michael pollan

If a Woodchuck Could Chuck…. Oh Never Mind

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.

The Food Police

Food policing is an area in which all sorts of assumptions are made about class and ability status. It goes hand in hand with the idea that people have an obligation to be healthy, that all bodies are the same so there’s only one way to be healthy, and that there is virtue in eating “right” as dictated by current authorities in the food world. Like, say, Michael Pollan, who is editorialized fawningly in numerous publications all over the planet for his “simple” and “helpful” food rules.

this ain’t livin’ » Blog Archive » Before You Criticize the Food Choices of Others…

This is a pretty interesting post about what it may be like to prepare a “simple” meal a la Michael Pollan—if you’re a person with various disabilities. I’ve criticized the class assumptions of the “cook-it-yourself” lectures, but being an able-bodied person myself I never thought of it this way. Worth a read.