‘The Omnivore's Dilemma’ at 20, with Michael Pollan

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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name's Robert Lamb, and today I'm sharing an interview I conducted with none other than author and journalist Michael Pollan. Most of you are aware of his multiple bestselling and highly impactful nonfiction books, including 2001's The Botany of Desire. 2018's How to Change Your Mind and 2021's This is Your Mind on Plants. We've cited his writings many times on the show, and if you're like me, you've been hearing his soothing voice on his own audiobooks as well as NPR interviews for years. His latest book, 2026's A World Appears, concerns human consciousness, but this year also marks the 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking 2006 book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's

now out in a new edition with an introduction, brand new introduction, reflecting on the book's legacy and current place in our understanding of food. I'm also pleased to mention that there's a new updated audio book that features narration by Michael Pollan himself. So without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. Hi, Michael. Thanks for coming on the show.

Sure, Rob. Good to be here.

Excellent. How has your garden performed this year?

Not a great year.

Yeah?

Yeah, I had more squirrels than usual, and they wiped out several of my fruit trees. I got like six figs and zero persimmons. Tomatoes were okay. But anyway, I've got a real war going with the squirrels, and I'm not sure exactly how to control them.

Oh, wow. Are they mostly ground squirrels, ground and tree squirrels?

I think they're tree squirrels.

Okay.

But they've gotten, I don't know, more plentiful and more aggressive in recent times. Anyway, they're not interested in my kale. I have plenty of kale. But very few pests are interested in my kale.

All right. Well, we're here to talk about the 20th anniversary of the omnivorous dilemma. I'm going to go ahead and hold my copy up here for the folks watching on Netflix. And I want to start just chatting with you here about where the book really takes off. And that's with you standing in an Iowa cornfield 20 years ago.

How did that environment strike you then? And how do you look back on it now?

Well, you know, the whole premise of the book was seeing if I could trace some meals back to their source. We've so lost touch with the fact that when we eat, we are engaging with the natural world. not with McDonald's, not with our local butcher, that all this food begins somewhere under the sun, in the soil. And when I was doing my investigations of the industrial food chain, whether I was looking at Coca-Cola or a McDonald's meal or a Twinkie or any number of processed foods, that's where they all began. And so I ended up going out to Iowa I spent several days there in the company of a wonderful farmer named George Naylor, who really explained a lot to me about how American agriculture works. And,

you know, Iowa is an amazing place. Endless vistas of corn and soy. I mean, gigantic farms now. Farms that used to be highly diverse. Yeah, farmers would have their corn. Maybe they had soy. But they also had some cows and they had some chickens and pigs and then sweet corn. The kind of corn they grow, by the way, is not sweet corn. It's inedible. It's number two field corn, which is not food exactly. It's the building blocks of processed food. It gets turned into high fructose corn syrup and all those strange ingredients on the side packet of a Twinkie. So I realized there I was at the beginning of the food chain. And although since I really love connecting dots, it's kind of like what I do,

I realized behind those cornfields were oil fields. Because the way you grow that much corn, you need a lot of fossil fuel, mostly in the fertilizer, the ammonium nitrate that the corn just sucks up and turns into food. but also all the diesel that is involved in the process, the fossil fuel that goes into processing and harvesting and all this kind of stuff. So, yeah, it was a big moment, my first moment in an Iowa cornfield. And they're amazing places because the corn now grows so close together.

The way we get these incredible yields that we get now, hundreds of bushels per acre, is that we figured out a way to breed corn so that, um, it could live like cheek by jowl with other corn plants and they wouldn't compete, um, because they were genetically identical. So, so they didn't race for the sun, um, which would have let, left them leggy and they'd fall over and things like that. So, um, it's like a city of corn.

I mean, it's, it's like Manhattan. It's so, um, so, so tight. You can't walk between these plants. Um, So, yeah, it was a big moment. I tried eating a corn cob and almost broke my teeth. It was pretty nasty. But it's an amazing plant. It's amazing what it can do. It's had incredible success in our world because of its, you know, if you want to maximize carbohydrate calories on a piece of land anywhere in the world, corn is the way to go.

