Michael Pollan



Michael Pollan (born February 6, 1955) is an American professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals(2006), was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He is also the author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World(2001); A Place of My Own(1997); and Second Nature(1991). A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper’s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2004); Best American Essays (1990 and 2003) and the Norton Book of Nature Writing.

Books

 * Second Nature: A Gardener's Education(1991)
 * Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder (1997)
 * The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001)
 * The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006)
 * In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008)

Articles

 * Our Decrepit Food Factories (2008) [| New York Times Magazine]
 * You Are What You Grow (2007) [| New York Times Magazine]
 * Six rules for eating wisely (2006) | New York Times Magazine]

About
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals(2006) What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.

Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

Source
http://www.michaelpollan.com/