Nature "Cooked" and in Ferment

Just read Cooked, by Michael Pollan, the guy who wrote Omnivore's Dilemma, which I have not read but intend to read now, although I can already hazard a guess as to the overall theme; mass produced food is bad and makes you fat and diabetic and prone to heart disease. In other words, it will make you an American.
That was his general point in Cooked anyway, which was written to persuade Americans to cook, and it worked, even on me. Now I want to cook, or at least I wish I already learned how to cook, which is what I usually mean when I say I want something.
In any case, back to Cooked. Its a journalistic book in the best sense of the word, even handed and thorough, and the author even successfully came up with a beautifully designed and esthetically pleasing outline and stuck with it to the end, a feat of perseverance which as an amateur writer I find even more miraculous and unbelievable than the ancient fire water air earth theory of the elements that he pays homage to with his outline structure. It's a pleasing idea, but to be perfectly honest it forces some arbitrary and unhelpful categorizing in his book, as does any outline. I think he got overexcited with the pleasing dichotomy he worked up between fire cooking as masculine and water cooking as feminine, but didn't have a third gender on hand to categorize fermentation with, and at that point he had to find something in fours.
But the book is interesting. I bought most of his argument against processed food, and for home cooking, even if I think American obesity and health issues is a fairly trivial problem, on the scale of things. If there are children actually going hungry in some parts of the world, who cares that more Americans could die in their forties and fifties instead of their seventies and eighties? I say this, of course, as an almost fifty American male who would himself prefer to live for at least a few decades more. But who cares what I would prefer? I had an awesome childhood, and only went hungry at scout camp (by choice).
But I mostly agreed with him. I did take issue with all the times Pollan uses the words "Nature" and "Community-based" in the book. It began to seem a little calculated after a while, as if an editor suggested more buzz-words or something. If it wasn't calculated, and Pollan honestly believes in Nature as the source of all goodness, then it's a little worse in my view. Journalists should be cynical and atheist, which is how Pollan comes across for most of the book, except for his "what have we lost?" nonsense.
I could go on about the true "nature" and source of modern Nature worship, but I will be dissecting Nature Worship in my massive thesis on The Hierarchical Nature of Homo Sapiens, which constitutes the fruit of twenty years of thought, still in ferment. Please note that I will be incorporating the word "Nature", as it should be used, in the title. Also please note that I used the word "ferment" to describe it. I use that word in a calculated fashion because the main success of Cooked, for me, was that the third section (divided unnecessarily into two parts just to fit Pollan's Fire Water Air Earth outline) goes into fermentation of food and induced me to purchase the Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz. I am excitedly delving into Art of Fermentation, and will hopefully soon be reporting on the success or failure of my own preliminary fermentation efforts!

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