Media Outlets
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MICHAEL POLLAN has perfected a tone — one of gleeful irony and barely suppressed outrage — and a way of inserting himself into a narrative so that a subject comes alive through what he’s feeling and thinking. He is a master at drawing back to reveal the greater issues. At one point in his new…
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UC Berkeley journalism professor and author Michael Pollan sat down with me, and a cup of tea, at the long dining table in the home his family rents in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood to talk about a few ideas from his latest book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” Q: How does “The…
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On the long trip from the soil to our mouths, a trip of 1,500 miles on average, the food we eat often passes through places most of us will never see. Michael Pollan has spent much of the last five years visiting these places on our behalf. “Industrial food,” as Pollan defines it, “is food…
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We’re clueless. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma he tries to cut through this fog of unknowing.
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Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in…
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“How did we ever get to the point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?” This question comes early in UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan’s forthcoming book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” due out April 11 from the Penguin Press. It’s essentially the…
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Pollan isn’t preachy: he’s too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He’s also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow’s-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the…
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We are seated in the back of a four-wheel-drive van, bouncing across a hypergreen cow pasture, our palms pressed against the roof to keep from flying, when Spot jams on the brakes. Spot is a burly, moonfaced twentysomething from Seattle who fiercely loves Kauai, his adopted island. He works as a guide for an outfitter…
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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…