You would need to have been living in a cave—and a mighty dark one, at that—not to have heard about Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma over the course of the last two years. First published in April 2006, the book quickly did for food what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change: it framed the terms of the debate about a crucial environmental issue, and in so doing, became the touchstone text for an emerging social movement. But while Pollan has spoken often about the subjects of his books—subjects that include not only food but also botany, architecture, and gardening—he has rarely discussed his craft: his identity as a nature writer; his influences, goals, and style; and the personal, cultural, and geographical context for his writing. These are the subjects we discussed with him by phone for about an hour on the afternoon of May 9, 2007.

Philippon: In the past you’ve described yourself as a kind of nature writer, although some writers balk at that label. Are you still comfortable with it?

Pollan: I know that the term “nature writer” scares people off, because it immediately tells you that the writing is going to be solemn and humorless and religious. But as I’ve often told people, I think of myself as a nature writer who doesn’t like to go camping. I like to write about nature very close to home. But nature is my subject; I don’t know that nature writing is necessarily a mode. So I’m a nature writer in the sense that I’m very interested in nature as a subject, but I don’t know that that interest dictates any one particular approach. In so far as nature writing implies that your set of ultimate questions have to do with man’s relationship to the natural world, then I am a nature writer. In so far as saying you’re a nature writer implies that you sit around and have large thoughts about wild places, no thanks.

Nichols: How else might you describe yourself—as a journalist, essayist, a memoirist, or some other type of writer?

Pollan: I think my identity as a writer depends on the circumstance. Sometimes I work very much as a journalist—often when I’m writing for the New York Times—and I feel like I’m carrying around that persona. It imposes certain obligations, and also affords certain opportunities in terms of the kinds of questions you can get people to answer. But then I do other pieces where I don’t feel like a journalist at all. For most of The Botany of Desire I felt like a writer, an essayist, someone who follows a thread of his curiosity, and combines what he’s reading with whom he’s talking to, with what he’s feeling. I love that aspect of the essay. It’s such a catchall; you can put in so many different kinds of discourse, and journalism is just one of them. And it becomes a very small one in that context. So it really depends: sometimes it’s essayist, sometimes it’s just plain “writer,” and sometimes it’s journalist.

Philippon: Who are some of the essayists that you find interesting or that you consider part of your tradition?

Pollan: Thoreau is a very important writer for me. And although he is often thought of as a nature writer, if you actually read him—which hardly anybody does since he’s one of those writers that you don’t really have to read to use in various ways—you realize that he’s writing about a lot more than nature. There’s tons of stuff about architecture, clothing, politics—every aspect of life. The fact that he’s using his own experience as a laboratory, that he’s willing to range so freely and widely from his immediate experience to what he’s read, what he’s heard—he’s definitely a key person in the tradition.

More contemporary, Wendell Berry, for sure, both his prose and the way he constructs his arguments. I find him a constant source of inspiration, even though I think my writing is very different than his. Humor is more important to me on the page than it seems to be to him, and I don’t come out of that Christian tradition that he’s clearly in. There’s a whole complicated relationship between the sermon and American writing about nature, and all of us who write about these issues are borrowing from the American jeremiad and the sermon-essays of Emerson. But Berry seems to me really rooted in that tradition. He’s spent time in a church, and I haven’t done that.

Edward Hoagland is another writer who’s really very important to me, how flinty and unsentimental he is about nature. All of us have a handful of writers that we pick up when stuck or trying to get going in the morning, and he’s one of the ones that I’ll often reach for.

Nichols: Increasingly, your work seems to be moving from the personal to the political. What are the goals of your writing, generally speaking? To get people to think, to get them to read further, to bring about change in public policy?

Pollan: In a way, it’s changing over time. I’m very interested in politics; I’m very interested in the political conversation going on in the country, about all political issues, and in the past I haven’t really written about them.

