Interviews of Profiles
Michael Pollan in Portland, OR: This is Your Mind on Plants Book Tour
OPB’s Dave Miller spoke to Michael Pollan in front of an audience at the Newmark Theatre July 27 in Portland in an event put on by Powell’s Boons. This was one stop in Pollan’s West Coast leg of his paperback tour for This is Your Mind on Plants. Four years prior to this recording, Michael
Michael Pollan takes a trip in his latest book, “How to Change Your Mind”
Over the past 30 years, in numerous food- and farm-related articles, and in his five best-selling books, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “Food Rules,” Michael Pollan has always retained a degree of journalistic detachment as he’s teased out the complexities of modern food production and consumption — namely why we eat what we eat, and the environmental and health consequences of our choices.
But when Pollan reported on a subject far more controversial than GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and Big Ag — the current renaissance in psychedelics research — for a 2015 New Yorker article “The Trip Treatment,” he realized he had “just scratched the surface” of a subject that only amped up his fascination the more he learned.
Michael Pollan: ‘I was a very reluctant psychonaut’
Michael Pollan first became interested in new research into psychedelic drugs in 2010, when a front-page story in the New York Times declared, “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning in Again”. The story revealed how in a large-scale trial researchers had been giving terminally ill cancer patients large doses of psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – to help them deal with their “existential distress” as they approached death. The initial findings were markedly positive. Pollan, author of award-winning and bestselling books about botany, food politics and the way we eat, was born in 1955, a little too late for the Summer of Love.
The Upshot podcast: Psychedelic Cure
Michael speaks with Leah Rose about the renaissance of psychedelic research. Listen here.
Michael Pollan Talks About Braises and Barbeque
When it was time for the audience at Portland’s Newmark Theater to ask Michael Pollan a question, the first out of the gate was: what are the five things that are always in your fridge? His answer: “Eggs. Milk. Yogurt. Mustard. Ketchup.” Other people wanted to know what he thought of Mark Bittman’s idea of being vegan before
Pots and Pans, but Little Pain
By the time most Americans reach adulthood, the supermarket ceases to hold surprises. But Michael Pollan, one of the most prominent voices on food today, a man who knows the nuances of the grocery store inside and out, was struck by the sight of the cheese aisle. “Look how big cheese has gotten,” he said,
Michael Pollan, The American genius
This month Michael Pollan, now succeeding Francis Moore Lappé as the most prolific and influential public intellectual teacher, writer and speaker in the USA on the web of topics that include the environment, agriculture, food, industry, society and nutrition, publishes his new book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. To public health and nutrition professionals
Author Michael Pollan goes ‘In Defense of Food’
Michael Pollan came to his calling by accident. Tall and lanky, a student of the essayists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he thought he would end up an English professor. But a garden intervened. And a rather unfortunate incident involving a woodchuck, cabbage seedlings and a gallon of gasoline. More on that later.
New Grub Street
Time was, a war of words between a food writer and an organic-foods retailer would have attracted the interest of maybe seven people in your local food co-op””a bit of chatter over the brown-rice bin and everyone would move on. Those of us in a Safeway with our Perdue roasters and our broccoli avec a
Voting With Their Forks
SUMMER is supposed to be the mindless season, with nothing deeper to contemplate than the instant gratification of barbecues and ice cream. But something is different this year. America is getting serious about eating. In the last couple of months a choir of disparate voices has been sending the same message through books, magazines and