SICKENING

How bad is processed food?

- ADAM GOPNIK

The opposition of the raw and the cooked, to borrow from the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s most cited though not best-read book, seems basic to our ideas of nature and culture. A raw prawn is part of the sea; broiled, it becomes part of our art. But for Lévi-Strauss the real work was done by the third leg of his “culinary triangle”: the rotting. Spoilage, after all, is a natural tendency of food and the most urgent reason we transform nature into culture—we’re desperately trying to keep what we’re about to eat from going bad.

The line between the raw and the cooked is, to be sure, nebulous; a plate of sushi is both raw and cooked, “made,” in the cultural sense, by a knife and seaweed. Sushi is the dream of pure sensation, but herring is the normal state of life. The more consequential point is that cooked meat decays more slowly than raw; pickling and curing postpone the unpalatable end even longer. We save the world from rotting by rolling it in salt, smoking it in maple fires, preserving it in brine. Nature is always going bad, and the most immediate form of “good” that humans know is keeping that from happening. Sisyphus’ famous boulder, rolled uphill and crashing down again, is better represented in our daily lives by the nova we eat on Sunday morning’s bagel—salmon saved from spoiling by smoke and salt—with the knowledge that lox, too, has a sell-by date. Its own bagel-shaped boulder ultimately rolls back down.