Interviews
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The human digestive tract has about the same number of neurons as the spinal column. What are they there for? The final word isn’t in yet, but Michael Pollan thinks their existence suggests that digestion may be more than the rather mundane process of breaking down food into chemicals. And, keeping those numerous digestive neurons…
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In this issue of Lancaster Farming we interview Michael Pollan, guru of the “real food” movement. He spoke recently by phone from his home in California with Northern edition editor Tracy Sutton. Pollan is the author of “In Defense of Food,” and the previous critically acclaimed best-seller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four…
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Sure, I’m on a food binge. But not what is usually meant when one hears the words “food” and “binge” put together. Readers can’t but help having noticed the cookbooks creeping into The Rolling Shelves, and the increasing number of food-related books that have come my way. A couple of weeks ago, I ran the…
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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.…
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“You are what you eat,” we’re so often told. And that is certainly true, but if you care to pursue that line of reasoning, you’ll start looking more closely at the individual components of your meals and their ingredients. Michael Pollan decided to follow this line, and the result was the best-selling and utterly compelling…
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BROOKE GLADSTONE: For decades, the consumption of news has complicated our consumption of – food. Nowadays, what we buy to eat is determined by shifting health studies. Carbs are good for you. No, they’re bad. Fats make you fat. No, they don’t. And food labels only increase our confusion. Michael Pollan, journalist and professor of…
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“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That’s the advice journalist and author Michael Pollan offers in his new book, In Defense of Food. “That’s it. That is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy,” Pollan tells Steve Inskeep.…
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In his 1996 book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, the great food anthropologist Sidney Mintz concluded that the United States had no cuisine. Interestingly, Mintz’s definition of cuisine came down to conversation. For Mintz, Americans just didn’t engage in passionate talk about food. Unlike the southwest French and their cassoulet, most Americans don’t obsess and quarrel…
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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…
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Michael Pollan is a nature writer of sorts. Throughout his career, his subjects have been places where people live and work, where humans take part in nature instead of just watching passively. This stands in distinction to a strain of nature writing that concentrates on wilderness. To put the contrast in simple terms: while someone…
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What if human consciousness isn’t the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn’s clever strategy game to rule the Earth? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see the world from a plant’s-eye view.
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Michael Pollan is, among other things, a writer, editor, gardener, and teacher. He spent 10 years as Executive Editor at Harpers Magazine (1984–94), is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, and has published four books: Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (1991), A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder…