The Food Detective

By Russell Schoch, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 7, 2005.

"The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare." The Palm is a restaurant known for its beef, the sentence is the opening of an article in the New York Times Magazine, and the author, Michael Pollan, is now a professor of journalism at Berkeley. The sentence shows how Pollan works as a writer. He doesn't lecture or assume a superior position; instead, with a comic juxtaposition, he places himself (and, by extension, the reader) directly inside a cognitive dilemma, setting up a tension for the article to resolve. Pollan finished the steak, and continues to eat meat, although his prime choice is grass-fed beef rather than animals that have been stuffed with corn, antibiotics, and hormones.

Pollan writes what he calls "food detective stories," but the way he stalks his prey sets him apart from others who write about our palate and plate. For an article about genetically modified food, for instance, his first step was to plant Monsanto's genetically modified NewLeaf potato in his garden. He then went to St. Louis to interview the folks at Monsanto, and to Idaho to talk to potato farmers. He called the FDA and the EPA, and interviewed people like Richard Lewontin, the Harvard critic of biotechnology. He read and admired scholarly articles, including "The Potato in the Materialist Imagination" (by Berkeley English professor Catherine Gallagher). He then mixed all of this, and much more, into a wonderful narrative stew, all the while continuing to tend his patch of potatoes, both old and NewLeaf. At the end, he had to decide whether or not to eat the Monsanto potato. The article's last sentence: "I choose not."

Pollan has chosen to wander between his study and the garden and into the world beyond in numerous articles and three books: Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991), A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder (1997), and The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001). A former editor at Harper's magazine, and since 1995 a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, he was named Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley in 2003.

While Pollan likes to get involved in what he writes about, he's never far from the library. He took up gardening and building in part because of the delicious reading that both activities would bring into his hands. His library research produces fascinating facts. The broomstick that witches are said to ride, he tells us in The Botany of Desire, was actually a dildo used to insert intoxicants from the witches' brew, which very likely made them "fly." "That's why I don't write fiction," Pollan says. "You can't invent things like that."

As readers of Second Nature know, Pollan grew up on Long Island, the oldest of four children (he has three sisters). His mother, Corky, spent 17 years editing Best Bets at New York magazine and now serves as style editor of Gourmet magazine. Michael describes his father, Stephen, as "one of the world's great indoorsmen." Stephen is also a best-selling writer, co-author of such books as Die Broke and How to Fire Your Boss, which come off the presses at the rate of one a year. Asked if he and his father ever discuss their craft, Michael says: "Yes. My father asks: 'Why do you take so long to write your books?' I answer: 'Because I write them myself!'"

Pollan earned his B.A. in English at Bennington College in Vermont, spent a year studying literature at Oxford, and received a master's degree in English literature at Columbia University in 1981. He then took what he calls "a major personal gamble" – betting that he could write meaningfully about American culture, and in particular our relation to nature, as a journalist rather than as an English professor. After working on several start-up magazines, in 1983 he was hired by Harper's editor Lewis Lapham to help overhaul the publication. Pollan started out as senior editor responsible for Harper's Index and the magazine's Readings section. The magazine won six National Magazine Awards during his tenure, which included ten years as executive editor.

In The Botany of Desire – a literary, philosophical, and social history of the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the genetically modified potato – Pollan describes John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed") as an American Dionysus, "innocent and mild," but with more than a hint of eccentricity: He had "the thick bark of queerness on him," as a biographer cited by Pollan notes. These all could be descriptions of Pollan's own sensibility. His writing displays an innocence tempered with knowledge of the world, and a mildness that has been forged out of various kinds of wildness. Streaks of eccentricity and extravagance (which etymologically means "to wander off a path or cross a line," Pollan reminds us) lace his paragraphs. Last month, Michael Pollan sat down – playing with his son's tiny toy pig ("I love pigs!") and sipping tea in the kitchen of his south Berkeley home – to talk about writing and journalism.

Russell Shoch: What are you working on now?

Michael Pollan: I'm writing a book about the three principal food chains: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer. We're all part of the first; I'm part of the second, since I garden organically; and, for the third, I'm going to learn to hunt.

This article first appeared in the December 2004 issue of California Monthly, Berkeley's alumni magazine.

Russell Schoch is an editor at California Monthly.

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