When I was a magazine editor, that was my political playpen, and that’s where I thought and read a lot about politics, that’s where I tried to figure out what I thought about public issues. Then, my writing had only a very implicit politics. In Second Nature there is a politics of the environment, but it’s not spelled out as policy. I’m really dealing more with the underlying assumptions behind policy. Is our environmentalism going to be based on the apocalyptic tradition or the agrarian tradition, on a certain sense of nihilism and the end of nature or Wendell Berry? There’s a politics to that, but there’s nothing to vote for, no policy prescriptions—although different policies would flow out of those ways of looking at things you adopted.

But over time, and perhaps because I’m not editing anymore and I don’t have a magazine, the politics have come into the work a lot more. But I think that has to do with moving into a very politically charged realm—which is to say, food, which has gotten very politicized. It’s very hard to operate in that realm without having politics get into your sentences. When you look at alternative agriculture, there’s a critique in it. And then you have things like the Farm Bill.

I was very interested in looking at the ecology of food, and I started The Omnivore’s Dilemma very much in the nature mode, but you realize at a certain point that even though you can look at corn biologically and really understand what a brilliant creature it is and how effective it’s been at manipulating us, finally you also have to take account of the fact that there is a set of agricultural policies that are decided in Washington for specific political reasons that have also advanced the interest of this plan. To ignore the politics of that is to really not tell the whole story.

So I think a lot of it is driven by the subject, the fact that I’ve entered onto a terrain that is inescapably political. Although I should say I’m still trying to avoid becoming an advocate for specific policies. Even when I write about the Farm Bill, I don’t go further—partly because I don’t know how to; I’m not a policy maker—I don’t go further than telling people, “Just think about this. Just think about our goals as a society. Don’t we want agricultural policies that are aligned with our public health goals? Don’t we want an agricultural policy that’s aligned with our environmental goals?” How exactly to get there isn’t my job as a journalist. That’s beyond my pay grade. But it is political to ask those questions.

Philippon: Did you have any particular models in mind when you began writing, or did you just fall into this particular style of mixing personal experience and reportage?

Pollan: A lot of the kind of writing I do I learned to do at Harper’s Magazine, when I was there as executive editor under Lewis Lapham, working with Gerry Marzorati, now editor of the New York Times Magazine.

There was a kind of journalism that we were practicing there in the late ’80s and early ’90s that was very skeptical of conventional journalism. In other words, very distrustful of the omniscient, third-person journalist who has no interest, declares no point of view, and merely moves you through a subject: this all-seeing eye that’s jumping around from this expert to that expert and appears to have no agenda. Lewis, in particular, really can’t stand that kind of writing. Often when a manuscript came in, he’d say, “This writer’s got to tell us why she cares. Why is she writing this piece? What’s in it for her?” Sort of like you had to have your customs declaration at the beginning of an article, or he wouldn’t trust it. Often we would end up working out one of those paragraphs at the beginning to motivate the story, out of some personal quest to answer the question or solve a dilemma. I found that this was very useful, not only in winning the trust of readers, but in motivating the narrative, creating a certain amount of suspense—“how is it going to turn out?”—and indicating that there was a character here, a human who had questions and preconceptions and prejudices, perhaps. I found that the goal of journalism was not to pretend to objectivity, but to declare its interests, and then be fair. So that was one aspect of the kind of writing I learned to do at Harper’s. And I learned as an editor, by the way. I only wrote one article for Harper’s while I was there.

The other thing was to work with microcosms. That was a function of our lack of resources as much as anything. We couldn’t send writers as many places as The New Yorker could send them, or even The Atlantic. So if you were going to do a piece on, say, the steel industry collapsing in the ’80s, we couldn’t send you to China, and then to Pittsburgh, and then to four other places, so you’d get a whole survey. We would have to pick that one town in Pennsylvania that kind of said it all. And we would plant our writer there and tease the whole global story out of that one location. I found that very effective as a writer, to find that one branch, that one meat plant, and use that as a microcosm. So that was another important thing that I acquired.

These have become elements in how I approach things. And in how my students approach things, too. There are a lot of tricks to using microcosms effectively. They’re never perfect, and they can misrepresent a story if they’re not chosen well or at least contextualized properly. But I like to write that way. It gives you some unity of time and place, and I think readers prefer to have those unities and not be jumping all over the world the way a newspaper article would.

