Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnam Girumurthy and this is the podcast

in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the events that

have helped shape them. We're on location this week at Q Gardens and I'll declare my interest

because I'm on the board of trustees here and I thought that the rather beautiful that Echoey

Marion North Gallery would be the perfect setting for my guest this week. Michael Pollan writes about

the things we put in our bodies, mostly food but also drugs, mostly derived from plants.

Time magazine describes him as one of the most influential people in America but is if you

use our controversial because he examines the effects of all these drugs on our minds and our

bodies. So I should remind you that of course drug abuse has caused huge numbers of lost lives

and ruined lives and please don't listen to this and decide to try anything at home. Michael does

this under very careful circumstances but it's a fascinating lesson and I hope you enjoy the

I mean that the really interesting thing for a man who writes about plants and science is

that you're not a scientist. No I'm not. I am strictly an amateur. I neglected to study science in

university. I began my writing career writing about what was happening in my garden which I

realized was a really interesting laboratory to explore our relationship to the natural world.

In a garden you're working with these domesticated plants and we have altered them in important

ways but I began to see how they altered us also and I got this idea at a very specific moment.

I was planting potatoes in my garden and this apple tree that's in my garden which is buzzing with

the attention of bees and it occurred to me as I was digging little holes for these pieces of

potato that I had something in common with those bees. I was doing work for this plant and in the

same way the bee has been manipulated by the apple tree to pay it visits. The bee has no idea that

it's been duped into penetrating that flower and it thinks it's getting the best of that

...