Summary: In 2016, Netflix produced a series called, Cooked, based on food-writer Michael Pollan's book about how basic ingredients are transformed into food through the four basic elements of fire, water, earth, and air. Although the series was full of surprises regarding the history of food, it is fairly easy to imagine how fire, water, and even earth create the food of myriad human cultures. But, air? Pollan admitted at the outset that "air" as transformation is the most mysterious, perhaps the most spiritual, of all the ways in which we cook. Despite the mystery of it, "air" has also give us the most basic of all food: bread. Bread was a bit of an accident - about 6,000 years ago in Egypt, when, as Pollan says, "some observant Egyptian must have noticed that a bowl of porridge, perhaps one off in a corner that had been neglected, was no longer quite so inert. In fact, it was hatching bubbles from its surface and slowly expanding, as if it were alive. The dull paste had somehow been inspired: The spark of life had been breathed into it. And when that strangely vibrant bowl of porridge - call it dough - was heated in an oven, it grew even larger, springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an airy, yet stable, structure that resembled a sponge." (Cooked, p. 207) Bread. With bread, everything changed. We learned how to turn grasses into food human beings could eat, store, and transport. We learned how to cultivate grains and manage fields, how to harvest and mill and leaven and bake. We created agriculture. We developed entire communities - entire civilizations - devoted to the making of bread.