Nichols: So it’s the writer in a place.

Pollan: Yes, exactly, and it’s the consciousness of the writer engaging with the story and the characters he meets in the place he is. That’s taste as much as anything; I really like that kind of journalism. And I, too, share those suspicions about those conventions. I mean, everything we write is first person, whether we admit it or not. Who else is telling the story? Who else is there? Whenever I get to that line in a New York Times news article, “so-and-so told a reporter,” they are writing about themselves in the third person. This is not the nineteenth century, but it still goes on. A lot of these conventions are invisible to people, but they really bug me. Some of that comes from having done a lot of literary studies in graduate school, and being very conscious of, “Who’s the ‘I’ here? By whose authority is this person writing?” All of that dreadful reading of theory I did took its toll, and it made me more skeptical of these kinds of conventions. Not that there aren’t other conventions in writing in the first person and having microcosms, but to me, at least, they seem more honest.

Nichols: As you say, the writer declares his or her interest, so then how do you decide then how much to declare, how much of your personal life and experience to reveal?

Pollan: Only what’s relevant. I think a lot of writers who work in the first person make a mistake of assuming that everything about them is fair game. I use the “I” quite a bit, and “me” quite a bit in my stories, but I also don’t actually reveal very much about myself at all. You construct a first person in this kind of nonfiction, and as those words suggest, it’s a created thing. That’s not to say that it isn’t truthful, but we all have so many different first persons we can draw on. I can write as a gardener, I can write as an eater, I can write as a Jew, I can write as a father, I can write as a son, I can write as someone who grew up in the suburbs. We have all these identities, and we simply choose the ones that are relevant to that story.

There’s also the kind of weird, deracinated “I” of newspaper feature writing, and that’s pretty annoying, too. Somebody’s writing as the “feature writer,” and that’s not something anyone can connect with. Because people don’t particularly like journalists, and they don’t know what the life of a feature writer is really like, except you go and interview some famous people and have lunch a lot. The challenge is to create a first person on the page that people can relate to, who’s a real person, whose experience is relevant to unpacking that story.

It’s interesting, if you look at a lot of pieces, even by the same writer, you find different first persons and different people. You have this kit of parts, which is who you are. The same thing is true in social interactions—we present a different self to our parents than we do to our students than we do to our teachers. Writing’s the same way. Settling on the proper first person is a big step, and you have to start from scratch every piece. I thought once I’d developed a voice, “Well, I cracked that. Now I can sit down and write about anything.” But it turned out not to be true. I had to start completely from the beginning with every story, and I still do.

Philippon: Your books also all seem to model the intellectual experience—that is, the process of information gathering and coming to some kind of new understanding about a subject. And you make this process look almost effortless. Is this intellectual experience as easy for you as it looks?

Pollan: I think you’re right and very perceptive to notice that one of the stories I’m always telling is about my education, and I usually progress from a state of near idiocy about something or utter confusion to some sort of resolution of, “Now I know where I stand.” I tell my students, that’s the narrative we all have. If you’re looking to turn your piece of journalism into a narrative you always have the detective story of having answered the question you set out to answer.

If it seems effortless, that’s an illusion, because obviously there were moments of utter despair and confusion and contradiction along the way. I’ve learned, though, to write about ambiguity and be interested in it and not try to be all or nothing, realizing that many questions don’t have a simple yes-or-no or black-or-white solution.

Some of the chapters in The Botany of Desire are an attempt to dramatize the thought process. If you look at the marijuana section there, I change the way I’m looking at it. When I’m writing something, I’m often thinking, “Let’s try looking at it this way, let’s see what history will tell us, let’s see what the philosophers know about this, let’s see what the devout think about this thing.” You look at your subject from many different lenses and stack them up and realize which one works. In that book I just let the lenses sit there because they were all really interesting, and they all had different versions of the same truth. So in a way that was my effort to dramatize the whole thought process. I really like doing that and not settling on one perspective.

