Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is an American journalist and author known for his writing about food and, later, psychedelics. Born on Long Island, New York, he studied at Mansfield College, Oxford, and earned degrees in English from Bennington College and Columbia University before turning to magazines, including the New York Times Magazine and Harper's Magazine, where he was an executive editor. His first book, Second Nature, came out in 1991, and he became best known for The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which the New York Times named one of the year's five best nonfiction books and the James Beard Foundation honored for food writing. Later books examined drugs and consciousness, among them How to Change Your Mind, a number one New York Times best-seller that also became a Netflix docuseries. He teaches at UC Berkeley, cofounded its center for the science of psychedelics, and appears in King Corn (2007) and Food, Inc. (2008).