The Ecotone Interview with Michael Pollan

88 Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, 2008). His previous book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, 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 (Random House, 2001); A Place of My Own (Delta, 1997); and Second Nature (Delta, 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 the University of CaliforniaBerkeley . His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2004); Best American Essays (1990 and 2003) and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac. The Ecotone Interview 89 Daniel J. Philippon & Capper Nichols 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. with Michael Pollan 90 Ecotone: reimagining place 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...