Michael Pollan Tried to Blow Up a Woodchuck

and In Defense of Food. But don't call him an obsessive foodie. He's more comfortable with the classification of nature geek, whatever you call him. Pollen reshaped our relationship to what's on our dinner plate. You might think Michael Pollen was a young kid scheming how to get broccoli into his lunch room, but the food activist in him developed later. The love of writing came first. I had this idea I was going to be a college professor in teach English. And then I got there and I did a year

of it, and it was really great. I mean, had a great experience. Um, But then I was getting to the hard part. I had to learn German and read the fairy queen and all this stuff I didn't want to do. And I had this wonderful journalism job this summer after my master's, So I decided I could write the kind of stuff I wanted to write as a journalist rather than as an academic. And you worked as a journalist where oh, I had a succession of jobs.

I worked for a bunch of failed startups. Magazine Harper Yeah, Harper's the only one that survived. But at a certain point I had to make a judgment was I going to be a writer or an editor? And I had and I had written my first book, which is called Second Nature, while I was moonlighting at Harper's. I was doing it evenings and weekends. But then I had a kid, and you lose your your ability to use your weekends and nights that way. So at that point I was at this fork in the read Was I an editor

a writer? I decided I wanted. I already had contracted for my second book. I was way behind on it. I would have owed a lot of money to star op it. So we decided let's leave town, live as cheaply as we could in rural Connecticut, and UM and I would just do be a writer and uh, um, and describe your first two books, which are not food related, were very exactly No, their their nature related. All the

work is really about nature. I mean, I think my my meta subject is our engagement with the natural world. So my first but I didn't know that when I started off. My first book was about gardening. Um. In graduate school, I had studied Emerson and Threaux, and I was very I was completely invested in these American was beautiful American ideas about nature as divine and you know, God's second book with the Landscape and the wilderness was this very special place. And I love those ideas and

love those writers. But when you start to garden, those ideas are a disaster because they preach um, it just kind of everybody gets along, you know, you don't don't worry about the squirrels or the woodchucks. And so I planted a garden based on those ideas, and it had no fence, and because fence and the violence of nature, greatd here. Yeah, And I was challenged. I was challenged by woodchucks, and I got into a war with one woodchuck in particular that I'm not very proud of how

I conducted UM and this this woodchuck. I would plant the garden one weekend, he would come along and mow it down. The next weekend, I would do it again. And UM, I realized that all the kind of intellectual armaments I had were not adequate to dealing with this problem. And I started doing some things that I'm really not proud of. So, for example, UM, I I read up on the woodchuck. That was my normal approach, and I said, Okay, he's gonna have a burrow and the borrow is gonna

have all these different rooms and they love. They're really clean freaks woodchucks. You wouldn't know. They look kind of sloppy, but they're clean freaks. So the first thing I did was I poured some like creosote and molasses down his hole. I found the borrow, thinking he would be grossed out, would move on. He wasn't. Um I he came back. He just made a new burrow and I went around it, and then I stuffed it with rocks and soil, thinking I would, you know, suffocate them, but they always have

a back door. And I finally, UM, condominium developer should hire you clear out there and control department you're like a New York landlord. Yeah, or Donald Trump, I can get rid of those old ladies and standing the way of his parking lot. And I burrowed to the other side. Yeah. And then I got this idea. I was driving along the road and I saw some roadkill, a dead woodchuck flattened, and I actually like scooped it onto a piece of cardboard, drove it home, stuffed it in the hole, thinking I

would intimidate him. Basically, it didn't work, so ultimately I was reduced to doing something that I am a little bit ashamed of as someone who's thought of as an environmental writer. I I poured a gallon of gasoline down his um, down his burrow, thinking that it would fan out through all the little rooms, the latrine room, the food room, the kitchen, and I threw matt each in there and uh and in my in my mind, the fire was gonna like go way down the You know,

I'd seen this image Crower basic. Well, actually it was modeled on There was a news item about a new fuel they developed for jet airliners that would be slower to combust, and they set up an old seven oh seven on an airfield somewhere and they put a camera in it and they lit a fire and to see if this would give people time to get out of the plane. But didn't work at all, and you just saw this image of the fire just shooting down the fuselage.

