According to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, "It's the birthday of journalist Michael Pollan, born on Long Island, New York (1955). He's the author of best-selling books about food: The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), In Defense of Food (2008), and Food Rules (2010). His nutrition philosophy is: 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.' He also said, 'Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.'"
Although I have not read any of Pollan's books yet (they ARE on my list of books I plan to read), when I was teaching an author's course on Wendell Berry at Southwest Minnesota State University, I read his excellent introduction to Berry's book Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food. Here's an excerpt:
"Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that it would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation, with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well and being in good health unless it also farms well. But to read the essays in this sparkling anthology, many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, is to realize just how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendell Berry hasn’t already said, bracingly, before.”
Have you read Berry or Pollan? What are your favorite books they've written? How has their writing affected how you view food and agriculture in your life?
Although I have not read any of Pollan's books yet (they ARE on my list of books I plan to read), when I was teaching an author's course on Wendell Berry at Southwest Minnesota State University, I read his excellent introduction to Berry's book Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food. Here's an excerpt:
"Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that it would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation, with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well and being in good health unless it also farms well. But to read the essays in this sparkling anthology, many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, is to realize just how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendell Berry hasn’t already said, bracingly, before.”
Have you read Berry or Pollan? What are your favorite books they've written? How has their writing affected how you view food and agriculture in your life?
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