Watch the trailer for Michael Pollan’s new Netflix show: “Cooked”

From best-selling author Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and an all-star cast of directors and cinematographers comes the Netflix Original Documentary Series Cooked, which examines the primal human need to cook and issues a clarion call for a return to the kitchen in order to reclaim lost traditions and restore balance to our lives.

The series premieres on February 16 at the Berlinale Film Festival in the Culinary Cinema Program, and launches globally on Netflix February 19.

Each of the series’ four episodes examines one of the physical elements used throughout the ages to transform raw ingredients into delicious dishes through cooking: fire, water, air, and earth.

Cooked takes viewers on a visually stunning journey to meet, among others: an Aboriginal tribe in Western Australia that fire-roasts Australian monitor lizards, a Connecticut Benedictine nun and microbiologist who makes traditional French cheese, Peruvian brewers who use human saliva to ferment a traditional beverage, and an ancient Moroccan granary powered by rivers.

Each episode also returns to Pollan cooking in his Berkeley, California, kitchen, appetizingly delivering his core message: Surrounded as we are by fast food culture and processed foods, cooking our own meals is the single best thing we can do to take charge of our health.

Our magazine wrote about Pollan, when he visited Grass Valley in a program hosted by The Center for the Arts. The article is here.

—Netflix