Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan Read Free Book Online Page A

better not fill up
on smoke!”
    Apparently the same perfume is equally
pleasing to the gods, whose portion of the animals we sacrifice to them has
traditionally been not the flesh of these animals but their smoke. There are two good
reasons for this. Humans must eat to survive, but gods, being immortal, have no such
animal needs. (If they did, they would also need to digest and then, well, eliminate,
which doesn’t seem terribly godlike.) No, the
idea
of meat, the smoky,
ethereal trace of animal flesh wafting up to heaven, is what the gods want from us. They
can and do fill up on smoke. And besides, if the gods did demand cuts, how would we ever
get their portion of meat to them? The fragrant column of smoke, symbolizing the link
between heaven and earth, is the only conceivable medium of conveyance, and also
communication, between humans and their gods. So to say this aroma is divine is more
than an empty expression.
     

     
    People have known that the smoke of roasting
meat is pleasing to the gods at least since the time of Genesis, where we learn of
several momentous sacrifices that altered man’s relationship to God and disclosed
divine preferences. The first such sacrifice was actually two: the offerings of Cain and
Abel. Cain, a tiller of the fields, sacrificed a portion of his crop to Yahweh, and
Abel, a shepherd, a choice animal from his flock—and God made it clear it was the
sacrifice of domesticquadrupeds he prefers. * The next
momentous sacrifice came after the waters of the Flood receded, when Noah, back on dry
land at last, made a “burnt offering” to Yahweh. This is a type of sacrifice
in which the entire animal is burned to a crisp—i.e., turned to smoke, and thereby
offered to God. “And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his
heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s
sake … neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have
done.” (Genesis 8:21) If there was ever any doubt about the efficacy of animal
sacrifice (not to mention the sheer power of scent), Noah’s experience should have
put it to rest: The aroma of burning meat is so pleasing to God that it tempered his
wrath and moved him to take the option of worldwide doom completely off the table for
all time.
    It’s striking how many different
cultures at so many different times have practiced some form of animal sacrifice
involving the roasting of meat over a fire, and just how many of these rituals conceived
of the smoke from these cook fires as a medium of communication between humans and gods.
Anthropologists tell us some such practice is very nearly universal in traditional
cultures; indeed, you might say it is the
absence
of such a ritual in our own
culture that is probably the greater anomaly. Though it may be that the faded outlines
of such rituals can still be glimpsed in something like whole-hog barbecue.
    But the prominence of smoke in rituals of
animal sacrifice suggests we need to add another myth of the origins of cooking to our
growing pile: Maybe cookery begins with ritual sacrifice, since putting meat on a fire
solves for the problem of how exactly to deliver the sacrificial animals to their
heavenly recipients.
     

     
    What the gods have demanded from us in terms of
sacrifice has gotten progressively less onerous over time. So what started out as a
solemn, psychologically traumatic ritual eventually evolved into a ceremonial feast.
Human sacrifice gave way to animal sacrifice, which in turn gave way to partial animal
sacrifice in a happy series of dilutions culminating (or petering out) in the modern
backyard barbecue, where the religious element is, if not completely absent, then pretty
well muffled. It’s not a big conceptual leap to go from the observation that the
gods seem perfectly happy with a meal of smoke to realizing that maybe we don’t
have to incinerate the
whole
animal in a burnt offering in order to satisfy
them. The gods can enjoy the smoke of the