On Food TV and Our Hunger for a Hearth
“Cooked,” Michael Pollan’s new four-part Netflix docuseries about cooking past and present, features Pollan the historian, Pollan the sociologist, Pollan the aspiring chef, and, yes, Pollan the wrangler. He may not be wagging his finger at us as emphatically as he often does (see: The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Food Inc.”) but the journalist can’t help but shame us about our terrible habits regarding the industry, preparation, and consumption of food. Though entertainingly educational and far gentler than his usual treatises, this is not a show to watch while eating. This is a show to watch while cooking – preferably from scratch.
As our own cooking efforts dwindle – Pollan estimates that the average American spends twenty-seven minutes a day on food preparation, which is less than half the time spent in 1962 – the amount of hours we log watching food television and cinema is on a major uptick. On one hand, the reason hardly requires spelling out: Who doesn’t love deliciousness? But the real reasons may be closer to the bottomless hunger we feel when eating Wonder Bread. Having stripped the wheat of its original nutrition, we crave the kind of nourishment that no amount of “enrichment” can confer. Though modern life has made it possible and even pragmatic for us to eat meals we have not prepared ourselves, we benefit emotionally, physically, and spiritually from cooking in ways that continue to haunt us. Some have attempted to rectify this void by taking part in the slow-food movement. But many more have developed the habit of eating supermarket rotisserie chickens and Trader Joe’s tikka masala while watching others cook on TV and in movies. Continue Reading →
Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Brave New World
Earlier this month, Jennifer Jason Leigh turned fifty-four. That’s middle-aged by any standards, not just at-thirty-she’s-over-the-hill Hollywood’s. Yet she’s knee-deep in a renaissance that may transform into a bona-fide career high, if it hasn’t already. On the heels of her much-touted voice work in “Anomalisa,” Charlie Kaufman’s animated feature, she’s received her first-ever Oscar nod for playing fugitive Daisy in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” What’s even more noteworthy: It’s her first major role since 2007’s “Margot at the Wedding.”
“I feel like the door was closed, and I had made my peace with it,” the actress told The Guardian last month, crediting Tarantino for her return to the limelight. Though that comment is gracious – and though the writer/director does have a knack for resuscitating actors’ careers (see: John Travolta and Pam Grier) – Leigh’s current success may have more to do with a tenacity that’s enabled her to survive in the film industry since she was a tween. It’s a tenacity that often takes the form of a ragged self-possession, and it’s arguably the only good thing about “Eight,” in which her black-eyed gang leader Daisy reads as a silent film actress amid a babbling brook of men. (She’s the only female lead in the film.) Watchful, wrathful, and impossibly comic, Daisy’s like a grown-up Katzenjammer Kid – if those cartoon characters were out for genuine blood. Continue Reading →
I woke up early for the first time in months, wrote for two hours, and then bounced down to the coffee shop to fetch a laaarge americano. The winter sun was bright if distant (like so many of my lovers; like me, arguably), the Brand New Heavies were blasting in my ears–“I like it!”–and I felt positively ecstatic that all I had to do was duck back home, throw open the windows, and write some more on a topic I genuinely find interesting. It’s amazing what a difference a day makes. Having finally fixed the