I’ve been Pollan-ated… | Eric Garza.
Each year the University of Vermont chooses a book that all first year undergraduates are expected to read. This year they chose Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, by Michael Pollan, a book I reviewed a while back. If Michael Pollan is anything, he’s certainly an excellent storyteller. As part of the curricula associated with Cooked, several groups teamed up to bring Michael Pollan to campus for a question and answer session and book signing this past Thursday evening, and I was lucky enough to attend the event.
The questions asked of Pollan were grouped broadly in three categories, the first of which centered around the author’s process of writingCooked. The second group centered around a central theme of Pollan’s writing, humanity’s relationship with nature. Although I’ve read a few of Pollan’s books I hadn’t caught this as a central theme, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense. Food remains, for many people, their last remaining connection to that abstract, distant thing called ‘nature’. Eating represents the process by which we take nature, which is ‘out there’, and turn it into us. The precise methods with which we do this define us, as individuals and as a species.
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