What should we eat? is a question most people for most of history have had little trouble answering. You ate what tradition (aka your mother) and nature dictated. Now, we have something called “nutritionism,” an ideology promoted by science, the food industry, government and the media that has hopelessly confused the issue and done nothing for our health, except to make it worse. Pollan traces the rise and triumph of nutritionism and the Western Diet, before proposing an alternative approach to eating that promises to improve both our health and the health of the environment.

Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.” His previous book, “The OmnivoreÌ¢‰â‰ã¢s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” (2006), was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of “The Botany of Desire: A PlantÌ¢‰â‰ã¢s-Eye View of the World (2001); A Place of My Own” (1997); and “Second Nature” (1991). A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of HarperÌ¢‰â‰ã¢s Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2004); Best American Essays (1990 and 2003) and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.

Pollan will be interviewed by Cynthia Gorney, who joined the Graduate School of Journalism faculty in 1999, after a career at The Washington Post that included serving as an award-winning national features writer, South American bureau chief and the first writer for the Post’s Style section based on the West Coast. She is the author of “Articles of Faith: A History of the Abortion Wars,” and has written for many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and the American Journalism Review. Gorney is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.