In revisiting your book, I was just taken aback again at just how sort of fundamentally weird and unnatural corn as we know it is, even like removed from the modern and industrial trappings of the scenario.

Yeah, well, it's gone through this transformation. I mean, if you look at the kind of corn that was grown in the 1920s, say, it's really a different plant. You know, we have thrown... It's like we put all our chips on this one plant. This is what we did the most research on, the most breeding work. And corn is a very good plant to invest in because you can really protect your intellectual property. An F1 hybrid, as they're called, will not come true. In other words, if you took the seeds from the kind of hybrid corn we're growing and planted it, you would not get the incredible yield and all these qualities that we bred into it. It would revert to some earlier, crummier version of itself. So because of the nature of hybridization and corn in particular,

you could, it paid, you got your investment back because nobody could rip you off by stealing your seeds. And I think that's one of the reasons so much capital went into corn, into breeding it. But it was a government plan too. I mean, the government, Since the 70s, where we really have a change in government policy around agriculture, moving toward, you know, Earl Butts was the Secretary of Agriculture, you know, plant fence row to fence row, get bigger, get out. You know, just this consolidation, yield at all costs, because he was trying very hard to make food cheap.

And cheap food is always popular. In our case, it's had terrible side effects. I mean, it's led to obesity and type 2 diabetes and all the problems that are traced to the Western diet that corn really directly contributes to. I mean, we're subsidizing high fructose corn syrup, which is giving people diabetes, which the government then pays to treat.

So it's kind of a screwed up situation.

You describe a food chain in our country that's just fundamentally linked to both corn and fossil fuels at pretty much every level. 20 years on, has this changed much?

I'm sorry to report that it hasn't. The way we subsidize agriculture has changed somewhat. We've gone from writing subsidy checks to farmers to crop insurance. but it's still set up in such a way that it just increases this path dependence on corn. Nobody's getting out of corn. I mean, there are a couple innovative farmers who have figured out ways to bring animals back on the land, for example, but we haven't diversified these monocultures. I mean, what you would have hoped would happen in the 20 years since Omnivore's Dilemma is a return to diversified farms. Because we know diversified farms don't need the chemicals to fight the pests.

You really only need those chemicals because you have a monoculture. Pests love monocultures. Their populations explode because there's so much food. But if you truly rotate, either in time or space, you break that chain of... of population growth and you don't need the chemicals that we're now spraying on our fields.

um so no things haven't changed i mean i think in the culture things have changed around food i think there's a lot more awareness around uh where our food comes from and curiosity about it you do have um probably $ 75 billion alternative food economy if you roll together organic and grass-fed or pastured animal agriculture and local food.

So there are people who are checking out of the industrial food economy, and that number continues to grow. But the main thrust of American agriculture hasn't really been touched.

There are a number of questions I feel like I could ask you about the cultural, even political impact of the book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. But these are, of course, questions that you really answer very well in the new introduction to the book, which I encourage everyone to pick up. But I was chatting with my wife before the interview here, and we were reflecting on how our own diets really began to shift in the wake of The Omnivore's Dilemma in direct response to the book, but also the cultural waves that this book helped generate when it came out.

And so, you know, in the new intro, you discussed that, you know, not all the earlier promises of the food movement panned out, you know, certainly politically, as everyone had hoped. But I hope enough people tell you just how impactful the ideas presented here were for their own personal relationship with food.

I hear that all the time, and it's incredibly gratifying. And it's people being more sensitive to where their food comes from, how it was produced, taking an interest in farming, you know. When I wrote that book, most Americans, if you asked them where their food came from, would say from the supermarket. And they really didn't think past that.

And our supermarkets are really opaque. You know, usually the meat comes, you know, shrink-wrapped. There are no bones anymore. So it just looks like this piece of protoplasm without any, you know, no connection to animals, no reminder that it was an animal. We no longer see butchers at work cutting up things. And so.

