MICHAEL POLLAN’S LONG, STRANGE TRIP
AUGUST 24
By Scott Edward Anderson
Photos By Olivia Douhan
GARDENING IS REALLY THE GERM OF ALL MY WORK,” says Michael Pollan. Watching him expertly harvest garlic scapes in his garden in Litchfield County, you believe him. It's a rather ordinary northwestern Connecticut landscape—rocky soil, hardwood trees like maple and birch, and the Housatonic River winding through the valley to the west. Yet for Pollan, these surroundings have been a constant source of inspiration, allowing him to experience firsthand the cycles and nuances of gardening that germinated his career-long fascination with plants.
For over thirty years and eight books, Pollan has been guiding readers to a deeper understanding of our relationship with nature and the plants that sustain us. This summer, the renowned author brings his insights north to the Berkshires. On Friday, August 30, Pollan will speak at The Mount in Lenox as part of its 2024 Masters Series, sharing his journey from tending his own soil to exploring the mind-altering properties of psychoactive plants.
While Pollan now divides his time between teaching gigs at Harvard and UC Berkeley, the garden at his longtime home in Cornwall serves as his personal oasis and source of inspiration. "This is where my heart is," Pollan says, describing the five acres of rocky, intractable hillside he and his wife, painter Judith Belzer, bought back in the 1980s. Whether planting in early May or tending to it on weekend visits from Cambridge, the garden remains his sanctum for reconnecting with nature’s cycles.
Pollan’s gardening adventure took root during his 1960s Long Island childhood. At age four, he accidentally grew a watermelon after spitting out a seed, sparking a sense of wonder he’s spent “thousands of hours” since trying to recapture. His maternal grandfather, a Russian immigrant turned potato farmer, further nurtured this passion through their shared time in the garden when Pollan was a teenager. “I loved working in his garden,” Pollan recounts, noting that he and his grandfather didn’t get along that well otherwise, “he thought I was too much of a hippie, and my hair was too long.”
It was on this sliver of a derelict dairy farm, as he describes his Cornwall home, where Pollan truly became a gardener, learning through hard-won experience as he tended vegetables and battled woodchucks ravaging his raised beds. At 69, he keeps a smaller two-bed garden focused on garlic and herbs surrounded by a simple fence of wooden posts and chicken wire. Gone are the poppies that open his latest book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, which chronicles Pollan's personal exploration of three plant-derived psychoactive substances: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.
His deep dive into psychoactives began with a Harper’s Magazine piece on opium, which he wrote and published 25 years ago, at the height of the drug war. Pollan became fascinated by the fact that an ordinary ornamental garden flower—poppies— were the source of opium, and that while growing them was not a crime, he learned cutting into the seed pods or boiling them down to make tea was a Federal offense. This sparked an enduring fascination with psychoactives, culminating with his game-changing 2018 How to Change Your Mind, which documented the therapeutic potential of psychedelics while being transparent about risks—and sharing his personal experiences with the drugs.
For Berkshire-area fans, Pollan's upcoming talk at The Mount with André Bernard, curator of the Masters Series and former vice president with the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, presents a unique opportunity to gain insights from one of our era's most influential writers on the human-nature relationship. In an interview with Bernard and audience Q/A under a tent on the grounds of what was once Edith Wharton’s summer home, Pollan will share his perspectives spanning the whole of his unconventional journey— from garden staples like apples and tulips to consciousness-expanding plants.
“Michael is such a humane person,” says Bernard, who has known Pollan since the early ’90s, when he acquired the author’s first book, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, for Book-of-the-Month Club. “He’s concerned with people, with humanity and living on the planet in a way that does honor to being human, and to honoring the natural world. I really admire his basic and deep goodness and interest in the health of the planet and people.”
The more he works on plants—now over 30 years of writing about them as sources of food, fuel, and healing—the more respect Pollan has for their ingenuity. “They don’t simply produce toxins that kill us,” explains Pollan, “which would seem to be a pretty straightforward defense. They produce drugs that do more subtle things like confuse us, undermine our memory, rob us of our appetite. These are such more clever strategies, because if they just set out to kill anybody who nibbled on them the way some mushrooms do, they would have selected for resistance on the part of their predators really quickly, and that would have disabled their armaments.”
By confusing us and making us lose our appetite, which most psychoactives do—cannabis being the famous exception—they get us to leave them alone. “I’m interested in plant intelligence,” Pollan explains, “in the ways they’ve devised to deal with the fact that they can’t get up and run away, which is to say they got really good at biochemistry and really good at changing the minds of their predators.”
What’s in it for the plants? Pollan wagers that this strategy has helped propagate their species and expand their territories. “Think of the care devoted to cannabis now,” Pollan says. “This is the most pampered plant! What the plants get out of it is more land and more numbers.”
Pollan has long been engaged in exploring the symbiotic relationship between plants and humans and how it’s evolved over time. As a result, he has developed a greater admiration for that relationship and a deeper understanding of our dependence. “We don’t really think of our dependence on plants, but it’s absolute,” observes Pollan. “Without them, we’re nowhere. We either eat them or we eat creatures that eat them. The only way to convert solar energy into usable calories is through plants.”
He does wonder who has the upper hand in the relationship. On the one hand, plants seem to be dependent on us for their cultivation and spread, and yet, as Pollan notes, “I think we’ve overdone it for plants.” He makes this case in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, where he explores our relationship with corn. “The amount of land that has been deforested and then poisoned in our efforts to grow more corn is not serving us,” Pollan argues. While it has provided us with sources of cheap, plentiful food, this is mostly in the form of ultra-processed foods, which studies have shown are destroying our health.
