Michael Pollan convinces you why your next meal is best served piping home at home.
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00:00 You wanna know the diet for America,
00:02 the one diet that would work?
00:04 As processed food has become more prominent
00:10 and as fast food has really taken over our diets,
00:12 home cooking is in free fall.
00:15 We spend 27 minutes on cooking per average
00:18 and four minutes cleaning up.
00:20 Now, that four minutes should tell you something.
00:22 I mean, what kind of cleaning up can you do in four minutes?
00:25 You can crumple a pizza box and scrape some plates,
00:28 but you're probably not tackling a pot.
00:30 What it suggests is even that definition of cooking
00:33 may be rather diluted.
00:35 Rates of home cooking have fallen by half
00:37 since the mid '60s.
00:38 And it is no coincidence,
00:40 and in fact, the link has been pretty well demonstrated
00:43 that as rates of home cooking decline,
00:45 rates of obesity go up.
00:48 And if you look around the world,
00:50 the countries where home cooking is still healthy,
00:53 that tradition, that practice,
00:55 have lower rates of obesity.
00:58 I decided that the best way to encourage people to cook
01:01 was to remind them what a beautiful, miraculous work it is,
01:06 practice it is,
01:09 and that we have been almost brainwashed
01:13 to think of cooking as drudgery,
01:15 something we don't have time for,
01:17 or something we don't have the skills for.
01:19 We fetishize cooking in our society today.
01:22 We all watch television shows
01:24 about these heroic, athletic chefs
01:27 who can do these amazing feats
01:28 while the clock is ticking down behind them.
01:31 It looks terrifying.
01:32 It looks like work best left to professionals.
01:35 And restaurant cooking has kind of become
01:37 what we think of as cooking.
01:39 But of course, that's never been the case.
01:40 Restaurant cooking is a very special, specialized activity.
01:43 And that's not the bar.
01:45 We're being daunted about cooking,
01:47 and then you have the industry with marketing messages
01:49 that are flattering our sense of busyness,
01:52 implicitly telling us,
01:53 you don't have time to cook, you're too important.
01:57 You're a loser if you have time to cook.
01:59 And that's, you know,
02:00 this is traditionally how marketing works.
02:02 You create an anxiety, and then you create a solution.
02:07 And if corporations can do this, we will let them do it.
02:10 Well, what about the obesity epidemic?
02:12 And what about type 2 diabetes?
02:13 You want to know the diet for America,
02:15 the one diet that would work?
02:18 Eat anything you want, just cook it yourself.
02:21 And you know, there's a real wisdom in that.
02:25 There really is.
02:27 It can solve a multitude of problems.
02:30 It causes some problems too.
02:32 It's, and we can talk about time
02:34 and all the impediments to cooking,
02:36 but it solves, it solves the big problem.
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