A Conversation With Michael Pollan

For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been leading the discussion about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. His numerous articles and book have earned him the distinction as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Michael Pollan is the author of nine books, including This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. In it, Pollan describes the four basic ways that human societies have obtained food: the current industrial system, the big organic operation, the local self-sufficient farm, and the hunter-gatherer. The book 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. The Oscar-nominated 2008 documentary, Food Inc., was partly based on this book and Pollan appears in the film.

Pollan’s 2001 book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, also a New York Times bestseller was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon.com. Pollan’s exploration of the concept of co-evolution, specifically of humankind’s evolutionary relationship with four plants—apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes – became the basis for a 2-hour documentary by PBS.

How to Change Your Mind, a book about the history and future of psychedelic drugs was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2018, and in 2022 was adapted into a critically successful four-part docuseries for Netflix.

His most recent book, This is Your Mind on Plants, an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and the taboos we place on them, was a New York Times bestseller and one of the Washington Post‘s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021.

A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and still teaches writing at Harvard University.