And that was exactly what I wanted to happen. But as uh as you know, I'm an English major, not a physics major, and a physics major would have known that fire is never going to go away from oxygen. It's always gonna go tord oxygen. So the fire came the wrong way and there was this torrent of flame that just kind of threw me back and shocked me into an awareness that this is probably not the best way to deal with the natural world. You can literally

hear the Woodchuck laughing inside the bar. It was. They had a lot of caddy check in this, It really was. It was. It was embarrassing, um, but it was. It was that. Well, what I learned is that I get to ask you that question, what did you learn, Michael pol these misadventures with the Woodchuck? I learned that Emerson and Threaw really didn't have very good guidance to us on doing things like farming, like gardening, like engaging with

nature when we have no choice but to intervene. They were very good for lot, Yeah, exactly, and so that you need another ethic in order to figure out how to deal with Look, as Americans, we've been very good at creating wilderness. We invented the wilderness, and we locked up and threw away the key to about eight percent of the American land masks. Really impressive accomplishment. Probably our greatest contribution of world culture is the wilderness park. The

rest of the world is like wilderness. You know. It was considered ugly in Europe and uh, you know the warts of nature, you know, and they hated it. Um. But we didn't have an ethic for dealing with the other which is why we made such a mess of it. The wilderness ethic is silent about agriculture. It's silent about cities,

it's silent about suburbs. And so I realized that I needed to look for a new way to think about nature in these places I was drawn to like gardens and farms, and and so I began that that journey that I'm still on. And your next book was one. My next book was about architecture. It was about building. I built building on my property. It was called a place of my own was a complete bomb um because the building was The building is fantastic. The book it just I made a few mistakes with the book, but

it too was about nature, I realized. And it's in your second book that you really figure out what you're about as a writer. And I think all writers have a set of kind of final questions that if you scratch deep enough, you will see that everything Michael Lewis writes is about success. You know, whether he's writing about sports or Wall Street, that's fundamentally the question that he's interested in. And you can go through any numbers and find what that question. Is it about money? Is it

about love? And I realized writing the book about architecture, which I thought was a departure from nature Um, what I was drawn to was the nature issues in architecture. So, for example, does nature tell us how to build in any way? Does it have any useful information or is it a pure confection of culture? Did you conclude that it did happen? Yeah, And at the time, architecture was going down this incredibly theoretical path where it was all language.

This is the moment of Peter Eisenman and Robert Venturi and and deconstruction. And it was completely out there and there were no rules. You can do whatever you wanted. But in fact there are rules. I mean they're based on our bodies. What makes our bodies feel good in a certain kind of space. Um, not to mention the nature of materials and trees and and uh So I kind of like realized, Oh, I guess that's my topic. Is that what you learned from writing the book was

to get what you want to be writing. Yeah, And I went back to plants in the next book. I wrote a book called The Botany Desire, which was kind of a d dive into our relationship with four domesticated species um, each of which got ahead in life by gratifying human desires. So there's an apple, which gratifies our desire for sweetness, profound desire. There's tulips gratifies our desire for beauty. Cannabis gratifies our desire to change our consciousness.

You know, your next book is is it about drugs? It's about psychedelic experience. Okay, we're gonna we're getting back there. So so Botany of desire to talk to about cannabis. Yeah, and that was my That's where I started looking at that really interesting question is why is the species? Do we want to change our consciousness? I mean, it's not adaptive, right,

it puts you at all sorts of risk. But we have this desire and in fact, many animals have it too, which is kind of a mystery which which animals have a desire to Elephants love to get drunk, and you can imagine how much it takes. Um, how do they get drunk? Well, they'll accidentally, you know, there's a few ways. I mean in nature, when fruit rots, it ferments, and so if you find a split coconut and it just sits there for a while, it's got alcohol in it,

and they'll they love that. But in India they're they're also all these wonderful reports of them. Um, someone will have a still or you know, and they'll just knock it over and take whatever. Yeah, and there are many animals and I don't know if you have cats, but if you've ever given it, I mean it was my cat's problem with cat neep. Actually that sensitized me to this.

I had a cat that and I grew catin up for him, and he came down to the garden every evening when I was this is in Connecticut, when I was harvesting somebody for dinner, and what he wanted was ahead of his cat neet. But every night I had to show him where it was. He forgot where it was every single night because he would get so screwed up on it and was wasted. He was wasted and that.

But I realized it was a very interesting strategy on the part of the plant because these are defense chemicals, and rather than kill him outright, which would have led to the evolution of resistance to their toxin, they just confused them so they can't find the plan the next day.

