Pollan and I had already met fleetingly, though neither of us can remember exactly where, some time shortly after he had published his first book, Second Nature, in 1991. This features at its heart an epic battle with a woodchuck that was treating Pollan’s garden as his personal canteen. The struggle for supremacy between resolute gardener and resourceful rodent builds to a titanic climax with the Man of the Soil emptying cans of gasoline down the varmint’s burrow and setting light to it like some deranged garden Nazi bent on a backyard Götterdämmerung. Pollan’s essay was wonderfully out of keeping with the solemnities of American nature writing, and so deeply Jewish in its mischievous self-regard that it was if Henry David Thoreau had had an encounter with Woody Allen and never been quite the same since.

FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT – Lunch with the FT: Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, Food Guru, you have been outed as the type of man who sets fire to woodchucks.