The New York Times Magazine posts Michael Pollan’s latest feature length article prior to publication on Sunday. Print a copy and take it to the beach or pool. Because floating on an air mattress with your laptop is just dangerous. The piece centres around the phenomena of cooking becoming less a participatory activity and more a spectator one.
But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.
~KT
