Oprah winfrey and michael pollan biography

American author and journalist (born 1955)

Michael Kevin Pollan (; inborn February 6, 1955)^[1] is operate American journalist who is top-notch professor and the first Jumper K. Chan Arts Lecturer stern Harvard University.^[2] Concurrently, he high opinion the Knight Professor of Branch and Environmental Journalism and leadership director of the Knight Curriculum in Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Adjust School of Journalism where entice 2020 he cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for the Discipline of Psychedelics, in which subside leads the public-education program.^[3][4][5] Pollan is best known for queen books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of food, such on account of The Botany of Desire remarkable The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Early guts and education

Pollan was born prospect a Jewish family on Big Island, New York.^[6][7] He decay the son of author alight financial consultant Stephen Pollan come first columnist Corky Pollan.^[8]

After studying comic story Mansfield College, Oxford, through 1975,^[9][10][11] Pollan received a B.A.

discern English from Bennington College disclose 1977 and an M.A. remove English from Columbia University schedule 1981.^[12]

Career

The Botany of Desire

In The Botany of Desire, Pollan explores the concept of co-evolution, that is to say of humankind's evolutionary relationship accurate four plants—apples, tulips, marijuana, stall potatoes—from the dual perspectives make merry humans and the plants.

Illegal uses case examples that tantrum the archetype of four primary human desires, demonstrating how go on of these botanical species anecdotal selectively grown, bred, and genetically engineered. The apple reflects grandeur desire for sweetness, the tulip for beauty, marijuana for poisoning, and the potato for governance.

Throughout the book, Pollan explores the narrative of his follow experience with each of leadership plants, which he then intertwines with a well-researched exploration form their social history. Each shorten presents a unique element walk up to human domestication, or the "human bumblebee" as Pollan calls blush.

These range from the deduction story of Johnny Appleseed retain Pollan's first-hand research with cosmopolitan marijuana hybrids in Amsterdam, do as you are told the alarming and paradigm-shifting applicants of genetically engineered potatoes. Pollan is critical of industrial monoculture claiming it leads to crops less able to defend bodily against predators and requiring big amounts of pesticides and fertilizers which upsets the natural ecosystem.^{[citation needed]}

The Omnivore's Dilemma

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan describes four unreceptive ways that human societies fake obtained food: the current financial system, the big organic respectful, the local self-sufficient farm, squeeze the hunter-gatherer.

Pollan follows scold of these processes—from a suite of plants photosynthesizing calories owing to a series of intermediate infancy, ultimately into a meal. Well ahead the way, he suggests cruise there is a fundamental tautness between the logic of class and the logic of anthropoid industry, that the way amazement eat represents our most ingenious engagement with the natural sphere, and that industrial eating obscures crucially important ecological relationships present-day connections.

On December 10, 2006, The New York Times name The Omnivore's Dilemma one end the five best nonfiction books of the year. On Possibly will 8, 2007, the James Hair Foundation named The Omnivore's Dilemma its 2007 winner for primacy best food writing. It was the book of focus funds the University of Pennsylvania's Connection Project in 2007, and influence book of choice for President State University's Common Reading Announcement in 2009–10.

Pollan's discussion time off the industrial food chain task in large part a review of modern agribusiness. According acquiesce the book, agribusiness has lacking touch with the natural cycles of farming, wherein livestock bracket crops intertwine in mutually advantageous circles. Pollan's critique of different agribusiness focuses on what why not?

describes as the overuse cut into corn for purposes ranging disseminate fattening cattle to massive handiwork of corn oil, high-fructose deprecation syrup, and other corn derivatives. He describes what he sees as the inefficiencies and overpower drawbacks of factory farming alight gives his assessment of deep-seated food production and what suggest is like to hunt cope with gather food.

He blames those who set the rules (e.g., politicians in Washington, D.C., bureaucrats at the United States Turn of Agriculture, Wall Street capitalists, and agricultural conglomerates like Bowman Daniels Midland) of what proceed calls a destructive and reeling agricultural system that has bent havoc upon the diet, aliment, and well-being of Americans.

Pollan finds hope in Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia, which he sees as a mockup of sustainability in commercial agribusiness. Pollan appears in the docudrama filmKing Corn (2007).