The irony is that when I wrote this book, early 2000s, the fact that you needed an investigative journalist to know where your food came from, when you think about it, that's crazy. You go back to the turn of, say, 1920 or 1900, and 40% of Americans were farmers. And everybody knew a farmer or had one in their family or visited a farmer. But agriculture now is just something that happens far away. And so I think one of the legacies of the book that I'm very proud of is it increased our consciousness about food and where it comes from. I think along with some chefs who were doing something similar at the same time, it's shown a light on farmers and how important they are to our culture and how dependent we are on them and how

hard they work and how innovative some of them are. Um, so, you know, that, um, when I hear from farmers, especially that's, that's really gratifying. Um, and they talk about, you know, uh, before Omnivore and after Omnivore and, uh, and certainly farmers markets, uh, and, uh, CSAs, you know, subscription farms. Um, I think they got a big boost from it and, and people who also, um, are, are producing grass fed or pastured livestock. which was not really a thing in 2006. It was very hard to find pastured eggs or, uh, you know, these are eggs from chickens that graze on grass and get to eat bugs and they're much more flavorful and much more humane or, um, grass fed, um, beef, um, which was also very hard

to find. And now you can find it at, at Whole Foods at least and many other places as well. So, um, yeah, that gratifies me a lot, but I still feel frustrated that, um, The changes in policy we were seeking, we didn't have great luck with. And I think we were naive. I was naive. I'm not a political activist. I'm a journalist.

And when the industry decided to fight back, which took a couple of years, it really isn't until 2008 or so. And it was, I really think on the release of Food, Inc., the documentary, which was a big deal in, I think it was 2008. And that movie was based half on Omnivore's Dilemma, half on Eric Schlosser's great book, Fast Food Nation.

And it was kind of a mind meld of those two books. And at that point, the industry woke up and started fighting us. And I don't think we were well prepared. And there are two powerful lobbies involved here. You have what we call big food, which is all the food processors, uh, the manufacturers, the fast food companies.

And then you have big ag, uh, which is, you know, represents all the monoculture farmers, but really represents the people who sell to monoculture farmers. Um, the, the, the makers of equipment, the, um, the people who sell fertilizer and seed, uh, the Monsantos of the world, or then they were called Monsanto.

Now it's Bayer. Um, and, uh, so we had quite a fight on our hands and, and Obama, you know, went through this. I mean, he was very sympathetic to the critique of, of, uh, of the industrial food chain that I was writing about. And in fact, I quoted, uh, an article of mine approvingly during the campaign in 2008, but very quickly. And then Michelle Obama, of course, made this her issue. And she planted an organic garden at the white house and worked really hard to reform school lunch and made some progress there. Um, but they got slammed by the industry at every moment. I remember when she put in her garden, a chemical industry front group attacked her as organic limousine liberals and said she should

be using pesticides, even though she didn't need any pesticides because it was a diversified garden. So there were a few steps in the right direction during the Obama administration, but I regret to say that he pulled back under pressure a couple times. So anyway, it's taught me something. It's taught me a lot about politics and how it works and how money plays a role in politics. Because this system really doesn't serve anyone, with the one exception that it does provide lots of cheap calories. I know they don't feel cheap today because we have this inflation, but the fact that Americans can eat, you know, 200 pounds of meat a year, no people in the history of humankind have been able to eat meat so profligately.

I mean, meat is a luxury good and usually a sign of, you know, status or wealth in most cultures. But we can have meat three times a day, and many people do. So that's the one great accomplishment of the industrial food system is cheapness. And the problem is, though, it has so many externalities. I mean, what it's done to the soil in Iowa, half the topsoil in Iowa is just gone. That's how much they had. You've got chemical runoff. You have very high rates of cancer in Iowa.

You see this happening right now with the politics shifting in Iowa. A lot of that is over water and what nitrogen fertilizer is doing to the water supply and what glyphosate is doing to the farmers. This is a weed killer that has been linked to lymphoma and the Trump administration is urging us to eat more of. basically. So, you know, I don't want to paint, you know, such a dark picture of things, but we still have work to do.

Another thing about the book that definitely influenced it out of me was it was one of these books that really made me rethink about not only the food chain and and the crops like corn or where our meat comes from, but also like what we are like thinking of ourselves as this kind of, you know, essentially still a biologically a hunter gatherer who is just in a different like non-hunter gatherer world that we've made for ourselves. Yeah.

