He added that "journalism thrives on novelty, not on tradition. And the fact is that most of the wisdom about food is old, traditional and not surprising."
Pollan, 54, grew up in Woodbury, N.Y., He got his undergraduate degree in English from Bennington College and his master's in American literature from Columbia University. He was an editor of Harper's magazine. For a time, he and his wife, Judith Belier, a painter, lived in a rural section of Connecticut. There, he planted a garden and did battle with a hungry woodchuck, trying to fire-bomb the critter before eventually building a fence to keep the animal at bay.
His career as a writer is, he said, a confluence of his passion for gardening and his study of American nature writing.
"One of the lessons you learn when you start gardening is that you have a legitimate quarrel with other species, weeds and pests. How you navigate that quarrel is going to define you as a gardener," he said.
"From the Puritans to Thoreau to John Muir, I love that whole question of our relationship to the natural world."
As fond as he was of the American literary tradition of nature writing, Pollan said its approach of "worshiping nature as a spectator" was a fine way to preserve wilderness but is not an approach that is useful today. "We talk about nature too much in terms of virgin land or raped land. We need to think about married land, about how we get what we need and the land is actually improved. I have seen that in farms and in my own garden."
Growing your own vegetables, as Pollan does in his Berkeley front yard, gives you an opportunity to negotiate a relationship with nature, he said.
"When you are cooking with food from the garden," Pollan writes in In Defense of Food, the food is "alive." "You are not in danger," he wrote, "of mistaking it for a commodity, or fuel, or a collection of nutrients."
Pollan, the proud gardener, puts it another way: A Sun Gold cherry tomato pulled from his front yard is, he said, "a tomato so sweet even a kid will eat it."
Pollan's rules
Here is a sampling of Michael Pollan's rules of how to eat well:
* Avoid food products that contain ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or include high-fructose corn syrup.
* Avoid products that make health claims.
* Shop in the peripheries of the supermarket, where the fresh food is; avoid the middle, where processed food resides.
* Eat meals, not snacks.
* Eat plants, especially leaves.
* Don't get your fuel from the same place as your car gets its gas.
* Eat slowly, at a table, and try not to eat alone.
If you go
Michael Pollan gives a free public lecture at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. There is also a cocktail reception from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the library. The reception is
sold out.
