capitainelaitue This is the story of a narcissist heteronormative man who believes he holds the truth about the history of the human kind. From avoiding the realities of slavery in american history (supposedly, food brought black slaves and slave owners together in peace), to having the egocentrism to believe he can impose meat eating onto vegetarian AND have change their life, to perpetuating patriarchal male ideals as well as gender inequalities, to cultural appropriation, to assuming that meat is the main food in all culture, Pollan really succeeds in showing how narrow-minded and ignorant white privileged folks can be.

kart jarth Dividing the show into four episodes each named after one of the fundamental elements is very misleading. You would not only have a hard time associating the name of each episode to the content, but also could not name the episode yourself if you had the option. Each episode is a mixture of mostly unrelated cooking tips, biology facts, historical events, and other topics. For instance the episode that is named earth is almost entirely about cheese making in a particular farm in the united states and becomes very boring after a few minutes. The presenter is of the impression that United States is the center of the world and California is the center of United States. He never leaves his front porch in the entire series, except the time he goes to his back yard to make a barbeque. The scenes of him talking are mixed with the footage a crew has taken from different parts of the world.There are a few good scenes in the series but the lack of any coherence makes if very difficult to watch. I believe with a little more research and planing and by using someone with a broader view as the presenter, this could have been a much better show.

bellebones-33752 Spoiler alert - I couldn't continue watching after an aboriginal woman snapped a giant lizards legs "so he wouldn't scratch" her while she carried him around. If you're going to eat the poor thing at least don't torture it. That scene made me want to vomit. It's disheartening because I was genuinely looking forward to learning about cooking on a meta scale, but I'd rather research on my own without having to view the shocking image of a woman being cruel. It seems that if our brains were so large and advanced that we would stop being so archaic. Anyone who holds reptiles especially close to their hearts will be devastated by the manner in which they are still tortured and killed - even now when this film was made in 2016.

Greg Clark Although this series starts with the interesting techniques of a group of Aborigines in Australia, there really is little new or interesting, or even that factual in this documentary and the show degenerates in to a smarmy, upper class, preach about the perils of not cooking properly. Yes people eat too much junk food, that much is clear, but to generate enough time of an hour cooking every day for a lot of people is just not realistic and the whole thing seems out of touch with reality. In an ideal world we'd all sit around with a source of a thousand, organic, fresh ingredients, but there are ways to do this without going back in to the past completely. At times the narrator and presenter produces some of the most general sweeping statements about food culture in the world and often seems to think that "the West" actually means "America". The food is pretty good to look at, but there's not a whole lot of interesting or different dishes in there. The presenter says a couple of times things like "Oh, you're doing what the French call 'XXXXX' and you didn't even know the name! That's fantastic!" which is just about as patronizing as you get. It's a shame. The most interesting person in the show was probably the food expert, Harry Balzer. He actually had something interesting to say that was aside from all the misty-eyed, 'it used to be better a hundred years ago' jargon, patronizing, preachy advice etc that we're left with. Good message, shame about the packaging and content.