Profiles

  • Down to a Science

    “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…

  • The Cheapest Calories Make You the Fattest: A food-chain journalist looks for stories in our meals

    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,”…

  • The High Price of Cheap Food Mealpolitik over lunch with Michael Pollan

    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…