Michael Pollan

What did you have for breakfast this morning?

Today, I had scrambled eggs with herbs from the garden and a piece of toast. The eggs came from the farmer's market and they're pastured eggs—eggs from chickens that are rotated around on green pasture. They're really good.

Was there a seminal moment that sparked your curiosity about the food industry?

There were a couple seminal moments. I was working on another story and I was going to [California's] Central Valley to interview an organic farmer and I drove past Harris Ranch on Route 5. About a couple miles before you get there, you're assaulted by this stench that you can't place because you look all around you and it's still beautiful golden, rural California hills. And then it hits you: you see this black landscape that goes on for miles. Black cattle and manure. The highway just kind of passes right through this landscape, and that was a wakeup call to me. And then another was being in Idaho researching genetically modified crops and visiting industrial potato farms that I wrote about in "Playing God in the Garden," and seeing just the shower of pesticides we put on these potatoes and the fact that the farmers were afraid to go into their fields for five days after they sprayed because they knew how toxic it was and the fact that they were growing organically by the house for themselves and that their potatoes were inedible until six months after they harvested them because they had to off-gas all the systemic pesticides. There was another example: French fries. What could be more common? But this is how we grow them. And so that kind of made me very curious to see what had happened to the American food chain. How did it get this way?

When you published The Omnivore's Dilemma, did you have any idea that it would spark a national conversation about what and how we eat? 

I had no idea, no idea. It's a big, hard book to read in some ways. It doesn't have any kind of easy solutions. It's long, it's dense, there's a lot of science in it. so I was pretty astonished at what happened to that book. I think it reflects in part that the culture was ready to have a conversation about these food issues and the ethical and environmental issues linked to our food choices.

Why now at this moment do you think that people were ready?

My sense is that we've had a series of wake up calls about our food over the last 10 years, beginning with Mad Cow disease. Even though it hasn't yet turned into an important medical problem here, as a consciousness problem it was huge. We learned something about how we were raising animals – that we were feeding cows to cows. Every time one of these things happens, it pulls back the curtain on how industrial food is produced and people are shocked usually because we still have in our minds the image of a small family farm or cowboys raising our beef. And our image when we imagine beef or chicken or pork is a myth. Anytime you get a glimpse—and they're only glimpses because they really won't let us into these places—of the reality, it sets up this cognitive dissonance and people suddenly realize, as I did starting to write about this, oh my God, I don't know where my food comes from, I'd better find out. I'm eating this stuff, I'm feeding it to my children, and I don't know how it works.

What do you tell people who say, eating well is for people who have more leisure time, or for the wealthy?

It's true that eating well costs more money or more time. You either have to be willing to invest one or the other. And that, until we really change the policies around food in this country, is just the reality. If you're willing to cook, and not rely on corporations to cook for you, whether through buying fast food or buying processed food, you can eat well on a budget. If you compare rolled oats in the supermarket, I can buy them for 89 cents a pound. That is a lot of oats. That's a lot of breakfasts. You compare that to Honey Nut Cheerios cereal bars which cost like five or six dollars a box and probably contains a couple ounces of those oats and a whole lot of ingenuity and intellectual property and processing. Yeah, you've got to cook the rolled oats. The cereal bar you can eat in the car, but it really takes five minutes to cook those oats and you end up with a more nutritious meal that is a lot cheaper. So I think sometimes we tell ourselves, well, I can't afford to eat this way because we love the convenience. Now, if you're really busy and you're working too hard then you need to spend a little bit more money to buy better food. But I think it's very important, if you think you're busy, to re-examine well, how is it that over the last five years, you found two hours a day to deal with the Internet and do your email? Where'd you get those two hours? We find time for things we value and my argument in [The Omnivore's Dilemma] is that we need to value food a little more highly than we do, both in terms of our economic and time investment. It's that important. And to say we're too busy, to say we can't afford it, for many people not for everybody, is to say we just don't value it enough. We dig down, we find the money for $100 a month on cell phones. We're paying for television, which we never used to pay for. We find money for consumer electronics, we find money for entertainment and that's because we think it's more important. I'm arguing, no, this is more important both for your health and your happiness and for the quality of your family life and community.

Yes, it's worth spending your money, so you go to your Whole Foods…