Explored through the lenses of the four natural elements—fire, water, air and earth—COOKED is an enlightening and compelling look at the evolution of what food means to us through the history of food preparation and its universal ability to connect us. Highlighting our primal human need to cook, the series urges a return to the kitchen to reclaim our lost traditions and to forge a deeper, more meaningful connection to the ingredients and cooking techniques that we use to nourish ourselves.

I soon came to see that, for her (Mother Noella), the miracles of Christ were many, and could be witnessed in the unlikeliest of places, including a barrel of milk or under a microscope. Several of Christ's miracles rather famously involve fermentation, as she pointed out to me with a twinkle. Like bread and wine, cheese is the transformation of ordinary matter into something extraordinary, a process suggestive of transcendence.

There’s an Aboriginal tribe in Australia that fire-roasts lizards, a Connecticut Benedictine nun and microbiologist who makes French cheese, Peruvian brewers who ferment a traditional beverage with human saliva and a Moroccan granary powered by rivers.

The series crosses the continents, looking at the differences and similarities between different food cultures. While Pollan's message isn't new to people familiar with his writing -- we need to spend more time cooking for ourselves, or we'll face more food-related health problems -- it's told with breathtaking cinematography as well as insights from food experts around the world.

Much of the information presented in the Cooked Netflix series won't be new to foodies who follow Pollan's work. It touches on the rise of industrialization and processed food, the beneficial gut microbes that thrive when we eat fermented food, and the importance of eating meat that came from ethically treated animals. However, even viewers obsessed with health food trends will be seduced by the series' vibrant scenes, which provide a glimpse of how cultures around the world make—and break—their proverbial bread.

But the show offsets Pollan’s sentimentality with dynamic and frankly gorgeous vignettes of people hunting, cooking, and eating—and not simply for the pleasure of sitting around a glowing hearth. We see a mother in Marrakech preparing khubz by hand and sending her son off with the risen bread dough to be baked in a communal oven. We see the Martu people of Western Australia hunting goanna (a large species of monitor lizard) and burying a bush turkey in the embers of a fire. These scenes take us out of Pollan’s nicely appointed Berkeley home and into the real world, where people are cooking as they have for generations.

The four parts of the series—'Fire,' 'Earth,' 'Water,' and 'Air'—mirror the cooking-as-alchemy theme of the book: that the kitchen is more than a room where we go when hungry, it is a holy place where the gifts of nature are transformed into physical, emotional, and even spiritual forms of sustenance.

Director Alex Gibney was given nearly free reign to interpret the book according to his own artistic and intellectual sensibilities, which are considerable, having earned him an Academy Award, multiple Emmys, and praise as 'the most important documentarian of our time,' in Esquire. Under Gibney’s eye, any material from the book that might have come off in film format as tiresome political diatribe or boring cooking show banter becomes neatly wrapped in an uplifting cinematic journey that makes milling wheat or learning to butcher a pig as magical as anything in a David Attenborough wildlife special.

The series’ most poetic moments come in the 'Air' segment, however, where rising yeast spores glistening in the sunlight and slow motion sequences of women squeezing and kneading moist dough are recurring visual motifs that exalt bread, the sole subject of the episode, as the most sacred of foods.

Cooked may sound worthy, but in the hands of these heavyweights it becomes a sumptuous ode to slow cooking – and a call to get back to the joy of simply preparing food for the people you love.

In Earth, it’s fermentation, presented as a magical alchemy of ingredients and microbes, with a cheese-making nun revealing the more esoteric case that the death of yeasts atop an aging wheel of dairy solids, and their resultant positive impact on the cheese itself, is a powerful metaphor for the afterlife. In Air, bread is presented as the driving force of civilization. In Fire, the focus on a group of Australian aborigines hints at the devastating result of removing ourselves from our ancestral culinary roots.

This is Michael Pollan the food historian, but Michael Pollan the crusader is always hovering, ready to remind us how far we have wandered from our culinary roots. In one way or another, each of these episodes mourns our detachment from our food and how to prepare it.