Cooked

Mr. Pollan’s messages are important to hear and are engagingly presented in this series. Still, there’s a disconnect that’s never addressed.... The world’s poorest people--some seen in idyllic imagery here--have to devote long hours to basic subsistence, and the world’s relatively well off have the luxury to indulge in artisanal cooking. Yet applying his ideas across the whole range of human circumstances is a trickier subject than this pretty series wants to tackle.

More than being a definitive explanation of the issues it discusses, Cooked serves more as a launching pad for discussion, offering viewers discussion topics, if not enough information to exactly have that discussion. Most of the time, Cooked does just what it says Americans shouldn’t: It heaps too much on its plate.