Interviews
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In his 1996 book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, the great food anthropologist Sidney Mintz concluded that the United States had no cuisine. Interestingly, Mintz’s definition of cuisine came down to conversation. For Mintz, Americans just didn’t engage in passionate talk about food. Unlike the southwest French and their cassoulet, most Americans don’t obsess and quarrel…
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Michael Pollan is a nature writer of sorts. Throughout his career, his subjects have been places where people live and work, where humans take part in nature instead of just watching passively. This stands in distinction to a strain of nature writing that concentrates on wilderness. To put the contrast in simple terms: while someone…
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Michael Pollan is, among other things, a writer, editor, gardener, and teacher. He spent 10 years as Executive Editor at Harpers Magazine (1984–94), is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, and has published four books: Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (1991), A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder…
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Over the past several years, journalist Michael Pollan has been assessing what he calls “our national eating disorder.”? Subsidies on corn fuel this epidemic as they cheaply allow factory farm feedlots to flourish. Pollan documented the life of one steer in particular, showing this cheap food comes with a high cost. In addition to exploring…
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You’re standing in the supermarket contemplating a nice warm-weather meal — maybe grilled fish or chicken and salad. But you worry: Is there any local or organic produce, or does that even matter? Is the salmon wild, or does it come from those fish farms that you hear might not be clean? Were the chickens…
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Author Michael Pollan explains how modern food choices will make future generations have shorter lives.
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Michael Pollan has built a reputation as a sleuthing agro-journalist. In his writing for The New York Times Magazine and a quartet of books, he’s trailed a steer from birth to dinner plate, traced America’s obesity epidemic to corn subsidies, and narrowly, fumblingly outwitted a small-town cop who came uncomfortably close to his marijuana patch.…
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“The omnivore’s dilemma,”? a phrase coined 30 years ago by research psychologist Paul Rozin, is the basic quandary we all face: As omnivores, what should humans eat when we could, hypothetically, eat anything? In Michael Pollan’s recently released book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, the author delves into America’s twisted nutritional…
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Rare is the day when yet another new book about food isn’t dropped onto my desk. Rarer still is the occasion when the latest reaches beyond the usual fare. After a while, food publishing be comes a blur of recipes punctuated by pretty pictures, or one more round of dietary diatribe. Michael Pollan is a…
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In his new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, journalist and writer Michael Pollan argues that many Americans suffer from a national eating disorder based on super-sized, corn-fed diets. Listen to the interview here.
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It became obvious to journalist Michael Pollan in the summer of 2002 that America had a national eating disorder. That July, The New York Times Magazine published an article titled “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”? which reported that a growing number of respected nutritional researchers were beginning to conclude that perhaps…
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Journalist Michael Pollan’s new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, follows industrial food, organic food, and food that consumers procure or hunt for themselves, from the source to the dinner plate. It also examines the importance of corn in all of our food products. Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at University of California…