A visit from Michael Pollan

This evening I was honored to occupy the same space as the esteemed author Michael Pollan, as he presented at Kennedy Hall at Cornell University. Having read three of his several books, I'm a bit of a fan. This was a huge treat.

I assume just about everyone knows who Michael Pollan is. He may be best known for his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. He's also known for the maxim: 

Eat food- Not too much- Mostly plants

Michael Pollan has written several books and they all seem to involve food and plants to some degree. I've always felt that his name was somewhat serendipitous or fateful for someone addressing issues about plants so much (Pollan as in pollen). When I first started reading his work at least ten years ago, and before I knew better, I actually wondered if he was using a pen name. 

In tonight's talk he mentioned that readers would rather go on a journey than endure a lecture. Indeed, his books read like journeys, bringing us along for a ride and learning much in the process. Omnivore's Dilemma was the first of his books that I read. At the time I had no idea who he was. I was attending a first time home buyers class with my boyfriend... for some reason a hand-out reading assignment for the class was an excerpt from In Defense of Food (we were probably addressing money management with grocery shopping?). I know it sounds bizarre and random, but just that hand out, of probably one chapter of reading, totally had me hooked. I'm like, "who is this guy?". 

Omnivore's Dilemma is in my top most influential books I've ever read. It is also one of those books that had the power of consciousness raising. This is not just me. It's one of those books that just sticks with you, you think about it now and then, about all the things you learned from it... all the things you never knew. I think at one point I was gifting out copies of it to family and friends. Practically shouting from the mountain tops: READ THIS BOOK! So needless to say, if you haven't read it, please do! 

To digress a moment, at one point I lent out my copy of Omnivore's Dilemma to a dear friend and former coworker. When she moved to another part of the state, I was pretty disappointed that I wouldn't get to see her much anymore... then I also realized she still had my copy of the book! Oh well. I really, TRULY, did not expect to see it again. I swear it was about a year or so later, when I received a package in the mail. It was the book! She had not only returned it, but she wrote me a personalized note explaining that Michael Pollan had visited her school and remembering my copy of the book- she had him sign it! To this day I think this is still one of my most cherished possessions. Not just how much the book has impacted my life, but the special journey my personal copy has endured.

About a month ago I found out he would be visiting Cornell University, here in Ithaca, NY. Imagine how elated I was. I specially requested the day off, just so I knew I would have nothing keeping me from being able to attend.

Pictured in the slide is Pollan's first garden.

The lecture itself followed his personal journey as a writer- from the garden to the plate and beyond! I was happy to hear him talk about the birth of his very first book- Second Nature (which I had embarked on reading this spring anyway, but had somehow not realized it was his first book). It's a book about gardening in his fashion of telling a tale that brings the reader on a journey. The journey began... in his first garden. From the introduction of Second Nature, he writes:

"This book is the story of my education in the garden. The garden in question is actually two, one more or less imaginary, the other insistently real. The first is a garden of books and memories, that dreamed-of outdoor utopia, gnat-free and ever in bloom, where nature answers to our wishes and we imagine feeling perfectly at home. The second garden is an actual place, consisting of five acres of rocky, intractable hillside in the town of Cornwall, Connecticut, that I have been struggling to cultivate for the past seven years. Much separates these two gardens, though every year I bring them a little more closely into alignment.

Both of these gardens have a had a lot to teach me, and not only, as it turned out, about gardening. For I soon came to the realization that I would not learn to garden very well before I'd also learned about a few other things: about my proper place in nature (was I within my rights to murder the woodchuck that had been sacking my vegetable garden all spring?); about the somewhat peculiar attitudes toward the land that an American is born with (why is it the neighbors have taken such a keen interest in the state of my lawn?); about the troubled borders between nature and culture; and about the experience of place, the moral implications of landscape design, and several other questions that the wish to harvest a few decent tomatoes had not prepared me for."

