## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Pollan]] - Full Title: Cooked - Category: #books ## Highlights - Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources of energy. ([Location 171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKOIN8&location=171)) - processed. Even today, as much as a third of the food in the world’s diet is produced in a process involving fermentation. ([Location 4044](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKOIN8&location=4044)) - (Unlike most other tissues, which obtain nutrients from the bloodstream, the gut wall gets most of its nutrients from the by-products of fermentation in the colon.) ([Location 4326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKOIN8&location=4326)) - During the two billion years of natural selection that bacteria have undergone before more complex multicellular creatures arrived on the scene, they managed to invent virtually every important metabolic trick known to evolution, from fermentation to photosynthesis. (According to Lynn Margulis, who until her death in 2011 was the microbiome’s most eloquent human advocate, the only important biochemical innovations to come along in the billion years since then are snake venom, plant hallucinogens, and—this is a big one—cerebral cortices.) ([Location 4352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKOIN8&location=4352)) - As nature’s most perfect food—having been shaped entirely by natural selection—mother’s milk has much to teach us, and not least these two crucial facts: that bacteria is good food, and that feeding the bacteria is as important as feeding the baby. Put in a more scientific way, the diet should include both “probiotics”—beneficial bacteria—and “prebiotics”—something good for those bacteria to eat. ([Location 4412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKOIN8&location=4412)) - As with the microbiota of the soil, another fermenting universe of biological complexity that it closely resembles, the complexity of the gut microbiota is supremely difficult to comprehend. So much more than the sum of its unprepossessing parts, it has been, until very recently, invisible to the reductive lens of Western science, which has always been better at understanding individuals (pathogens, variables, elements, whatever) than communities. ([Location 4482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008EKOIN8&location=4482))