In Cooked, which I watched a couple episodes of Your Costar, in the first half, as a lizard in the ground in the Western Australian outback, a huge, ugly, damn lizard is being cooked by these people who seem to enjoy it actually and uh and that opening is incredible, the fire break they do. And then a pig is the coaster of the second half. But you go to a factory farm and you you touch on the conditions there, so you're saying to people, eat pig and eat meat

if it's raised the right way. If it's a saying, if you're gonna eat meat, you owe it to yourself and you owe it to the animals to take a look at the process and that if you can't own that, the fact that an animal has to die for you to eat meat, something a lot of us don't think about, and in some senses live the way they live. And then and then it's even worse. I mean, there are different ways that an animal can live, obviously, and I think that makes a profound difference, at least to me

and my own eating decisions. Um, So we wanted to kind of like remind people that it's very consequential act when you eat meat. And the wonder of the modern food chain, the industrialized food chain, is that the process is completely hidden from us. You know, these these meat shows up at shrink wrapped, it's it's they don't even leave bones in it anymore. It's just protoplasm. You know, I could have come from anywhere. Kids don't realize that when they need a chicken nugget. And I know this

from my own kid. He hadn't made the connection between a chicken nugget and chicken. And I think the film opens the way it does. Alex give me who's the director of that episode and oversaw the whole thing. I really wanted to reconnect with the fundamentals of eating meat and it's not always a pretty thing. And and I think it was a way to say right off the bat, this is not food porn um. You're gonna see some things that are not appetizing in this film as well

as some things that are incredibly appetizing. And over the course of that one hour, you go from perhaps some feeling of disgust. There's that young woman who eats the pork is amazing moments. Yeah, I'm thinking to myself, you must have very incredible powers for the vegetarian woke in house and go I'll have some pick. How the hell did that happened? Good barbecue is really temptation. It's a powerful temptation. The smell of it, the uh and I was you know, that was not a setup. We had

no idea she was. We had it. We had made vegetarian sides because I knew any group now you have in California with twenty people, you're gonna have four or five vegetarians, and but she was like really curious about it, but we didn't twist her arm. There's some vegetarians online are very upset about that scene. I've been getting some grief that you know, we forced her into it or something. But if you watch it, you can sell and and the play of emotions over her face is just priceless. Um,

and she did. She was kind of I mean, great barbecue is pretty sure had that wonderful look that kind of I hate to admit it, but this is really good. Now. One of the most interesting parts of the films when you get into the second program and you talk about food service. At one point, when you're talking about the evolution of food service in this country, you basically have somebody say, the guy who's selling you your gas now

is selling you your food. He's flinging a pizza at you, throw a window or whatever, sacks and so forth, and you make this incredibly compelling statement about how, you know, we just where is this stuff coming from. When you talk about the cost of protest going up, and you talk about the amount of time down to down to twenty seven minutes using to prepare food, do you think that there's an answer for this in American society. Well,

I do. I'm an optimist, and you know, I would love nothing more than to see a renaissance of home cooking. I mean, you know, sometimes societies try things and they realize they don't work out. We've tried this industrial food system now for you know, a generation basically, and we're seeing what it does to us. I mean, we have, you know, epidemic chronic diseases UM. You know, type two diabetes is going to affect a third of people born

in the last ten years. A third. We're spending most of our health care money on UM treating chronic diseases linked to diet totally preventable. The Aborigines in the first episode talking about how until sugar was in tradition that they weren't fat people. That's right. So it's had a profound effect on us. And I sometimes think, and this

isn't this is kind of an overblown analogy. But you know, when crack came into the ghettos, it was like a huge issue, big problems, and but at a certain point communities turned against it and they realized that this is really not working for us, this is destroying our communities. I think we are having We're not at quite at that stage yet, but we're having a moment of recognition that the way we're eating is causing more problems than it is giving us solutions. And it is giving us solutions.