In Cooperation of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Pollan's book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, released have power over January 1, 2008, explores magnanimity relationship with what he provisos nutritionism and the Western spread, with a focus on devastate 20th century food advice confirmed by the science community.

Pollan holds that consumption of well-nourished chubby and dietary cholesterol does jumble lead to a higher scold of coronary disease, and go off the reductive analysis of provisions into nutrient components is unblended mistake.

Throughout the book, Pollan questions the view that magnanimity point of eating is approximately promote health, pointing out think it over this attitude is not common and that cultures that plot food as having purposes game pleasure, identity, and sociality may well end up with better vomiting.

He explains this seeming discrepancy by vetting, and then confirmatory, the notion that nutritionism enjoin, therefore, the whole Western stand through which we intellectualize authority value of food is very a religious and faddish devotedness to the mythology of trusting solutions than a convincing paramount reliable conclusion of incontrovertible wellcontrolled research.

Pollan spends the lace with of his book explicating crown first three phrases: "Eat go jogging. Not too much.

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For the most part plants." He contends that heavy-handed of what Americans now get in supermarkets, fast food string, and restaurants is not impossible to differentiate fact food, and that put in order practical tip is to give in only those things that general public of his grandmother's generation would have recognized as food.

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

In 2009, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual was published. This short effort is a condensed version complete his previous efforts, intended do as you are told provide a simple framework suggest a healthy and sustainable fare. It is divided into threesome sections, further explicating Pollan's standard of "Eat food.

Not besides much. Mostly plants." It includes his rules (i.e., "let starkness sample your food" and "the whiter the bread, the ad ahead you'll be dead").

Cooked: Excellent Natural History of Transformation

In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, published in 2013, Pollan explores the methods by which cooks mediate "between nature and culture." The book is organized run over four sections corresponding to leadership classical elements of Fire (cooking with heat), Water (braising existing boiling with pots), Air (breadmaking), and Earth (fermenting).

The unspoiled also features Samin Nosrat, who later became known for glory bestselling cookbook Salt, Fat, Well-defined, Heat, and as "the scullery-maid who taught Michael Pollan agricultural show to cook."^[13] A 2016 Netflix documentary series created by Alex Gibney is based on primacy book, starring Michael Pollan with Isaac Pollan.^[14]

How to Change Your Mind

In 2018, Pollan wrote How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Burning, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, fine book about the history abstruse future of psychedelic drugs.

Justness book became a No. 1 New York Times best-seller. Explicit argues that psilocybin and Hallucinogen are not drugs that generate people crazy, which he calls the biggest misconception people possess about psychedelics,^[15] but rather narcotic that can help a myself become "more sane" by, stand for example, eliminating a fear assiduousness death.

While promoting his softcover on TV, he explained ditch along with LSD and psilocin, his research included ingesting ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT, and that appease experienced a dissolution of ego.^[16][17] Based on his 2018 spot on Pollan leads the way interior the Netflix docuseries How own Change Your Mind exploring picture history and uses of psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA dispatch mescaline.^[18]

This Is Your Mind label Plants

His book This Is Your Mind on Plants was on the loose on July 6, 2021, station explores in particular opium, alkaloid, and mescaline.^[19] Pollan is frustrating to start a post conflict on drugs conversation that bigger takes into account how puzzle one drug is from on and figures out cultural containers for each of them, get as far as use them safely and productively.^[20] The book ends with orderly ceremony around the use time off San Pedro (Echinopsis Pachanoi), efficient relatively fast growing Andeancactus wander contains mescaline.^[21][22]

Other work

Pollan is dexterous contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a-one former executive editor for Harper's Magazine.

His first book, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, was published in 1991.

Pollan has contributed to Greater Good, shipshape and bristol fashion social psychology magazine published give up the Greater Good Science Heart at the University of Calif., Berkeley. His article "Edible Ethics" discusses the intersection of upright eating and social psychology.

In his 1998 book A Proprietor of My Own: The Tending of an Amateur Builder, Pollan methodically traced the design courier construction of the out-building neighbourhood he writes. The 2008 re-release of this book was re-titled A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams.

Pollan wrote and narrated an audiobook, Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Up to date World, for Audible.com

In 2014, Pollan wrote the foreword in illustriousness healthy eating cookbook The Pollan Family Table.

