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

roasting animal, and we can enjoy the meat.
How convenient!
    But keeping the best cuts of sacrificial
animals for human consumption is an innovation hard won, at least in classical
mythology, and the figure responsible for it paid a heavy personal price. The Prometheus
legend is usually read as a story about man’s hubris in challenging the gods, the
theft of fire representing the human assumption of divine prerogative—costly yet a great
boon to civilization. All this is true enough, but in the original telling, by Hesiod,
the story is a little different. Here, it turns out to be as much about the theft of
meat as it is about the theft of fire.
    In Hesiod’s
Theogony,
Prometheus first incurred Zeus’s wrath by playing a trick on him during the ritual
sacrifice of an ox at Mecone. Prometheus hid the best cuts of beef inside a
nasty-looking ox stomach but wrapped the bones in an attractive layer of fat. Prometheus
then offered Zeus his choice of sacrificial offerings, and the Olympian, deceived by the
“glistening fat,” opted for the bones, thereby leaving the tasty cuts of
beef for the mortals. This set a new precedentfor animal
sacrifices—henceforth men would keep the best cuts for themselves, and burn the fat and
bones for the gods, as indeed is the custom observed throughout the
Odyssey
.
(What Henry Fielding called “Homer’s wonderful book about
eating.”)
    Infuriated, Zeus retaliated by hiding fire
from man, making it difficult, if not impossible, for men to enjoy their meat. Indeed,
without the cook fire humans are no better than animals, which must eat their meat
raw. * Prometheus then proceeded to steal it back, hiding the flames in the
pith of a giant fennel stalk. In retribution, Zeus chained Prometheus eternally to a
rock (where his liver became the unending feast—the raw meat—of another creature) and
sent down to mortal men a world of trouble, in the form of Pandora, the first woman.
    In Hesiod’s telling, the Prometheus
story becomes a myth of the origin of cooking, an account of how animal sacrifice
evolved into a form of feasting, thanks to Prometheus’ daring reapportionment of
the sacrificial animal to favor man. It is also a story about human identity—how the
possession of fire allowed us to distinguish ourselves from the animals. But the fire in
question—the fire that elevates us above the beasts—is specifically a cook fire, and
what had been strictly a religious observance—a burnt offering of an entire animal to
the gods in a gesture of subservience—becomes a very different kind of ritual, one with
the power to bind the human community together in the sharing of a tasty meal.
     

     
    The dining room of the Skylight Inn could not
be much less ceremonial: wood-grain Formica tables scattered beneath fluorescent lights;a sign over the counter with old-timey snap-in plastic letters
listing your options; faded newspaper and magazine clippings about the establishment,
and portraits of the forefathers, decorating the walls. By the door, a glass case
proudly displays the restaurant’s James Beard Award from 2003.
    But there is
one
ceremonial touch:
Directly behind the counter where you place your order sits an enormous chopping block,
a kind of barbecue altar where one of the Joneses, or their designated seconds,
officiates at lunch and dinner, chopping with heavy cleavers whole hogs in full view of
the assembled diners. The maple-wood block is nearly six inches thick, but only at the
perimeter. So much pork has been chopped on it that the center of the block has been
worn down to a thickness of only an inch or two.
    “We flip it over every year or so, and
then, when that side wears down, we have to get a new one,” Samuel told me, with
the glint I’d learned to recognize as a sign that a tasty BBQ sound bite was fast
approaching. “Some customers look at our chopping block and say, Hey, there must
be a lot of wood in your barbecue. We say, Uh-yeah, and our wood is better than