It's it's freeing us from the labor of cooking. If we don't want to cook, we don't have to anymore. But when you turn over your your meal preparation to large industrial corporations, we see what they do. They create feed lots, you know, these brutal landscapes where animals now live and they're fit. You know, they're giving hormones and they're given antibiotics. Uh. They create these monocultures or corn

and soybeans that have taken over the Midwest. UM. And you know, agriculture now is um the second biggest contributor to climate change. It's a third of greenhouse gases somewhere between. Greenhouse gases come from agriculture. UM. And that's particularly weird because you have to remember, at the base of the food chain is a plant doing photosynthesis, Okay, the ultimate in sustainable production, right, turning sunlight into sugars into food. So food, the food system doesn't have to be a

contributor to climate change. It could be the opposite. But we've were essentially eating fossil fuel. Now it's interesting you say that because a friend of mine said to me, he said, oh wow, wonderful for you that you own acreage on Long Island where you live, because we're all going to be growing our own food in there's fifteen or twenty years because of because of drought driven by

global warming. Like where Yeah, No, this is I mean, when we say that the food system is unsustainable, we're not just saying we have an esthetic objection to it. We're saying that their problems with it that are going to lead to a breakdown. And we don't know exactly where the breakdown will come. It could be, you know, shortage of fossil fuel, because that's really what runs it all.

The fertilizer is made from fossil fuel. That transportation, the processing. UM. We now, just to give you an idea, UM, we used to generate for every calorie of fossil fuel energy we put into the food system, we got back two point three calories of food. Okay, that was a net gain, and that was the sun that was solar energy. Now, we put in ten calories of fossil fuel energy to get one calorie of food, So we're losing nine calories of fossil fuel energy for every calory we get. And

that's meat production behind large. So it might break down there, or it may break down because we can't afford the healthcare effects or the climate change effects. I don't know where that breakdown happens, but yeah, it's it's on a it's on a really dangerous trajectory. And there was so much locally grown stuff from Riverhead. I'm just going to talk about the area that I live in from Riverhead, Up Island, west of uh, the Hampton's as people called,

I hate that phrase. But and then there's some local agriculture on the east end where I live, and yet everything there that's grown locally has higher right costs. And for the that what it is. When I grew up on Long Island, we would drive out there and they

were all farms. You know, there were potato farm Long Island potatoes were famous from there, and UH and there was you know, my grandfather was in the produce business on Long Island and he was buying produced from all the local farmers but then he began buying their land and turning it into shopping centers and things like that, and so you have this translation process as and real estate costs do drive what happens to what happens to land and some of the prices. The fact that high quality,

local organic produce the demand is huge. People are learning that it makes a difference how something has grown, and that that you know, hasty vegetables or are an amazing thing, but you know they don't take as much work to cook. But you notice, probably as I do, that that the best meals I ever had is like to go to a an Ecuadorian rice and beans placed upon eighty nine and Amsterdam World taxi drivers eat well, that's peasant cuisine.

And peasant cuisine is inexpensive, democratic and wonderful. But it's being destroyed and it's being intentionally destroyed. And there's a scene in the second episode, the Water episode where they go and I thought this was amazing journalism on the part of the filmmaker Caroline Suit produced that one um where they go to the Nestly factory where they are trying to figure out how to sell the Indians who India, Indians who have this amazing food culture and and and

cling to it. And I mean, I know, I have Indian students and they still grind spices every day fresh and they bring tiffins with their lunch and they won't eat our crap. You know, they're just they're gonna stick to their Indian food. Um. But they were trying to figure out how how to give the Tandori flavor to Maggie noodles, those you know, poor walls noodles and um. And they had all these chefs and they're trying to duplicate this flavor. And they are systematically taking apart those

cuisines and turning them into flavoring. Do you think it's responsible? How do governments decide or do they legislate even to make processed food that are easy to cook and feed people a lot of calories more available because the quickest road to political instability is hunger and high food prices. We've seen that revolution, I mean beginning with the French Revolution and the the Arab Spring was about high wheet. That what's coming on in any of they just want

to feed people, Uh. In India. In India, there there's this, there's several there's a cultural phenomenon too, I mean, which is that the prestige of Western food, the prestige of

American junk food. It's sexy, yeah, any doubt. And you and you're entering the middle class, you start eating meat like an American, you start eating KFC like an American, and this idea which and that's marketing, right, I mean, that's really good marketing, and that that that this stuff, which is so inferior to what they have, is the glamorous food, and that's part of it. But also the fact that cooking takes work, and there are other ways

to spend our time. And if you offer to do the work for somebody and you've got something you just have to pour water on and it's acceptable. Some people will go along with it. I hope the Indians don't fall for the Maggie noodle ploy. And if there's any culture that won't, it's that one. More on what Michael Pollen thinks about the future of food coming up explore the Here's the Thing archives, where I ask Amy Schumer, is she a foodie? You're not. I love food, but