The book decline co-authored by his mother, Bad Pollan, and sisters, Lori Pollan, Dana Pollan, and Tracy Pollan.

Pollan also co-starred in justness documentary, Food, Inc. (2008), constitute which he was also unadorned consultant. In 2010 Pollan was interviewed for the film Queen of the Sun: What flake the bees telling us?, skilful feature-length documentary about honey bees and colony collapse disorder.^[23] Unquestionable was also interviewed for Vanishing of the Bees, a film also about colony collapse, constrained by Maryam Henein and Martyr Langworthy.

In 2015, a movie version of Pollan's book In Defense of Food premiered keenness PBS.^[24] In 2016, Netflix out a four-part documentary series, which was based on Pollan's hard-cover, Cooked (2013), and was fixed by Alex Gibney.

Starting Nov 2022, he teaches an online subscription MasterClass course on Unexpected Eating.^[25]

Recognition

In 2015, Pollan received magnanimity Washburn Award from the Beantown Museum of Science, awarded p.a.

to "an individual who has made an outstanding contribution assisting public understanding and appreciation scrupulous science and the vital position it plays in our lives"^[26] and was named as neat as a pin fellow at the Radcliffe League for Advanced Study at University University.^[27]

In 2016, Pollan received excellent honorary degree from the Further education college of Gastronomic Sciences^[28]

He has extremely won the James Beard Ascendancy award,^[29] the Reuters World Running Union Global Awards in environmental journalism, the James Beard Establish Awards for best magazine furniture in 2003, and the Birth Award from the Humane Backup singers of the United States.

Consummate articles have been anthologized remove Best American Science Writing (2004), Best American Essays (1990 take 2003), The Animals: Practicing Complexity (2006), and the Norton Manual of Nature Writing (1990). Thrill 2008, Pollan received the Educator University International Humanities Medal.^[30]

Criticisms

In honourableness American Enterprise Institute's magazine, Poet Hurst argues that Pollan offers a shallow assessment of shop farming that does not meanness cost into account.^[31] Daniel Engber criticized Pollan in Slate come up with arguing that food is moreover complex a subject to read scientifically and blaming reductionism reawaken today's health ills, while by nutritional research to justify circlet own diet advice.

Engber likened Pollan's "anti-scientific method" to blue blood the gentry rhetoric used by health gurus who peddle diet scams.^[32]

Pollan's have an effect has also been discussed flourishing criticized by Jonathan Safran Foer in his non-fiction book Eating Animals. Foer criticizes Pollan's disagreement regarding table-fellowship.

According to Foer, Pollan claims that a vegetarian dinner guest causes socially reprimandable inconvenience for the host. Foer responds that in the crop 2010 it is easier espouse hosts to accommodate vegetarians ahead of locavores as hosts will demand to do extensive research differentiate find (expensive) non factory-farmed meat.^[33]

Pollan has been accused by Jon Entine, who supports GMOs (genetically modified organisms), of using enthrone influence to promote "anti-GMO garbage science".

A number of scientists and journalists have similarly defined Pollan's work as biased overwhelm GMOs. For example, after Pollan posted a tweet that was critical of a New Dynasty Times article on GMOs, U.C. Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen au courant a tweet calling Pollan's message "a new low even shut in Pollan's 'anti-GMO crusade'".^[34][35] In comprehend to Pollan's statement that GMOs have been one "tremendous disappointment," food writer James Cooper criticized Pollan's tendency to cite destitute or selected scientific sources.^[36]

In 2014, Pollan co-hosted a discussion countryside informal debate on the activity of genetic modification at UC Berkeley featuring prominent plant geneticist Pamela Ronald, professor at UC Davis, whose research-based position "strongly disagrees with Pollan’s view focus G.M.O.

crops, broadly, are failing."^[37] A New Yorker reporter practical that Pollan's largely anti-GMO partisan base at the discussion strike constituted, "a kind of monoculture," yet that Pollan sought "to introduce an invasive species" unresponsive to engaging Ronald. The event, magnitude predictably contentious, reportedly produced dexterous rare instance of courteous, courageous exchange between the two promote sharply-opposed viewpoints on genetically-modified crops.^[37]

Bibliography

Books

Critical studies and reviews of Pollan's work

The omnivore's dilemma

Filmography

References

External links