Um, you know, I looked at it, I looked at this whole question of if we are eating so much corn, is it, is there any way to measure that? And, um, And I learned that, in fact, you can take a sample of hair or skin or nails and put it through a mass spectrometer and actually determine how much of the carbon, and of course, we're mostly, right, the carbon life form, it's the bulk of our bodies are carbon, how much of that was originally derived from corn. And I didn't know this was possible, but corn has a very special isotope. And it's recognizable. And this scientist at Berkeley, where I was teaching at the time, said, oh yeah, we can do this. And he's done it himself. And he said, we just look like corn chips. That's who

we are. Yeah, so it's penetrated us, you know, deeply. Deeply, deeply, deeply. Now, is that bad to be made of corn? Not necessarily, but I think it would be a sign of good health if there were more diversity in the diet. One of the things we've learned since 2006, it really wasn't on the radar then, is the importance of the gut microbiome to our health. And we have this semi-organ in our large intestine full of bacteria, trillions of bacteria, that are producing really important chemicals that we need to be healthy, that are training our immune system and managing our immune system.

They're doing all sorts of things for us. And they depend on a diet of plants, not processed corn, but real plants, because these microbes need fiber to ferment. And they ferment fiber into all these metabolites that are critically important to our health. And processed food does not feed them. because it's all easily absorbed fats and sugars that enter the bloodstream in the small intestine and don't get to the large intestine. So it's interesting, this finding, because it's telling us what we knew then, that we should be eating more plants, less meat, less fat. But now we have another reason for it or another explanation for why it's important.

Coming back to foraging, I love your tidbits about foraging chanterelles in Northern California, especially when you had the one that you were tempted to drive back across the bridge to get identified. Yeah.

So, you know, part of the book is about the industrial food chain. And then I start looking at other food chains and I culminate in the most primordial food chain, which is food that we hunt, gather ourselves. And so I had to learn a bunch of skills I didn't have. One was mushroom hunting, and another was hunting hunting. I went hunting for feral pigs or wild boar. And this was the most enjoyable part of the book. Probably the most enjoyable to read as well, but certainly the most enjoyable to research and write. And mushroom hunting's really interesting.

It puts you back in touch with a head that we once had, which knows how to scan a landscape for a very particular pattern. And mushroom hunters talk about getting your eyes on. So you enter the woods and you don't see anything. You just see woods. And then gradually you start seeing there's a visual pattern tied to a chanterelle or to a porcini or something like that.

And it's called the pop-out effect. And once you've seen it once, your brain has erected a kind of filter on the landscape and it will pop out at you as you walk around once you have your eyes on. It's hard to get your eyes on. But the professionals I was hunting with would always find one, not pick it in a certain area in a like six foot by six foot square and say, okay, there's one in there.

See if you can find it. And it would take me a really long time for something that they just saw. But once I saw it the first time, I could see it everywhere. And that was incredibly satisfying. It's a wonderful way to be in the woods with something to do as opposed to just, you know, forest bathing or walking through it. But having the confidence to eat a mushroom you have found yourself is a whole other question.

And so I went, I started looking for mushrooms everywhere I went. And I do a lot of hiking in the Berkeley Hills. And I found what I was like 90% sure was some big, fat, beautiful orange chanterelles. And I looked them up in the books when I got home. I picked them. And I looked them up in the books when I got home. And they looked right. And the gills matched. Or the pseudo gills matched. And the color matched. And the smell matched. But I didn't have.

the guts to eat it, um, until I could show it to somebody who knew, who knew his stuff. And, uh, and he said, yes, that's a chanterelle. From the moment that happened, I have total confidence when I find a chanterelle, I will eat it. Um, so there's a kind of knowledge that I think has to be conveyed human to human on something as consequential as eating a wild mushroom. Um, And the mushrooms I will find and eat myself now are really pretty limited. It's chanterelles, porcini, black trumpets. I mean, those are really the main ones. Chicken of the woods, I guess. And that's all because I had a human interaction with someone who knew them. And now I trust myself.

But I wouldn't on anything else that I hadn't had that experience with. So that's kind of curious. It's an argument for the limitations of book learning.

