Today is the day to invent a new salad.

Summer fun in the city.

Today I'm speaking with the author of some very thought-provoking books. His most recent is The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, where he follows each of the food chains that sustain us. In tandem with this, he recently published an article in the New York Times Magazine about hunting, killing and eating his own meal. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World and A Place of My Own. He is a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and former executive editor of Harper's Magazine. Yesterday we chatted on the phone but got interrupted, but I figured half an interview is better than no interview at all, so here's the first part. You will find part two next week.

The Michael Pollan Interview: Less Than Ten Questions (for now)

What did you have for dinner last night?
Pizza and a salad. There's a really good pizza parlor here [in the Bay area] that has genuine New York-style pizza. I'm sorry, but I can't stand Chicago-style pizza. We just moved, so we're not quite set up to cook yet. There was nothing on top. My son is Mr. Plain, so there were no additives.

Based on what you learned while researching The Omnivore's Dilemma, which foods did you find yourself giving up based on learning too much bad information about them, and which did you know you should give up but love too much to do so?
Fast food beef. Once you've stood on a feed lot in manure up to your ankles watching miserable animals eat corn mixed with lard mixed with who knows what hormones and antibiotics, conventional hamburger is just not very appealing. I've given up industrial meat in general. I still eat meat, but on a pretty limited basis from producers I know a lot about.

Something that I haven't given up that I should have? Tuna and sushi in general. Some kinds of sushi are fine. I just read that we should eat all the mackerel we can get but that's not my favorite kind of fish. Those big fishes though like tuna and swordfish are getting quite rare and are also full of mercury. When you eat tuna, you're basically eating pollution. You're not supposed to have any of it of it if you're pregnant. Eating tuna is just one of the many things we do that costs us brain cells, but we need all that we can get.

As a journalism teacher, which lesson or assignment do your students seem to find the most challenging?
Write a 5,000 piece word of narrative journalism. Actually, they have the most trouble with structure in the long story and finding a narrative line with a complicated subject. That's something we work hard on. Also, figuring out how to write in the first person in a way that is not simply self-indulgent. That has a lot to do with choosing which first person you use-we have so many available to us. For instance, if I write in the first person I could choose to write as a father, a son, a husband, a Jew, and so on. We have all these different identities available to us-the key is choosing the right one.

Do you remember which of the stories you published while editor at Harper's that were especial favorites?
There were a few with Stanley Elken, the late novelist-I did a couple stories with him. He had MS and was confined to a wheelchair. I sent him to cover the Oscars once and it was hilarious-the piece was very David Foster Wallace but incredibly digressive (and without the footnotes so it was probably easier to read). I bet he influenced Wallace in various ways, actually. It was a very ornate, intricate digressive creation. I also sent him to do a piece on dance. He got obsessed with it when he could no longer walk. I don't think he'd done a lot of nonfiction before that.

And then there a series of political pieces by Walter Karp, who nobody had heard about. He'd written a series of pieces about the Reagan Administration for us, some really tough pieces on how Reagan was turning into an autocrat. He was a brilliant historian and political writer.

Most of your book have a specific point of view or follow a specific path. Do you think these through before you write or do these tend to come naturally as you research?
I often don't figure it out until I'm pretty far into it. With The Botany of Desire, for instance: wanted to write about the relationship between people and plants. I didn't know it would be something that looked at from the plant's point of view when I started out. It was not in the book proposal. The book proposal was actually incredibly bland. In this book, I did have this idea that it would be organized around meals, but that would be the beginning instead of the end of the chapters--it does change. I've been lucky to have the same editor and agent for my own career-they have enough confidence that I'll figure out a way to do it. Sometimes they sell books based on a two-page letter.

Do you think it is more expensive to eat well than it is to eat poorly? Why is that?
No question. The system is designed that way. The system is designed to make bad food cheap and good food expensive, because the government subsidizes bad food. That's the way the rules of the game are set up. The price of cheap food doesn't really reflect the cost of producing it--animals, public health, welfare, the environment. People who can afford to spend more money on food really should. We've been brainwashed into thinking that food should be cheap which we don't believe about other things like clothing, cars, electronics. For some reason we don't get it with food.

You discuss that a lot of your concern with the current US food system is how much effort goes into making food portable. However, this might just be my point of view, but that also seems like that can be very helpful for people trying to lose weight (i.e. 100 calorie packs, mini carrot bags, etc.) Is there a happy medium between not putting too much time into the packaging of foods yet making healthy foods more accessible?
I think those 100-calorie packs are interesting. But I'm talking about expressely designing foods to fit in your cupholder, or designing foods to eat at different times of the day. The system is breaking down meal time and breaking down community. People eat a lot less when they eat together than they do in front of the TV. When my son was younger and didn't want to eat something I'd put him in front of the TV with it and he'd eat it without paying attention.

Tune in next week for the rest of the interview! In the meantime, you can find other interviews here.