I don't know about it. Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. In two thousand twelve, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced a proposal to limit the sales of sugary drinks larger than sixteen ounces. The proposal, which the soft drink industry fought hard against, was finally killed by the New York State Court of Appeals two years later. My Guest Today writer Michael Pollen

paid close attention to the case. Bloomberg had the right idea. It was very interesting to watch what happened to him, um, and how badly he got beaten up for this. I mean, he wasn't taken away anyone soda. He was basically saying, just to have a pause between that sixteen ounce soda and the next sixteen ounces. I just think, do you want to do that? That's all. It's a It's what the social scientists called a nudge, right, which is which is the least um interfering kind of social engineering you

could possibly have. Right, It's like do you opt into organ donation or opt out of organ donation? Okay, these are all called nudges. And so this was merely a nudge. And it was like people's freedom was being taken away from them. I think there are a couple of problems

with what he did. I think he made one tactical mistake, which is he should have talked about children, because the nanny culture, which is really the argument used you know, you're the government shouldn't be a nanny, doesn't apply to kids. Kids can't make their own personal responsibility is meaningless when you're talking to kids. Adults have to make decisions for them,

whether it's parents or other people in the community. And so had he made this about protecting children, I think he would not have gotten as much grief that was. I think that was a mistake, but it was very interesting to see how we put up with social engineering. Every time we walk into the supermarket. I mean, we

are being manipulated in ten ways till Sunday. I mean when you walk down from the beats of the music that they play, to the high of the oatmeal as opposed to the lucky charms, to where the milk is all that stuff? Now, um, are you diet couch? Do you weigh yourself? Have you ever been heavier than you wanted to be? And as a result of what like,

what did you eat? In my twenties, I worked in New York, worked for a magazine, and every day for lunch, I had a cheeseburger, French fries, and a beer, which seemed totally you have it at the same place was a fabulous cheeseburger Charlie Os or someplace in Times Square where it was just near my office, and my friend Michael Schwartz and I would go out there and and ask what we would have, and we thought that was totally normal. And I weighed about I don't know, thirty

or forty more pounds than I do now. I you know, I was sensitized to food relatively late in life, and now I don't count calories. I seldom weigh myself, and I eat whatever I want to eat, but merely what you want. Yeah, what I want to eat, what gives me pleasure. I mean, my journalism is made certain things very hard to eat. I mean I've been on those feed lots and in those hot confinement operations and and industrially produced feed lot and meat. I just this no

appeal at all, and I will avoid it. I mean, if if if I go to your house and you serve me some feed lot steak. I'm not going to make a scene, but I haven't had beef since nineteen nine two. I haven't had pork since nine two, and I don't miss either one of them. So why did you stop beating meat and two? Uh? Well, the truth is is that initially I did it to seduce my former wife. She told me she was a vegetarian. I said, oh my god, so am I. I took me to

a restaurant. I said, I'll have the roasted squash. Oh this is great. I'll make it too keen wash salad. But then she saw a couple in and out burger rappers stuffed under the seat of my car a few times, and she said, we know, why are you lying to me? Why don't you? And then Peter, I have no appetite for I just especially when you say to me the culture of deception you're involved in, Like now, the beef

industry has beef blend. So every hamburger you eat in a fast restaurant is they're like, okay, there's seven stocks, and which one of us caused the go ahead? Animals represented in the average burger unbelievable, believe. But once I realized that that's they're going to go to those links

to hide something. I said, well, I always tell people, I say you liked meat, to go get yourself a really nice piece of stick, pay the money for really quality and you know where I've kind I went through that whole exercise too, and learning a lot about what was going on with their meat eating. I was doing all this reporting on the industry and and also philosophically went through this thought process which I wrote about in

The Omnivorous Dilemma. But I came out in a surprising place, which was eating meat in a very limited way because there was a kind of agriculture I wanted to support, basically, which was grass fed beef production, which I think environmentally can be really beneficial. And and also the presence of

animals on farms. The most sustainable farms I've seen, and I've been looking for great sustainable farms for the last fifteen years, have both plants and animals working together, as you find in nature always um and the plants feed the animals, and the animals with their waist feed the plants, and that nutrient loop is like essential to nature's um uh successful operations. And so there's a handful of farmers doing this really well in the country right now, and

