Evolution

"In 1964, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss published “The Raw and the Cooked” (“Le Cru et le Cruit”), in which he argued that turning raw food into cooked food traced a symbolic passage from nature to culture. Cooking, in other words, was a kind of bildungsroman for civilization itself. Lévi-Strauss’ essay theorized what Julia Child’s popular television series, The French Chef, had begun to demonstrate a year earlier with respect to American society; for we were evolving, under her tutelage, from the “raw” to the “cooked”— from meat loaf and mashed potatoes to coq au vin and pommes de terres lyonnaises. The recent film, Julie and Julia, is an index to how far we have come, not only in our culinary evolution but in our cinematic one."

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