For the industry, we’re told, “people cooking their own food is an obstacle”.Īnd yet, no matter the remove, the appeal of cooking endures. Of course, the reason we don’t always cook is that, as the freezer section of supermarkets the world over demonstrate, we don’t have to.įrom an ad for one of the earliest ever ready meals – “Now mum can finally learn what’s going on in the outside world!” – to a Nestlé rep in India talking about fortified ingredients and consumers not willing to compromise on taste, while he stands before the world’s most appetite-suppressing array of instant noodles, it’s a chilling look at the worldwide food processing industry and its vested interest in keeping people out of the kitchen.

Today, it’s no longer a given that if we want to eat we must cook, he observes – and yet the less time we do spend cooking, the more we seem to devote to watching other people doing it on TV. Take a first look at the trailer for Cooked Suddenly, we cut to a beeping microwave, the LED display flashing “Enjoy your meal” as a black plastic tray sits ready on the turntable. It’s an overly earnest but hard-hitting investigative attempt to answer two questions: how did cooking become optional, and what did we lose in the process?Įpisode one starts with Pollan describing the cast-iron casserole dish he remembers his mother dishing out beef stews from throughout his childhood. This new Netflix four-parter is the latest outing from docu-whizz Alex Gibney – who recently made a stink in the Scientology world with his expose Going Clear – in collaboration with the author Michael Pollan. “It’s a big one,” she says, as she pulls up a large wriggler and whacks him on the ground, before chucking him on a fire for dinner. A Martu woman in Western Australia is hunting: she takes a burning wad of dry grass and sets fire to the brush to expose lizard burrows, pounding the smoking earth with a large stick when she finds one.

Cooked netflix ed mitchell