Michael Pollan
By Veronica Suchodolski
Michael Pollan didn’t expect to write about food. “I mean, I ate,” he joked to an audience of Oregon State University students. But becoming a major critic of agricultural industrialism and an expert in environmental journalism wasn’t on his radar.
On Tuesday, April 2, the bestselling author and sustainable food advocate came to OSU for the second Provost’s Lecture of the 2023-24 Series, an in-depth conversation with Emily Ho, University Distinguished Professor of Nutrition and Director of the Linus Pauling Center.
But before the lecture, Pollan held an intimate Q&A session attended by approximately 30 students representing a wide range of programs and disciplines at the university, including students from SWLF’s Food Writing and Magazine Writing classes. During the hour, Pollan responded candidly to questions from the engaged audience about his path from a BA in English, to editing, to writing his own gardening column, which eventually led to his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan also holds professorships at Harvard University and at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
While Pollan touched on some of the larger policy questions in his work, he talked at length about what it means to be a writer of nonfiction, to include real people in his works, and to write from the beginning of the learning curve instead of as an expert.
In response to a student question about how Pollan picks his topics, and whether he worries about his current audience being interested in his next project, Pollan shared that he considers his books to be the story of his own learning process. This helps him avoid pigeonholing himself. “If you worry about audience, you’ll end up repeating yourself,” he advised. “That, to me, is the great danger: writing the same book over and over again.”
That’s what led Pollan to write on topics ranging from factory farming to psychedelics. “It’s a path that makes sense only in retrospect,” Pollan said. “As yours will.”
