Michael Pollan

Your Mama’s Kitchen

Higher Ground

Relationships, Society & Culture

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author, journalist, and professor Michael Pollan talks about the influence Julia Child had on his mother’s kitchen and the nature of kitchens in America today, and shares his unexpected favorite dish growing up.

Michael Pollan is a renowned advocate for responsible farming, gardening, and slow, local eating. Pollan has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 1987 and is the author of several successful books. Pollan writes about “the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds.” In 2003, Pollan was appointed Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In 2017, he was appointed Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard. In 2020, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. In his Netflix documentary series Cooked, Pollan explores how cooking transforms food and shapes the world.

Michael Pollan was born into a Jewish family in Long Island in 1955. He is the oldest of four children and brother to three little sisters. His father, Stephen Pollan, was a financial consultant, and his mother, Korky, was a New York Magazine columnist, style editor at Gourmet magazine, and an avid home cook. Pollan has a son, Isaac, and lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	No one has seen a watermelon seed in years. But in those days they had plenty of seeds and the ones you didn't swallow you'd spit out.
0:15.2	I just kind of kicked it into the dirt in this spot and returned three or four months later
0:21.6	to find a vine
0:24.4	cradling this watermelon.
0:26.8	It was like the size of maybe a football.
0:30.1	It was absolutely thrilling and shocking and I made the connection. I had made this happen and I promptly like broke off the vine and carried it running and screaming to show my mother in the house. I've proceeded to trip and the
0:45.6	watermelon squirt it out of my arms and just splattered. That was a kind of
0:51.2	formative moment for me. I don't run with produce anymore.
0:58.0	Welcome to your mama's kitchen, the podcast where we explore how the food and culinary traditions of our youth
1:04.7	shape who we become as adults. I'm Michelle Norris.
1:08.0	Our guest today is Michael Pollan, author, journalists, lecturer, and gatekeeper for good eating.
1:13.6	His books include the omnivores dilemma in defense of food,
1:17.1	and this is your mind on plants.
1:19.6	Michael has spent a lifetime looking at the places where nature and culture intersect in the grocery store and our gardens and industrial farms in restaurants and school lunch kitchens and at our dinner table.
1:32.0	As you can guess, he's a clean eater,
1:34.0	not much meat, not much dairy, sugar, or fried food.
1:37.0	So I was a little bit surprised that when he went down memory lane
1:41.0	to his mama's kitchen, his version of childhood comfort food was
1:45.9	chicken a la kiev. Yes, chicken a la kiev. If you've never had this dish before, it's just
1:51.9	as frilly and frufrew and complicated as it sounds.
1:55.2	Those who have had it, or even those adventurous enough to have made it, can appreciate
2:00.0	the intricate, almost excruciating process it takes to bring this entree to life.
	...

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