Media Outlets
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Carbophobia, the most recent in the centurylong series of food fads to wash over the American table, seems to have finally crested, though not before sweeping away entire bakeries and pasta companies in its path, panicking potato breeders into redesigning the spud, crumbling whole doughnut empires and, at least to my way of thinking, ruining…
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LINDA WERTHEIMER, host: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I’m Linda Wertheimer. Coming up, the skinny on Luciano Pavarotti. But first, Michael Pollan is an author. He’s written about food, gardening, the environment, building his own small house in the woods. That book is called “A Place of My Own.” He’s now turned his…
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Why are Americans so fat? According to Michael Pollan, it’s not just supersized portions and sedentary lifestyles that make obesity the second-highest cause of preventable death in the United States. It’s corn. When exploring the causes of the obesity epidemic, Pollan, a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine and proponent of “food-chain journalism,”…
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Late last summer, I moved from Zone 5 to Zone 9, or, to be both more and (at least to a gardener) less geographically precise, from southern New England to Northern California. We gardeners divide the world into zones of plant hardiness; the lower the number, the colder it gets; so to go from Zone…
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If you’re reading this on a fair Sunday, journalist Michael Pollan is probably in his garden. That’s where he harvests a lot of his ideas for his award-winning books and articles on what’s for dinner and how it got to our plate. Orville Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, persuaded Pollan, former…
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Americans have been talking a lot about trade this campaign season, about globalism’s winners and losers, and especially about the export of American jobs. Yet even when globalism is working the way it’s supposed to—when Americans are exporting things like crops rather than jobs—there can be a steep social and environmental cost.
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A new report finds high levels of PCB contamination in farmed salmon, at a time when American consumption of the fish is growing rapidly. Factory farming keeps the U.S. meat and fish supply cheap and plentiful, but at what cost? Join NPR’s Neal Conan and his guests. Listen to the interview here.
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It’s hard to say whether an American hamburger was appreciably less safe to eat the day after a Holstein cow tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Washington State last month than it was the day before, but it had sure gotten less appetizing. The news cracked open a door on the industrial kitchen where…
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“The first time I opened Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare.” The Palm is a restaurant known for its beef, the sentence is the opening of an article in the New York Times Magazine, and the author, Michael Pollan, is now…
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ALEX CHADWICK, host: As you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, consider for a moment the side dishes. One of the items that may be there can do more than provide nourishment. It can also affect public health, the economy, even national politics. Corn is the subject of this report from DAY TO DAY’s Mike Pesca…
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Sometimes even complicated social problems turn out to be simpler than they look. Take America’s “obesity epidemic,” arguably the most serious public-health problem facing the country. Three of every five Americans are now overweight, and some researchers predict that today’s children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter…
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When I was a kid growing up in the early 60’s, anybody could have told you exactly what the future of food was going to look like. We’d seen “The Jetsons,” toured the 1964 World’s Fair, tasted the culinary fruits (or at least fruit flavors) of the space program, and all signs pointed to a…