The whole essence of such a poetically written work about gardening and our interactions with nature... is really in this garden girls wheelhouse. I feel somewhat disappointed that this book is only just entering my life, but in a sense it is better this way. Each year of gardening tucked under my belt, has made the sentiments and reflections held within, speak to me that much more.

I particularly relate to, what he called, a 'horticultural Vietnam' with the groundhog (groundhog = woodchuck). When describing his first garden, he waxes romantic in notions gathered from Emerson and Thoreau about nature... "until," he said, "I met this guy." Up came a behemoth slide of groundhog mugshot. This was followed by much laughter from the crowd. Michael Pollan was relieved to once again be in a part of the country where people were familiar with this animal. The foul beasts run amok in my own backyard. They are my gardening nemesis. I was happy to be reminded that I am not the only one that has fought a 'horticultural Vietnam' so-to-speak, in my own backyard.

Michael Pollan recounts the discouragement he faced upon seeing his vegetable plants systematically mowed down. He would replant and the carnage would repeat itself over and over. Deer, while also a garden pest, are always keenly aware of imminent danger- their grazings are hit and miss. A dainty nibble here. A munching there... and boom, they are off and running from some perceived threat, real or not. A ground hog cannot see very well, and that being the case, they set up camp and move from one plant to the next in succession until nearly nothing is left. 

Having found the nasty rodents lair nearby his garden, he embarked on all sorts of attacks. Groundhogs are very particular about grooming, they abhor things sticking to their belly fur. With that in mind, he poured all sorts of things down the burrow of the groundhog: a dozen broken eggs, a pint of molasses, motor oil, a dead mouse, creosote ("...vile stuff so sticky the woodchuck would need to have the fur on his belly steam-cleaned."), a dead groundhog he found by the side of the road. Ultimately he, being more journalist and less physicist, poured gasoline down the hole and lit it on fire. The burrow, lacking adequate oxygen, quickly shot fire out in the opposite direction that was originally intended and threatened to burn down his garden all together. "I guess this was my destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it phase." 

Ultimately, he learned the hard way to not go too hardcore Thoreau (who wrote something like, 'what is a weed but a defect of our perception') and that he should have put up a fence to begin with. 

This experience launched him on his journey to write Second Nature. He said at the lecture that "people put more into their first book than they know". Since Second Nature, he's continuously addressed the question of whether their existed models of good behavior in how we interact with nature.

He went on to write Botany of Desire. He said it was probably the most fun he had as a writer. This book was inspired by his ponderings as he planted potatoes in his garden (something I, myself, did this past week!). He said that one of the nice things about gardening is that there is a lot of mental space left open when working in a garden (oh how true that is!). He noticed that as he planted his potatoes, there were bees busily working at pollinating a nearby apple tree. He said he asked himself, how what he was doing, was like or unlike, what they (the bees) were doing? In a sense, they were both engaged in some elaborate plant behavior modification on others to get them to spread their genes.

His latest book is Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation which is divided up into the classical elements of Fire-Water-Air-Earth (cooking with fire, boiling and braising, breadmaking and fermenting). I've had this book, like so many, staring at me from the bookshelf... begging to be read. So many good books, so little time!

After some Q&A, the completely packed auditorium slowly emptied. I was a nerd and sat in the front row (I arrived nearly a half hour early and not a minute too soon as the seats filled up within a handful of minutes!). I took the emptying of crowd as an excuse to hang back and wait and see what would happen next. To my relief, I saw other nerds with their copies of Michael Pollan books in their hands slowly congregating around him. He seems like a genuinely great guy, so gracious and polite. He was happily entertaining us all with autographs, additional questions, and even SELFIES! (I was too star-struck to ask for a selfie). I only brought Second Nature and Cooked with me, but he graciously signed both! I now have in my possession THREE signed Michael Pollan books! With is friend, Marion Nestle (author of Food Politics and more) being a visiting professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell, and a desire to investigate all the many projects going on at Cornell in general, we were taunted with the potential of perhaps some additional future visits.