I want to support their work. And these animals also get to live, um, you know, a very good life in keeping with their creature, really character. They get to have the behaviors that they want and the diet that they should have. And as the farmers say, they have one bad day and um, and of course that's the day of their slaughter. And UM. I'm just very comfortable supporting that. It's hard to find that meat. It's expensive and and if you limit yourself to that meat, you

will only have meat like once a week. And that's about what. But the guy on the on the water episode w says, have the cake and the cookies in the ice cream, as long as you make it all yourself, make it all yourself. When you when I watched the show, I uh, beyond the croc that you have there, that was your mother's croc that you cooked in that pot. Um, you do get the sense you miss home a little bit, is that there's a boy in you that had a want was your Your mother was adored by all New

Yorker was obviously because of her column for many many years. Yeah, and she was a great, responsive, responsible. Yeah, you know, she fed us really well, and she she made a home cooked meal, I would say, four nights a week, and uh, we got to have a TV dinner on Saturdays when they went out, which was a great treat. And Sunday we'd have order in something but um, often

Chinese food. And yeah, she would make beautiful meals. She she loved Julia Child and was learning from Julie Child, so she would actually like we would get to have booth Burgan on Tuesday night because she was trying it out and see if she could make it. So we were very fortunate. She's still a great cook. Um. So yeah, I mean that's some of my love of food definitely comes from that and the memories of the table, you know, um,

being with my sisters and my mom. My father, oddly enough, usually wasn't at dinner because he had this long commute from Manhattan, and so he would get there and have leftovers a little bit later. I know, it's a shame he had like a two hour commute, but amazing things happened at the table. And you know, as you give up cooking, you give up eating together, and when when

you start going to the microwavable meal. Everybody gets their own, and there's something about eating from the same pot that puts people on the same page psychologically, I think, And we give that up and increasingly we're eating alone. We're eating in the car of American food gets eaten in the car right now, Um, we eat alone way too often and so we're losing. It's not just about the food. I mean, food is important, but there are the institutions

that come with it. Now, your son is viewed in the film in the second episode doing his little contribution. Does he does he still enjoy food and people the camera? No, no, no, no, they're you know, that was taken when he was fourteen. Actually he's now twenty three, so that footage is old and you actually see him again in the fourth episode in his full he's a big hairy guy. Now. It's funny. He had a very complex history with food, which is that he really couldn't need it. For about eight years.

He was one of those really picky eaters only eight white food drove us absolutely crazy. It was very hard to feed and we were actually happy if he would eat a McDonald's meal because at least he was getting some protet because he was one of these kids. It was noodles rice. Um, no, no, that would be mixing food, macaroni. He was a purist. He was a purist, hated sauces,

would never put butter on noodles. When we went traveling, we would bring his brand to pasta with us to like a resort, and we'd say, would you make a ball of this? And he and they would cook up his barilla pasta, his noodles the shape that he liked at the moment, and he would take one bite and he said, this tastes different. Of course, the water was different and he could taste it, and so he just he just said, this is horrible. So he started bringing

the water from home. We didn't go that fard. What does he do now? He works for an architect he's he's a junior designer and an architecture firm in Brooklyn. But in in high school he went to work in a restaurant and he did prep cooking at a really good restaurant near us, and um, he learned to eat there and he watched how food was made. And if kids cook, they will eat what they cook. And that

was a really important insight for us. If you have a kid who's really picky, get him in the kitchen, make them do something, make them make what I love, and make whatever they want, and they will eat it because the mystery of like what's hiding under that sauce? And you know, they kids think you're putting something over on them whenever you serve them food. But if they make it, they're like, oh, it's okay. It's made of this, which is normal in that, which is normal in this thing,

and and maybe it's okay. And so he started eating and now he loves food. He's a great eater. He's a really great cook. Um. So, No, one of the things you touch on is the evolution of cooking in terms of feminism. The second episode talks about how you know what women are out the door doing other things? Do you feel that men and women we can find some way where we can achieve something culturally where we can both share the cooking without a doubt. That's what

we have to do. That's I mean, the answer is not to get women back in the kitchen. No, and it shouldn't happen, And it's to get the whole family back in the kitchen. And uh, it's enormously important to get your kids cooking. I mean, I really think it's irresponsible parenting to to send a kid out into the world not having a clue out of roasted chicken or

how to how to make a basic meal. Um, it's it's a really critical life skill for their health, for their success, you know, dating, for all these kind of things. It's it's a big deal. And we're sending kids out a whole generation and they don't have a clue, and they're totally dependent on the industry, which means they lose control of their diet and they lose control of the ability to make these decisions about what kind of food system they want to support. So I think it's very