Philippon: Tell us about your new book, In Defense of Food, published by Penguin Press.

Pollan: It’s kind of a manifesto; it’s not a reported book. I essentially defend food from attacks on two sides: one is from the scientists and the other is from the marketers, both of whom are trying to replace this wonderful stuff called food with nutrients. I’m trying to understand why Americans are such suckers for scientific eating, as it was called about a hundred years ago during the last major period of food faddism in this country, when John Harvey Kellogg was out there making people crazy about food. The book is about how to eat and how to think about food and how not to think about it. And it attacks nutrition science to some extent and shows how limited our knowledge is—but why that’s not such a bad thing. You don’t need to know all this to eat well. In a way it’s a sequel to The Omnivore’s Dilemma in that it does answer some of the questions raised in that and more explicitly suggest to people how they might approach the supermarket or farmer’s market.

Nichols: Looking back over the last fifteen years or so, your books have been published about five years apart. Does this new book signal a change in that pattern?

Pollan: No, this is a small book; it’s on a different scale. And all the ideas in it still arise from the kind of reporting I did for The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In a funny way a lot of it came out of the public speaking I’ve been doing since The Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, because I’ve been answering a lot of questions from people about food and what they should eat—I’ve done many speeches over the last year or so—so I think I have a real sense of what people want to know, where they get hung up. So it’s really an attempt to answer the questions people are putting to me. I shouldn’t call it a sequel, because, in fact, it’s not. In my head it’s a sequel in terms of my experience, but as a reading experience it won’t be a sequel at all. It doesn’t depend on having read the other book at all. But it really is a manifesto. There’s a food movement gathering in this country right now—a political movement, a social movement around food—and I feel that I’ve got a contribution to make to that by offering this kind of manifesto. But it’s also going to be a funny manifesto.

Philippon: To what do you attribute the blossoming of interest in food, food writing, and the whole sustainable food movement?

Pollan: There are a lot of things that have come together. On the food side itself, there are growing levels of anxiety about the industrial food system. I think things like mad cow disease have had a very powerful effect. Even though they didn’t end people’s eating of meat, by any means, each time one of these things happened—mad cow disease, food poisoning incidents of various kinds, even this pet food thing that came out of China—these are all teachable moments for the culture. Suddenly, intensely, for a week or two, people peel back the curtain and see this food chain that sustains us, that we’re totally dependent on. And they see that, “Oh my God, they feed cows to cows? They grind up old cows and turn them into cattle feed? They take chicken shit and feed that to cows? How did this E. coli bug that evolved on feedlots get onto spinach? Why would the Chinese be putting poison into pet food?” And the cumulative effect scares the hell out of people and makes them very uncertain about this food chain that they’re dependent on. We know this is happening because every time one of these stories breaks, there is a rush to organic food, and most of the growth in organics has been driven by a series of food scares—Alar, mad cow disease—and you can bet that a lot of organic pet food will be sold in the next year or two. So we’ve had these stories that have sensitized us to the problems of the industrial food system. That’s one thing.

We’ve also had all this conflicting science about food—this is a carcinogen, this is going to help your depression—there’s just so much journalism about food that is confusing people, so there’s a high level of confusion and anxiety. And then I think you have the growing recognition that food is at the nexus of many different other stories that are important, including the environment story, the energy story, the health story. It really is a node in all those different lines of force.

I do think, too, that there’s a lot of free-floating political energy out there that has been frustrated by what’s going on with the war, with elections since the year 2000, and a lot of that political energy is flowing into the food issue. There are many, many things that people don’t feel they can do anything about, that they don’t feel they can change, but the beauty of food as a political issue is that you can do something today. You can do something three times today. You get all these votes.

