Best-selling author and food advocate Michael Pollan's best-selling book "Cooked" took a close look at how cooking has changed throughout history, and the key role that the elements - air, water, fire, and Earth - play in food preparation.
Now Netflix has adapted "Cooked" into a four-part documentary series, which is available for streaming beginning Friday. The series crosses the continents, looking at the differences and similarities between different food cultures. While Pollan's message isn't new to people familiar with his writing -- we need to spend more time cooking for ourselves, or we'll face more food-related health problems -- it's told with breathtaking cinematography as well as insights from food experts around the world.
Here are 12 things we learned from the show:
- Baking bread was a revolutionary advance for humans because it requires a civilization. But the discovery of bread is thought to have happened by accident 6,000 years ago in Egypt, when naturally occurring yeast got into wheat porridge and caused it to ferment and rise.
- Wheat is the most-widely planted crop today, with more than 550 million acres worldwide.
- Bread is sacred in many cultures. In Morocco, for instance, cutting bread with a knife is forbidden because it is considered too violent.
- Gluten intolerance is a very recent phenomenon, and is thought to be a byproduct of industrialized bread production, which is very different from how bread has been baked historically.
- Humans aren't the only species that "cook." Dogs bury meat so that it ferments, making it easier to eat than when it's raw. And birds have learned how to make seeds sprout, making them easier to digest.
- More than a third of the food we eat is fermented, though in many cases - ketchup, chocolate, hot sauce, salami and cheese -- we don't think of these foods that way.
- People learned to ferment foods long before they knew that microbes even existed, and fermentation was the primary way that food was preserved before refrigeration.
- The bacteria that makes some stinky cheeses smell that way is related to the bacteria that makes armpits and feet smell bad, which is why limburger is such an acquired taste.
- Humans have been cooking since prehistoric times. But cuisine only developed when pots and pans were created that could stand up to the heat of fire. That made it possible to combine ingredients, creating flavor combinations that were unique to specific places.
- The average American currently spends just 27 minutes a day on food preparation. That's half the amount of time that was spent cooking in 1965.
- Industrially processed foods haven't been around that long. Many of them were created during World War II as a way to feed troops overseas. After the war, food companies had to figure out how to get those foods into American homes, ushering in the era of the TV dinner.
- What makes processed foods so crave-worthy? Many of them are loaded with salt, fat and sugar, which have addictive qualities that our brains are hard-wired to like.
All four episodes of "Cooked" premiere Friday, Feb. 19, on Netflix.
-- Grant Butler