“I would say at this point, corn is getting the better of that relationship,” Pollan suggests. “Corn has got us completely running around.”
Ultra-processed foods are the subject of another of his recent projects, Food Inc 2, a sequel to the 2008 documentary he co-starred in with Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast-Food Nation. While Pollan and Schlosser long resisted making a sequel, he says that the pandemic revealed a lot about the dysfunction and brittleness of the food system in America.
In May 2020, both Pollan and Schlosser coincidentally published separate pieces exposing the pandemic's rupturing effect on America's food supply chains. As Pollan recounts, a bizarre paradox had emerged—grocery shelves lying barren as farmers were forced to euthanize livestock and discard produce. This breakdown, he argues, stems from decades of increased consolidation and over-specialization across the food system. With a handful of large corporations dominating production of everything from beef to baby formula, any shocks to the rigid supply lines creates widespread shortages.
It’s a situation that has worsened in the past few decades, Pollan asserts, “much worse than when Teddy Roosevelt was going after the meat trusts and the other trusts. He’d be turning in his grave to see that four companies dominate beef packing, and two companies dominate baby formula.”
While critiquing the fragility of the industrialized food system, Pollan does see opportunities for more sustainable alternatives in the growth of the “food movement” since the early 2000s. He points to the codification of organic standards around 2000 and the subsequent rise of farmer's markets, grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) as positive signs. “It's big now,” Pollan notes of these locally-focused food models.
Significantly, the Berkshires region helped spark this movement—Indian Line Farm and its founder, Robyn Van En, are often credited with pioneering the CSA concept in North America, having launched one of the nation's first programs in the 1980s. This innovative model connecting farmers directly with consumers helped inspire similar efforts nationwide.
While challenges of equity and accessibility remain, Pollan sees promise in continuing to build and strengthen community-based alternatives to the consolidated industrial system. “There’s a tremendous equity issue around alternative food systems that needs to be resolved,” says Pollan. “We have to address wages of fast-food workers and farm workers at the same time we address other issues.”
In 2020, Pollan, along with Dachar Keltner, the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, and others established the Center for the Science of Psychedelics at UC Berkeley, which seeks to understand the brain mechanisms involved in the psychedelic experience and what psychedelics have to teach us about consciousness, predictive coding, and perception. The center also plans to fund journalism fellows and train psychedelic guides, trying to fill an estimated 100,000 gap in the number of people who will be needed to help others on their journeys.
For Pollan, his work with psychoactives is simply an extension of his lifelong interest in the relationship between humans and plants—and, although he encourages a variety of uses for plant medicines and not just in therapy (he’s a believer that they have value for people who want to explore consciousness), he cautions that we may be experiencing a period of irrational exuberance with regards to psychedelics.
“I think the benefits are being exaggerated and the risks are being underplayed,” he says. “The whole field could use a little more sobriety. I talk a lot more about risk than I used to for that reason.”
Pollan is not alone in calling for more caution. In a 2023 opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Psychiatry), Sarah McNamee, of the School of Social Work at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and her co-authors warned that the risks to patients of the therapy component of psychedelic-assisted therapies are not being studied enough and that the manual and guidelines for such therapies are based on old models from the 1970s.
And in 2020, writing in The Lancet Psychiatry, Ioana A. Cristea of the Department of General Psychology at the University of Padova, Italy, points out that “there were no specific requirements for an evalution of the psychotherapy component” of psilocybin-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant depression.
This November, Massachusetts may join Oregon and Colorado—along with several municipalities, such as Somerville, Northampton, and Cambridge in the Commonwealth—in decriminalizing psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) through a proposed ballot measure. Asked what Massachusetts should do differently from the earlier examples, Pollan suggests a “wait-and-see approach.”
“Oregon is having some growing pains that are interesting,” Pollan suggests. “They’re struggling with the fact that the price of psychedelic therapy is so high.” In part, this is because the state didn’t set aside funds for the regulatory apparatus. “It all has to come from licensing fees, so a psychedelic facilitator pays more to maintain her or his annual license than a doctor does in the state of Oregon. Thousands of dollars a year, and that’s driving up prices.”
Massachusetts could fix this if they attached a suitable financial mechanism to the legislation, Pollan believes, but he also knows ballot initiatives often lose votes when so encumbered. Still, he thinks it’s positive that Massachusetts is opting for regulated access rather than going for simple decriminalization.
“A lot of people think it’s the next cannabis. I don’t think psilocybin should be put in the same box as cannabis,” Pollan says. “Each substance has to be dealt with on its own terms, and if you’re going to have a high-dose experience with psilocybin, you definitely want a facilitator who knows what she or he is doing.”
As someone deeply immersed in exploring the nature of consciousness, Pollan advocates a nuanced, careful approach to psychedelics. Sitting on the steps of the one-room, cedar-shake writing shed he constructed—and wrote about in A Place of My Own—a spot where he has written most or nearly all of his work over the past 27 years, Pollan reveals his next book will be about consciousness, although he remains mum on specifics for now.
“I would want to read anything Michael writes,” says André Bernard, who admires the writer’s gift for exploring and explaining his subjects. “He delivers information in a very accessible way that makes you feel like you’re being spoken to by a friend.”
Assessing Pollan’s writing over the years, it’s clear he hasn’t strayed far from the garden that originally piqued his interest in our—and his own—relationship with plants. When Pollan makes his way up the Housatonic Valley in late August, he looks forward to the community of readers he’ll meet in the Berkshires, some of whom have long followed him on what he calls in his latest book, This is Your Mind on Plants, “this improbable, winding journey, from the garden to the farm and kitchen and then to the mind, and, now, back to where we started, with the plants we rely on and the human desires on which they so cleverly play.”
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