Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles for over thirty years about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers, with three—including How to Change Your Mind—reaching #1. His books include Cooked (2013), Food Rules (2009), In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008), and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), which was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by both The New York Times and The Washington Post and won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the James Beard Award for best food writing. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (2001) was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon.com. Several of his books have been adapted for television, with four-part series based on Cooked (2015) and How to Change Your Mind (2022) streaming on Netflix. Pollan’s writing has received numerous awards including the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest, the Washburn Award for “outstanding contribution to public understanding of science,” and the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace. In 2010, he was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Pollan is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard. In 2020, along with Dacher Keltner and others, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, which conducts research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception, and emotion. He lectures widely on food, agriculture, health, and psychedelic science.
Why their voice matters: Michael Pollan demonstrates that the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we should eat can be answered in seven words—”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”—cutting through nutritionism’s ideology that has overcomplicated and harmed American eating habits to reveal that real food is what our great-grandmothers would recognize, not the edible food-like substances of the food-industrial complex. By exploring where the human and natural worlds intersect on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds, Pollan shows that the single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, proving that we can find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world if we bother to try. His work on psychedelics through How to Change Your Mind and co-founding the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics demonstrates that consciousness itself is less a window on reality than a controlled hallucination, revealing that transforming our relationship with food, nature, and our own minds requires recognizing that the shared meal elevates eating from mechanical fueling to a ritual of family and community—from mere animal biology to an act of culture.