There’s something very primary about the decision of whether to take something into your body or not. In a way, it’s the primal politics; it’s saying “no” to your parents when they’re shoveling that spoonful of baby food in your mouth. That’s your first political act; you’re saying, “No, I won’t do that.” We all have the ability to do that with feedlot meat, with food we simply don’t approve of for ethical reasons or don’t like for aesthetic reasons. At a time when we feel we don’t have a lot of political leverage, we do have that political leverage. We’re seeing, too, that it really works in food, that when you change the way you make choices, big things happen in the world—new markets are created, farmland is preserved, chemicals are eliminated from the water table in a certain place. It really does something very concrete. I think it’s a very accessible politics, and it sure is easier to fix than the Iraq war or AIDS or global warming.

Nichols: How has being a parent affected your thinking and writing about food and eating?

Pollan: I think as soon as you have kids you start thinking about the food question in a way you hadn’t before. It’s so complicated, and you’re dealing with the other side of that politics, which is your kid being absolutely insane and obstreperous about food. I happen to have a child who had a very complicated relationship to food, and it’s had, I’m sure, a large effect on my thinking about it and really sensitized me to this idea of the omnivore’s dilemma, about what a complicated transaction this is between us and the world, and how charged it is in so many ways. There’s also this issue of, you want your child to be healthy, so what about these pesticide residues? Is it worth spending money on the organic strawberries? Just wanting to get to the bottom of those questions. So there’s no question that the beginning of food consciousness for a lot of people is having a child, and then when they have a child who doesn’t eat very well, that only multiplies the level of food consciousness.

Philippon: How have people reacted to your ideas about the treatment of animals in The Omnivore’s Dilemma?

Pollan: In very complicated ways. I constantly hear about people who became vegetarians after reading the book, and specifically reading the stuff on the meat industry. And there are people who stopped being vegetarians. I have heard stories about people who said, “I couldn’t eat meat because of what I knew about the industry, and then I realized that there was this other kind of meat agriculture that I really wanted to support,” and so I think it’s enlightened people to become meat eaters again. The fact that both those reactions could come from the same book I find very heartening, because I didn’t want to tell people, “Don’t eat meat.” I just wanted them to think it through. People can think through the issue and come out in different places, and I think that’s wonderful. That’s a sign that the only thing I’m prescribing is thought, not a particular practice.

Philippon: Although everybody eats, not everybody reads, and despite the success of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, there are still millions of people who haven’t—and probably won’t—read the book. Do you want to reach these people, and if so, how?

Pollan: Books have a way of accessing people’s minds, even people who don’t read, and I have great confidence in the influence of print. Even though it’s small—and a bestselling book is puny compared to a bestselling movie or a best-selling record album—nevertheless, it’s very interesting to watch how, because of the authority of print, information filters out though the culture. There’s a kind of viral effect that happens with a book and with stories in a book. One person buys a book and reads a passage to another in bed—you’re always hearing stories like that. So I still have great faith in the power of books, even if they just sell several thousand copies. They nevertheless can have tremendous impact.

Nichols: One of the things that might have surprised the audience of The Omnivore’s Dilemma was that you moved from northwest Connecticut to Berkeley. How important are particular landscapes to your writing?

Pollan: This book has much less sense of place. The earlier three books are all, in one way or another, set in my garden in Connecticut. So that was a big departure for me, and that is one of the reasons I think it’s a more journalistic book, a more reported book; it really takes place out in the world. It was very hard to leave and give up that scene for my writing, which I really enjoyed, but arguably I’d gotten all I could get out of it.

Being in California has been enormously valuable for this book. Being in Berkeley—which has really been ground zero for a lot of the politics that has been taking place in food since 1969—has been very useful. Through the people I’ve met out here—beginning with Orville Schell, the dean of the journalism school, who actually started out in the food business, and Alice Waters, and the farmers out here that I’ve met, and the farmer’s market scene—I’ve gotten a much deeper education than I could have about this movement. So I feel like that’s been really useful.

This is also where America looks to see where food trends are going. My guess is I get a little bit of authority out of the fact that I’m here, on the issue. Although you are open to the, “Well, a professor from Berkeley, of course they think that,” and you can be marginalized, too. I know that being a professor is the worst thing for your journalism in some people’s eyes, because they think you must be too comfy to really get your hands dirty. But, believe me, there’s just as much dirt out here as there was in Connecticut.