Author Archive
Michael Pollan on Bill Maher
Michael Pollan, the author of “In Defense Of Food,” and also in the documentary movie “Food Inc.” to be released June 12th, 2009 speaks with Bill Maher about our food supply.
Michael Pollan on The Colbert Report
Michael Pollan advises that the best food to eat is anything with less than five ingredients in it.
Michael Pollan at the Long Now Foundation
Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle.
Michael Pollan on PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal
Bill Moyers sits down with Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley, to discuss what direction the U.S. should pursue in the often-overlooked question of food policy.
Farmer in Chief
Dear Mr. President-Elect,
It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration–the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda.
Michael Pollan at Google’s Zeitgeist Forum
Larry Brilliant, then executive director of Google.org, interviews Hugh Grant, Chairman, President and CEO, Monsanto, Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Journalism, UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and Sonal Shah, Director, Global Development Initiatives, Google.org.
How to Feed the World
The worldwide crisis over food prices is the direct result of the decision, made by the Bush administration in 2006, to begin feeding large quantities of American corn to American automobiles, in the form of ethanol. This fateful decision led to a run-up in corn prices, which in turn led farmers to plant more corn and less soy and wheat–leading to the surge in the price for all grains. But make no mistake: we’ve created a situation where American SUVs are competing with African eaters for grain. We can see who is winning.
Why Bother?
Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing.
A New Way to Think About Eating
The subject of Michael Pollan's fine new book, "In Defense of Food," is the technological abyss toward which humankind with its tacit consent is being driven by the industrialized American diet. Pollan's critique of the American food industry and the plague of obesity, diabetes, coronary disease, cancer, and untimely death for which it is largely responsible is comparable to the work of Rachel Carson as a contribution to the history of human self-destruction, for the food fabricators could not have done their work without our complicity any more than the environmental polluters could have done theirs. One might go so far as to say that these calamities are themselves the outcome of a species failure, an evolutionary maladjustment of the human brain implicit in the triumph of ingenuity over wisdom.
Michael Pollan Predicts a Food Culture Revolution
Michael Pollan: We’re just at the beginning of something that’s going to be very big. And I think if we look in our food supply in 10 or 20 years, we’re going to be very surprised at how much change has come about. That’s Michael Pollan, best known for his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Like