Food, Home & Lifestyle, Wellness
Meet Your Instructor
Lesson time 06:36 min
Bestselling author and award-winning journalist Michael Pollan shares where his fascination with food chains began, and celebrates the start of the class with a surprise.
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Topics include: Meet Your Instructor
Teaches Intentional Eating
Acclaimed author Michael Pollan teaches you what he’s spent decades researching: how to eat more ethically, healthfully, and sustainably.
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MICHAEL POLLAN: I see what you're doing. You're eating peanut M&Ms while you're listening to me talk about food and health. There's a place for peanut M&Ms. I was on a hike on Sunday. And what we took with us were peanut M&Ms. And they were delicious. But eating them in front of the TV I think is another matter. In recent years, it's become easier and easier to do things mindlessly, whether that's scrolling through Twitter or binge-watching on TV or eating without realizing what you're doing. All this kind of mindlessness is really destructive. Food matters. Food matters a lot. It doesn't just matter to your health. It matters to the environment, to the animals, to the community, to your family. The goal of this class is to help you align your values with your eating. Are we eating from an abusive unhealthy industrial system that's exploiting workers? Or are we eating from a sustainable, nutritional food chain that is supporting everybody in it and treating them with dignity? So there is a lot at stake in our eating. - I'm very excited about our next guest, who is the bestselling author of "Food Rules" and the "Omnivore's Dilemma." Please welcome Michael Pollan. - I'm a journalist. I'm a writer who has written extensively about food and agriculture and nutrition. I really like to take my readers or my viewers on a journey with me, rather than stand up on a lectern and lecture from the point of view of the expert. The fact is, when it comes to food, I don't have a lot of confidence in the experts. The nutritionists have led us astray over and over and over again. There are ways that we can learn to eat, guided by culture, guided by tradition, guided by an ordinary guy like me to do this thing called eating. [MUSIC PLAYING] - This class is not about restrictions. I'm not going to put restrictions on what you eat. You can eat whatever you want. The only restriction I have is on ignorance. Eating in ignorance I think is really a bad idea. Choice has to be informed by knowledge to have any meaning at all. And that's why I think you're only obligation is to know something about the system that's feeding you. And then you make your choices. I can well remember when I realized I had no idea where my food came from. I was driving down Route 5 in California. And you're going through these golden hills of California. And suddenly, before you see any change, you smell it. Three miles later, you arrive. And you are at the Harris Ranch feedlot, black cows standing in this black ground that you realize is their manure. I was like, wow, that's where the hamburgers come from? So I spent several years of my career trying to follow that food chain, or I should say, the food chains because there's now more than one. To understand how our food is produced, which was shocking, frankly, I also became very interested, as a journalist, in what I should eat. What do we know about nutrition? What are the li...
About the Instructor
For more than 30 years, award-winning journalist Michael Pollan has explored the intersection of humans and nature—including groundbreaking probes of the food we eat. Now the NYT bestselling author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” teaches you how to ditch fad diets and eat with intention. From following the food chain to fixing dinner, learn to make choices that reflect what’s important to you.
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Michael Pollan
Acclaimed author Michael Pollan teaches you what he’s spent decades researching: how to eat more ethically, healthfully, and sustainably.
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