetable pickles. In a brief exchange between Pollan and the audience, the names of several local organizations that follow a similar philosophy of cultivating wild and other helpful micro-organisms were discussed.   

In his talk, Pollan suggested that our modern methods of food processing with their insistence on the removal of competing micro-organisms may be causing harm to our food supply. On the topic of cheese-making, Pollan told a story of meeting a nun from Connecticut during his research for Cooked, who was famous for a certain hand-made cheese. In spite of the science of conventional modern cheese-making practices, this woman insisted on making her famous cheese in an oaken barrel. Pollan described how this nun with a Ph.D. in food science demonstrated that the combined microbial processes in the ancient oaken barrel method more effectively eliminated the danger of harmful bacterial contamination than the modern method using a sterile steel vat.    

Overall, Pollan’s presentation was brief and well-paced. He not only discussed content from Cooked but covered other sources on his topic, as well. He read one selection containing a serious assessment on the smell of cheese. Pollan himself made one hilarious point comparing the language of wine appreciation to that of cheese tasting. He explained while the wine taster’s comments are full of metaphors for grapes and the land, the cheese taster’s comments, if verbalized at all, typically draw comparisons to the human body and animal functions. Pollan shared a report about American soldiers when they entered the Camembert cheese-making region in France during World War II. Without first investigating, the soldiers set about burning the buildings where the cheese was stored because they assumed – erroneously clued in by fumes of Camembert cheese, that the buildings were full of corpses.  

Afterward, in the Q&A session, someone in the audience asked Pollan whether he’d covered barbeque in his book because he had not mentioned it in his talk. It’s not a surprise that some in the audience wanted Pollan to talk about meat. Pollan’s Omnivore book offers ethical relief to Americans who otherwise identify ideologically with vegetarianism, yet still crave meat in their diet.  In response to the barbeque question, Pollan acknowledged the tradition in the American South to argue about a preference for a particular regional recipe.  For his reply, however, he drew attention to the lack of a local barbeque tradition in the Bay Area. Even so, members of the audience enthusiastically supplied the names of local restaurants that serve excellent barbeque. The barbeque restaurants mentioned were Memphis Minnie’s in San Francisco’s Haight Asbury and Smoke Berkeley on San Pablo Avenue. The recommendation for the proprietor of Smoke Berkeley was, “She’s from Texas. She knows what she’s doing.”

All this from your neighbors who obviously love talking about food -- and reading about food.   #### By Andrea Dace, May 23, 2013