reading notes from Cooked (present in the foam library https://www.zotero.org/groups/foam_library/items/itemKey/4MP2FF5D )

• dough and bread
• category food

Above all else, what I found in the kitchen is that cooking connects. (p. 18, italics by the reader)

Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility. (…) it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. (…) Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective to this way of being in the world - a corrective that is still available to all of us.

In a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization - against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. (…) Cooking has the power to transform more than plants and animals: it transforms us, too, from mere consumers into producers.

FIRE the control of fire

According to Levi-Strauss the distinction between “the raw” and “the cooked” has served many cultures as the great trope for the difference between animals and people. (…) Cooking transforms nature and, by doing so, elevates us above that state, making us human.