I like what you said, though, about the human connection, because I think my wife does a little bit of mushroom foraging and mostly for chandrels and chicken woods. And I'm a bit more nervous about the identification process. And, you know, we have all these different apps and so forth that do ID, but really most of it ends up falling back on, OK, show the photo to this person and we'll let that person tell us if we can trust it or not.

Well, it's funny. The other mushroom I now have confidence for is morels, which are rare and hard to find. But one day, my wife was taking a hike with a friend along a new rail trail in Northwest Connecticut, and they found a massive flush of morels. And they picked them, and they had pounds of them, and she brought them home. And this is before I learned anything about mushroom hunting. And I said, you know, are we going to eat these? You know, I don't feel comfortable eating these. I mean, how do we know these are really morels? And she said, well, my friend thought they were and they look right and they smell right. And I said, I have an idea. Your friend had half the bag. You had the other half of the bag.

Let's wait till tomorrow. Presumably he's eating them for dinner.

Yes.

And we'll call him in the morning. And if he's still alive, we will eat them. And that's exactly what happened. Since then, I'm pretty confident about morels.

Well, speaking of mushrooms, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you at least one question about another of your most influential books, 2018's How to Change Your Mind, which I know personally impacted countless readers like myself, but also played a major role in helping to reignite mainstream acceptance and scientific study of psychedelics in the U.S. So we're not even 10 years into the life of that book, but how would you compare its impact with the impact of The Omnivore's Dilemma?

Well, to me, it's really interesting and kind of surprising that two books I wrote ignited a conversation, a cultural conversation, uh, one about food, one about psychedelics. And I don't know why that is. Um, it may have to do with the fact that as journalists, we're trained to kind of have some feel for the zeitgeist and where it's, where it's blowing. And, um, and you know, we're supposed to be able to look around a corner and, um, I don't know that that's what it is or just good luck to. I mean, in both cases, I felt a wave building under me. When I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma, if you asked my wife, she would say, that whole time you're writing that, you kept saying, I got to get this book out. I'm late. I'm late. I'm late.

Because there was something happening in the culture. It just hadn't reached a very high level. Two books had come out before mine that were influential. One was Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. And the other was a book, a wonderful book that taught me a lot. by Marion Nestle called Food Politics. And those both came out a couple years before Omnivore's Dilemma. But there was a lot of interest in slow food and farmer's markets and stuff, so I felt late. With psychedelics, I was like, where is everybody? This is such a great topic and no one's writing about it, except in the fringe press. But comparing the two, the ripples from both, psychedelics has made more progress in changing the culture in winning acceptance I

think than change we've seen in the food system and the reason is that psychedelics as a therapy psychedelics as a therapy doesn't have any opposition so there's a kind of open field politically and which has been enhanced by the fact that we now have a right-wing constituency interested in psychedelics. The president, I mean, signed an executive order a couple months ago, speeding the approval of psychedelics.

Why?

Well, Joe Rogan sent him a text was one reason, and he needed Joe Rogan's audience, or was hoping to reclaim it after losing it. But also because veterans had a stake in psychedelics. Veterans were finding them very helpful in treating their PTSD. And for some reason, Big Pharma, the big drug companies, did not get involved either as a lobby to stop it because it is a threat to their business model in some ways. I mean, certainly to SSRI antidepressants, which is a huge category for them.

But they just kind of hung back and were watching and not putting up a lot of opposition. So the progress in getting psychedelics accepted in the culture and approved by the government, which may be imminent, in just eight years is quite remarkable. Um, and it, I think it's just a lesson in how politics work and that you really need to have support on the right and the left.

And the food movement by comparison was really coded liberal or left. It was a coastal phenomenon, um, tended to be more affluent people who could afford organic food. Um, but that's changing now, of course. or may change because of the so-called Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement.

And for the first time in modern times, we have a right-wing constituency in favor of some aspects of food reform, getting ultra-processed food out of the school lunch programs and getting pesticides out of our food and also dyes out of our processed food. And I mean, there's lots of areas of non-overlap between the food movement from 2006 or so and Maha now, but there's also some significant overlap.

And the potential, when the right leadership emerges, to join these constituencies, and maybe then we could get some change. So I think the food movement could learn something from the psychedelic movement on how to proceed And I remember in psychedelics, it was very controversial when Rick Doblin, who's a real leader in the psychedelic movement, he started a group called MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, that really did the research on MDMA for trauma and will be responsible when that gets approved for having done the science.

