Michael Pollan

Award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA and IN DEFENSE OF FOOD

Photo of Michael Pollan

Biography

Chosen as a New York Times Best Book of 2006, Michael Pollan’s THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals brought out ideas and facts that stimulated minds and altered people’s perceptions about our daily bread. Michael’s columns in the New York Times Magazine continue to contribute to …

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Chosen as a New York Times Best Book of 2006, Michael Pollan’s THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals brought out ideas and facts that stimulated minds and altered people’s perceptions about our daily bread. Michael’s columns in the New York Times Magazine continue to contribute to our nation’s conversation about food consumption.

For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture.

Pollan is the author, most recently, of New York Times bestseller IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: An Eater’s Manifesto. Pollan’s book THE BOTANY OF DESIRE: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, was also a New York Times bestseller, received the Borders Original Voices Awards for the best non-fiction work of 2001, and was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon.com. He is also the author of A PLACE OF MY OWN (1997) and SECOND NATURE (1991).

A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987, his writing has received numerous awards, including the John Burroughs prize (for the best natural history essay in 1997); the QPB New Vision Award (for his first book, SECOND NATURE); the 2000 Reuters-I.U.C.N Global Award for Environmental Journalism for his reporting on genetically modified crops; the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003; and the 2003 Genesis Award from the American Humane Association for his writing on animal agriculture. His essays have appeared in many anthologies, including BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING (2004), BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS (1990 and 2003 editions), and the NORTON BOOK OF NATURE WRITING. In addition to publishing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, his articles have appeared in Harper’s (where he served for many years as executive editor), Mother Jones, Gourmet, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, Gardens Illustrated, and House & Garden.

In 2003, Pollan was appointed the Knight Professor of Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In addition to teaching, he lectures widely on food, agriculture, and gardening.

Pollan grew up on Long Island and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University, from which he earned his master’s degree in English. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.

Check out Michael’s website at www.michaelpollan.com.

Photo by Ken Light
 
Speaking Topics
  • In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution

    Real food—the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize as food—is being undermined by science on one side and the food industry on the other, both of which want us to focus on nutrients, good and bad, rather than the actual plants, animals and fungi that we eat. The rise of “nutritionism” has vastly complicated the lives of American eaters without doing anything for our health, except possibly to make it worse. Nutritionism arose to deal with a genuine problem—the fact that the modern American diet is responsible for an epidemic of chronic diseases, from obesity and type II diabetes to heart disease and many cancers—but it has obscured the real roots of that problem and stood in the way of a solution. That solution involves putting the focus back on foods and food chains, for our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the soil, plants, and animals that make up the food chains in which we participate. In this talk, Michael Pollan explores what the industrialization of food and agriculture has meant for our health and happiness as eaters, and looks at the growing national movement to renovate our food system.

  • The Botany of Desire: The Forgotten Power of Plants

    The sweetness of apples, the beauty of tulips, the intoxication of cannabis: these domesticated species and the human desires they’ve evolved to gratify pose an intriguing question about our place in nature, which is this: Who’s really domesticating whom? For these species have surely gained as much by their association with us as we have by associating with them. By looking at our intimate relationship with a handful of everyday plants, Pollan develops a fresh perspective on the human place in evolution, one that takes us beyond the “zero-sum” relationship of Man and Nature to put us back into the reciprocal web of life on earth. He also makes a compelling case for the power of plants—and the importance of botany—in human society.

  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Searching for the Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World

    All creatures are defined ecologically by how they fit into a food chain. In the case of humans, the industrialization of food has obscured this once-plain fact, to the point where most Americans are only dimly aware that their food represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Over the past few years, Michael Pollan has conducted a series of personal explorations of our food chain, growing a genetically modified potato, tracing an organic TV dinner from grocery freezer to farm, buying and following a steer from insemination to steak. In this talk, Pollan will use these stories to tease out conclusions about what’s gone wrong with the industrial food system and its implication for our health. He’ll also explore some of the healthier alternatives to industrial food.

  • Connecting the Dots: Health and Agricultural Policy

    Sir Albert Howard, one of the earliest pioneers of sustainable agriculture, said that we ought to “treat the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.” What happens when we take that advice seriously? We begin to see how health problems such as obesity, food poisoning (including mad cow disease), heart disease, and many others are connected to the way we grow our food. We also discover that agricultural policy has enormous implications for our health—and that current USDA policies are actively promoting the same epidemic of obesity which other branches of the government are urging us to confront.

  • The Future of the Garden in America: Beyond the Wilderness and the Lawn

    America’s two biggest contributions to the history of world landscape could scarcely be more different: the front lawn, and the wilderness preserve, both of which were invented around 1870. Each of these institutions has fostered a way of looking at, and managing, the land—two diametrically opposed ethics. And both have stood in the way of both a sane approach to the environment and an important tradition of garden-making in this culture. As the coexistence of two such different institutions suggests, Americans are somewhat schizophrenic about nature—we’re not at all sure whether we want to dominate it in the name of civilization (the lawn ethic) or worship it untouched as an escape from civilization (the wilderness ethic). And in fact we have created a landscape that accurately reflects this split: some 8% of the American landmass has been carefully set aside as wilderness, while the rest has been deeded unconditionally to civilization—to the realm of the parking lot, suburban subdivision, commercial strip and the lawn.