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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…
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For organic farmer Judith Redmond and others like her, Michael Pollan, who wrote “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” is more than a bestselling author. “In our world,” she said, “he’s a rock star.” That’s why the balding, bespectacled Pollan cannot shop at his Berkeley farmers market without being approached by adoring…
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A few weeks ago, I was alerted to a fascinating online exchange involving two people who care passionately about organic food. In one corner sat Michael Pollan, the well-known author who, in April, published “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” In the other sat John P. Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market, which, with…
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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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“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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It’s hard not to like Michael Pollan. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a best-selling author whose new book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” was released last month, he is down-to-earth, friendly and easy to talk to. His course evaluations at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism — where he is a professor…
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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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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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“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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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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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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“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…