He reached out to people on the right. to veterans groups, to Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas, to Rebecca Mercer, who was a funder of Trump One, to fund this movement. And in retrospect, I think that was visionary on his.

Part. I like a lot of people. I've been reading you for years, but I've also been listening to you for years in documentaries, your many NPR appearances. And my whole family really enjoyed your self-narrated audiobooks, Caffeine and This Is Your Mind on Plants, during some road trips we took in recent years. Oh, thank you. I was wondering, though, how did you come to start narrating your own audiobooks?

And did anyone, yourself included, need convincing to make that happen?

Yes, yes, yes. So, by the way, with the republication of this book, there is a new audio book that I'm reading. When the book came out in 2006, the conventional wisdom was that you had to have an actor or a professional read books, nonfiction books. And I really bridled at this because I write in the first person and my readers want to hear me. And I don't have a terrible voice and I don't have an accent and I don't have a lisp. Um, so why not?

But that was the conventional wisdom. They wouldn't let you do it then. Um, but in the years since, I think there's a general recognition that people do want to hear the author, at least when the book is first person in a memoir or first person piece of journalism. I get it for novels where you need to do voices and, and, and some acting chops is helpful. Um, But, uh, so I've been gradually, um, doing audio books of my earlier books. And, um, and when the idea of republishing or doing a 20th anniversary edition of Omnivore's Dilemma came up, I said, great, but we have to do a new audio book. So I, I got to go back and read it, um, earlier this year. And, um, and that was a trip cause you don't normally read your books, uh, again. Um,

at least I don't. Um, but I've done, I think most of my books, I think there may be one I haven't done now in audio book. And there was a guy named Scott Brick who used to do them all the time. He was perfectly good, but I would hear from readers saying, that's not you. Um, so anyway, I, I, um, it's important to me and, um, and I, I don't mind doing it. It's a, it's a grueling week in a studio. Um, but I learned something from it. Um, and, uh, so now when I'm doing a new book, um, I do the audio book early enough in the process that I can make changes based on what I'm hearing. Because when you read things aloud, as I tell my students all the time, you will find mistakes. You will find $ 10 words you don't need. You will find sentences that

are run on. So I always record an audio book with plenty of time to make changes.

It's the last step of editing.

Oh, wow.

That's amazing. That was one of my questions I was going to ask, if audio book recording has changed your writing approach.

Yeah oh it has i think it's pushed my writing in a more conversational direction and slightly less pretentious direction when i go back to my first books um which were you know a little showy as everybody's first books are um but yeah i mean i tend to i've also done i'm working on another audible original like the caffeine piece and you know writing that that the only way well i the only way you think it's going to be get out there is in an audio book. And, and that writing, I think that does affect your writing.

I think you tend to avoid long sentences. You tend to avoid getting too technical, um, you know, avoiding details that would be very hard to hold in your mind or the, the kinds of things you would want to go back and read. Um, so, uh, and, and definitely a more conversational, uh, and, and maybe a little more emphasis on humor. Um, So anyway, so I'm doing another one of those right now. And I think, yeah, I think it's funny how your writing, my writing changes when you know the context. Like when I, when I first wrote for the New Yorker, which is like 2013 or something like that, it was like this piece came out that sounded like a New Yorker piece. And that's not the way I normally write. And it had a long

historical lead. I would never do that for the New York Times. So it's kind of interesting how when you know you're writing for this market or that market, you subtly change what you do. And I mean, it's what we all do in life, right? When we're talking to different kinds of people, we talk in a slightly different way.

And I think that definitely happens with writers.

Yeah. It's funny because as I was rereading the book, they'd send me the physical copy. I had an advanced PDF. And I didn't know that the new audio book was coming out. And my wife was like, why don't you listen to it? We're about to go on this trip. And I was like, oh, it's not Michael Pollan reading it.

You know, this is an older narration. I don't know if I can do that. And then we got back from the trip and Audible sent me a little update saying, hey, there's a new audio book for Michael Pollan. Oh, good.

