Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is an American author and journalist who has shaped public discourse on food, agriculture, and consciousness through books including The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and one of the most influential food writers of the past two decades. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) follows four meals — from industrial food system to fast food to organic to hunter-gatherer — back through the food chains that produced them, generating a detailed and often disturbing portrait of how Americans eat and what that eating costs. It is one of the best-reported books in the genre: grounded in specific places, specific farmers, and specific biological and economic facts rather than in ideology.

In Defense of Food (2008) distils The Omnivore’s Dilemma’s findings into a shorter and more prescriptive argument, captured in the seven-word summary Pollan offers in the introduction: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The book is a critique of nutritionism — the reduction of food to its constituent nutrients — and an argument for returning to simpler, culturally grounded eating practices. The Botany of Desire (2001), an earlier work, examines four plants through the lens of what they have to teach us about the relationship between humans and the species we cultivate, and is Pollan at his most intellectually playful.

More recently, Pollan has shifted toward psychedelic research with How to Change Your Mind (2018), a personal and reportorial investigation into the therapeutic potential of psilocybin and LSD. Critics across his career have noted that he can be prescriptive in ways that reflect his own class and cultural position — his ideals of good eating are more accessible to the wealthy and time-rich — and some of his generalisations about industrial food are contestable. But Pollan writes with genuine curiosity and clarity, and his influence on how Americans think about food is difficult to overstate.