Raymond Sokolov
The Loaves of Others
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
By Michael Pollan
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 468pp £20 order from our bookshop
Here is a charming, open-hearted, hard-working book which I agree with almost entirely. I agree with Michael Pollan’s dark view of industrial agribusiness and the marketing giants who purvey its over-packaged, over-medicated products. I applaud his efforts in this newest of his bestsellers to put his principles into action in the kitchen.
How could I not? In 1986, in a short culinary primer aimed at non-cooks fresh out of universities, I explicitly recommended cooking as one of the few areas in modern life where individuals could take an effective stand against the encroachment of corporations upon their lives. But my book disappeared
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