I'm so glad they got it out there. Yeah, I enjoyed doing it. It was very interesting to go back and think about what's happened since. And that became the basis of the introduction. looking at the changes that have happened and the changes that haven't happened. And, you know, the two biggies that I talk about, um, and I, you know, there were others I could have talked about, but, uh, one is, um, the rise of the Maha movement and the fact that we now have a constituency for change on the right, as well as the left, and that that gives me some grounds for hope. I mean, there are things about the Maha movement that are absolutely, you know, crazy, but, um, You know, sometimes you have to hold your nose when

you're making a political alliance. And I'm a pragmatic person. The other thing is the rise of this term and everything that goes with it, ultra-processed food. And that is a term that doesn't appear in Omnivore's Dilemma. We talked about processed food and junk food, but the refining of a definition of ultra-processed food as a kind of food that's ready to eat, that you can't produce yourself at home.

You need a factory to produce and all these chemicals that nobody would have in their pantry. And that this now is 55% of our diet and 72% of kids' diets. And we now know there's been enough research on this category that it is worse for your health and more likely to induce you to overeat. And there was a Brazilian epidemiologist who put forward this idea. His name is Carlos Monteiro. And he didn't, I think, put forward this idea until 2009. But it's had legs and it's really penetrated.

And there's an active conversation in the government about how to define ultra-processed food and what to do about it. Not that this administration will do anything about it, but they're going through the motions and laying the groundwork, I think, for another administration to really look at this category of food, which is the food that's making us sick.

Now, coming back to the audiobook, you're talking about revisiting Omnivore's Dilemma. Part of the reading experience for us on the reader's end is that you transport us to these places and we travel with you to the Iowa fields or to the feedlots or out foraging in the forests. And I was wondering, had enough time passed that you felt transported as well, or were you still very much engaging with the text as the author of that text?

No, it brought me back. I mean, I had powerful memories. As a reporting, I don't think I had written a book that was so reported or investigated as this was. I was learning a lot about how to do journalism at that point. So I had written a lot of personal essays, and I was writing a lot about my garden and what I was learning about nature and how to behave in nature. So I came up through this essay mode and then I started looking at the food system.

I mean, it was kind of a natural outgrowth. I was interested in plants and gardens and that got me interested in farming and how farmers do what they do and how do they deal with pests, for example. I mean, it's the same issues. And so... you know, finding my way, getting onto feedlots and getting into slaughterhouses and getting into hog confinement operations. These were all difficult journalistic, uh, adventures, um, that took some doing and persuasion, you know? So, you know, there's a chapter where I follow one cow steer really through the whole system from insemination to slaughter. And that was a, that took a lot of, uh, you know, persuasion to get people to let me that close to the process. And, um, uh, so yeah, it brought me back. Um,

the first day I went to garden city, Kansas and found myself on a feedlot, which is, is a mind blowing place to be. Um, I remember getting in, in a rental car, landing late at night in garden city, Kansas, which is really where feedlots began. Um, and, uh, getting in this car and driving toward the town where my hotel was and the smell was just overwhelming. And I thought like, did something happen in the backseat to this car?

Did the last person lose it? And then I opened the window and no, it's outside, it's all around me. And just the stench of these feedlots, I had no idea. And spending a day on the feedlot was mind blowing. So many scenes came back to me, powerful scenes. And then the happy scenes, like mushroom hunting and cooking and spending time on Joel Salatin's farm. I spent a lot of time looking at a really model animal farm where animals live a very happy life and are treated with incredible dignity. And as they say, have only one bad day.

And learning about, I mean, we talked about how the oil fields lay behind the corn fields. And if you really wanna follow it all the way, here was a farm that was based not on corn, but grass, which in turn was fed by the sun. So you had this contrasting food chain that was sun feeding grass, grass feeding animals, animals feeding us, much more beautiful food chain, as opposed to oil feeding corn and corn feeding us meat or processed food. So there were scenes that to me were very powerful rereading them. And then the hunting scene, I mean, where I, you know, fired a gun for the first time and killed an animal for the first time was very.

Powerful.