important to get everybody in the kitchen. And what happened with feminism and food A story we tell in the second episode is that the industry have been trying to insinuate itself into the American kitchen for a hundred years with processed food. Women who were doing most of the cooking were rejecting it. They just didn't feel good about having these companies cook for them. They couldn't take credit

for what they made. Quality wasn't very good. Then you have this this tension that erupts when women go back to work, and in households across America, you have this argument about housework because it's not fair that women work and also do childcare and also clean and also cook. And so there was this very tense renegotiation going on, and before we could complete it, the industry steps forward and say, hey, stop arguing, we got you covered. We'll

do it all. And KFC has this billboard campaign across America with an image of their big red and white bucket of chicken and two words above women's liberation, and they aligned it was it was sort of like the quote says, mother can find out what is happening in the outside world. My god, what a time counsel shot that is. But you know, the idea that liberation would disguise dependence in fact on these corporations was lost on everybody.

And so so the important point though, is that that these companies let men off the hook as much as they let women off the hook because men didn't want to do any more work. And so when you had companies coming saying, don't argue, we'll do it, everybody jumped, well, what's wrong with how do you fight, they're gonna win because they're oh yes and no. I mean, we all

have power. I mean one of the great things about this issue is we get three votes today, you know, and people are voting in a different way for a different kind of food system. I mean, eating is a political act. And um, those of us who can afford to buy the sustainable chicken and beef or whatever, you know,

not everyone has the same vote, and that's unfortunate. And that's why voting with your fork is not We also need to vote with our votes, and we need new policies without question, um and policy change you'd like to see, well, the big policy change, I mean right now, as as the film suggests, we're we're subsidizing the least healthy calories. We subsidize the sweeteners and the soda. We subsidize the building blocks of junk food, which is corn and soy.

That's what the government subsidizes. We do nothing for the people growing program with energy. We subsidized oil and we don't exactly. So we have to we have to align our agricultural policies with our health and environmental objectives. Right now, they're working across purposes. We are subsidizing the creation of sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup. At the same time, the government is also paying for dialysis for for type two diabetes. That's crazy, that's it's supporting both sides in

the war on type two diabetes. UM. Obviously, you have members of your family, your your sister's husband, of the well known actor, people who suffered from diseases and have been sick with diseases. Do you wonder everyth there's a link between diet and some of these diseases that are non diabetic related diseases. I think there's a link between a lot of disease and diet. I I don't know

about Parkinson's. I've never seen any research about that. UM. I think we will find that Alzheimer's is connected, that it is a disease of inflammation. Basically, there's a kind of a grand unified theory of a great many diseases that's coming to the floor, and it's built around the idea of inflammation. That we have bodies that are now inflamed. That's why we have so many more allergies, so many more autoimmune conditions. And it may turn out that Alzheimer's

is another one of those inflammatory diseases. And what inflames us is a shitty diet, is a junk food diet, and we know that and we can we can see you can feed people, um, a junk food meal with lots of fat and sugar and salt, and you can check their markers for inflammation within hours and you see them spike. And many of us live in a permanently inflammed condition because of the way we're eating. So it's no wonder we're getting these diseases. But Parkinson's, you know,

I don't think we know. Um. I'm a believer in the some uni unifying theory as well, which what is it that's causing Parkinson's and and autism clusters and this whole lot of things that we didn't deal with in these numbers before. And you know, we are also exposed to lots of toxins. And there are some people who think that Parkinson's is related to pesticides. Some people I know, they posit that. You know, they go over to Europe and they eat the bread and eat the pasta. They

don't have the same problem. They don't have the bloating, they don't have and they commack, are they are they imagining that. Yeah, there, I'm pretty sure they're imagining it for two reasons. One, there's no G M O wheat on the market anywhere in the world. It hasn't been approved. I mean, it's been approved, but Monsanto's declined to sell it because the wheat farmers don't want it. So far to most of the wheat that you eat in Europe is grown in like North Dakota and Saskatchewan. They don't

grow enough wheat. So I mean it may be that in Europe you're getting bread that's properly fermented. We talked about this in the third episode, is that we've sped up the making of bread in such a way that

the gluten doesn't get broken down. So instead of having these long sour dough fermentations we I went to I I went to a wonder bread plant, and they can with thirty seven different chemicals get a loaf of bread to to do everything within four hours, you know, rise, baked, package, the whole thing, and but they're not properly fermenting it. So therefore the gluten is not breaking down, and it may be that change that is giving people a lot

