http://www.grist.org/feature/2007/10/12/pollan/index.html

Table Talk

A conversation with Michael Pollan

By Tom Philpott

12 Oct 2007

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In his 1996 book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, the great food anthropologist Sidney Mintz concluded that the United States had no cuisine. Interestingly, Mintz's definition of cuisine came down to conversation. For Mintz, Americans just didn't engage in passionate talk about food. Unlike the southwest French and their cassoulet, most Americans don't obsess and quarrel about what comprises, say, an authentic veggie burger.

But if cuisine comes down to talk, things are looking up a decade after Mintz cast his judgment. Now, more and more people are buzzing about food: not only about what's good to eat, but also -- appropriately for the land that invented McDonald's and Cheetos -- about what's in our food, where it came from, how it was grown.

Michael Pollan.

No writer has galvanized this new national conversation on food more than Michael Pollan, from his muckraking articles on the meat industry for The New York Times Magazine earlier this decade to the publication last year of The Omnivore's Dilemma.