I mean, that's a, That to me is a momentous thing to do. And I had such complicated feelings about it. I mean, I had some sense of shame that I was doing this, these beautiful animals. On the other hand, as soon as I succeeded after multiple tries of tracking and trying to shoot feral pigs who were not easy to find during the day, I had this flush of pride Um, and I have this picture of me holding a gun behind with one hand on this large sow, like 500 pound feral pig. And I have this shit eating grin on my face that I I've never shown this picture to anyone. It's just really embarrassing. Um, but I get it. I mean, talk about being hunter gatherers, you know? this was success. This was a very important,

it still is in certain tribes, um, to get the big animal, you're going to feed your family and your community. And, um, it's a, it's a real accomplishment. Uh, on the other hand, it's inflected by all these doubts and shame that we have about killing animals. So yeah, all this came back to me reading it, um, reading it over and, uh, some of it I'd forgotten. And, um, so it was, it was a positive experience rereading it. Um, The only negative was, God, I wish more had changed. I wish this book were completely out of date, because that would have been a good sign.

You mentioned the Roman poet Virgil several times in the book, especially when you meet your foraging Virgil, Angela Garo. Did you ever think of yourself as a kind of Dante figure elsewhere in your travels for the book, visiting these alien cornfields and field lots? Feedlots, rather.

No, I didn't think of myself as Dante. But I did think of myself as an amateur. And, you know, I love writing at the beginning of the learning curve. I don't write as an expert. I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as a learner. And so I have to find my guides, my Virgils, whatever I'm doing. This person who is trustworthy and can guide me into a world that's very foreign to me. And then I become sort of a guide for my reader.

But if you read my work, almost always on page one, I'm sort of an idiot. You know, I've got questions. I don't have answers. I don't like to write. I don't like to lecture the reader. I really like to take them by the hand and take them on my journey with me. And so the books, I think this is true. All my books is that there is an arc from ignorance to some mastery of a subject. And I don't start with that. The way an academic would, for example. If you read an academic article, the abstract gives it all away. And the piece is written from this position of complete authority and expertise. And that's true in the way, you know, a lot of nonfiction is written, that you're being told what the truth is beginning on

page one. I find that really deadening as a reader. And I'd much rather recreate my ignorance at the beginning of the book and then walk people through the process of learning and the surprise. I think questions are generally more interesting than answers, and curiosity is the great driver of good nonfiction. So I want to recreate in the reader's mind the questions and the curiosity that I felt.

And that's one of the reasons I didn't stay with food as a subject. I wrote like four books about food, but now I'm an expert on that, and I can't write the same way. Maybe if I wrote about fisheries, I don't know anything about fisheries, I could recreate that ignorance. But it's one of the reasons I move on and moved on to psychedelics and from psychedelics to consciousness. I really like being in that state of, I don't know what's going on, but I really want to know and I have these questions. So yeah, curiosity is the great driver.

And a question gives you suspense, right? Is he going to be able to answer this question? it turns every story into a kind of detective story. And the question in Omnivore's Dilemma is very simple, like where does this food come from? How was it made? But a simple question like that can lead you to all sorts of unexpected places.

Well, Michael, thank you for chatting with me here today. Again, I'm gonna hold it up for folks watching. This is the Omnivore's Dilemma 20th anniversary edition. I don't want to overstate things, but I was talking with my wife and I was like, what other books and what other authors that I've had the opportunity to chat with can I say like that their work actually changed the way I live my life day to day? And I really couldn't come up with another answer other than the On the Wars Dilemma. So thank you for writing.

Oh, thank you, Rob. That means a lot to me. Thanks a lot. Very generous.

Thank you. It's been an honor. Thanks once more to Michael Pollan for coming on the show. Again, the 20th anniversary edition of The Omnivore's Dilemma is out now in all formats, and that includes the updated audio book that we were talking about in the interview. His latest new book, A World Appears, is also out in all formats. Read more about his work at michaelpollan.com. As for our own show, we'll just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with four episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do a short-form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we just set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

As always, if you have questions, comments, interview suggestions, write in. We would love to hear from you. Thanks, as always, to the excellent J.J. Possway for producing the show, and you can reach out to us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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‘The Omnivore's Dilemma’ at 20, with Michael Pollan

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