Interviews
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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…
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Over the past several years, journalist Michael Pollan has been assessing what he calls “our national eating disorder.”? Subsidies on corn fuel this epidemic as they cheaply allow factory farm feedlots to flourish. Pollan documented the life of one steer in particular, showing this cheap food comes with a high cost. In addition to exploring…
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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…