of trouble with gluten um, it's gluten plus something else. Yeah, I think it is something else. And and but they're different, I mean people, they're different. I mean there are real people with Celiac disease who are allergic to gluten in any form and shouldn't eat it. But then there's this massive people who are convinced that if they just got off gluten, you know, they would sleep better, their sex

would be better, their their lives would be fine. And there's a very powerful marketing machine encouraging us to feel this way. Um. I just think that the number of gluten intolerant people um is growing so much faster than any biological change in the human species can account for. So there are some real their people struggling with it. And it may because they're inflamed it, maybe because their microbiomes. Yeah, people will think that for quickest about And but we're

always looking for dietary salvation in this country. We're always pointing to the evil nutrient and the blessed nutrient. And it used to be saturated fat with the evil nutrient. Now it's gluten and sugar. And there'll be another one next year. So yes or no question? Is the book Cooked and especially the show Cook, which has got a very warm tone to it. It's a very warm and very wealthy celebration, but it's a very warm, warm program.

Do you think in some part that this was something you did to answer some charges of elitism against some of the work you've done. Some people have found your work rather elitist, you know, I think that we were trying to We didn't want to put a lot of chefs in this, We didn't want this to be a foodie thing. I hate the I hate the word foodie and everything that attaches to it. And that cooking is this universe, human universal people do it all over the

world every different socio economic scale. But do you think do you think you bring that to the four more so in this project than any else you've done. Maybe maybe we have, Um, I mean it is you know, cooking is a very democratic activity. It's still available to all of us. We still have kitchens. They still sell houses with kitchens and rent houses with kitchens, and we have pots and pans and knives, and they still saw they still sell raw ingredients down at the supermarket along

with the rotissary, chick and everything else. Um, and so it is I don't buy that. It's elitist, and um the charges sometimes made and um, any kind of concern and interest in food is is is you know, is elitist, and it's it's very interesting that companies like well, yeah, it's very interesting that companies like McDonald's get to occupy the populist high ground. Multinational companies are offering the democratic food.

I don't buy that. So my last question for you is, what right do you have to write a book about psychedelic drugs? What possible? Well, I don't have a lot of experience with them. Actually, what's what's the curiosity for you? The curiosity for me is there's a revival of research around psychedelics, and we are learning amazing things about the brain by studying what happens to people on psilocybin, especially

an LSD. To some extent, these drugs are also proving to be as they were in the fifties before this, you know, most of us are history of psychedelics begins with Timothy Leary in a way. That's the end of the first phase, which was some really serious research in the fifties, and obviously, yeah, Huxley and a group of psychiatrists who were having very good luck administering into their patients, using it to cure alcohol addiction, using it to help

people die. And so I started learning about this research, which is underway now, and I wrote a long piece for The New Yorker about it, called The Trip Treatment last year, and um, and realized there was a whole world I didn't know that much about. And here I was, you know, nearing sixty and um, thinking about mortality and and here was this drug that was I saw helping people die. And I thought that was fascinating. Why was that? Why would why would this mystical experience change your complete

outlook about mortality? And I saw that in many people that it did, and I saw them die in different kind of deaths, so that that kind of got me interested. And since then I've been puzzling over questions of like, why should a mushroom make a chemical that gives humans mystical experiences? That's kind of trippy Cooked, which is on Netflix. Now. What's interesting to me is You've given me a great gift, truly, because I've got little kids and I want to teach

them about food by cooking food with them. I don't want to sit there and say to them, don't eat that and don't eat that, and you're not gonna you can't have that. I want to sit down and want to sit them, Well, what do you want? We're gonna make it. Whatever you want to eat. By now you can hear's how you make We're gonna make Let's do it. I can't wait. You know. Some of the sweetest moments of my time with my son when he was still at home was cooking together. And you see a little

of that in that in that second episode. Um, but it was there's something about especially with a teenager. Teenagers are very hard to talk to eye to eye, all right, it gets very difficult. Um, I have a twenty year old sorm Okay, so you know, but side by side. That's why you have all your difficult conversations with your kid in the car, usually right because you're both looking

their head but but chopping onions. Um. You know, working side by side, doing a project together, that's the best time to talk to your kid, and that's when they just open themselves up. I thank Michael Pollen for opening up to me. Our time was up before I got to ask him what his favorite packaged food is. I found out later cracker Jack's You can see Michael Pollin's four parts series Cooked on Netflix. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. M